Cleopatra: She Came, She Saw, She Conquered
Cleopatra, the last great queen of Egypt, doesn’t really need an introduction.
You can see her in your mind already, can’t you? Pretty and sultry with her cat-eye makeup, covered head to toe in shiny gold. Extravagant, self-serving, ruthless: this epic seductress used every magic trick in her lady arsenal to hold onto power, no matter the cost. Didn’t she? That’s the Cleopatra the ancient Romans want us to see.
The truth is that few women’s stories have been more brutally revised by sexist haters threatened by a woman’s right to rule. The Romans used her as a scapegoat to explain away two powerful Roman men’s actions – because there’s no WAY big top dogs Julius Caesar and Mark Antony would have done the crazy things they did with her unless she used her feminine wiles to lay down some sexy sorcery!
Most Roman writers take pains to make her the villain of their stories. Ancient writers got out their hater brush for Cleopatra, running one of the ancient world’s most effective smear campaigns. Where we might see an intelligent, savvy, thoughtful leader, ancient writers turn her into, as Cicero put it, an “uncommonly impertinent harlot.” Cassius Dio calls her “a woman of insatiable sexuality and insatiable avarice.” Plutarch claims she showed “unseemly opulence”; Flavius Josephus jumps on the slut-shaming wagon and calls her an “extravagant woman” who was “by nature very covetous” and “a slave to her lusts”; Roman poet Lucan, the drama queen, calls her “the shame of Egypt, the lascivious fury who was to become the bane of Rome.” Greek writers supposedly called her meriochane, which translates to something like “she who gapes wide for 10,000 men.” Um, rude.
The themes here are clear: Cleo wanted too much – in bed and in politics – and was way too greedy and emotionally volatile to be trusted with any real power. But clear away the acrid smoke of sexist Roman killjoys and another picture emerges: of a deft and capable pharaoh who ruled one of the most powerful empires the ancient world would ever see. This last pharaoh of Egypt was dealt an impossible hand, and yet she stayed on top of the game for decades when lesser women would have crumbled.
Temptress, schemer, mother, witch, party girl, strategist, warrior…over the years she’s collected an impressive list of adjectives, her image fixed in our imaginations. But is that image nothing more than a fantasy? We don’t know what she looked like; we have next to nothing in her words. Only one can possibly be credited to Cleo, though it’s pretty fitting. In 33 BCE, either she or her scribe signed a royal degree with the Greek word ginesthoi, or: “Make it so.” And though we all know her name, so much about her is a mystery. Who was Cleopatra, beyond the smoke and hate and all that glitter? Let’s travel back and see if we can find her. Grab your strappy sandals, some hot pink smoke bombs, and your shiniest diadem. Let’s go traveling.
Grab your sandals, your hot pink-colored smoke, and your nicest diadem. Let’s go traveling.
Move over, ancient world. Cleopatra is coming.
Cleopatras II and III, from Kom Ombo Temple. Wikicommons.
research SOURCES
BOOKS
Cleopatra: A Life. Stacy Schiff, Virgin, Sept. 2011. This one is fantastic: so thorough and so readable. If you want to find out more about Cleopatra, this is the place to turn.
When Women Ruled the World. Kara Cooney, National Geographic, Nov. 2018.
Cleopatra of Egypt: From History to Myth. Eds. Susan Walk and Peter Higgs. Princeton University Press, 2011.
Cleopatra: A Sourcebook. Prudence J. Jones, Oklahoma Series in Classical Culture.
Kings of the Bible. National Geographic Special Edition, 2019.
ONLINE
“Who Was Cleopatra? Mythology, Propaganda, Liz Taylor and the real Queen of the Nile.” Amy Crawford, Smithsonian Magazine, Mar. 2017.
“Raising Alexandria” by Andrew Lawler, Smithsonian Magazine, Apr. 2007.
“Isis: Worship of this Egyptian Goddess Spread from Egypt to England.” Jamie Alvar, National Geographic History, 2020.
“Make It SO! Sayeth Cleopatra.” Angela M. H. Schuster, Archaeology Magazine News brief, Volume 54 Number 1, January/February 2001.
“THEDA BARA AS CLEOPATRA.; With Much Rolling of Eyes She Portrays "the Siren of All Ages.” The New York Times, Oct. 1917.
“Cleopatra’s Legacy in Art.” by Hermenia Powers, Art UK, Mar 2020.
“How Millennia of Cleopatra Portrayals Reveal Evolving Perceptions of Sex, Women, and Race.” Alina Cohen, May 2018.
“Sculptor Edmonia Lewis Shattered Gender and Race Expectations in 19th-Century America.” Alice George, Smithsonian Magazine, Aug. 2019.
“Almost all of the actresses who’ve played Cleopatra have been white. But was she?” Nadra Little, Vox.com, Jan. 2019.
Flavius Josephus, The Antiquities of the Jews, 15.88–15.107. Lexundria.
Plutarch, Antony. Perseus online database.
Plutarch, Caesar. Perseus online database.
If you like this map, you can grab a printed poster of it in my Etsy shop. Just go to the tab labeled “Merch” above!
transcript
please keep in mind that I edit a bit as I record, so this won’t match the audio exactly. Also, it’s likely you’ll find typos or funny formatting issues here and there: do forgive me. also, the quotes in bold are ones I’ve made up for the drama, so please don’t quote them as fact in your high school history paper!
PART 1
Before we start, I’d like to point out there’s a reason I’ve saved Cleopatra for so late in Season 2. To truly understand her story, you’ll need to have listened to my series on women in ancient Egypt, Greece, AND Rome thus far, particularly the episodes on lady pharaohs and Olympias, Alexander the Great’s mom. Those will give you the background you need to appreciate the world we’re about to time travel back to.
Let’s start around 69 BCE, around when our Cleopatra is born. But first, let’s hover over the Nile River Delta, right over the port city of Alexandria, and soak in the big picture. You might be picturing, say, Nefertiti or Hatshepsut’s Egypt, but Cleo’s world looks very different than it did when our other female pharaohs ruled. This soon-to-be pharaoh queen comes into the world at the tail end of Egypt’s majesty. We’re more than 2,000 years past the construction of the great pyramids of Giza. It’s been more than 1,000 years since the last lady pharaoh we covered, Tawosret, was rocking that crook and flail. And though Cleo is considered Egypt’s last pharaoh, it turns out that in some ways she isn’t Egyptian at all.
Between the New Kingdom period, which started in the 16th century BCE and saw such lady greats as Nefertiti and Hatshepsut, and 69 BCE, Lady Egypt was invaded and overrun by foreign powers, such as the Assyrians and Babylonians. It’s been a rotating door of extremely bad dates. Then, finally, in swept Alexander the Great, that studly Macedonian god-king who absolutely slayed when it came to dominating other empires. Alex is pretty famous, as you already know, for building the largest empire the ancient world would ever see and giving every Greek and Roman after him a very tiny man complex. And by the time Olympias’s son arrived in Egypt on his steed in 332 BCE, the Egyptians were maybe almost excited to see him. I mean, at least he’s acting like a proper pharaoh, they said. And I mean, he isn’t Persian…so, that’s good. Let’s declare him an Egyptian god and make him our pharaoh!
Hey, Egypt! Let’s do this.
Alexander the Great, Roman floor mosaic, originally from the House of the Faun in Pompeii . Wikicommons.
God status achieved, Alexander set about putting his personal stamp on this part of the Mediterranean. It was while trotting through Egypt to see an oracle in 331 BCE that he had a vision of a great city that would link Greece and Egypt. It would be some 20 miles west of the Nile’s opening, on a narrow spit of land jutting out between the sea and a lake. A canal dug to the Nile would provide fresh water and transport to the interior. He called it Alexandria, because he sure did love naming cities after himself! But then he died rather suddenly at the tender age of 32, but he didn’t leave clear directions about who should take over after him. So after some very tense skirmishing, his land was divvied up among his closest bros. Cassander got Macedonia and Greece, Lysimachus got Anatolia, and this guy named Ptolemy got Palestine, Cilicia, Petra, Cyprus, and – you guessed it – Egypt. This ancestor of our girl Cleopatra was actually a childhood friend of Alexander’s, the son of a country squire and a princess. For a time he was also Alex’s official taster, which may be why the Ptolemies seem to have a thing for poison. But Ptolemy had a problem: how do I get the people of Egypt to see me as their leader? Luck would have it that as he was mulling the problem over, he was helping escort Alexander’s body back to Macedonia for burial. Then Ptolemy had a lightbulb moment. “You know what? Imma steal that body.” And so he whisked Alex’s corpse away to Alexandria, put him in a gold sarcophagus in a public place, and was like, “see Alex, everybody? All draped in gold in stuff? What a total god he was – and you know I’m basically kind of MAYBE related to him, so that means I’M a god too, and it totally makes sense that I be your new pharaoh! So don’t try and overthrow me, k? Thanks byeeeeee.”
And that is how a Macedonian Greek family came to rule Egypt for the next 300 years. I’m sure some Egyptians were unsure about this new regime, and about moving the capital city from Thebes to this new city, but Egyptians really wanted to Make Egypt Great Again, and for that they needed a ruling family. And unlike the people who’d ruled previously, at least the Ptolemies actually based themselves in Egypt, and they were eager to lean into Egyptian culture, at least in some ways. They cast off their Greek getups and adopted that Egyptian god-king lifestyle, seducing the people into thinking that maybe Ptolemy was meant to rule after all.
Going Egyptian also meant reintroducing the whole brother-sister-daddy-wife incestuous marriage cycle. When he first settles in Egypt, Ptolemy is all ready to follow Macedonian custom: just like Olympias’s husband Philip II and Alexander before him, he took several wives. But then his daughter, Arsinoe, saw an opportunity: she convinced her brother, also named Ptolemy, to marry her against Greek custom, thus establishing herself as his co-ruler: his equal. I have a lot to say about Arsinoe’s rollercoaster life, and how she set the tone for all the women to come after her. You’ll find a bonus episode about her on my Patreon very soon. For now, let’s just say that is how Egyptian women once again found themselves with a clear path to the power seat if they were game enough to grab it.
Dynastic origins established, we fast forward through several decades of intense family rivalry to get back to 69 BCE. As we do, be aware that this family has a very short list of baby names. There’s really only one name for boys - Ptolemy - and for girls there’s three: Berenice, Arsinoe, and Cleopatra (which is actually a Greek name, did you know, meaning “Glory of her Fatherland”). To keep things straight, they often picked up nicknames: that first Ptolemy, for example, was Ptolemy Soter, which meant “Savior.” Historians have also given each of them numbers so we can tell who’s who. How about a visual to help make sense of this twisty-turny family tree?...
It must be said that the Ptolemy Family makes the Lannisters from Game of Thrones look like a bunch of My Little Ponies. They’re incestuous and cutthroat, like the Lannisters, but they take both of those things to a whole other level. Don’t like your brother husband? Poison him, naturally. Want dad out of the way? Knife to the ribs, no big deal. When it comes to role models, Cleopatra has some intense female family members to learn from. We’ll talk about Arinoe II, that first Ptolemy’s daughter, in that bonus, but some high and lowlights of her life include: marrying a king, having her two sons murdered in front of her, fleeing from the half-brother who killed her kids and stole their throne, and then marrying her full-blood brother to become one of the most influential women in the ancient world. Allllrighty then! A bit further down the family tree we have mother-daughter duo Cleopatras II and III. Cleo III isn’t a big fan of her mom, it seems, so she deposes her and promptly marries her mother’s husband and her own uncle, Ptolemy VIII. Nevermind that his nickname is Physkon, or “Pot-belly.” Just lie back and think of Egypt! But Cleo II isn’t about to retire and move to the Gold Coast. She raises an army and uses it to drive Cleo III and brother-husband right out of Egypt. Ptolemy VIII gets her back by murdering their son together, chopping him into several pieces, and sending him wrapped up like a present to Alexandria for Cleo II’s birthday. Wait...what? Eventually, they all settle into a very bizarre ruling threesome. I’ll bet they all sleep super soundly at night.
An Egyptian wall relief showing Cleopatra III, Cleopatra II, and Ptolemy VIII before Horus. Just your average incestuous threesome. Wikicommons.
This is all to highlight a simple, strange truth about Cleopatra’s story: she is born and raised in what’s essentially the family edition of the Hunger Games. She grows up surrounded by subterfuge, political backbiting, and the kind of life where you never drink out of a cup before a slave tastes its contents for you. She knows that if she doesn’t end up in power herself, whoever is will see her as a threat and seek to destroy her. It’s a life where loyalty means both everything and nothing; where love can be a powerful bond and a weakness, and trust is a luxury you can’t often afford. Kara Cooney, author of the excellent book When Women Ruled the World, puts it best when she says: “Ptolemaic life was one of persistent PTSD.”
What would this childhood feel like? Would Cleo have run through the gilded halls of the palace with her sisters, laughing and playing make-believe, before they were old enough to understand they’d probably end up killing each other? Was there love here, or only animosity? Each of them is surrounded by a team of hangers-on: tutors, advisors, generals, moneymen, all hoping to make their young charge the next king or queen of Egypt. They fight her battles until she’s old enough to fight them for herself.
It’s easy to imagine that this childhood doesn’t engender much trust or compassion. It does, however, shape her to successfully rule a country in a very troubled time. But to make it to adulthood—which is no guarantee—she’ll have to have a sharp mind, a clear grasp of politics, a decisive wit, the ability to adapt to changing circumstances, a strong sense of her worth, and a real sense of entitlement. Luckily, she’ll have all of these things in spades.
Cleo’s father is a guy named Ptolemy XII. He became unlikely pharaoh in 80 BCE, when the direct family line looked up and was like, “oh, wait: did we kill everybody? Shit, we did. Better find a second cousin!”
He was the son of a Ptolemy, Ptolemy IX Soter II, but his mom was only one of his side pieces, so his claim to the throne was tenuous at best. His grandmother, the cutthroat Cleo III, sent him away from Alexandria years before to keep him out of danger, doing we have no idea what. Maybe he was groomed for kingly greatness...or maybe he looked up in 80 BCE and was like, “Wait, what? Me? Pharaoh? Oh... I mean, sure. I guess I can make that could work.” Since the elite of Alexandria are big on their kings being too legit to quit, he makes sure to solidify his claim quickly, renaming himself the “New Dionysus” to give himself some extra swagger. But most people call him by one of two nicknames: Nothus, or “Bastard,” and Auletes, Greek for “Piper” or “flute player.” This last is because he’s fond of playing an oboe-like instrument that is apparently a favorite among prostitutes. Mmk.
But it works for Cleo’s dad. He’s fond of wine, parties, women, and whaling on his flute. As Strabo said, “...apart from his general licentiousness, [he] practiced the accompaniment of choruses with the flute, and upon this he prided himself so much that he would not hesitate to celebrate contests in the royal palace, and at these contests would come forward to vie with the opposing contestants.”
Though in the midst of all these epic jam sessions, he does a pretty good job of producing future Ptolemies. It’s interesting to note that though the family is into incestuous closed-loop marriages, it doesn't seem like they have the same incest-related issues as the earlier pharaohs. That might be because, though Ptolemy XII marries his sister (or maybe cousin) Cleopatra V Tryphaena, he definitely takes unrelated mistresses on the side. The Ptolemies don’t have official harems like the old dynasties used to, just dalliances out of wedlock, which can make lines of succession fairly confusing. Some people think Cleo herself might have been the product of such a union. Either way, we know next to nothing about her mom of record, Cleopatra V Tryphaena, who falls off the face of ancient records the same year Cleo’s born.
Ptolemy the sexy flautist also has two sons, BOTH named Ptolemy, and two other daughters: Berenice and Arsinoe. Cleo, we think, is the middle child.
There’s a lot we don’t know for certain about Cleo’s childhood, but plenty we can infer. For one, she’s raised by a horde of royal helpers: wet nurses, nannies, servants, bodyguards, hangers on, tutors. There will be at least one official taster who chews her stewed carrots to make sure there isn’t any poison in them. She’ll have a girl gang of noble children to run around with. Each child will have a whole team of people around them, very interested in keeping them alive to claim power.
