Publisher's Synopsis
Cleopatra the biographer may approach his subject from one of several directions. He may, for example, regard the Queen of Egypt as a thoroughly bad woman, or as an irresponsible sinner, or as a moderately good woman in a difficult situation. In this book it is my object to point out the difficulty of the situation, and to realise the adverse circumstances against which the Queen had to contend; and by so doing a fairer complexion will be given to certain actions which otherwise must inevitably be regarded as darkly sinful. The biographer need not, for the sake of his principles, turn his back on the sinner and refuse to consider the possibility of extenuating circumstances. He need not, as we so often must in regard to our contemporaries, make a clear distinction between good and bad, shunning the sinner that our intimates may not be contaminated. The past, to some extent, is gone beyond the eventuality of Hell; and Time, the great Redeemer, has taken from the world the sharpness of its sin. The historian thus may put himself in touch with distant crime, and may attempt to apologise for it, without the charge being brought against him that in so doing he deviates from the stern path of moral rectitude. Intolerance is the simple expedient of contemporaneous society: the historian must show his distaste for wrong-doing by other means. We dare not excuse the sins of our fellows; but the wreck of times past, the need of reconstruction and rebuilding, gives the writer of history and biography a certain option in the selection of the materials which he uses in the resuscitation of his characters. He holds a warrant from the Lord of the Ages to give them the benefit of the doubt; and if it be his whim to ignore this licence and to condemn wholesale a character or a family, he sometimes loses, by a sort of perversion, the prerogative of his calling. The historian must examine from all sides the events which he is studying; and in regard to the subject with which this volume deals he must be particularly careful not to direct his gaze upon it only from the point of view of the Imperial Court of Rome, which regarded Cleopatra as the ancestral enemy of the dynasty. In dealing with history, says Emerson, "we, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner." Even so, as we study the life of Cleopatra, we must set behind us that view of the case that was held by one section of humanity. In like manner we must rid ourselves of the influence of the thought of any one period, and must ignore that aspect of morality which has been developed in us by contact with the age in which we have the fortune to live.
Good and evil are relative qualities, defined very largely by public opinion; and it must always be remembered that certain things which are considered to be correct to-day may have the denunciation of yesterday and to-morrow. We, as we read of the deeds of the Queen of Egypt, must doff our modern conception of right and wrong together with our top-hats and frock-coats; and, as we pace the courts of the Ptolemies, and breathe the atmosphere of the first century before Christ, we must not commit the anachronism of criticising our surroundings from the standard of twenty centuries after Christ. It is, of course, apparent that to a great extent we must be influenced by the thought of to-day; but the true student of history will make the effort to cast from him the shackles of his contemporaneous opinions, and to parade the bygone ages in the boundless freedom of a citizen of all time and a dweller in every land.
