The Classical Novels: The Macedonian & Scenes from the Life of Cleopatra

by Mary Butts

Alexander the Great and Queen Cleopatra stand shrouded in myth and mystery at opposite ends of a Greek epoch, symbols of the Hellenizing conquests of Egypt and Persia, the ascendancy of Alexandria, and the final absorption of Ptolemaic Egypt into the Roman Empire. Many authors have exploited their lives as the very stuff of legend, beyond human dimension. By contrast, and with penetrating insight, Mary Butts brings Alexander and Cleopatra alive as human beings in two vivid novels, shattering their conventional masks to explore motivations of power, the allure of “the sacred,” and the clashes of cultures. In dramatic vignettes from various angles, the lives of Alexander and Cleopatra are separately presented with their extraordinary entourages, including Aristotle, Callisthenes, Julius Caesar, Mark Antony and Cicero. Combined for the first time in this volume, The Macedonian and Scenes from the Life of Cleopatra form a unified work, richly imagined, thoroughly researched, and augmented by three classical stories not previously collected.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction

385 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1994

About the author

Mary Francis Butts was a modernist writer whose work found recognition in important literary magazines of the time, as well as from some of her fellow modernists, T. S. Eliot, Hilda Dolittle, and Bryher. After her death, her works fell into obscurity until they began to be republished in the 1980s.

Butts was a student of the occultist Aleister Crowley, and as one of several students who worked with him on his Magick (Book 4) in 1912, she was given co-author credit. She was married to poet, publisher, and pacifist John Rodker from 1918 to 1927; their daughter, Camilla, was born in 1920.

Reviews

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This volume collects two novels and three short stories set in the classical world. They are an odd mix of the omnipotent view of the modern author and the voices of the characters in their own times. In the very last story of the book, Julius Caesar says:

“—I’m no expert on ecstasy, but the cheap sort you get in crowds and among men with a grievance seems to me about the nastiest emotion to which man is subject.”

If that doesn’t describe the Trump rallies, I don’t know what does.

In Scenes from the Life of Cleopatra, there’s a mix of the mystical and the practical: The mix of Hellenistic Alexandria and Ancient Egypt that Cleopatra more or less embodies is also represented in her two close companions, one a Macedonian Greek, the other an Egyptian from a prominent priestly family. The practical side is good, but I really enjoyed some of the more out-there parts. I love the way this letter by the Egyptian to her sister back in Egypt begins:

“It is much better that people who have no business to know the future should leave it alone. It is fitting only when it is done by people who are taught what can be known and what cannot be known: when to look for the signs without, and when for those that are inside one’s body: under what ways it is possible to look round the corner of the earth-mirror and to translate rightly the things seen.”

I just love “under what ways it is possible to look round the corner of the earth-mirror….” But the letter gets weirder later on:

“There are all sorts of people up and out and about you should not meet. They should be on their backs, not walking. Instead you rub shoulders with them in the street, and on your flesh is the ice-burn where you touched. You cannot always tell which, except that some cast no shadow, and others leave no print in the dust. Or that one has come out of its place without an ear, or an eye, or a breast. Something they must leave behind to get back to their own place; whose bodies are not given to the fire or received, as ours are, in a place prepared.

In the end of our garden-court I myself saw a man-dog, a cat-woman, and a man-bird change shapes as one day changed to another. The last I could prevent, who have the bird-magic of Egypt. The rest are out in packs.”

Definitely going to look for more books by this author.

[EJ Easlick · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was very hard to follow. Not much happens, although she expends a lot of words saying very little.