When no one’s trying to kill her, it’s a lush and indulgent existence in one of the ancient world’s richest and most beautiful cities. Imagine her running down hallways filled with tiles of ebony and ivory, over lush Persian carpets and leopard skin rugs, through doors decorated with mother of pearl, garnet, and topaz. She’s playing in palace gardens where keen zoologist Ptolemy II is said to have once kept giraffes, bears, and pythons. She’s taking trips during the festival season down the Nile between Alexandria and Memphis, dressing up and participating in cult rituals to remind the people of the family’s divine right to rule. Through it all, she’s receiving the best education a Hellenic girl can buy. And she’s an excellent student, keen to soak up everything she can.
HOMETOWN ALEXANDRIA
Alexandria, Baedeker, Karl Egypt, handbook for travellers, London 1885. Rice University
Let’s talk about her hometown, as it’s a place whose streets we’ll want to get lost in. Despite the many years of stabby family relations between that first Ptolemy and this latest one, the family has managed not only to hold onto and expand Egypt’s border, but to bring Alexander’s dream city to life. It’s in essence a Greek city, full of Greek language, art, and culture, but with distinctly Egyptian accents. If the ancient world had a Most Livable Cities List, Alexandria would top it every time.
Sailing into this walled city on a narrow strip of peninsula, you’re greeted by the city’s great pharos, or lighthouse. It’s the world’s first such structure, and it’s the reason we call tall structures with flaming lights atop them “lighthouses.” It has some five levels and stands some 455 feet (140 meters) tall, guiding sailors into port with fire by night and smoke by day, we think, and using metal mirrors to send the light over the water. It will survive for a staggering 17 centuries. They sure don’t build ‘em like they used to.
Once you’ve landed, you’ll find yourself strolling along a long, wide boulevard called the Canopic Way, which is kind of like Paris’s long promenades. It’s the grandest street in the ancient world: 80 chariots can ride down it side by side. All the better for holding grand parades, which the Ptolemies are very fond of. It runs from east to west, lined with elegant columns and silk tapestries, capped by the ‘Gate of the Moon’ on the east and the ‘Gate of the Sun’ on the west. The royal complex is quite prominent, located near the harbor. Beyond it, you’ll find bustling market stalls, vibrant shops, street performers, and lots of ibis. These black-and-white birds are sacred to Egyptians, tied to Thoth, the god of wisdom and writing. But watch out: they’ll steal your lunch if you let them. I once had one snatch a sandwich right out of my hand with its long, bendy beak.
Ships pour into this port from all over, bringing silk and spices, ebony, ivory, aromatic plants, precious metals, scrolls, perfumes. Egyptian grain flies out of its port, marching out to feed a huge proportion of the population in places like Rome. The city is heavily influenced by Greece in terms of style, language, and its love of the arts, and thus feels very different than the rest of Egypt. You’ll find public baths, giant statues, a massive gymnasium, and temples dedicated to both Greek and Egyptian gods. It’s as New York City is to New York State: a part of the greater whole, to be sure, but also its own world.
Alexandria is a diverse city. It links India, Arabia, Africa, and the Western world, and being a port city, it’s full of riches and wonders and people from everywhere. Its citizens love to have fun, to live out loud and in color. “It is not easy for a stranger to endure the clamor of so great a multitude,” said one tourist, “or to face these tens of thousands unless he comes provided with a lute and a song.”
It’s separated into ethnic quarters, all called by letters of the alphabet, making Alexandria perhaps one of the earliest cities to have street addresses as we recognize them today. Jews, Greeks, Egyptians, and others are running their own parts of town, but also mixing and melding around the many theaters, bordellos, and warehouses. Riots and protests aren’t uncommon.
“Looking at the city, I doubted whether any race of men could ever fill it. Looking at the inhabitants, I wondered whether any city could ever be large enough to hold them all.”
The Ptolemies have taken great pride in making Alexandria a place of art and learning. “The city has exceedingly beautiful public parks and palaces covering a quarter or a third of its area,” Strabo tells us, “since each of the kings, just as he contributed some enhancement to the public monuments, so too he added to the existing buildings a private residence, so that now, as the poet says, they are one on top of the other.”
The city’s famous library contains the greatest collection of knowledge in the ancient world. It’s called the Mouseion, which is Greek for “a seat or shrine of the Muses,” and is where we get the word “museum” from. Ptolemy Soter was known to hoard everything ever written, on a quest to create the world’s largest book collection. A man after my own heart, to be sure! He sent emissaries all over the world to acquire them, raiding book fairs in Rhodes and Athens; he even plundered ships coming into harbor. “Don’t worry,” he’d say. “I’ll have my scribes make a copy and give the original back to you…you know, probably.” Some say the Mouseion houses 500,000 scrolls, though it’s probably more like 100,000, including some of Sappho’s poetry. A massive number when you consider this is a time when everything is written out by hand. There’s a museum attached, where a community of scholars are given tax-free room and board so they can focus on Thinking Big Thoughts together. The circumference of the world is first measured here, coming within a few hundred miles of accurate. The sun is pinned at the center of our solar system. Legend has it that Archimedes – the guy, not the owl from Disney’s Sword in the Stone – invented his “Archimedes’ screw” here, which is a pump for transporting water from below ground to above. Kind of a big deal. This is the intellectual center of the world. If you’re in Rome and your tutor didn’t train in Alexandria, then he’s a hack job, and don’t let anyone tell you different.
Cleopatra has all this at her fingertips, and lives in a society where it’s cool for royal women to know things. Not just royals, but women in general: Alexandria is home to lady doctors, painters, poets. You don’t even have to be noble to get an education. We talked in another episode about a woman named Agnodice, who came from Greece to Alexandria so she could train to be a doctor, then practiced secretly back home even though she wasn’t allowed. While Romans tend to think women are at their best when they’re quiet, barefoot, and pregnant, Egyptians like an educated woman: you know, as long as she doesn’t cause too much trouble.
Cleopatra is probably studying math, geometry, and astronomy, and knowing her dad, there are probably some music lessons thrown in there. She’s reading the classics and memorizing epic poems. Imagine her sitting on the palace steps, reading Homer’s The Iliad in the original Greek. Her tutors make sure to instruct her in rhetoric: how to persuade, convince, and manipulate someone into seeing your side of things. She seems to take a shine to languages: Plutarch tells us she speaks Greek, of course, and Hebrew, plus the languages of the Medes, Parthians, Arabs, Syrians, Troglodytes (a word that in Greek means “cave dwellers”), and an Ethiopian language that Plutarch says is “like the screeching of bats.” She’s apparently the only one of her siblings who bothers learning native Egyptian: the same language her 7 million subjects speak. She must know the power that comes from being able to communicate directly with the people, whether they be Macedonian or Egyptian. I hope she occasionally wanders out into the city in disguise, all Jasmine like, and eavesdrops on all the shit the locals are talking.
Greek writer Plutarch, like pretty much all of our sources, never meets Cleo – he won’t be born until around 45 CE – but he still has lots to say about her, including how lovely she is to listen to:
“It was a pleasure merely to hear the sound of her voice, with which, like an instrument of many strings she could pass from the language to another; so that there were few of the barbarian nations that she answers by an interpreter; to most of them she spoke herself.”
A word on Cleo’s looks. We have MANY pieces of art that depict her, but the truth is that we don't know what she looked like. And though the shade of her skin seems to be a bone of contention, it’s unlikely that she was a woman of color in the Egyptian sense. Being from Macedonian Greek stock, she probably has an olive complexion, and very little - if any - African descent in her family tree, though of course it’s a possibility. It’s telling that the most potentially accurate portrait we have of her is from the coins she minted. On them, she looks precisely nothing like Elizabeth Taylor: prominent nose, exaggerated features, and a very manly Greek look. But this is a coin we're talking about, which in the ancient world is a powerful piece of propaganda, with all the hallmarks of an Egyptian ruler trying to make herself look imposing to solidify her power. So we’ll just have to use our imaginations.
This is my little image to Cleopatra, which you can get on greeting cards or as a wall hanging in my Etsy shop. The pictured marble bust of Cleopatra comes from the Altes Museum Berlin.
Plutarch insists that Cleo isn’t beautiful. Instead, he writes, her bearing is…
“ ...not in itself so remarkable that none could be compared with her, or that no one could see her without being struck by it, but the contact of her presence, if you lived with her, was irresistible; the attraction of her person, joining with the charm of her conversation, and the character that attended all she said or did, was something bewitching.”
In terms of her level of power, we don’t know if she’s being groomed to be pharaoh. Given that she’s not the first born or a man, it’s unlikely. But she’s groomed for pharaohdom anyway: with the Ptolemies, you never know who is going to end up on top.
It’s worth repeating that this Egypt is very different than the one we left Nefertiti and Tawosret in: even Cleo would have seen those women as ancient history. This country has been broken open, globalized and exploited by outsiders. As the breadbasket of the Mediterranean, the superpowers all around it see it as a prize jewel worth winning. One of those covetous powers is ancient Rome.
If Rome and Egypt had a Facebook relationship status, it would definitely be “it’s complicated.” Rome is the Mediterranean world’s greatest military power, and they’re insatiably hungry, gobbling up nations left and right. They’d LOVE to invade and run Egypt as a client state. But it’s too big to control, and they’re stretched pretty thin already. Plus, whichever individual general conquers it could turn around and use its resources to seize control of what is, right now, the Roman Republic. Better to make sure that whoever’s ruling Egypt is firmly on the side of Team Rome.
Ptolemy XII isn’t afraid to wave his Team Rome foam finger, since he inherited a land with crippling debts. A previous Ptolemy actually left Egypt to Rome in his will, which means it’s hard to shut Rome out completely. And in a family where someone’s always trying to steal your throne, it pays to have powerful friends. So like many Ptolemies before him, he looks to Rome for legitimacy, giving them troops and money in exchange for their support. For context, this is right around the time when our favorite threesome – Pompey, Julius Caesar, and Crassus – are causing trouble over in Rome. Ptolemy supposedly pays Pompey and Caesar six thousand talents – it’s hard to translate what that would mean now, but we’re talking crazy money – to be his friend. The Alexandrians don’t like how chummy he’s being with these outsiders, and the city’s population isn’t afraid to stage a good old-fashioned riot. Which they do. Auletes is like, “shit, everybody. I just wanna play my flute. Is that so wrong?” And then he goes too far. The Romans take over the island of Cyprus, which Ptolemy’s brother rules, and he doesn’t stop it. His brother kills himself rather than give in to the invaders, and it royally pisses everyone off.
So they kick Auletes out, and he and a teenaged Cleopatra flee to Rome. At least we think she does. She might stay in Alexandria. Like so much about her life, it’s unclear.
Either way...the throne is empty, ya’ll. Let the Games be ever in your favor! Big sister Berenice ends up nabbing the prize. It turns out that the Egyptians dislike Ptolemy XII so much that they’re willing to have a teenage girl at the helm. But she’s a woman ruling alone, and we all know that won’t do, so her loyal followers pressure her to marry someone ASAP. One of her brothers would be best, but they’re really young, so she lets the people choose for her. The chosen suiter is a prince from the massive Seleucid Empire in what is nowSyria empire, and whose name is – inevitably – Seleucid. But he must be either really boring or flosses in bed, because within a week she supposedly has him strangled. Boy, bye! Next up is Archelaos from Anatolia, who fares better, but he has about as much power as the pool boy who fans her face with a palm frond. Berenice is running the show.
PAPPA ROME
Meanwhile, over in Rome, Ptolemy isn’t holed up in an Air B&B eating his feelings. He’s “petitioning” (*cough* bribing *cough*) anyone who will listen to help him take back his throne. If Cleopatra is with him, she’s getting a serious lesson in how to market yourself AND bribe with abandon. Dad plasters posters around the Forum and Senate (“vote for me, I play the flute!”) and gifts people with fancy canopied couches – the ancient equivalent of a really cool Vespa. In fact, he’s so up in Rome’s business that in 56 BCE our pal Cicero complains that his suit has “gained a highly invidious notoriety.” Pompey actually put Auletes and Cleo up, and speaks on their behalf in the Senate – a favor that he hopes will be repaid someday in full. When 100 delegates from Egypt arrive to protest Auletes’ return to the kingship, he throws a hissy, poisoning their leader and either murdering or bribing the rest to leave town. Classy.
And so it is that, with a whole lot of palm greasing, Ptolemy marches back to Alexandria in 55 BCE, backed by a Roman army: the first to ever touch down on Egypt’s soil. As you can imagine, the Egyptians aren’t real thrilled about it. But neither are the Roman soldiers, who aren’t keen to brave the scorching desert for a flute-playing foreign bastard. We’re Rome, dammit. What are we even doing here?
One young, chiseled Roman officer is totally down; his name is Mark Antony. This currently 25-year-old up and comer will spend time in Alexandria once they take it back for Ptolemy. This may be where he first meets and has lusty feelings for a 13-year-old Cleopatra. Maybe she likes him too, or maybe she just briefly ogles his legs under his Roman armor. Who knows, but keep him in mind. We’ll be coming back for him later.
When Ptolemy’s secured the city, he’s like, “Bye, Berenice!” and promptly chops her head off. Nice, dad. And lucky Cleo probably gets to watch. Being a daughter of the pharaoh, she must wonder how many steps she might be a way from a similar fate. Some say Ptolemy makes her his co-regent at this point – and, thankfully, he doesn’t try to marry her. Dad clearly likes her, and she likes him: she’ll later add the word Philopater, or “Father-Loving,” to her official king name.
Five years later, Ptolemy XII must know he’s dying, because he writes his will, and in it he does something truly annoying. He declares that he wants Cleopatra and her younger brother Ptolemy XIII to be co-rulers after he bites it, and he puts them both under Rome’s “guardianship.” Which seems like a bad idea all around. Maybe he doesn’t think Cleo will be accepted without a man beside her; maybe he is hedging his bets in case one of them dies. Maybe he sees there’s just no surviving as an independent empire without Roman support—not anymore. Auletes officially calls them Theoi Neoi Philadelphos: “New Gods” and “Loving Siblings,” probably hoping they’ll also get married...which, eventually, they will. Yummy.
When dad dies of, incredibly, natural causes - winning! - Cleo takes the throne with one hand tied behind her back. She has to share the title with a brother whose team will, from minute one, be trying to get rid of her. Thanks a lot, dad. But at age 18, Cleo is ready to rule, and she has all the tools she needs for greatness. “Move over, bitches. I’m about to show you what a real ruler looks like.”
First, she works to get in good with the local Egyptians. With the sacred Buchis bull dead – an animal worshipped by a cult near Thebes in Upper Egypt – she sails with the new bull some 600 miles up the Nile to oversee his inauguration. In fact, she may have been the first Ptolemy to do it in person. These festivals are sacred moments when the Egyptian people get to see their gods and goddesses, to interact with the divine. And Cleo knows it. So she makes sure to present herself at many such religious ceremonies, where the people can see her doing the ancient equivalent of kissing babies – and looking like an absolute goddess as she does it.
Ptolemaic women have made an artform out of aligning themselves with this fierce goddess and lady of the Underworld. Isis is actually the Greek form of her name: in Egyptian it’s Aset, meaning “seat” or “throne.” If you’ll remember from our earlier Egypt episodes, she’s the one who uses powerful magic to resurrect her murdered husband Osiris, whom she gifts with a golden penis so they can have one last epic roll in the hay. The product of that union is Horus, the god upon high who protects Egypt’s royalty. She goes back a long way, to the Old Kingdom, but she really picks up popularity under the Ptolemies. Powerful, yet kind, Isis becomes popular even beyond Egypt, with cults popping up in Greece, Rome, and beyond.
Royal women going back as far as Arsinoe II take pains to associate themselves with this powerful goddess linked to healing, magic, fertility, and a potent kind of female power. Cleopatra goes so far as to claim to be her manifestation on Earth; in fact, I think she believes it wholeheartedly. If you’d been told from infancy that you were the child of a new god, you’d probably believe it too.
She also takes every opportunity to be like, "Oh, I’m sorry. Ptolemy who?”, claiming herself as sole ruler on a bunch of monuments, conveniently forgetting to add her brother’s name. He doesn’t feature on the flip side of her official coins, either. Ooh, BURN. Meanwhile, she’s taking a page out of Hatshepsut’s book and carving images of herself all over Egypt. “Who needs to kill their brother when they’re crushing that ancient Instagram feed?”
This is the Cleo we don’t often see: an absolute boss, both great at PR and at making sure her country runs smoothly. But she’s inherited a country in decline on a couple of fronts. The Nile isn’t flooding like it used to; people are starving; grain stores aren’t what they were. And she keeps stumbling over the issue of how to deal with Rome, whose generals are currently playing a bloody game of political musical chairs as they shift from a Senate-led democracy to one that crowns people Emperors for Life. How can she keep Egypt independent in the midst of Rome’s epic civil war between Caesar and Pompey? How to hold Rome at bay without pissing them off?
