Sirens, Egyptian and Equine

Op-Ed by Maureen Dowd, The New York Times

It has not been a stellar year for women in politics.

Some of the women who have wanted to lead are cartoonish, others charmless. Some are smart but tightly wound. Others are dumb and completely loose.

The first female speaker of the House has been dumped, and the paltry number of women in Congress has shrunk for the first time in three decades. Alpha women in politics and business are in a slump.

So instead, I have found myself obsessing on two enchantresses who knew how to win — one equine and one who claimed to be divine.

In an era when it’s hard for women to be powerful and flamboyant at the same time, to be uninhibited and unflappable, Zenyatta and Cleopatra are not merely legends, but role models. They dazzled with glamour, while fiercely and daringly pursuing shrewd strategies to win against the biggest, fastest, most competitive boys. Both divas were renowned for coming from behind, until those last heartbreaking times when they couldn’t pull it off.

Zenyatta drinks Guinness, while Cleopatra quaffed poison. (That asp may be the ancient world’s version of George Washington’s cherry tree.)

Zenyatta, Hollywood’s “aging Amazon,” as one of the commentators at Churchill Downs called her last weekend, is statuesque and beautiful, with stylish bangs and a mink-brown coat.

Cleopatra, the Egyptian queen, was not beautiful. But she was certainly sensual and theatrical, glowing with gems, pearls, intellect and charm as she sailed around the Red Sea in a cloud of incense, once dressed as Venus to greet Marc Antony’s Bacchus.

She spoke nine languages, and was especially fluent, as Plutarch notes, in a 10th: flattery. She sent her love letters on black onyx tablets.

In the enthralling new biography “Cleopatra: A Life,” Stacy Schiff describes the Egyptian ruler with the same imagery used to limn Zenyatta: “self-assured, authoritative and saucy.” Certainly, both ladies were masters at demanding, and deserving, attention.

Cleopatra had powers of persuasion and seduction so potent that male historians often attributed her sway over the fathers of her children, Caesar and Marc Antony, to magic or drugs. The men instantly lost their heads, before they instantly lost their lives.

I was quickly beguiled by Zenyatta in June when I gazed up at her at her home track, the pink deco Hollywood Park, with my friend David Israel, the vice chairman for the California Horse Racing Board.

To read the full editorial, visit The New York Times.