Duane W. Roller

her court, and the Libyka of her son-in-law Juba II of Mauretania.
As always, inscriptions and coins and—because the area of interest
is Egypt—papyri off er a signifi cant amount of valuable evidence, all
from the queen’s point of view. But the preponderance of the literary
material comes from Plutarch, Josephus, and Dio. Yet much of the
modern popular image of Cleopatra is based on the post-antique elaboration
of her career, especially in drama, rather than any information
from her era.
Personal and Geographical Names
Th e matter of handling personal and place names from antiquity is diffi -
cult and admits of no obvious resolution. Transmission of proper names
from one language to another, and also from one form of writing to
another, causes numerous problems. Th is is a diffi culty anywhere in classical
studies, but it is worse with Cleopatra than in many cases because
the heavy modern overlay has created popular forms such as “Antony”
(for Antonius) or “Pompey” (for Pompeius) that have no authority from
antiquity and are probably no earlier than the sixteenth century. Th ere
is the further problem of indigenous names passing through Greek into
Latin and then English, oft en inaccurately. Moreover, the late Hellenistic
eastern Mediterranean was a region of intense linguistic diversity—one
need only remember that Cleopatra herself knew many languages—and
names moved through several forms. Malchos, the king of Nabataea,
may have his name also represented as Malchus, Malichos, or Malichus,
dependent on the language and orthography of the written source, all
versions of the original Maliku (mlkw or mnkw). Egyptian names can be
even more confusing, transliterated according to a variety of competing
schemes.
With a certain amount of reluctance, the present author has used
popular English spellings of well-known ancient names (Cleopatra,
Ptolemy, Herod) rather than direct transliterations from the original
(Kleopatra, Ptolemaios, Herodes). Less common names that may not
have an accepted English form are directly transliterated insofar as this
is possible. But any system is full of diffi culties and inconsistencies, and
Introduction 9