From here on in, Cleopatra is going to spend a lot of time trying to keep the wolves at bay: or, more accurately, in trying to tame them.
Egypt may always be going to Papa Rome to help settle their dynastic matters, but Rome is always sailing to Sugar Mama Egypt for supplies and money. This is the time period when Pompey and Julius are duking it out for who’s going to be Rome’s one true leader. It’s only a matter of time before one or both of them come calling, asking for ships and money and political backing. Who to choose? When Pompey’s son asks Cleo for troops, she gives them freely; Pompey is the one who got her dad those Roman troops, way back when. But the Egyptian locals tend to revolt when they’re hangry, and this move does not make her many friends. There’s also what she does when those Roman legions that once helped her dad out were recalled back to Rome. They refused to go, as they’d settled in and started families in Alexandria, and got so upset about it all that they killed the governor’s son who came to collect them. Cleo, thinking she’s doing a good thing, sends the soldiers back to Rome in chains. Again, Alexandrians are pretty unimpressed by so giving in to Rome’s whims, forsaking their own.
And don’t forget, there is Ptolemy XIII and his posse to contend with, who are more than ready to get rid of her at the first available opportunity. And then, in 48 BCE, they do just that. They press Pompey to officially claim Ptolemy XIII Egypt’s sole ruler. And Pompey’s like, “No prob. Because I mean, a woman in power? I'll take a hard pass on that.”
Cleopatra finds herself an exiled queen, fleeing the only home she’s ever known with no certainty that she’ll ever make it back again, or even that she’ll live to see another day. She heads to Thebes, then to Syria to try and figure out how to get her throne back. This is where young Cleo really starts to come into her own.
PART II
Last time, we watched her grow up in the city of Alexandria, amid both luxury, excess, and the constant threat of death by family member. When her pharaoh father fled Egypt, she went with him, experiencing Rome for the very first time. General Pompey and some of their other Roman friends helped dear old dad win back his throne from his other daughter Berenice, and then, years later, he did something unfortunate: he left Egypt to Cleopatra AND her annoying brother Ptolemy XIII, and then he ALSO put them under Rome’s guardianship. She ruled well for a while, but her brother’s advisors conspired against her. Now Cleopatra’s a 21-year-old exile. How will she find her way back to greatness? Grab a fetching cloak, a burlap sack large enough to get rolled up in, and a strapping male companion. Let’s go traveling.
BATTLE LINES DRAWN
It’s 48 BCE, and dear brother Ptolemy XIII and his advisors have just managed to kick Cleopatra out of Alexandria, exiling her to the desert and what they hope will be permanent obscurity. But she’s not about to sit around and pout about how unfair the world is. After fleeing through Middle Egypt, then Palestine, then Syria, this rejected royal gets busy. She spends a hot, dusty summer raising an army. I imagine her command of languages comes in handy here as she uses her epic powers of persuasion to recruit some (hopefully) loyal followers. When we picture Cleopatra, we often think of her lounging in luxury, but this isn’t her situation. She knows how to rough it when she needs to and is willing to go to great lengths—and suffer great discomfort. Cleopatra is an adventuress as well as a queen.
Knives out, she marches through the Sinai to camp in the eastern Delta. For a clearer picture of where she is, exactly, check out my map of ancient Egypt, which you’ll find in the show notes AND in my Etsy shop, if you fancy one to hang on your wall. Unfortunately, Ptolemy XIII and his team are ready for her with a 20,000-man force full of pirates and outlaws. They are stationed at a fortress in Pelusium, making it nie on impossible for her to break through. She is relegated to the red sands down the coast, where she paces and schemes. She’s outnumbered, which means she will probably lose a battle. But how to get around them and back into Alexandria? How to reclaim her throne and neuter her brother for good?
That's when fate intervenes in the form of Julius Caesar.
Julius is never afraid to toot his own horn.
A bust of Julius Caesar, Wikicommons.
As a reminder of where we’re at in Rome’s history: this is right around the time when the First Triumvirate is duking it out for who will control their home country. Right about now, the tide is starting to turn against Pompey the Great. This is the year he gets roundly trounced by Julius at Pharsalus. He limps off the battlefield to seek a place of refuge, and immediately thinks of Alexandria: I mean, he IS the only reason those Ptolemies are even on the throne, remember? Their dad loved him, and these kids owe him. So they’ll definitely roll out the welcome mat! What he doesn’t know is that Ptolemy XIII and his band of advisors are keenly aware that they need to stay in Rome’s good books, and they worry that in Pompey they have backed a losing horse. Should they try and make nice with him, as Ptolemy XII did, or should they side with Julius Caesar? Ptolemy isn’t sure. But his three main advisors – Theodotus, Achillas, and the eunuch Pothinus, are like, “Ugh, you know what? We’re overcomplicating this. Let’s just chop off his head and get rid of him entirely.” He’s too much of a danger. And after all, as Pothinus apparently says, “dead men don’t bite.”
Pompey lands just off of Pelusium, where he’s picked up in a small boat and taken to shore. He hasn’t even stepped onto the sands when a band of soldiers kill him while his entire force watches in their ships out in the waves. When Caesar arrives three days later, ahead of most of his troops, in search of Pompey, he’s gratified by his warm reception. But then, when Ptolemy XIII hands him Pompey’s severed head – surprise, you’re welcome! – it’s said that Caesar bursts into tears. Yes, so maybe it’s convenient that his enemy is gone, but this guy wasn't always his enemy: he was once his ally and his son-in-law. Caesar had it all planned out: he would forgive Pompey, and then they would march back to Rome arm-and-arm, uniting a divided Rome. But Ptolemy has robbed him of that future. So instead of pumping his fist and saying, “sweet job, Egypt!” he’s pissed. Ptolemy’s plan had blown up in his face.
And when Caesar looks around, he’s annoyed by the mess he sees in Egypt. He can’t afford for the Mediterranean’s breadbasket to explode in civil strife, especially when they still owe Rome a good amount of money. “What is this royal mess you’ve made, Ptolemy? Where is your sister? Ugh, you know what? Bring her back here. We’re all going to sit down and have a nice little chat.”
Young Ptolemy XIII has no interest in being commanded by Caesar, OR in seeing his sister back at the palace. Luckily, Cleo has plenty of spies in high places, and she gets word of the goings on anyway. Like all great leaders, Cleo recognizes an open door when she sees it. Julius is now Rome’s most powerful man; he’s currently mad at her brother; and he has troops, or soon will have. She has one chance to win his favor and woo him to her side, and she isn’t about to miss it. But if she isn’t careful, this door might just slam on her fingers. When and how to get to Caesar is going to be one of the most fateful decisions of her life. She could send a messenger to plead her case, but they could be intercepted or bribed. Sometimes, if you want something done right, you’ve gotta do it yourself.
She gets her loyal servant, Apollodorus, to sneak her back into Alexandria in a tiny boat. This isn’t an afternoon pleasure cruise. She has to navigate around some treacherous swamplands, then go the long way down South and up the Nile, past patrols and who knows what other dangers. It’s a trip of some eight days, and those days are very tense.Eventually Apollodorus rows her into Alexandria as the sun sets. But how to get in without anyone seeing her? She decides to pull her own version of the Trojan horse. Apollodorus rolls her up in a giant carpet, throws her over his burly shoulder, and carries her into the palace. Well, that’s how the legend goes. Plutarch tells us that “as it was impossible to escape notice otherwise, she stretched herself at full length inside a bed-sack, while Apollodorus tied the bed-sack up with a cord and carried it indoors to Caesar.” Some historians think it’s the type of sack one might have transported papyrus scrolls in, which is a nice image: papyrus scrolls are full of wit and knowledge, and you now what? So is Cleo.
Regardless of its exact dimensions, Apollodorus covers her with something and walks her right in, with none the wiser. “Scrolls coming through. Nothing to see here.” He has to take her all the way to the suite Julius has locked himself into, since the Alexandrians are now rioting outside the royal complex. Turns out they’re pretty pissed to see another Roman lording it over the Egyptian royal family.We don’t know if she’s actually unrolled in FRONT of Caesar. If your entire future depended on the impression you made on one particular Roman gentleman, wouldn’t you want a minute to freshen up and check your breath? Despite what most pieces of art will tell you, she probably isn’t dripping in jewels OR dressed in nothing but her lacy underthings, either. I mean come on, Renaissance painters…eyes up. In fact, it’s fair to say that she must plan this moment carefully, from what she’s wearing to every word she’s going to say. This secret meeting is a giant risk. She’s shrewd, adaptable, and knows a thing or two about rhetoric. Still, her heart must be pounding as she makes her way into his rooms.
Hey, Julius….
“Cleopatra and Caesar,” J. Jerome (19th century). Wikicommons
We have no idea what she and Julius say to each other, so let’s do a little creative scene setting.
C: *unzipping noise* “Heeeeeeey, Julius.”
J: "…oh damn, girl. How’d you get in here?”
C: “I lady never reveals her secrets. Listen: about this whole Who Should Rule Egypt business. I think we both know I’m the best person for the job.”
J: “Go on. I’m listening.”
C: “You want Egypt’s riches. I want to be the queen I was destined to be. Let’s be friends, you and I.”
J: “…political friends, for sure. But also…sexy friends?”
C: “…maybe.”
Does she charm him into bed with her sexy magic, poisoning his mind as Roman writers would have us believe? Perhaps. But arguing that she humped her way into Caesar’s good books does them both a huge disservice. As we’ve already learned, Caesar is a master seducer; there’s no WAY some horizontal tennis time with a pretty young queen is going to force him to do anything he doesn’t want to. And Cleo’s got a lot more going for her than the sweet delights of her body. There’s every reason to believe that she convinces him that allying with her is a good idea without resorting to such tactics. Though knowing how much Julius likes a strong, opinionated woman, we can imagine that he’s extremely impressed. “It was by this device of Cleopatra's,” Plutarch tells us of the unfurling carpet trick, “that Caesar was first captivated, for she showed herself to be a bold coquette, and succumbing to the charm of further intercourse with her, he reconciled her to her brother...” No matter how it goes down, this we know for certain: this exiled queen with everything to lose convinces Rome’s most powerful general that she’s the one he should throw his weight behind. I think if Cleo could sum it up, she might say: “I came, I saw, I conquered.”
To say that her brother Ptolemy XIII doesn’t take this well is putting it mildly. In fact, it’s said he runs into the street and throws a hissy fit, before promptly finding himself under house arrest. But from there, not all is smooth sailing for Cleo and Julius. Far from it. Not only are the Alexandrians angry about Caesar storming their city, but at Cleo for getting into political bed with him. Over the next several months, they’ll be trapped in the palace and fighting for their lives under a full-scale Alexandrian rebellion. And the Alexandrians are not to be underestimated. Cleo’s great uncle, Ptolemy XI, was once torn limb from limb in the streets because the people were mad that he murdered his wife. They subscribe to the ‘eye for an eye’ brand of justice. So her royal name is not enough to protect her, and Julius Caesar might not be either. They face threats both without and within.
Though Ptolemy XIII is under house arrest, his supporters are out there raising armies. Not wanting to be left out, Cleo’s younger sister, Arsinoe IV, sneaks out of the palace complex and helps lead a rebellion. Though the guy in charge of that rebellion, Achillas, gets mad because she has too many opinions. Ugh, men. No matter: Arsinoe kills him and takes over. The Ptolemy women do NOT suffer fools! Unfortunately, her troops ultimately betray her, turning her in in exchange for Ptolemy XIII, and she ends up a prisoner once again.
During all this madness, Julius and Cleo are trapped in the palace complex with nothing but his skeleton crew of 4,000 men—small beans compared to the rebel forces. He can’t get word out to try and rally reinforcements, so he and Cleo try to broker some peace. At a banquet they throw, they find out that some of Ptolemy’s advisors are planning to poison Julius and murder Cleo. Fights are taking place in the streets on the regular. Before long, they’re cutting off their supply lines, determined to starve them out. Julius’ men freak out because someone fills the palace reservoirs with saltwater. And Caesar’s like, “We’re Romans. Pull up your big boy pants and dig some new wells.” They even start erecting assault towers: how long will it be before they breach Julius’s defensive walls? At one point, with battle raging around the Pharos, he is tossed from his boat and almost drowns. In desperation, he has his troops set fire to his ships in the harbor: better that than have the enemy take them. This may or may not be responsible for burning down the city’s world-famous library. I can’t imagine Cleo is very psyched about that.
J. Caesar says: “Whoops.”
Burning of Alexandria’s port and surrounds, Wikicommons
She has to be anxiously biting her nails, wondering if she’s played her hand right. Have all her power plays been for nothing? Can she and Caesar pull this off? And yet it isn’t all bad news. If the Alexandrians are hoping to get Julius out of Egypt, all they really succeed in doing is pushing him and Cleo together. Turns out that she and 52-year-old Julius find plenty to do to pass the time on lockdown. Namely, lots of horizontal tennis! So…at least there’s that.Eventually some allies swoop in from Judea to help Caesar, and the climax of the so-called Alexandrian War takes places at the Battle of the Nile. Ptolemy XIII drowns there, rather conveniently, and Caesar finally puts Cleo where she belongs: on the throne. But not alone. You didn’t think we’d let a lady rule solo, did you? She’s crowned alongside her even younger, still-living brother Ptolemy XIV, whom of course Cleo marries. “…a mere pretence,” Dio tells us, “which she accepted, whereas in truth she ruled alone and spent all her time in Caesar’s company.”
Even when things calm down, Caesar doesn't sail straight home. Not even when Rome calls him up, all like:
*ring ring* “Um, hello? Julius? What you doin’?”
J: “Sorry, what was that? I can’t hear you – you’re breaking up…”
Instead he stays for months, eating figs and basking in his boo Cleopatra’s glory. It’s said they go on a pleasure cruise down the Nile together, taking in the Great Pyramids with many ships in tow. Why does he stay, when there’s no clear political benefit to doing so, and in fact perhaps some political harm? Roman poet Lucan says that “Cleopatra has been able to capture the old man with magic.” I say she’s captured him with her wit and many charms. Does he love her? He’s most certainly fascinated, and definitely infatuated. Does she love him? It’s hard to say, but I think she’s drawn to his strength and his power. Besides, they make a great team, and they want to show Egypt—perhaps the entire Mediterranean—that this power couple is not going to be trifled with.But all good things must come to an end. In 47 BCE, Caesar sails into the sunset, leaving Cleopatra with 12,000 legionnaires to protect her. He also leaves her with a VERY royal bun in the oven, whom she’ll give birth to not long after he departs. With her half-Roman son, Ptolemy XV Caesar – otherwise known as Caesarion – Cleopatra becomes perhaps the first Egyptian female pharaoh to use her baby-making ability to her own advantage. And she does it without giving up even one inch of her power.
Over in Rome, Julius has a big triumph to celebrate all the places he’s conquered. During it, he parades Cleo’s sister Arsinoe through the streets in golden chains. He then stuffs her in a temple and hopes she won’t cause any trouble. A Ptolemy princess, fading quietly into obscurity? Right, Julius. Good luck with that. He also starts making some reforms directly inspired by this time in Egypt, concerning a census and plans for a public library. He also reforms the unwieldy Roman calendar so that it more directly mirrors Egypt’s 365-day schedule.
Meanwhile, Cleo is left to rule Egypt in relative peace, with young Ptolemy XIV not much more than a royal seat warmer. But her regained position isn’t without its challenges. After the Alexandrian War, there are a lot of hurt feelings and rivalries at court, which means she has to do some housecleaning. And by that, I mean some executions.Like the rest of her family members, she grew up with a sense of herself as a goddess on Earth, and she isn’t afraid to act like one. She builds her image as a divine ruler through theater and epic pageantry, dressing herself up as Isis at every opportunity. She also gives money and favors to important priests, winning their devotion in a country where they are absolutely key. Like her ancestor Arsinoe II before her, she participates in festivals and holy rituals, always rocking her goddess outfit, and the people are LOVING it. But she doesn’t just rule from on high. She actually hears their grievances and helps settle disputes, helping to smooth out snarls between her subjects and her sometimes corrupt government officials. She takes the country’s debts in hand, devaluing the currency and introducing coins with different denominations for the very first time. Their markings determine their value, not their weight, and greatly help to regulate the economy. She and her massive governmental system control goods and services, making sure that money keeps flowing back to the crown. Take the brewing industry: Cleo makes sure that brewers operate only with a license and receive their barley from the state. And so Egypt’s most lucrative industries, from wheat and barley to papyrus, linen, and oils—are essentially royal monopolies. Cleopatra is only growing richer, raking in fully half of what the country produces. She commands the army and navy, negotiates with foreign powers, decides the price of goods and oversees the country’s agricultural plans. This is the Cleo we don’t often hear about: capable, savvy, thoughtful, and benevolent. A papyrus dated to 35 BCE calls her Philopatris, or “she who loves her country.” And she does it all while carrying, and then delivering, a child.
