CLEOPATRA's VENUS Elisabeth Bronfen Venus, Taking Her Name

CLEOPATRA’S VENUS Elisabeth Bronfen Venus, taking her name from the Latin word for a gracefulness adept in exercising an alluring charm, came to be known as the “patron goddess of all persuasive seductions, between gods and mortals, and between men and women.”1 Seminal for the imaginary alignment Western culture, in turn, came to draw between Cleopatra VII, the last pharaoh of Ancient Egypt, and this goddess of seduction, is the way both Greek and the Roman mythology cast her as a representative of an ambivalent charm, combining erotic power with a capacity for deception. Although Venus was first and foremost conceived as an emblematic figure for the feminine procreation necessary for the continuity of the community, the mythopoetics of antiquity sometimes also places her in proximity to Hesiod’s first woman, Pandora, whose curiosity released a plethora of destructive forces into the world. With the snake as one of her attributes, Cleopatra, in turn, was repeatedly painted to resemble Eve, the first woman of Judeo- Christian mythopoetics, whose curiosity, also, was made responsible for the loss of paradise and the introduction of death and sin into human existence.2 There is, however, a further similarity at issue between these two feminine embodiments of deceptive sexual allure, namely, the lack of agreement on their historical origins. Greek literature in particular often claimed that Venus came from the East, while Cleopatra, whose family was of Greek origin, self-consciously styled herself as Eastern royalty, only to have herself declared a living embodiment of the Egyptian goddess Isis.3 What Venus and Cleopatra thus also share is the way in which they 1 See John Scheid’s entry on “Venus” in Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth, eds., The Oxford Classical Dictionary3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) 1587. 2 For documentation on the visual analogies between Cleopatra and both Eve and Venus, see the Musée Rath’s exhibition catalogue, Claude Ritschard and Allison Morehead, eds., Cléopâtre dans le miroir de l’art occidental (Genève: Musée d’art et d’histoire, 2004), March 25 to August 1, 2004. 3 See Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life (New York: Random House, 2010) for the most recent discussion of the ambivalent mythic narratives surrounding this historical figure. See also Prudence J. Jones, ed., Cleopatra: A Sourcebook (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 2006) for a representative selection of texts dealing with her hybrid representation, as well as Sabine Kubisch and Hilmar Klinkott, Kleopatra. Pharaonin. Göttin. Visionärin (Stuttgart: Konrad Theiss Verlag, 2011) especially for the way it foregrounds her political role. © Elisabeth Bronfen, 2013 | doi:10.1163/9789004241923_009 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.Elisabeth Bronfen - 9789004241923 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 06:33:52AM via free access 138 elisabeth bronfen were conceived as culturally hybrid figures. Both were worshipped within a cultural domain to which they were also declared to be foreign. Their cultural uncanniness continues to be part of their seductive power, allow- ing them to bridge the Western world with its Oriental influences. Indeed, if their allure is familiar and strange, it is so powerful perhaps precisely because it is both. Venus was a double-voiced goddess in that she was worshipped by girls about to be married, who hoped for successful sexual reproduction. Yet she was also the protectress of prostitutes, whose profession depended on sexual charms. Although a wide range of attributes came to be ascribed to Venus, for the purpose of my discussion of the way Cleopatra was reconfigured along the lines of this love goddess, this essay will focus only on her significance as a divine embodiment of a femininity, especially in the literary tradition prominently associated with Mars, the war god of antiquity. While in mythopoetic texts, the martial power of Venus/Aphrodite pertains primarily to a battle of the sexes, it is worth recalling that in the mythic story of the Judgment of Paris, she is the one who wins the competition against Hera and Athena, and in so doing is partially responsible for the outbreak of the Trojan War. The conjunc- tion between sexual allure and war, in turn, becomes more prominent regarding Cleopatra, who quite explicitly did not shirk from battle and for whom the role of warrior queen supported rather than contradicted her impersonation of a love goddess. Indeed, the cultural afterlife of Cleopa- tra’s Venus this essay proposes is grounded on the way this last Egyptian pharaoh thrives on a transitional hybridity in more than one sense. Both in the literary and the visual representations we have of Cleopatra, we find a sovereign who crosses not only her Greek heritage with her Egyp- tian symbolic political mandate. Nor is she simply reduced to the feminine embodiment of an Oriental allure that came to successfully entrap two Roman war heroes. She is also conceived as a transitional figure in the sense that her demise marks