Another Cleopatra
In the afternoon we went to the British Museum, another haunt of my childhood. There used to be a magic shop (run by Neville Maskeleyne’s descendants, I believe) on the other side of the road, and after I’d scared myself visiting the mummies in the museum, I’d cross over and spend my pocket money in the magic shop. Now the museum has been spruced up wonderfully. Of course, like all great museums it would be possible to spend days in there, but with limited time at our disposal we targeted our visit on three objects/displays: the Rosetta Stone; the Elgin Marbles; and the mummies (natch). The Rosetta Stone is disappointingly displayed in a glass cabinet in the middle of a very large room full of Egyptian and Assyrian objects. How much more eloquently it would speak to us of its enigmatic past if it had a darkened and subdued room to itself! Coincidentally, the Elgin Marbles were in today’s newspapers, since the wonderful new museum at the foot of the Acropolis built to house them is now complete and there is talk about ‘loans’. And in the middle of the mummies we bumped into Cleopatra. For a moment we thought it might be the Cleopatra; you know, the one with the big nose. But in fact our Cleopatra was the daughter of an important official at Thebes at the time of the Emperor Trajan (AD 98-117) who died some 150 years after the Cleopatra. You can read about her here. In any case, it gave me the chance to bore the children by reciting one of the two greatest lines (in my opinion) about beautiful women and their effects. It comes from Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra (which I studied for O level) and goes like this: ‘Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale/ Her infinite variety: other women cloy/ The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry/ Where most she satisfies.’ The other greatest line, by the way, is from Christopher Marlowe, in Doctor Faustus, describing a vision of Helen of Troy: ‘Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships, And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?’
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