She must do a great job of getting Egypt running smoothly: enough so that, in 46 BCE, she feels confident to leave Egypt and sail for Rome with baby Caesarian in tow.
WHEN IN ROME (AGAIN)
We don’t know exactly why she leaves Egypt to fly into Julius’s arms. Maybe she really misses him; more likely, she wants to remind him that she exists, thank you very much, and introduce him to his child—his only male issue. She’s probably hoping he’ll name Caesarian his heir, making him the future ruler of both Rome and Egypt. It’s hard to say, but this queen is definitely going to make a splash.
We can only imagine her first impression of Rome, but it’s probably something like along the lines of “Ugh. Why does this place smell like pee?” As we’ve already explored, the Romans are great at building things like roads and aqueducts, but at this point, they’re not so renowned for their art or interior decorating. Rome is pretty ugly, at least at this point in history—rough and tumble and constantly under construction. Right now there is no Coliseum, no Pantheon. Compared to rich, colorful, sophisticated Alexandria, it won’t exactly make Cleo feel at home.
And the WOMEN. Rome likes its ladies quiet and subservient, at least in public, so this foreign queen, with her lavish gifts and entourage and the illegitimate son of their leader in tow, is bound to get tongues wagging. Cleo sweeps in like an ancient Kardashian: the public doesn’t want to look, but they just can’t help it. She even inspires a new Roman hairstyle that involves many braids. A trend setter, always.Julius seems happy to have her: he moves her into his country estate, on the west bank of the Tiber. No foreign royals are allowed in Rome, so it’s outside the city limits, but still a perfectly acceptable address. And thankfully it’s not the house his wife Calpurnia lives in, because…awkward. But Cleopatra’s position here isn’t easy. As good as she is with languages, she isn’t used to speaking Latin, and her biting wit and commanding presence must ruffle more than a few Roman feathers. In a world where women don’t get to choose their husbands and they’re supposed to keep eyes down in public, Cleopatra is very much out of her element, and there are men who resent her for it. As big-deal complainer Cicero will say later, though never to her face, “I detest the queen.” To which I’m sure Cleo would reply, “Boy, please. I don’t like you either.”
Though they’re sure to spend time together, Caesar’s away a lot, leaving her to fend for herself. Then in 44 BCE he’s made Dictator for Life. We talked about this in our episodes on Servilia and Fulvia, but to remind you, Rome is still a Republic at this point, and a lot of people are worried that Julius is getting too big for his breeches, acting all kingly in a land that is emphatically opposed. Julius already has a reputation for enjoying luxury a little more than a Roman leader should do. Maybe spending all that time with a queen and living goddess in Egypt gave him some poisonous notions? And she makes Senate members nervous. They can only imagine what she might be whispering to Julius over her wine glass during late-night dinners. “I mean really, babe. You’re not fooling anyone. You want to be a king, so…become one.”
All that said, this is definitely the wrong moment for Julius to commission a huge golden statue of Cleo and install it in a temple right beside one of the goddess Venus. And yet that’s exactly what he does! This is probably par for the course for Cleopatra, who grew up surrounded by statues of her family members. It is, after all, the Egyptian way. But the Romans are like, “Are you serious right now?” Because it’s one thing to worship a foreign queen in private. It’s quite another to publicly place her next to a Roman goddess while acting like a god yourself.
it was fun while it lasted.
“Caesar’s Triumph,” Peter Paul Rubens and Erasmus Quellinus II, Wikicommons.
That year, fearing where Caesar’s power is steering the Republic, some conspirators decide to stab him many times. We’ve covered this already, and so we know what happens: anger, finger pointing, fear, general chaos. But what of Cleopatra, who’s still in Rome when this happens? How must she feel when she hears of Julius’s demise? In a moment, she’s lost her lover, her powerful protector, and all of the security she fought so hard to win. And now she’s a foreign queen, with Caesar’s only natural son, in a city that’s as flammable as a barrel of gasoline. She knows when it’s time to make her exit. “OK, entourage, it’s time to BOUNCE.”
As 26-year-old Cleo boards her ship for home, she must be plagued by dark, troubled thoughts. If she was hoping for a loving future with Caesar, those plans are torn to pieces. If she wanted lasting security, that is nothing but tattered rags at her feet. And to add insult to injury, when Julius’ will was read aloud, she and her son feature nowhere in it. She thought she played the game so well, and now it seems like she’s back where she started: rich and powerful, but also vulnerable. And there may be a nagging question at the back of her mind, circling and painful: did her presence in Rome help bring about his death?Some sources say that when she sails away from Rome, she is pregnant, and has a miscarriage on the journey. That alone would be heartbreak enough. But she also knows that Rome is in chaos: how long before its generals start fighting for power, dragging her and Egypt into their squabbles? What if those powers see her son as a threat they have to get rid of? How long before the wolves start circling? How is she going to keep them at bay?
Next time, we’ll see Cleopatra cleverly navigate these very perilous waters. We’ll also see her strike up an alliance with another Roman general that will go down in history as one of the greatest love affairs of all time. We’ll experience lavish feasts, passionate love, savage murders, war, triumph, heartbreak. We’ll see Cleopatra reach her highest point, and then fall.
PART III
When we last left Cleopatra, she was creeping out the back door of a chaotic Rome in the wake of Julius Caesar’s death. As she sails the waves back to Alexandria, she broods over what might happen next. She’s just lost her Roman lover, ally, and protector, in a world where Rome is increasingly calling most of the shots. And then there is Caesarion, her son with Julius Caesar. In him, she has both a valuable advantage AND a potential danger. In some ways, she’s just as vulnerable as she was as a young exile. But Cleopatra is only now, a seasoned leader, and she isn’t one to sit back and let the gods take the wheel on her destiny. She’s managed to harness Rome’s powers in her favor and ensure her family’s continued legacy successfully before. And she can do it again—if she can just figure out how best to play the game.
GUESS WHO’S BACK
When Cleopatra arrives back home in Alexandria, she must be relieved to be back in her comfort zone. This is her city, her empire, and she knows her place in it. But she also has some fires to put out. Over at the temple of Artemis in Ephesus, Cleo’s sister Arsinoe is stirring up trouble, gathering up money and followers. They insist that SHE’S the real queen of Egypt. Also around this time, a pretender makes himself known in the front row, proclaiming that he’s Ptolemy XIII, returned. Surprise, everyone: you didn’t think I really drowned in the Nile, did you? To make matters worse, her 15-year-old brother-husband Ptolemy XIV is also becoming a nuisance. She’s facing potential threats on a couple of fronts here, and she hasn’t got time for petty Ptolemy infighting. So she nips the closest of these problems in the bud and has her brother killed, probably by way of poison. Ooh, Cleo. That is COLD. But this is just everyday business for the Ptolemies. Unsavory as it is, it’s nothing different than her forebears would have done.
With him crossed off the Future King list, she can do something she’s probably been dreaming about since she birthed him: install Caesarion as the new pharaoh. This achieves a couple of wonderful aims all in the one decision. First, it allows her to rule for him as co-regent without anyone trying to stop her. Because we’re fine with women leaders in Egypt, just so long as they have a man around as well! This particular man is only three years old, and her son, so he poses no threat to his mother’s way of doing business. She can feel that much more secure on her throne.And he’s a bit of a golden goose, this boy: the heir of Egypt AND a golden son of Rome. It’s right there in his official king name: “King Ptolemy, who is as well Caesar, Father-Loving, Mother-Loving God.” Subtle, Cleo! In propping up her son, she more firmly aligns herself with Isis in the Egyptian imagination: that powerful, much-beloved goddess who is also a mother who was willing to do anything for her family. She becomes even more of a godly creature, to be revered and respected. And in wrapping her son up in Caesar’s legacy, she’s reminding those who might try and challenge her—Rome included—that she’s got something they don’t. And she’s going to make sure that everybody knows it.For starters, she builds temples all across Egypt—like so many lady pharaohs before her, she knows the potent power of ever-present PR. She carves herself and young Caesarion into stone at places like the Temple of Dendera. There they stand in crowns, offering incense to Isis, her son Horus, and husband Osiris. That’s some powerful iconography right there. And she’s only getting warmed up.
larger than life.
Cleo and Caesarion from Dendera, courtesy of John McLinden (Flikr)
By this time, she may also have started building the Caesareum in Alexandria, a massive structure dedicated to her baby daddy right there in the harbor. She builds a giant temple to Isis, as well.She also spends a lot of time nurturing an intellectual renaissance in her city. Like the Ptolemies of old, she starts rebuilding her hometown as a place that learned people want to hang out and make merry. She starts a school of philosophy and fans the flames of a resurgence of scholarly works in areas like grammar and history. Medicine, too, sees a bump: under her reign, doctors produce new works on treating many maladies and new surgical techniques. She is credited with furthering studies in science, magic, and medicine. The Talmud says she had a “great scientific curiosity.” Roman men might want to see her as Caesar’s temptress, but at home she is a mighty scholar. Years later, she’ll be given credit for contributing new works on things like hairdressing and cosmetics. And though both claims come long after her death and are pretty dubious, it’s said she invents a great trick for keeping the skin young—bathing in asses’ milk, obviously—and a handy cure for baldness. Its key ingredients are burnt mice, burnt horses’ teeth, and bear grease. User discretion advised.
She’ll later get a rep in the Talmud for supposedly trying out experiments on her female prisoners to try and figure out when a fetus becomes an embryo, which sounds...pretty unsavory, and we can hope isn’t really happening. Especially since she becomes a patron of the Temple of Hathor, dedicated to women’s health.
So, stay in power: check. Produce an heir: check. But things aren’t all intellectual salons and fine perfume. In 43 BCE the Nile doesn’t flood, and Cleo once again has to deal with big-time plague and famine. She has to grant tax exemptions, devalue her currency, give out free grain. Still, when left alone to do her kingly business, Cleopatra proves herself a deft leader, well capable of running the show on her own. And yet, like a truly terrible ex-boyfriend, Rome just won’t stop calling her up. They’re currently back at war, and Cleopatra’s soon going to be forced to pick sides.
WHEN ROMANS ATTACK
Here’s what’s up with Team Rome right now. The studly Mark Antony – he’s baaaaaack – is now one of the top dogs in Rome. But so is Julius’s eighteen-year-old adopted son Octavian. They have temporarily joined forces to try and chase down Caesar’s killers, including Servilia’s son Brutus. This results in many battles, and everyone wants Egypt’s money and ships to give them an edge in the conflict. Cleo tries to stay out of it, but she finds she can’t ignore it. Not when one of Julius’s murderers, a guy named Cassius, tries to bully her into giving him some ships. She sends him her apologies, no can do, then sends her ships to a guy named Dolabella – remember him from our episode on Fulvia? But then one of her commanders goes behind her back to help out Cassius, who is an enemy to Mark Antony and Octavian. Later, she tries to meet those two at the head of her very own fleet, but it’s turned back by foul weather, and then illness. In the end, she just makes several men mad and makes friends with none of them. Suffice it to say it’s all a bit of a mess.But eventually Mark Antony and Octavian defeat the conspirators at the Battle of Philippi and become Rome’s #1 Heroes.
And then, after some very tense months of hating each other, they decide to join forces with that guy Lepidus and form the Second Triumvirate. Rome’s territory is now so big that one man can’t really manage it alone, so the three men split it up into chunks between them. Octavian will manage Italy and the West, Lepidus gets some of Africa, and Mark Antony, now truly at the top of his game, is given the whole of the East. He and Cleopatra are now on a collision course.And so this conquering hero decides to leave his wife Fulvia behind and go on a grand tour of his new territories. It’s basically the ancient equivalent of a lavish, long-term party bus.
This guy, who we’ll remember is intense, excitable, and loves a good party, stumbles into many different Eastern ports to great fanfare. He starts in Greece, where he hails himself as the New Dionysus. When he sashays into the city of Ephesus, he’s met by women dressed up as Bacchanalian revelers, the whole town wrapped in ivy. All the client kings and other Eastern royals are very much invested in trying to keep him happy. He is showered in attention, swimming in flowers with virgins thrown down at his feet. Some even offer up their own wives for his pleasure. He settles in at Tarsus, a city in modern-day Turkey, and his mind gets to wandering to that luscious Egyptian queen. He sends a guy named Dellius to call her to account for not supporting him and Octavian and maybe woo her a little if necessary. He says listen, I know you’ve been burned before. But Mark’s a great guy. You’ll love him.
But of course it’s Cleo that does all the wooing. She charmed the pants off of Dellius, who quickly realizes he’s dealing with a powerful woman who isn’t going to bend the knee for anyone. And he knows his boss Mark is going to be HELLA into that. And yet she doesn’t go to Tarsus. So Mark starts sending her texts through emissaries:
M: “Sup, girl. You up?”
M: “People say I look a lot like Hercules. I mean, that’s what I heard.”
M: “Yo Cleo, Mark again, just checking to see if you got my texts? Def not, because otherwise you’d already be here.”
Cleo chooses not to respond, or if she does, it’s with something like:
C: “Yeah, hey. That’s cool, but I’m super busy running a country. I just don’t know when I’ll have the time.”
She is always planning to go and see Mark, of course: she can’t afford not to. This isn’t the time to spit in Rome’s face. But she also knows the powerful allure of delayed gratification. And she isn’t some 21-year-old exile sneaking back into her country by night: not this time. There will be no slinking around in a burlap sack. No: this 28-year-old assured lady boss of a country is going to show up with more swagger than Beyoncé and more costume changes than a Lady Gaga concert. She must know him, at least by reputation: they’ll have met, either in Egypt or in Rome over the years, and his reputation is bound to proceed him. This is a guy who has been scooping up land and property along his way and handing it out to whoever flatters him the most profoundly. It’s a guy who loves to laugh, at other people and himself, and who is both charming and reckless. He LOVES drinking, good times, and a heaping helping of drama. And, of course, fancy women. He’s already slept with a few king’s wives on his epic Eastern party bus adventure. To win and then hold his attention, she’ll need to do much better. As Plutarch tells us, she knows it’s time to be “putting her greatest confidence in herself, and in the charms and sorceries of her own person.”
holla at me.
“Antony and Cleopatra” by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1884
A SEXY CLASH OF TITANS
So she sails toward Mark on the ancient world’s most opulent party barge, making one of the grandest entrances that history has ever seen. Shakespeare will describe this with his typical flair centuries later, but he won’t have to stretch his creative faculties to come up with this scene setting. Plutarch does that for him. He describes a boat with a gilded stern, silver oars, and purple sails. Music plays while colored smoke trails behind them:
“She herself reclined beneath a gold-spangled canopy dressed as Venus in a painting, while beautiful young boys, like painted Cupids, stood at her side and fanned her. Her fairest maids were likewise dressed as sea nymphs and graces, some steering at the rudder, some working at the ropes. Wonderous odors from countless incense-offerings diffused themselves along the river-banks.”
Cleo means to make a powerful impression, and she does it. You can almost hear Mark Antony’s jaw dropping. But I wonder if behind this careful staging, Cleopatra is anxious. The deal she strikes with this particular Roman general may have the power to change her country’s future. And she didn’t rush in with troops to help Mark when he and Octavian needed her: is he going to hold that against her now?