the end of a political dynasty, serving to consolidate the hegemony of Roman rule. The image most readily associated with Cleopatra is that of her beautiful corpse, either exposed as a naked body, with a snake at her breast, or placed on public display in full funeral regalia. Over her dead body, Octavius came to celebrate his political ideology by erecting a monument to precisely the embodiment of a foreign but seductive culture he had vanquished and sacrificed.4 Indeed, it is important to remember that we 4 For a discussion of feminine sacrifice as constitutive within foundation myths, see Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 1992). Elisabeth Bronfen - 9789004241923 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 06:33:52AM via free access cleopatra’s venus 139 know very little about the actual historical person Cleopatra; we have little factual evidence of what she looked like. Instead, most research on her cultural afterlife draws attention to the way she functions as an enig- matic figure to whom we have access only through the long tradition of posthumous representations she has been able to call forth. Her affective effect is on the level of memory and representational traces. Even the coins and sculptures of her may well say more about how she wanted herself to be viewed and remembered by posterity than what she actually looked like.5 Equally seminal is the fact that her cultural survival in the image reper- toire of western literature, painting, and film has its beginnings in Octavius’ propaganda, whose purpose was fairly straightforward. To salvage Anto- ny’s name, it was of utmost importance to paint his warrior queen as the wicked, morally depraved, oriental, lascivious whore. The Roman authors on whose texts all subsequent reconfigurations necessarily must rely paint her as the femme fatale in a battle between valiant Roman politicians, for which, having successfully brought about the downfall of his rival, Mark Antony, Octavius needed his Egyptian queen to take the full blame. Since the medieval period, each century, as Lucy Hughes-Hallett documents, has accentuated this story differently, and yet we find with an astonishing persistence the rhetorical gesture of feminine sacrifice.6 The visual and narrative celebration of Cleopatra’s beautiful corpse is coterminous with the successful destruction of a sexual charm attributed to the East. At the same time, this belated mythic narrative seeks to screen out the manner in which Cleopatra’s erotic allure was already during her lifetime coupled with political power and, as such, posed an actual political threat to the government in Rome. If in its foundation myth Augustan propaganda maligns her, it obliquely discloses its own desire and need for a cover- up. At issue is precisely the duplicitous rhetoric of fetishism at work. By erecting a monument to the vanquishing of this last Egyptian pharaoh, what came to live on in the cultural imaginary of the West is precisely the myth of an oriental femme fatale, commemorating a feminine allure that uncannily straddles the political and the public. Indeed, it is fruitful 5 For feminist research seeking to reconstruct and critically reflect on this history of belated transmission, see Mary Hamer, Signs of Cleopatra (London: Routledge, 1993). For archeological reconstructions of her representations, see the catalogue from the Brooklyn Museum’s exhibition of Cleopatra’s Egypt: Age of the Ptolemies (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1989) as well as Susan Walker and Peter Higgs, Cleopatra of Egypt: From History to Myth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 6 Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions (New York: Harper & Row, 1990). Elisabeth Bronfen - 9789004241923 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 06:33:52AM via free access 140 elisabeth bronfen to recall that had Cleopatra not committed suicide, Octavius would have put her on display in his victory parade through Rome. Given her suicide, he could instead only include a statue of her dead body, with the fatal serpent at her naked breast, in his procession. If, then, Cleopatra is an empty figure (a historical “X”), whom we have come to know only belatedly through her subsequent representations, to reconstruct her involves what Mieke Bal calls doing “preposterous” history. We need to reimagine her as the effect of the recyclings through which she has had such an affective cultural effect.7 We need to look back at her from the position of a belated viewing, through the lens of representations that have come to make up her myth. While Venus is not the only iconographic point of reference in the plethora of paintings that have come into circulation since the late medieval period, this essay will focus on Cleopatra’s posthumous staging as a duplicitous love goddess because this visual trajectory allows one to uncover more than the continuation of the misogynist tradition Octavius’ propagandists inaugurated, a tradition in which she first and foremost survives as the fatal love goddess who bewitched two valiant Roman war heroes.

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