Clcopatriot

CLEOPATRA--Emil Ludwig--Viking ($3-50).

According to popular legend, Cleopatra nearly vamped the Roman Empire to death. But if Cleopatra had been half as lucky in historians as she was in love, her reputation would now be very different. Such, at least, is the thesis of Biographer Ludwig's Cleopatra. A by-product of Ludwig's The Nile (TIME, Feb. 22), Cleopatra adds no new data to the little there is to go on: three lines from a letter of Antony's, one authentic bust. But Author Ludwig reopens the 2,000-year-old Cleopatra Case on the grounds that all contemporary evidence, except Plutarch's incomplete account, was only frenzied, made-in-Rome propaganda. His "new" evidence was dug out of a "psychological" investigation. And Author Ludwig does succeed in presenting a Cleopatra who, as Queen of Egypt, Cyprus and Syria, deserves something better than her reputation as a sort of Oriental Mae West.

Because of her tremendous, sharp-beaked nose, like the prow of a war galley (see cut, p. 79), the Romans were easily led to believe that Cleopatra had to hold her men with knockout love drops. The kind of men she seduced made her sex appeal even more mysterious. Tall, black-eyed, bald Caesar "had known the whole gamut of indulgence," three or four faithless marriages. Yet Caesar, already married, defied hostile public opinion to keep Cleopatra openly in Rome with their illegitimate son during his last three years, introduced a law permitting him to marry several wives; and at 60, in spite of bad health, was prepared to go to war to silence anti-Cleopatra agitation.

Handsome, big-chested, lusty Antony, easily bored, with ten mistresses to Caesar's one, seemed an even less likely fellow for any woman to hold for long. Cleopatra held him nearly 13 years. For her he deserted his brilliant wife Fulvia, his beautiful wife Octavia, risked a revolution to crown Cleopatra Queen of Egypt, risked the good opinion of posterity by making their three children his heirs, ignoring his four in Rome. Finally he divorced Octavia at the risk of war, the war which finished him off.

Sex appeal alone, Author Ludwig insists, has never achieved such results. That Caesar and Antony went down was not Cleopatra's fault; if, says Ludwig, they had followed her advice, her example in killing off two brothers and two sisters, had not naively pardoned their enemies, everything would have been all right. Pale, cold-blooded Octavian, whom easygoing Antony had twice neglected to "liquidate," won out because he followed a more modern technique of demagogy and blood purges. It is in tracing such blunders of Caesar and Antony that Author Ludwig makes Cleopatra's maneuvers shine with genius, makes her biography a nice contemporary commentary.

He has no trouble in showing Cleopatra as ''the shrewdest and most intelligent woman of her time." She roughed it with Caesar during their hard pressed military campaign, was a model of reserve as his mistress in Rome. With Antony she played the lavish wanton, outdid him in everything from drinking to horseplay. Deserted on the eve of bearing his twins, she greeted him three years later as though he had only been out for a walk. But her price was the old Pharaoh empire, his divorce from Octavia. This last move, says Ludwig, marked the point where her emotions began to cloud her statesmanship. It is his sober opinion that she helped Antony's defeat at Actium because she feared that victory would result in his going off with a younger woman.

Underlying purpose of Cleopatra's maneuvers, avers Ludwig, was to preserve her honor as patriot, mother, loving wife. In order to make this point, he rejects the orthodox version: that she made a deal with Octavian to assassinate Antony, tricked him into suicide, committed suicide herself only when her planned seduction of Octavian did not work.

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