Cleo sends him a message, saying that Venus has arrived ready to party with Bacchus for the greater good of Asia. He responds by inviting her over for dinner. But she writes back saying she’d really rather have him over to her place. And he goes, because damn, this whole playing-hard-to-get-cuz-I’m-a-goddam-queen thing is working for him. He’s not single, but he’s most definitely ready to mingle. Over a series of several nights, Cleo proceeds to do what she does best and pulls out all the extravagant stops. She decorates dozens of banquet rooms with luxe couches draped with rich fabrics and decks out the trees with twinkling lights. Every table is laden with gold cutlery. One night she fills the dining room knee-deep in roses. At the end of each meal, she invites her Roman guests to take things home with them: furniture, horses, slaves. Whatever. But even more impressive than this display of Egypt’s many riches is the pharaoh herself. Ever the quick-witted chameleon, she swiftly reads Antony’s personality and moods and caters to them. When he makes crude jokes, she makes some of her own. Instead of trying to show herself above him, she meets him on his level. By the time she sails home just weeks later, their traveling romance has Mark completely smitten. Once again, Cleo’s got one of Rome’s most powerful men on the hook.
all the heart eyes.
“Meeting of Antony and Cleopatra,” Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, courtesy of the MET
Are they in love, or lust, or is this just politics? There’s no doubt that this alliance is important for them both. Mark Antony needs money and ships, both to deal with internal Roman problems and pursue his own ambitions; Cleopatra needs Rome’s support to keep her throne. Of course, ancient Roman writers would love you to think she uses dark, evil sex magic to addle this man’s senses. “The moment he saw her,” Appian tells us, “Antony lost his head to her like a young man, although he was 40 years old.” Another claims he’s under the influence of drugs when he falls so hard for her. Plutarch lays all of Mark’s mistakes to come at Cleopatra’s feet. He had faults before, but she’s really the one who ruins him, saying that “…now as a crowning evil his love for Cleopatra supervened, roused and drove to frenzy many of the passions that were still hidden and quiescent in him, and dissipated and destroyed whatever good and saving qualities still offered resistance. And he was taken captive in this manner.” But…come on now. He might be a good-looking Marlin Brando-type bruiser, with great curls and a hot temper, who has probably slept with more women than you could fit inside an Egyptian pleasure barge. But he is still an accomplished Roman general. Does Cleopatra completely have him in thrall? Yes, probably, but not just because of the charms of her body. She is smart, and an incredibly interesting woman to hang out with. She’s absolutely one of a kind.
Soon Mark Antony’s advertising his feelings by offing Cleo’s one remaining sibling. He orders someone to drag Arsinoe out of that temple in Ephesus and murder her right there on the steps. RIP, you almost queen! To give Cleo some credit, the priests there WERE proclaiming Arsinoe the rightful ruler of Egypt, and she knows that the threat will never die unless her sister’s done away with. And when the priests come before Mark and Cleo to beg for their leader’s life, she does ask Mark to spare him. That Ptolemy pretender doesn’t get the same courtesy. Mark has him executed, as well as that rogue naval commander on Cyprus—the one who supported Cassius behind Cleopatra’s back during all that Roman squabbling. But of course, every crazy thing Mark does from this point on is Cleo’s evil influence.
“Straight away the attention that Antony had until now devoted to every matter was completely blunted, and whatever Cleopatra commanded was done, without consideration of what was right in the eyes of man or god.”
Whatever, Appian. Don’t blame Cleo for Mark Antony’s itchy trigger finger!When winter comes that year, as he sends his army to various winter quarters, he can’t stop thinking about Cleopatra. So even though things at home in Rome are a bit touchy, and even though the Parthians are causing trouble he should probably deal with, Antony gets on a ship and heads to Egypt.
WHAT HAPPENS IN ALEXANDRIA STAYS IN ALEXANDRIA (BUT NOT REALLY)
Just like Julius before him, Antony falls in love with Alexandria. But unlike his deceased mentor, he sails in without a grand Roman retinue, and the locals like him all the better for it. Before long, he’s fully leaning into the Alexandrian lifestyle, shedding his Roman clothes for the comfort of Greek dress, speaking Greek instead of Latin. He uses the opportunity to cut loose like a college boy on spring break, and Cleo is more than able to keep this party boy entertained.It’s said they sometimes sneak out of the palace disguised as a maid and a slave, eavesdropping at people’s windows and occasionally getting screamed at, which Mark thinks is positively hilarious. I can absolutely see him leaving a flaming bag of dog poop on people’s doorsteps and laughing from behind a loaded cart. The Alexandrians know it’s Mark playing pranks, and they indulge him. And though she’s got to be busy, you know, running a country, Cleo indulges him too.They hunt, they drink, they gamble, and above all, they feast. They even form a little club called the Inimitable Livers, and their parties are the stuff of legend.
let’s get lavish.
“Cleopatra’s Banquet” Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, courtesy of the NGV
Plutarch heard a story, passed down from a guy named Philotas who was there in the kitchens during one of them. He was blown away by how much food they were making—there must be a whole lot of people coming. No, says a kitchen hand: there will only be twelve guests, but we never know when dinner will start, and it has to be fresh and perfect, so we have to make several dinners. Turns outs that Mark Antony is an expensive houseguest to have. Things get wild at these dinners. Years from now, for example, an advisor of Antony’s named Lucius Munatius Plancus comes to one such dinner dressed as the sea god Glaucus, naked, painted blue, with a fake fish's tail.Plutarch also tells us that the two make a bet about who can prepare the most expensive banquet. Cleo wins by drinking a giant pearl worth 10 million sesterces, which I’ve seen equated to 60,000 pounds of gold. Pliny tells us":
“The servants placed in front of her only a single vessel containing vinegar. She took one earring off, and dropped the pearl in the vinegar, and when it was wasted away, swallowed it.”
Modern scientists have tested this out, and a pearl will dissolve in vinegar if you leave it for long enough. True or not, this story illustrates the kind of wild nights these two are having. The ever-judgy Appian says that in this way Mark “…was often disarmed by Cleopatra, subdued by her spells, and persuaded to drop from his hands great undertakings and necessary campaigns, only to roam about and play with her on the sea-shores.” But even as they play, you have to wonder if Cleopatra is finding this all a little stressful. She wants to keep Mark engaged, and if possible, keep him close, but can she ever truly be herself with him? How can she juggle the responsibilities of being a ruler, a mother, and a pleasant playmate, and still occasionally get a few hours of sleep? She has the ancient equivalent of a CEO mom’s problems, and the fate of her country sitting squarely on her shoulders.
Here’s another story that highlights her ability to meet Mark measure for measure. They go fishing one day, and Marc is frustrated by how few fish he’s catching. So he hires a guy to covertly dive into the water and put a fish onto his dangling hook every few minutes—classic Mark. Cleopatra, not at all fooled, sings his praises like she hasn’t noticed. But the next day she gets her own servant to dive in and put a salted Black Sea herring on his hook. “Leave the fishing rod, General, to us,” one historian has her saying, probably with a sly smile on her lips. “Your prey are cities, kingdoms, and continents.”
While Mark is having a grand old time in Alexandria, his Roman responsibilities don't just fade away. News comes that the Parthians are causing trouble, as per usual, by invading Syria. And then he gets an awkward call:
*ring ring* Um, Sir? I know you said not to bother you while you’re living it up, but your brother and your wife Fulvia just started a war with Octavian in your absence? And lost?
So Mark sails off to deal with his issues, and Cleo is left alone, having deftly cemented her powerful connection to the Roman Empire...or at least to one of its most powerful generals. And even though he goes and yells at Fulvia where she’s taken refuge in Greece, and even though she dies of illness and Mark doesn’t stick around to console her, none of that is his fault. According to Dio, his neglect of her was all because of “his passion for Cleopatra and her wantoness.” …mk.
And so once again, Antony finds himself at awkward odds with Octavian. They come to accord at the Treaty of Brundisium in October of 40 BCE, which states that Mark Antony will deal with the Parthians and Octavian will deal with Sextus Pompey, that other Pompey’s son, who is also causing trouble. And Mark also does what any Roman hotshot would do, now that he’s officially single, and agrees to marry Octavian’s sister. Her name is Octavia—of course it is—and she is sweet, serious, and docile: everything that Cleopatra is not. We don’t know how Cleopatra feels about any of it, but the alliance has to make her uneasy. There’s also the fact that she’s back in Alexandria giving birth to Mark Antony’s progeny: a set of twins. She names them Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene, the sun and the moon. Now she’s tied to Rome through three children. She’s creating more potent ties between the East and the West than anyone else could dream of doing.
From 40 to 37, Cleopatra has to watch her lover’s actions from a distance. But she isn’t worried; she knows Mark will be back. But for a while, he stays away, having children with Octavia—all girls, so, lame—and just barely getting along with his brother-in-law. I don’t want to get embroiled in Roman man business here, but it’s hard to appreciate Cleo’s story without it. Suffice it to say there are spats, riots, battles, power grabs. Eventually, in 37 BC, Octavian and Mark have to meet once again to hash out their issues, and Octavia gives an impassioned speech about how she really, really wants them to all get along together. Fences mended, mostly, he gets ready to sail away and finally defeat those pesky Parthians. His friends have every reason to hope he’s over that whole Cleopatra business. But as he sends his wife and young kids back to Rome, he also sends a message to Alexandria asking Cleo to meet him in Antioch. Three and a half years after they last saw each other, this thing is officially back on.
“Cleopatra Dissolves a Pearl in a Cup of Wine,” Carlo Maratta Roberto Morgenthaler, Wikicommons.
REUNITED AND IT FEELS SO GOOD (UNTIL IT DOESN’T)
It must be a pretty exciting reunion, because not long after they arrive coins start circulating sporting both of their faces: a pretty flagrant PDA. And Mark officially one-ups Caesar by acknowledging their children together. It doesn’t hurt that one of them is a son—something Octavia hasn’t been able to produce.Then he showers his leading lady with gifts in the form of land. He gives Cyprus back, for starters—something Caesar never did—plus pieces of Cicilia and Crete. Sometimes he even deposed sovereigns to give these key places to Cleopatra; now she rules nearly the whole of the eastern Mediterranean. This is a new era for Egypt, and Cleopatra is the queen of it all. She rebrands herself with a new title: “Queen Cleopatra, the Goddess, the Younger, Father-Loving and Fatherland-Loving.” And she has every reason to feel on top of her game.
By 36, she’s given birth to another son, whom she calls Ptolemy Philadelphus. She’s got the devotion of one of the most powerful men in Rome. It seems like no one can touch her. All she needs is for Antony to do what he’s long promised and defeat Parthia so she can truly be the empress of the East. He heads off on campaign, and she takes a bit of a victory march through some of her territories. Meanwhile, Mark Antony is having a rough time in Parthia. He gets lost in the desert, betrayed by local guides he thought he could trust, and ends up limping away with troops dying of starvation and dysentery. He loses a third of his army, not in battle, but in running AWAY from battle. Which, of course, later writers will blame Cleo for. “So eager was he to spend the winter with her that he began the war before the proper time, and managed everything confusedly,” says Plutarch. “He was not the master of his own faculties, but, as if he were under the influence of certain drugs or magic rites, was ever looking eagerly towards her.” Drugs, sorcery, and an evil uterus: the source of all the world’s problems, to be sure.
When Cleo arrives in the town where he’s staying to help him out with reinforcements, she finds a wreck of the passionate man she knew—depressed, demoralized, defeated. We don’t know how she reacts to seeing him like this, but it can’t make her feel confident and relaxed. She and Egypt are just as invested in his successes as he is. Meanwhile, Mark Antony’s wife, Octavia, has sent word that she’s coming to his aid with 2,000 well-equipped guardsmen. Octavia is something of the Jackie Kennedy of Rome, much loved and admired for her beauty and infinite virtues. Cleopatra, of course, is not. She makes it to Greece, but Mark Antony holds her off via messenger: he doesn’t want to lose Cleopatra’s aid for the sake of what Octavia is offering. Octavia sends an envoy to remind him of her many charms, urging him to accept her help. Cleopatra knows a dangerous rival when she sees one, so she tries a new approach: flagrant emotion. Apparently she cries, refusing to eat, dying of her love and passion for him. Her entourage say that she will give him everything if he will stay with her, she says; and she will die if he doesn’t. Even Mark’s friends are enthralled by the intensity of her emotions, giving Mark grief for being such a heartless boyfriend. Is she a woman desperate not to lose the man she loves, and the father of so many of her children? It’s entirely possible. She is definitely a woman who knows that if she loses Mark to his Roman wife, her throne might be lost with it. Octavian might ruin her. Her children’s legacy might end in blood. For this pharaoh of Egypt, the stakes really can’t be any higher. She will do anything she has to to keep him by her side.
Real or staged, her show of emotion works on Antony. “He was not governed by the reasoning of a commander or of a man,” wrote Plutarch, “or, indeed, by his own reasoning at all. Rather, as some say in jest, that the soul of a lover lives in someone else’s body, he was dragged around by a woman as if he had become part of her and was carried with her.” He goes back to Alexandria for the winter and tells Octavia not to bother coming. Back in Rome, Octavian is definitely NOT impressed.
In the spring, Mark Antony gets it together and invades Armenia, whose king betrayed him in his quest for Parthia. He just really needs a win, you know? He defeats their army, marching the captured royal family back into Alexandria in chains. He holds a triumph celebration there – the first ever held outside of Rome. Mark sweeps down the Canopic Way on his chariot to much fanfare. And then he presents his treasures and captives, taken presumably for Rome, to the queen the Egypt. He, Cleo (dressed up in full Isis gear), and their children all occupy a set of golden thrones. Then Mark starts handing out titles and lands like it’s Halloween candy.
Mark: “Baby 1 gets land, Baby 2 gets land, my boo Cleo gets land: girl, let’s light it up!”
In what will later become known as the Donations of Alexandria, he gives Armenia and Media to his son Alexander Helios; Cyrenaica and Libya to Cleopatra Selene, Syria and Cicilia to his son Philadelphus. He also calls Cleo the “Queen of Kings” and pronounces Caesarian as both the King of Egypt AND Julius Caesar’s true heir, flipping the bird straight in Octavian’s direction. If there is anything that’s going to make Rome lose its mind, it is this.Cleo must know she and Marc are poking the bear in this moment. But for all the glory this means for her family and Egypt, it’s a gamble she seems willing to take. Is she drunk on power, or is this a calculated move? In everything she does, she is trying to protect her country from being absorbed and overrun by the Roman machine. And since Mark Antony IS Rome, maybe she doesn’t think she has anything to fear in making hay while the sun shines. Octavian is far away, young and frail, and everyone knows he doesn’t have the full support of the Roman people. Surely this is a game she’s going to win.
eat, drink, and be merry.
“The Banquet of Cleopatra” by Sebastiano Mazzoni. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Museum of Art
And for a while, that seems true. Her wealth and prestige continue to grow, and she uses her money to build a MASSIVE navy. She’s having fun feasts with Antony and hiring expert tutors to educate her children. She’s participating in religious rituals and festivals, like always, and even hearing lawsuits with Antony. Mark’s running Alexandria’s gymnasium, getting buff, while she manages the affairs of her country. The crying, very hungry woman from Antioch is a thing of the past.But meanwhile, the relationship between Mark Antony and Octavian is deteriorating. At first it’s all about misappropriation of land: Mark Antony didn’t get his share of Octavian’s Italian distributions; Octavian wants his share of Armenia’s spoils. As the clock ticks down the days until the contract they made to rule Rome together comes to an end in December of 33 BCE, it starts turning ugly. Octavian’s telling everybody who will listen that Mark Antony’s acting so badly that he’s gonna have to give up his claim to the East. And, of course, Mark is completely not down with this. Quiet barbs turn into a full-blown battle of insults hurled via quill and scroll.
MA: Octavian’s a coward who hides during battle!
O: Marc’s a raging drunk!
MA: Octavian slept with Julius Caesar AND he likes deflowering virgins!
O: Well Mark is old and effeminate, AND he spends his nights with a foreign sorceress instead of his actual WIFE!
Octavian leans hard on this last one, because if there’s something that makes Romans deeply uncomfortable it’s a Roman leader acting like a king. Octavian wants Egypt—its riches and spoils—for his own purposes, and he wants Mark Antony out of his way. That means he needs to find a reason to start a fight with them. So he gets to work on a smear campaign meant to prove two things: one, that Mark Antony is no longer making his own decisions, but is being manipulated by a foreign power. Two, that this foreign, Eastern queen won’t stop until she conquers Rome itself.
