Word: caesarion
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...contemporary collector (for 150,000 francs): 27 letters from Shakespeare to his friends, "communications from St. Luke and Julius Caesar, from Sappho, Virgil, Plato, Pliny, Alexander the Great, and Pompey. These . . . were somewhat eclipsed by such unusual items as a letter from Cleopatra to Caesar discussing their son Caesarion, a little note from Lazarus to St. Peter, and a chatty bit of gossip from Mary Magdalene to the King of the Burgundians. All were written in contemporary French . . . which . . . certainly . . . made it easier for [the purchaser] to read them. . . . Lucas was on the point of selling him the original manuscript...
...historical fact, Caesar and Cleopatra lived together in the most literal sense of the phrase. Cleopatra bore him a son, Caesarion, who was promising enough to be assassinated eventually by order of Octavian. In Shaw's charming fiction, they warily skirt the quagmires of passion while the aging political genius, with rueful avuncular irony, helps to convert the puppet Queen from a fierce child into a woman, ripe for Mark Antony's plucking...
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