How do you see Susan?

Mary Beard

• Cleopatra: Beyond the Myth by Michel Chauveau, translated by David Lorton
  Cornell, 104 pp, £14.95, April 2002, ISBN 0 8014 3867 5
• The Roman Mistress: Ancient and Modern Representations by Maria Wyke
  Oxford, 452 pp, £40.00, March 2002, ISBN 0 19 815075 X

Cleopatra’s last public appearance in the city of Rome was in the form of a wax model, complete with model asp, carried in the victory parade of Octavian in 29 BC. Octavian – a bloodthirsty ideologue in the civil wars – was by then well on his way to reinventing himself as Rome’s benevolent autocrat, its first (and almost only) ‘good’ Emperor, Augustus. Three days of triumphal procession through the streets of the capital – to mark his victories over an assortment of Northern barbarians, over Mark Antony’s forces at the battle of Actium and finally over Egypt itself – were to draw a line under civil war and inaugurate the new regime. Along with the wagonloads of booty, the placards blazoning the names of massacred tribes and annihilated cities, the hordes of bedraggled, defeated troops, the prize exhibit in the procession – walking in chains just in front of the triumphant general’s chariot – was to have been Queen Cleopatra herself.