Mark and Cleopatra give him plenty of material to work with. They head over to Ephesus to organize a military base and start recruiting other Eastern leaders. Ever the sugar mama, Cleo provides by far the most treasure: 200 warships, fully manned, 20,000 talents, full supplies for the soldiers, to keep them fed and clothed for however long the coming conflict might last. But the Senate isn’t ready to give up on Mark: not yet. About a third of them are with Mark Antony, and as the triumvirate deal expires, they sail over to Ephesus to let him know that allying with Cleopatra is seriously jeopardizing his cause on the home front. So Mark tries to send her away, but guess what? Cleo refuses to go. She argues that while she might not be a commander, her soldiers won’t fight without their leader. They are loyal to their queen above all else. They argue, but she refuses to be sidelined, when this fight is as much hers as Antony’s. She is here to stay.
In the summer of 32, they sail over to Athens, where Mark Antony gives Cleo quite a thoughtful gift: the library of Pergamum, one of the largest of the day. This adds fuel to Octavian’s fire about Mark’s dangerous affection for this foreign queen, as do their frequent Public Displays of Infatuation. Supposedly as Mark sits in discussion with kings, he frequently receives sultry love notes from Cleo, written on onyx and crystal—well that’s extra—and stops what he’s doing to read it. There are stories of him following along after her litter like a puppy, and of very publicly rubbing her feet: all real no-nos in the eyes of any self-respecting Roman. Octavian can’t believe his luck with this madness. And then, in May of that year, Mark decides to officially divorce Octavia and orders her to pack her bags and leave his house. No one in Rome is taking this lying down.
The last straw comes when Octavian gets his hands on Mark Antony’s will, which he apparently wrestles out of the hands of the Vestal Virgins. When he starts to read it out loud to the Senate, everyone is uncomfortable: this is NOT how things are done. But they forget about that when Octavian starts dropping bombs, either real or invented. First, Mark’s will says, he gifts his lands and wealth to his children with Cleo. And then he says that he wants to be buried not in Rome, but Alexandria, “sent away to Cleopatra in Egypt.” Wait….what?! See? says Octavian. He’s not even really Roman anymore. It’s all he needs that October to proclaim war with Antony and Cleopatra. Except he doesn’t declare war on Mark at all: just on Cleo. On EGYPT. That’s why he had to make her into the lascivious, lusty harpy in the eyes of every other Roman. He knows the people wouldn’t have been down to start another civil war with a Roman. But a war against a foreign queen who wants to conquer them? I’ll go get my sword.
WAR AGAINST THE QUEEN
Usually, there are several steps between declarations of violence against a client state and actual fighting: Senate approval, a chance for the other side to state their case. But there is none of that; there aren’t even really any official charges against Cleo. Just some swiftly mumbled “she’s being mean and bad and she’s a lady, so, bye” are all that seem to be required.Cleopatra’s got to be…not surprised, but to paraphrase her thinking: damn, what did I do? She hasn’t done anything hostile to Rome. And yet here they are, and this time there’s no escaping it. As Stacy Shiff says in her excellent book, Cleopatra, about her place in the situation: “Antony could not win a war without her. Octavian could not wage one.”
But this isn’t just a battle between two Roman leaders: it’s one for every Eastern monarch who’s sick and tired of bowing down to Rome’s bloodthirsty desires. And so it isn’t long before they recruit several Eastern kings to throw in with them. Marc Antony is going to lead the troops, obviously, but not on his own. He appoints Cleopatra his co-general. Put on your armor: we’re going to battle.Octavian’s savvy general, the strapping Agrippa, sails his troops along the coast of Greece to surprise them. Eventually, after some to-ing and fro-ing, he corners Antony and Cleopatra in the port town of Actium. They have enough troops and a good enough position in the harbor that Octavian’s troops can’t sail in without losing a LOT of their men. But the same goes for Mark Antony and Cleo: they can’t sail out, they can’t escape overland, as they’d have to leave everything behind to do it. Agrippa’s cut off their supply lines. They’re trapped.
There they languish for months on end, as Agrippa waits with weapons fully loaded for them to try and face him. Before long, things in Mark and Cleo’s camp start to fester. With ranks filled with Thracians, Medians, and Macedonians, Cleopatra is a real asset; she can speak to them in their native languages. And though they’re used to women in power, they’re not all that comfortable with one holding court in the world of war. The Romans who’ve joined Mark’s side are horrified to have a woman giving them orders. They start telling Mark that he should send her away, or maybe just kill her. But he refuses. Disease spreads through camp, and bitterness along with it. Mark’s allies and client kings start to defect. Tensions are running high. What should she do: take the hint and step out of the spotlight? Or stick it out and take a very public stand? Not one to be pushed aside, she chooses the latter. Maybe it's a mistake, and maybe not. But Octavian declared war on HER, remember. She is fighting for her country, her family, and possibly her life as well, and she can’t afford to be seen as a wilting flower. But she also can’t afford for these men to see her as bossy or domineering, telling them how to go about their business. She’s stuck squarely in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situation that many modern-day boss women will know all too well.
Starving, mosquito-infested, and suffering from desperately low morale, they know it’s time to make a decision. She and Mark have to decide: retreat by land, or force a sea battle? Soon enough, they’re making a break for it. Under cover of darkness on the eve of September 1st, Cleo and her people load her ship the Alexandra with all of their treasure. In the morning, Antony and Cleo’s 240 ships face off against Octavian’s 400. Squadrons of 60 ships each head out in front, with Mark Antony captaining one of them, while Cleo’s squadron follows behind. Can we just stop and enjoy the fact that Cleopatra is commanding 60 ships like a goddess of war? Can we picture her with a sword and dripping in gold? Okay, great. Now that we’re got a visual.
“Battle ofActium,” Lorenzo A. Castro (f 1664–1700)
At midday, it begins. Ships crash together, a fury of arrows, wood and steel, in one of the most epic naval battles in history: the Battle of Actium. But then things start going south; the center line starts breaking. Suddenly, Cleo’s squadron crashes through the break and sails swiftly away into the sunset. Then Mark Antony abandons his warship for a smaller galley and follows after, leaving the battle behind. Opinions are divided on what’s happening here: was this their plan all along, a worst-case-scenario gambit to save their treasury? Does Cleopatra lose heart when she sees they’re losing and decide to make a run for it? I can imagine her standing on the deck of her ship, watching the navy she paid for burning, and wanting more than anything else to go home. But I also struggle to imagine this fierce, calculating, powerful woman tucking tail and running with two whole armies watching. No matter the reason, the result is disastrous: as the days go on, the remaining fleets are surrounded. Those who don’t die will defect to Octavian. The battle is lost, but is the war?
THE BEGINNING OF THE END
As they fight to get away, Mark Antony is clearly disturbed and deflated. He’s done the unthinkable, by Roman standards: he’s left his men behind to die. It’s a betrayal from which he isn’t going to recover. A broken man, he broods around in Alexandria.
Cleopatra tries to get him to pull up his bootstraps, and then sends him off to North Africa to recruit some allies, where he mostly just mopes around with his friends. Meanwhile, she wastes no time trying to recruit some new friends to her badly depleted numbers. She gets busy executing anyone who speaks out against her, confiscating their money to fill her war chest, and pilfers some from temples as well. Brutal? Yes. But Cleopatra has a mind that never stops working: she’s always coming up with plans on plans on plans for how to protect the things she values: her life, her family, her country. To save those things, she will do whatever it takes. It turns out that money can’t always buy friends, and she has trouble recruiting Eastern allies to help her. So this Queen of Pivot comes up with another idea: Maybe she can transport her fleet and main fan base over land, then across the Red Sea to India, setting up operations there for a while? Her ships could be carried in pieces over the sands: I mean, Hatshepsut did it, all those years ago. They make it pretty far, all the way to the far side of the isthmus, where they meet with the Nabateans. Not a fan of Cleopatra, they destroy her fleet as they reach the shore.
After attempted suicide, Mark Antony is brought back to Alexandria, where he builds himself a hut at the foot of the Pharos where he can pout luxuriously and generally be a sack of useless. But Cleopatra isn’t about to admit defeat, even if things are getting dark.She throws some parties, partially to get Mark’s spirits up, and also to usher their oldest sons 16-year-old Caesarion and 15-year-old Antyllus, Mark’s son with our friend Fulvia, into adulthood. They both enlist in the Egyptian army as a morale booster. They do everything they can to get the country feeling patriotic and ready to resist Octavian’s inevitable arrival.
On the flip side, Plutarch tells us, she and Mark also start a second club together. It’s called the Companions to the Death. Cleopatra’s goal is to develop a poison that couples can use to perish together, and that won’t be too painful. “Cleopatra was getting together collections of all sorts of deadly poisons,” Plutarch writes, “and she tested the painless working of each of them by giving them to prisoners under sentence of death. But when she saw that the speedy poisons enhanced the sharpness of death by the pain they caused, while the milder poisons were not quick, she made trial of venomous animals, watching with her own eyes as they were set upon another. She did this daily, tried them almost all…” Well…that’s pretty bleak, but you have to hand it to Cleopatra. In the midst of what must seem like insurmountable odds, deep disappointments, and growing dread, she never stops scheming.
what? it’s science.
“Cleopatra Testing Poisons on Condemned Prisoners,” Alexandre Cabanel, 1887
Finally, with Octavian’s forces growing larger and larger, few friends, and their options dwindling, Cleopatra and Marc both write letters to Octavian. He promises to kill himself if he’ll just spare Cleopatra. She vows that she’ll step down as queen if he will just leave her family alone. Octavian ignore Mark but replies to Cleopatra, saying he’ll be happy to oblige if she’ll kill Mark. But for all of her sibling throat slashing and rash executions of rivals, when it comes to her ally, her lover, and the father of her children, she’s not willing to do that. Instead, she tries to bolster his spirits while also figuring out how they’re going to get out of this. She doesn’t need any saving—she’s going to be their knight in shining armor.Instead, she sends her oldest son Caesarion away, tucks her children into safe places with their trusted groups of advisors, and starts building her mausoleum. She fills it to the brim with jewels, gold, art, precious spices: in other words, the bulk of her personal riches. She also stocks it with a heaping pile of wood. If Octavian comes too close, she’ll set it all on fire, and she tells him so. And he’s very lusty when it comes to getting his hands on her wealth.
At last, Octavian and his forces make their way to Egypt. How this part actually goes down is a big bundle of confusion. When Octavian sails to the city, it seems that Mark Antony awakens from his woe-was-me stupor and actually goes out to fight him off…at least until his troops see the writing on the wall and start defecting to Octavian. This, too, is of course Cleo’s fault. “Cleopatra has betrayed me,” one historian has him saying. “to the enemies I made for her sake.” Does she betray him to appease Octavian, hoping for clemency? We don’t know. But what must it be like for Cleopatra, to see her enemy march his troops into her city? Knowing that she’s all out of cards to play? And what of her children, who Octavian is sure to want to get rid of? Whatever the reason, she sees what’s happening and her attendants rush to her mausoleum and seal themselves inside, leaving Mark behind them. She knows it’s a fight neither of them is going to win.One ancient source has Cleopatra sending him a note falsely claiming that she’s dead, hoping to inspire him to commit suicide. This, remember, is seen as a far better alternative to letting your enemy take you: in the ancient world, when you find yourself defeated, it’s the courageous and noble way to go. Maybe she sees it as a mercy to him. Anyway, when Mark Antony hears she’s dead, he has nothing else to live for. He grabs his sword and stabs himself through the heart—or tries to. Instead he misses and proceeds to bleed out slowly in what must be a painful agony. Then he finds out that Cleo’s still alive, somehow, and he either commands his servants to bring him to her or she gets hers to go and retrieve him. Either way, the scene that unfolds is heartbreaking: he’s hoisted by rope in through the mausoleum’s one window. He reaches for her, and she reaches for him. They embrace, kissing his brow. There he dies in her arms. Is this the ancient world’s greatest love story? Is their passion what brought about their end? Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Cleopatra reportedly smears his blood on her face, tears at her clothes, beats at her breast in an Egyptian show of lamentation. In this moment, Cleopatra loses the man who has stood by her side for more than a decade. They lose so much of what they built, including each other.
Octavian tries to coax her out of the mausoleum. She says she’ll set it on fire without certain guarantees. One of his followers uses a ladder to get in through the window, and Octavian is quick to put her under house arrest. He allows her to bury Mark Antony’s body. Otherwise, her ever-present guards spend their time making sure she doesn’t commit suicide. That won’t do, when he wants to march her through the streets of Rome in chains. She requests an audience with Octavian. One writer has her looking worse for wear and “in terrible disarray,” while another has her dressed to impress. Ever the savvy politician, even cornered, she uses what remaining cards she has to play. She whips out all the love letters Julius Caesar once wrote her: “Look how much he loved me,” she might have told him. “I bore his son, and that makes you and I practically related. Won’t you spare me out of love for him?” When that doesn’t work, she either tries to seduce him – um, no – or throws herself at his feet and begs for mercy. One account has her clawing at his face. We have no way of knowing how this brilliant, brave, ever adaptable woman may have tried to save herself and her children. And we have no right to judge her. But the result is the same: Octavian is having none if it. He’s going to march her through the streets of Rome in golden chains, like Julius Caesar once did to her sister. Her children will probably die; her dynasty will be lost forever. Imagine the despair that must be echoing through her.Octavian thinks he’s finally bested Cleo. But she is not easily bested, and she isn’t about to be anyone’s slave.
IT IS INDEED MOST FINE
She engineers one, last brilliant plan. She asks Octavian for permission to give her final goodbyes to Mark Antony at his grave site, which is granted. Then, when she returns to her mausoleum with her two favorite ladies, she orders a bath be prepared and enjoys one last meal. A basket of figs arrives, which is fully inspected. Then Cleo asks for a sealed letter to be taken to Octavian: nothing major, just a little question. She closes the doors, gets herself dressed in her fanciest robes, and has her ladies tie on her favorite diadem. Even in death, she’s going to meet fate as a queen.When Octavian opened the letter, in which Cleo asks to be buried with Mark Antony, he bursts into her chamber, only to find her dead on her golden couch. Her two most loyal ladies are there beside her, and one of them, Charmion, close to death. When one of his soldiers yells something like “what deed is this?”, she offers these proud final words for her mistress: “It is indeed most fine, and befitting the descendant of so many kings.”
If you know anything about Cleopatra, you’ll have heard that she killed herself by letting an asp, a poisonous snake, bite her breast. You’ll see this image echoes in art throughout the centuries, but it seems pretty unlikely. A snake bite wouldn’t have guaranteed a swift or certain death in the time she had available. That fig basket probably couldn’t have hidden one, anyway. It’s more likely she swallowed poison – hemlock, perhaps – or put on some lethal ointment. She was, after all, a master of poison.Octavian is said to have been grudgingly impressed by her suicide. Even those who hate her have to admit that it’s a distinguished and honorable way to go. In an ode written no long after her death, Horace expresses his own admiration:
“The queen, in search of a more noble death, did not, womanish, shrink from the sword, nor did she retreat in her swift fleet to hidden shores. She dared, too, to look with a calm face upon her fallen palace, and to handle deadly snakes, so her body might drink their black venom. More defiant in a deliberate death, begrudging the cruel Liburnian ships to head her, a queen no longer, but never humbled…”
At age 39, Cleopatra died the last pharaoh of Egypt. But at least, in these final moments, she got to outwit her captor and go out on her terms, in her style. She is buried alongside Mark Antony in Alexandria. No one has ever found their tomb. Ancient Egypt as we know it is no longer, absorbed into the Roman empire, never again to be what it was. Sadly, her son Caesarion is sought out and killed not long after; his lineage is too big a threat for Octavian to allow him to live. Her other kids, by contrast, are sent in another direction: they are adopted and raised by none other than Octavia, Mark Antony’s long-suffering wife. These half Egyptian royals are brought up in a good Roman household, surrounded, we can only hope, with some semblance of love. Later, Cleopatra Selene will be married off to a king, who was also raised in Rome by strangers: Juba II of Mauretania. Together, they make a court that’s full of art and sophistication: there’s even a library. Their son, Ptolemy of Mauretania, will take the throne after his father leaves it. More than a decade into his reign, he’s invited to Rome by an emperor we’ll get to know a lot better in future episodes: a guy named Caligula. When Ptolemy sweeps into some gladiatorial games wearing a purple cloak, Caligula has him murdered. And thus, Cleopatra’s story finally draws to its end.
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EPILOGUE: THE LADY BECOMES THE LEGEND
Cleopatra died more than 2,000 years ago. And yet stop any person on the street today and ask them who Cleopatra was, and they’ll know – at least they’ll know her name. That name has been attached to soaps and bath balms, to slot machines and casinos, to a popular brand of cigarettes. As an asteroid - 216 Kleopatra – the Egyptian queen has even made it to the stars. Harold Bloom once called her the “world’s first celebrity.” And while she may not be the first, she’s certainly one of the most enduring. What is it about Cleo that has captured out imaginations for not just decades, but millennia? Why do we remember her so well?
