Notes and Asides.

Memo to: Bill From: Reid

A beautiful sequence from the December 2000 issue of The New Criterion.

Roger Kimball is writing about the influence of Plutarch and comes up with Plutarch's description of Cleopatra:

[S]he disdained to set forward otherwise, but to take her barge in the river of Cydnus, the poop whereof was of gold, the sails of purple, and the oars of silver, which kept stroke in rowing after the sound of the music of flutes, howboys, citherns, viols, and such other instruments as they played upon the barge. And now for the person of herself: she was laid under a pavilion of cloth of gold of tissue, apparelled and attired like the goddess Venus commonly drawn in picture; and hard by her, on either hand of her, pretty fair boys apparelled as painters do set forth Cupid, with little fans in their hands, with the which they fanned wind upon her.

 
But wait! Private Eye Kimball follows this with, fifteen hundred years 
later, Shakespeare's handling of Cleopatra: 
The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne, 
Burned on the water; the poop was   beaten gold, 
Purple the sails, and so perfumed, that 
The winds were love-sick with them, 
   the oars were silver 
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made 
The water which they beat to follow faster, 
As amorous of their stroke. For her    own person, 
It beggared all description; she did lie 
In her pavilion-cloth-of-gold of 
   tissue- 
O'er-picturing that Venus where we see 
The fancy outwork nature; on each    side ...