There was one too between virility and promiscuity: Caesar left Cleopatra in Alexandria to sleep with the wife of the king of Mauretania. As one of her sworn enemies asserted, she did not fall in love with Antony but “brought him to fall in love with her.” In the ancient world too women schemed while men strategized there was a great gulf, elemental and eternal, between the adventurer and the adventuress. “We know that Antony pined for Cleopatra months later, though she wound up with all the credit for the affair. As much as one third of Ptolemaic Egypt may have been in female hands.” As wives, widows, or divorcées, they owned vineyards, wineries, papyrus marshes, ships, perfume businesses, milling equipment, slaves, homes, camels. They initiated lawsuits and hired flute players. They served as priests in the native temples. Egyptian women married later than did their neighbors as well, only about half of them by Cleopatra’s age. Romans marveled that in Egypt female children were not left to die a Roman was obligated to raise only his first-born daughter. The law sided with the wife and children if a husband acted against their interests. Her property remained hers it was not to be squandered by a wastrel husband.
Until the time an ex-wife’s dowry was returned, she was entitled to be lodged in the house of her choice. They enjoyed the right to divorce and to be supported after a divorce. Married women did not submit to their husbands’ control. They inherited equally and held property independently. Over time their liberties had increased, to levels unprecedented in the ancient world. Well before her and centuries before the arrival of the Ptolemies, Egyptian women enjoyed the right to make their own marriages. “Cleopatra moreover came of age in a country that entertained a singular definition of women’s roles.
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