JENNY: She just leaps off the page. I think that that is something that really impressed me reading about her, the way that she's so vivid. She has so much agency. She's always doing things that are so dramatic. She's got such an eye for spectacle and everything that she does. And I think she's really seized the imaginations of so many people all through the centuries who read about her. I mean, how could she not?
And yet for such an enduringly famous woman, her legacy has come down to us as more of a caricature than anything. What we remember about her tends to be defined as follows: she was a lavish, wanton queen who made two famous Roman men her conquests. She ruled Egypt for a time, well, mostly using her sexual wiles, and then, she fell. Where in there is the deft political leader who held onto her country for more than two decades, who minted coins and savvily managed the Egyptian economy? Where is the fierce mother and protector of her country? Where is the linguistic, level-headed scholar?
In my quest to understand the evolution of her twisty, turning legacy—how we remember her and perhaps how we SHOULD remember her—I turned to some of my favorite history podcasters and teachers who have covered her themselves.
Dr. Rhiannon Evans from Emperors of Rome
Genn and Jenny from Ancient History Fangirl
Katy and Nathan from Queens
Ann Foster from Vulgar History
Dr. Rad and Dr. G from The Partial Historians
With their help, let’s try to understand the shape Cleopatra’s image has taken over the centuries. Why do we remember her the way we do, and what we SHOULD remember.
Let’s go traveling.
TO THE VICTORS GO THE SPOILS: HOW ANCIENT WRITERS SHAPE OUR VIEW OF CLEOPATRA
To make sense of her legacy and the shape it’s taken, we have to start in the ancient world, after her death. Imagine Octavian sitting at his desk, quill in hand, and writing out the following recipe:
Half a cup of Male Roman writers with agendas
3 dashes of lost documents and a lack of primary Egyptian sources
2 heaping tablespoons of an emperor who doesn’t like powerful women
Bake for a few generations. Enjoy!
We know that the ancient world had other queens and infamous women. Olympias, Agrippina, Boudicca: the list goes on. There were also some rather impressive women operating in the Roman empire itself. And while we know some things about them, they’re often footnotes in ancient writer’s stories about other people. Cleopatra stands out for being one of the main players, not written about for her own sake, perhaps, but a central piece of the narrative about the period in which she lived. Why, of all these women, is Cleopatra the one we see blown up to such epic proportions?
DR. EVANS: One of the reasons we remember Cleopatra so vividly and she's so popular in our collective consciousness is chance, basically. We have a lot of written sources about her, or rather about the Roman men she was involved with. And unfortunately, we've lost many sources or some ancient women who were really interesting, haven't been written about very much.
Another reason she features so prominently in the ancient sources is because she lived during a really momentous time, in which big changes were happening in the Mediterranean. As part of those big shifts, she was the last pharaoh of Egypt: not just of a dynasty, but of a mighty, incredibly long-lived empire.
Dr. G: …the way that Egyptian rule and so rule of Egypt sort of slides to an end, this is an incredible story. And so you've got a savvy politician coming out of Egypt mixed up with the best of the late Republican bunch that we've got. And so it's a recipe for a legacy that's really hard for other women, other ancient women figures to compete with…
And, of course, there’s the fact that Cleo got all tangled up in one of the most significant, and tumultuous, periods in the Rome’s history. She became very involved with two of its most famous, game-changing men; and even if Octavian despised her, she also played a big part in the origin story of how he became Rome’s first emperor. As such, ancient historians couldn’t ignore her. But unfortunately for Cleopatra, the few ancient writers who give us her story aren’t doing it to flatter her or highlight her many fascinating qualities. And they could do this without issue because Cleopatra ultimately lost the war against her.
Dr. Evans: Part of the reason she's remembered is that the kind of image that we've got of her has been really manipulated by the surviving sources because she was the loser, in the end, in the war against Augustus (Octavian as he was at the time). So she comes out on the losing side, and that means that she's in a way vulnerable to the way that people want to represent her at that time. And ever since.
Now add in the fact that these accounts are all we really have of Cleopatra. There’s almost nothing left of her in Egypt, written out in her own words.
Dr. G: she faces the same challenge that just about every female figure in history has suffered from off into a certain point, which is the lack of having their own voice on the record.
Her Alexandria was destroyed, most of her great monuments eroded, many of her physical achievements sunk down into the sea. And so she becomes a shadowed, sultry outline that male writers can fill in at their pleasure.
ANN: …the thing is that nobody has found - yet - any Egyptian or Greek writing surviving from Cleopatra's lifetime. So it's not just a history written by the victors scenario, but it's also slanderous history written by the misogynist haters who are also the victors sort of situation. So we remember her the way we do because that is how the only surviving records, most of the surviving records, write about her.
Things get more complicated when that victor also happens to be Octavian, who later becomes Augustus, the first emperor of Rome. He uses Cleopatra as a way to get rid of his rival Mark Antony. He needed Antony to seem like a drunken, besotted puppet, and for Cleopatra to play the part of the manipulative, dangerous seductress. That image making doesn’t stop after she dies.
Dr. G: …There is this real dual narrative going on and a high tension that we see in the way that Cleopatra is portrayed because on the one hand, she has to cop a sort of a highly negative political invective for her connection with Antony. That's coming from Octavian. But at the same time, she can't be too great because if she is, then Octavian and victory doesn't mean that much or there's problems for him in terms of how he positions his victory over her if she's…So, yeah, this sort of benevolent, destructive figure, she has to be a worthy opponent on some level. The Roman narrative dictates that as well.
And then, three years after Cleo dies, Octavian manages what once seemed like the impossible: he becomes Rome’s very first official emperor. The Republic is dead; we’re now at the dawn of the Roman Empire. Somehow, the man now known as Augustus Caesar gets this monarch-hating land to accept him as their more or less absolute ruler. How does he do it? Very carefully. And manipulating Cleo’s image to suit his purposes is definitely a key part of his business plan.
As part of his slide into power, he embarks on a kind of family values campaign, becoming the moral whip cracker who will bring the increasingly lax ways of his compatriots up to scratch. And while playing down his own absolute power, he turns up the volume on his version of Cleopatra. In death, she becomes his own personal pin the tail on the donkey; he gets to put deviousness, decadence, and moral corruption all over her. By blowing up all the ways in which she was wanton, power hungry, and exotic, he gets to look good by comparison.
And, as Genn tells us, he gets to grapple with a thing he doesn’t like or understand: an independent and capable female ruler.
JENNY: …a lot of the reasons why he demonized her is because once he took power, I think women like Cleopatra and also Fulvia, who’s another woman around this time period, terrified Augustus. I don't think he knew what the hell to do with a strong woman, because what we see when Augustus comes to power and a lot of the stuff we're finding out about Cleopatra is being written during this time or slightly after with this lens on it is that women who have power, women who have agency, they are awful. They're mannish. They are not to be trusted…
Writers like Plutarch, being products of their time, also had trouble grappling with Cleopatra as ruler. The Romans were both fascinated and confused by her, and so they wrote to try and understand her in relation to themselves. As Ann says:
ANN: …the men who wrote these things couldn't wrap their head around the idea, like the concept that a woman could be smart and savvy and charismatic and a good leader…Because if she was just this, like, sexy witch who used magic to make fine men fall in love with her or just choose just so sexy that people threw themselves at her feet, that makes what she accomplished seem less impressive somehow.
Guys like Cicero, who actually met her, talk about hating her. But, as Dr. G says:
DR. G: …this has more to do with the way that she's engaging and causing problems for the way that Rome does its own politics. And part of the reason why she might have stood out for our consciousness is because of the way that Romans have tried to build a particular legacy, a narrative for understanding her in terms of themselves.
Most are writing about her long after she lived, in the shadow of the Augustan era. They have every reason to make her into someone we might love to hate. Plutarch is our main source for Cleopatra’s story—and he’s doing it a hundred years after her death—and he only talks about her so much because he’s writing his Life of Antony, in which he uses her to explain away what’s perceived as Mark’s perplexing failings. Cleopatra is used to tell readers a cautionary tale about what happens to great men who let themselves be seduced by power, and especially by a powerful woman.
Dr. EVANS: “So contemporary writers depicting her as this extravagant, drunken, sexually lax figure, are really playing into the Augustan discourse about queens, about the East, and indeed about Antony, who's the other loser in that war, means that we're left with this version of her that she couldn't control. Which is a shame because she seems to have been quite good at controlling her image while she was alive.
Cassius Dio, Josephus, poets like Horace: they all use her for their own narrative purposes. Pliny doesn’t relate that whole thing about her drinking a pearl because it’s a good story: it’s supposed to be a moral tale to show readers how shameful Cleopatra really was.
As Katy and Nathan put it…
Katy: But the question is, why do we remember her the way we do?
Nathan: Cause misogyny.
Katy: Because misogyny is the short answer. And I think the longer answer is, is because she took the hearts of these two very powerful Roman rulers. And until you put her, you know, like the lens on it that people use now, people just thought, well, she wouldn't have been able to do that if she wasn't beautiful. And it's just discounting women that could also be brilliant without being beautiful. So I think she's remembered for being like this beautiful seductress, and conniving. And I'm not saying she wasn't conniving. She was a little bit conniving. But maybe she should also be remembered for being smart.
At the same time, those ancient writers couldn’t quite play down their awe of her—their clear fascination.
GENN: … there was a real mythology they built up around her, like Cleopatra was a living goddess on Earth. She was Isis come again into this world. And the Roman people, and particularly like the upper-class Romans who her writing about her, they all had strong feels. I mean, many of them are negative, but none of them could actually like as much as they didn't like her. They were all like she might not be the most beautiful, but damn, she's charismatic, DAMN she knows how to make a scene and an entrance. And she knew how to get what she wanted.
And the way they write about her helps blow her up into this larger-than-life figure that’s impossible for us to ever forget.
JENNY: So this is the demonization of Cleopatra. And you see it in a lot of different ancient sources. But there's, of course, also the glamor of Cleopatra, the agency of Cleopatra, the wealth, the sophistication and the spectacle, which just absolutely leaps off the page no matter who is writing about her. So you get both. The time period really affects how we remember her.
And as Ann says: … the same men who tried to put her down by claiming she was a sorceress or just used sex appeal to get ahead wound up, without meaning to, creating a legend that people have found captivating, clearly, century after century.
AND THEN CLEO BECOMES A MUCH PRETTIER FACE
As we move away from the ancient world and into the Middle Ages and beyond, we see Cleopatra’s legacy become even more exaggerated, though only certain aspects of her seem to shine through. Those aspects take on their own life, becoming the sum of Cleopatra: 1) she was exceptionally beautiful, and 2) she was an accomplished seductress: a femme fatale for the ages. But if there’s one thing the writers of around her day tell us it’s that Cleopatra wasn’t beautiful. She was charming, well spoken, and magnetic, but no Helen of Troy. As Jenny says:
JENNY: But when you look at the ancient sources that knew her and that were more contemporary to her time, they don't say she was beautiful. What they say is that she was smart, she was charismatic. She was a riveting conversationalist. She was a linguistic genius who spoke nine languages. They really respected her for her mind and for her conversation and for her presence.
ANN: I think it's so much more interesting to know that she may not have been beautiful, or if she was, that wasn't the main reason that she was able to lead people so effectively,” Ann says. “It was her magnetism, her charisma, and her intelligence and wit that won people over to her side. It's so much more interesting to think that who she was as a person is why she was so successful, not just because of, you know, witchcraft or because she just had a pretty face or a nice figure or whatever.
But that’s complicated for writers of the past to grapple with. And her legacy has, by and large, been shaped and polished by men. Most of history has been written by men, and men traditionally don’t know what to do with a powerful female leader. The options are: 1) turn her into a corruptive demon; 2) take away her power by making it all about her beauty. Or why not do both?
If you Google “Cleopatra’s Legacy” in 2020, at LEAST half the articles you’ll find have titles like “Was Cleopatra Beautiful?” She is almost entirely defined not by her leadership ability, but by her sexuality, her physical presence. To boil her success down to her beauty is a way to simplify and explain her influence. It’s a means of taking the spotlight off of her accomplishments as a political leader and savvy stateswoman and focus instead on her female body. Because isn’t it much less scary to imagine a woman who wins men over with her body than her brain? As Dr. G says:
DR. G: …it's the fear factor that means that she's left with nothing but being beautiful, which may or may not be true, but it is a good justification for why men might lose control.
Long after the Augustan period, we still struggled to know what to do with a powerful woman in a position of power. So with that fragility, and all the juicy drama the ancient writers gave us, she becomes a canvas that artists in later eras can use to reflect their own ideas, culture, and morality. They pick up what works for them and run with it.
Take Giovanni Boccaccio, who wrote in his 1362 book On Famous Women: “…she gained her kingdom through crime. She was truly notable for almost nothing, except her ancestry and her beauty; rather, she was known throughout the world for her greed, cruelty, and excess.”
Geoffrey Chaucer takes another tack in his “Legend of Cleopatra.” By the later Middle Ages, the whole ‘tales about ladies’ thing had become something of its own recognized genre, and Chaucer wanted to talk about women who gave themselves up to love: a kind of amorous martyr. Her love made Antony better, and she was totally fine to give up her life for love of him! “Anon the vipers her began to sting, And she her death received, with good cheer, For love of Antony, to her so dear.”
And then, of course, there’s Shakespeare. His famous play Antony and Cleopatra was inspired by an English translation of Plutarch's "Life of Antony". He does make her a more complex character – in many ways, she’s perhaps the most complex female character he ever writers – but he, too, focuses right in on the tragic love story, the amorous drama, the image of an emotional, covetous, jealous Cleopatra. Gone is the cool-headed maneuverer. Gone is the pharaoh who wanted to save her country and her family at all costs.
don’t hold me back.
Mrs. Yates as Cleopatra, 1777, courtesy of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
It must be said that women writers also get in on the Cleopatra shame game. They use her as a way to wax lyrical on what happens when a woman gives in to her passion. In 1757, Sarah Fielding re-imagines a scene where Cleo and Octavia meet up in the underworld and have a chat about their life choices. “But now, at the approach of my last hours, I could not avoid reflecting on my past life,” she has Cleopatra saying, “and found, upon the whole, that the indulgence of my ambition, and the cultivating in myself the spirit of pride and vanity, had produced far more misery than happiness. How indeed can it be otherwise?” Charlotte Bronte, much to this podcaster’s shame, has a character in her novel Villette comment on a painting of Cleo, suggesting she looks lazy and scandalous, and calling her “an indolent gypsy-giantess.” Much later, pioneering nurse Florence Nightingale called her “that disgusting Cleopatra.” Alas, they too fell for the ugly propaganda that reduced Cleopatra to nothing more than a wanton body.
In the Romantic period, we see another strand of her legacy get blown up for inspection: her dark, insatiable sexuality. Her sexuality and her cruelty wind like two snakes around each other in her legacy; this is where that whole femme fatale thing really starts to take wing. Some poets from the period pick up on an anecdote found only once in ancient sources: it comes from the fourth-century AD—note how long that is after Cleopatra was actually alive. Sextus Aurelius Victor tells us that she was “so lustful that she often prostituted herself, and so beautiful that many men bought a night with her at the price of their lives.” Alexander Pushkin, in his work Egyptian Nights, paints a scene in which three aroused and terrified men volunteer to be her lovers, even though they know they’ll have to die at the end.
History seems to be really interested in giving Cleopatra a wild sexual history. It started not long after she died. A first-century A.D. Roman writer would say that “ancient writers repeatedly speak of Cleopatra's insatiable libido” though we know that isn’t true.
The Arabic sources are much more interested in Cleo as a deft leader. In Egypt and its surrounds, Cleopatra remained a point of pride: a savvy politician who would do anything for her people. They had no special love for the Romans, and so were interested in making Cleo the heroine of their histories. Zenobia, the ancient queen of Palmyra who we’ll talk about at length in an upcoming episode, loudly and proudly proclaimed herself a descendant of Cleopatra. John, the Bishop of Nikiu, wrote around 690 BCE that “there was none of the kings who preceded her who wrought such achievements as she.”
Arab sources claimed her as author for many scholarly texts, including ones that include her supposed skin treatments and cures for baldness. But in Western sources, she also picks up an avid interest in things having to do with her lady parts. By the 1500s, we find the Gynaecia Cleopatrae, or “the Gynecology of Cleopatra.” It’s one of that era’s first and most popular gynecological treatises, though it was supposedly written by our Cleopatra VII. It’s full of handy recipes for encouraging conception and birth as well as preventing them. In it, she describes a suppository “that I always used, and my sister Arsinoe tried.” Can you imagine Cleo and Arsinoe swapping tips on contraception? Because...no. Just no.
There is a series of letters, completely fabricated by a guy in the 15th century, supposedly between Cleo, Mark Antony, and the Greek doctor Soranus, who most certainly did NOT live at the same time she did. Allegedly found on bronze tablets in Cleopatra’s tomb, Mark writes Soranus to plead for help in dealing with his wife’s inexhaustible sexual appetite. They detail how Cleo once went to a brothel and she slept with 106 men in a single evening, but still wasn’t satisfied.
wishing i had more lovers to conquer…
Cleopatra by Mose Bianchi
And then there is the story that she invented the vibrator. You’ll find this all over the internet: she ingeniously takes a papyrus box or a hollowed-out gourd, fills it with bees, and then puts against her lady palace. Living dangerously, Cleo! Bizarrely, it seems like this claim first appeared on the scene as late as the 1990s. We’re inventing stories about Cleo’s epic and varied sexual appetites, even now. Which is…pretty rich, given what little we know about her sex life. It seems to me like her roster of lovers was quite short. As Ann says:
ANN: …the whole thing about her being this sort of, like, sex bomb is like, I can't imagine how that would possibly be true. She's married to her young brother for years before she began her affair with Julius Caesar. So she probably wasn't very sexually experienced at all when they first met.
Imagine that: a Cleopatra unfurled from her burlap sack not controlled and ready to roll in the hay, but young, and quite nervous. That’s not an image of a young Egyptian queen we’ve left much room for.
DR. EVANS: “…this depicting her as this sexually lax character is nonsense as far as we know. We only know of her having children with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. We don't know that she had sex with anybody else during her life.”
Even scholarly texts, until quite recently, have given Cleo a bad rap. Dr. Evans told me about the go-to reference text when she was a student. It’s the second edition of the Oxford Classical Dictionary, which came out in 1949. Let’s see what it had to say about Cleopatra:
DR. EVANS: “‘She was always her own law. Almost certainly she never loved any man. Her two love affairs were to gain power, for the keynote of her character was intense ambition.’ It talks about her fire, her mysticism. You really can't imagine a reference work talking about any man like this. And indeed, this work doesn't.”
CLEO’S IMAGE OVER TIME
Over the years, Cleopatra has been featured in all kinds of artwork. From 1540 to 1905 she found her way into some five ballets, 45 operas, and 77 plays. One of the places you’ll find her most often is in paintings. In these, like in literature that features our Cleo, we see her through the lens of the time and place in which she’s being painted, often tinted with in the color of misogyny. In the Renaissance period, it become in vogue to paint figures from antiquity or mythology, but often she’s reimagined to conform to the beauty standards of the day. And so we often find Cleopatra portrayed as a very pale skinned, blonde- or red-haired Cleopatra, dressed in Western clothes, and pleasantly curved to match the beauty idyll of the era. European painters highlighted what they thought their audiences wanted: the beauty, drama, the extravagance and pageantry. People who wanted to commission an erotic piece of art, but one that wouldn’t get them in any social trouble, often asked for Cleopatra. Young society ladies were also fond of having their portraits done in ways inspired by Cleopatra. Many of these feature the woman in question about to drop a pearl into a goblet of wine. Are these meant to be an homage to the classical world? A socially acceptable way of exuding a bit of sexy? Or are they a subtle expression of power, wrapped up in classical packaging?
A good example of how actual ladies wanted their portraits done with inspiration from Cleo. “Kitty Fisher as Cleopatra Dissolving the Pearl” (1759) by Joshua Reynolds. Courtesy of Historic England Archive.
Very few of the paintings from any era show you Cleopatra sitting at her desk, commanding an army, or holding a child in her arms. Instead, they show are sexiest and most dramatic moments. I defy you to find a painting of her that doesn’t include a dangling pearl, a viper, or a nip slip. Sometimes all three. Her complexities and political accomplishments are tucked away behind drunken excess, promiscuity, mystery and allure.
But more than anything else, artists have loved to paint her death. This, too, they often sexualized, showing her at least partially nude, reclining on a bed with a snake held near her breast. In many of these, she’s dead already – a lifeless, yet suggestive doll (see the many pictures from earlier in the show notes). Those that show her in the act of the snake bite turn her death into an erotic act. The look in her eyes isn’t one of fear or determination, but a kind of steely-eyed, heartless creature. Sexy, aloof, wanton…so many of them turn her death into a lavish kind of spectacle. This is what happens when we let power-hungry women rule the world. This is how we reduce them.
Almost ever since Cleopatra’s lifetime, there has been a certain amount of Egyptomania floating around in the Western world. But after Napoleon Bonaparte marched through Egypt at the turn of the 19th century, bringing many of its ancient spoils back to Europe, it really took Europe by storm. The Victorians LOVED everything Egyptian: the exotic allure, the glitz, the style. Even the Washington Monument in my hometown of D.C. stands as testament to that enduring fascination.
So it’s no surprise that in artwork from the period, Cleopatra once again becomes exotic, pictured with Egyptian jewelry, animal prints, and clouds of incense. But these portrayals, for the most part, continue to show only judgement, and no sympathy, no true complexity.
egyptian again, but still nude.
“The Death of Cleopatra” (1890) by John Collier, courtesy of Gallery Oldham
But in a spectacular 19th century marble statue by Edmonia Lewis, we see Cleopatra’s story take on yet another layer of meaning. Edmonia, a Black artist working in Rome, does something rather wild by depicting the moment of Cleopatra’s death in a more realistic fashion. With her almost 3,000-pound masterwork, we see Cleo dying rather than dead, wearing her royal clothes, but in a pose meant to show struggle rather than sexiness. She’s in a throne chair rather than reclining slinkily; there is no snake, but instead two small heads carved into the arms of her chair meant to represent her children—a reminder that she was a mother as much as she is was anything else. Her head is thrown back, pain on her face, actively dying realistically and graphically. Some artists, like William J. Clark, were disturbed by it. “…the effects of death are represented with such skill as to be absolutely repellent,” he said, “and it is a question whether a statue of the ghastly characteristics of this one does not overstep the bounds of legitimate art.” It also shows a real determination. We see her making a brave and difficult choice to end her own life rather than be enslaved by the white man who defeated her. There are those who suggest this depiction of Cleopatra is also a commentary on American slavery.
“The Death of Cleopatra” by Edmonia Lewis, courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
The marble was much fanned over when it was exhibited at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876. Then the disappeared: A saloon owner bought it, and then it served as a grave marker for racetrack owner’s horse, and then it ended up in a salvage yard, left to the elements. Boy Scouts helpfully painted her to cover up some graffiti. A strange and somewhat sordid trajectory to which Cleopatra, sadly, would be able to relate.
And so we see Cleopatra’s legacy take another interesting turn as people start to debate her ethnicity. We don’t know for sure who her mother was. Could it be that Cleopatra was Black? In the 20th century, she becomes a key figure in the fight for Afrocentrism: the idea that so much of culture in the West was stolen from African lands. But let’s talk about that more in a minute, shall we, as we dive into Cleo’s image on the silver screen.
CLEO ON THE SILVER SCREEN
It’s no surprise that she popped up in movies pretty much as soon as we invented them. One of the first movies about her was an 1899 French silent film called Robbing Cleopatra's Tomb. As one of the very first horror films, its story focuses in not on Cleopatra’s life, but her death. In trying to resurrect her, a man ends up chopping Cleo’s mummy to pieces, then makes a woman pop out of a smoking brazier. Alrighty.
It seems like every decade has a Cleopatra movie. In 1912 there was another silent film that of course focuses right in on her love life. Then there’s another one in 1917, with the famous Theda Bara as Cleo. Theda Bara was one of Hollywood’s early IT girls: the sex symbol who pioneered the whole vamp look. “Cleopatra of Egypt was among the earliest of the vampires of history, if not the earliest,” wrote the New York Times at the time of the movie’s debut. “…and it was therefore but a matter of time until the siren Theda Bara should duly attend to the transfer of that temptress to the movie screen.” We can imagine her Cleopatra was very goth, set on sucking the hearts and souls out of men’s bodies in her quest for power. The words that flashed up on the screen to introduce Cleopatra were: ‘the serpent of the Nile, the siren of the ages, and the eternal feminine.’ Though because of the morality codes of the time, and the fact that the movie was deemed too racy for public consumption, very little of the film survives.
In 1934, Cecile B. DeMille made a movie about our Cleo. When he asked his leading lady if she wanted the part, he supposedly said, “How would you like to be the wickedest woman in history?” In 1945, the glamorous Vivienne Leigh gets a turn, but none are as famous as the 1963 version written by—of course—another man.
This epic film is what most of us think of when we close our eyes and envision Cleopatra, though Elizabeth Taylor and the Lady Herself probably had little in common in terms of their looks. It’s in many ways a great film, but once again the spotlight in on Cleopatra’s sexual prowess—her skill at seducing two powerful men. We don’t see her making political decisions or minting coins or dealing with grain shortages. Instead, we see her bathing in a gigantic marble tub with fancy toy sailboats. We see her arriving in Rome at the end of a long, lavish parade, riding on top of an all-gold float. We see Elizabeth Taylor change lavish costumes some 65 times.
DR. RAD: But the really interesting thing I think about it is that originally it was destined to be to feel like all up it was looking at about six hours. And it was meant to be to feel one which dealt with Caesar and Cleopatra. And one that dealt with Antony and Cleopatra. But because of all the various things that happened, I mean, Elizabeth Taylor almost died. They have to shoot locations. You know, all the….And then, of course, all the drama with Burton and Taylor, all these various things were happening.
All the drama with heartthrob Burton and Elizabeth Taylor was that they fell in love on set, even though both were already married, and it caused quite a scandal. Not unlike Mark Antony and Cleopatra once did.
DR. RAD: …the guy who is writing it, Joseph Mankiewicz, he is actually known for doing quite strong female films. And he originally had this vision of Cleopatra that I think is probably closer to what we would like to see these days in that she's more of a political visionary or at least said political, you know, a real political player, not just of them football, but a lot of that story got lost because when they had to cut down by so much time, they ended up focusing, of course, on the epic angle, which is the battle scenes, you know, the pageantry, that kind of stuff. And of course, they want to play up the romance as well, because the tension and the affair between Burton and Taylor was such that everybody wanted to see that on the screen. So a lot of the best stuff about Cleopatra and Antony ended up on the cutting room floor.
When it comes to looks, all of the women who played Cleopatra on screen were chosen less because they looked like her and more because of what they represented to audiences of the time. And here again, we see the question of her ethnicity rising to the surface.
DR. G: This is one of these big mysteries around Cleopatra is that we're not actually sure of the food swathe of her parenthood. So this puts us in a position where it also leaves Cleopatra open to various kinds of reception as well. And we see this coming through from second wave feminism onwards, where there's the sort of real push for like, is this a black Cleopatra? And do we have an Egyptian Cleopatra as opposed to a Macedonian Ptolemaic Cleopatra? To what degree is she one of the people? And how does that factor into the way that we might think about her today?
Though we know that Cleopatra considered herself Macedonian Greek and it’s unlikely she would have had much Egyptian or Nubian blood, if any, there’s this desire to claim her as a woman of color. When it came out that Angelina Jolie and Lady Gaga were being considered to star as Cleo in a new movie version of her life, the internet was very angry. They wanted someone like Beyonce to play her. And why not? Perhaps it doesn’t matter what Cleopatra actually looked like or didn’t, but what she represents for different generations. And this generation wants to see her step out of her Western trappings and represent the continent she ruled. If she was anything in life, she was always adaptable—always ready to shift into what her people needed her to be.
rebuilding a legacy
But in recent years, we’ve been rethinking Cleopatra, trying to see her world and story through her own eyes, without quite so much judgement – without needing to make her into a wanton temptress or a victimized queen. As Genn points out, we’re starting to realize that we can view her and other ancient women as people who contained complex multitudes.
GENN: ...I think that for a long time, when history was really dominated by gentleman scholars, shall we say, we kind of saw the glamor of Cleopatra and the demonization of Cleopatra. Now, what we're seeing is those things don't have to necessarily be two different strands. Cleopatra was a human being who is complicated, who made some unpopular choices and some incredibly calculated and clever choices, who loved and who lost and who lived vibrantly and vividly.
So: what should we remember about Cleopatra? What’s been shuffled out of the spotlight that should be brought back into focus?
DR. EVANS: The way I think we should remember Cleopatra is that she was an extremely intelligent woman. She was clearly a great diplomat. She was somebody who was prepared to engage with Rome. But, you know, she knew what she had. She had an awful lot of wealth in Egypt, and she played well with that. So she extended the borders of Egypt; she extended Egyptian territory. She spoke multiple languages. And indeed, she was the first Ptolemy to learn the native language of Egypt. She was clearly interested in providing for her people and breaking new ground in Egypt.
JENNY: … I feel like one of the things that we miss about Cleopatra, when we get wrapped up in the romance of her and Mark Antony is how long she actually ruled without Mark Antony, how well Egypt was doing at the time and what that looked like. She was a ruling woman in an era where women were encouraged to be quiet and demure and retiring. And she also spoke nine languages and ruled the richest client kingdom in the Mediterranean world. And she did it really, really well.
Nathan: … She's a genius!
Katy: ...I feel like regardless of who was going to be the pharaoh at this time, Egypt was gonna be lost. But she really tried. She really tried to save the land for her people…I think she should be viewed as a uniter. She tried, she really tried to be the savior of her people and it didn't work out, but…
GENN: …Cleopatra's mind never stopped. She was always trying to find a pragmatic way of conquering all of her problems. … her brain never stopped working. She was always trying to figure out her next move. And I love that about her. I love the perseverance. I love that she just didn't give up.
DR. G: I would say, first of all, powerful. There is something really quite incredible about what she achieves and the way that she achieves it.
DR. RAD: …I think she was a political animal… But I also thought that she is timeless and seductive. I don't mean that in the femme photo version of things. I just mean there is something about her, whether we like it or not…She she's not going to shake off that. That appeal by now. You know, I think she'll always, because of the way that her story was treated at the time, because of her involvement with people at the time who will obviously very significant and still considered very significant. We're not going to erase that now. And I wouldn't want to take it away. I don't want to disappear or anything like that. So I think she is timeless and seductive in that we're going to want to keep going back to her story, because even in spite of the lack of source material, there is something very appealing about that whole life story from all different perspectives. And I don't think we're done with her yet. And I'm glad of that.
ANN: To sum her up in one sentence, it would be: extraordinary leader born into a challenging situation who did the best she could. This was hugely competent woman up against great odds.
In all of my guest’s responses, the same three words came up in different forms. Here they are, summed up by Dr. Evans:
Dr. EVANS: independent, intelligent, inspiring.
Cleopatra was a complex leader who had to make many difficult choices—who loved and lost on an epic scale. To my mind, her physical appearance and her sexual conquests are intriguing, but they aren’t the things I want to remember about her. When I imagine Cleopatra, I see a woman with a complex history who had to make difficult choices. I see her with a book in one hand and a child’s hand in the other, dressed to kill, and with success on her mind. I see a woman who fought hard and bravely for her country. A ruler who refused to bow down.
Until next time.
MUSIC
Derek and Brandon Fiechter, from their album Ancient Egypt.
Keith Zizza who created a whole bunch of wonderful tracks for a game called Immortal Cities: Children of the Nile.
Michael Levy, whose ancient lyre music gives us a glimpse into the ancient world.
“Egyptian Ella” comes from the Ted Lewis Collection, full of songs from the 1910s through the 1930s, which you can access for free from The Popular Jazz Archive.
VOICEOVERS
Veronica Washington-Ramos = Cleopatra
Andrew Yurgold = the strapping Mark Antony
Steven Reichel = Octavian
Phil Chevalier = Julius Caesar
John Armstrong = the Ptolemies, plus some of their advisors, plus Lucan the poet, plus Appian
Paul Gablonski = assorted ancient haters
Shawn from Stories of Yore and Yours podcast = Plutarch
Avery Downing = Cicero