Who Was Cleopatra? The Last Queen of Egypt Beyond the Legend
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The most famous woman of the ancient world was not Egyptian, did not look like Elizabeth Taylor, and was probably not killed by a snake. Cleopatra VII was a Greek queen of a Greek dynasty who ruled Egypt for twenty-one years, kept her kingdom independent through the collapse of the Roman Republic by allying with the two most powerful men in it, and lost when the third defeated them both. Almost everything written about her was written by her enemies, and the task of finding her is the task of reading through them.
A Greek on the throne of the pharaohs
The Ptolemies had ruled Egypt since 305 BC, when Ptolemy, one of Alexander the Great's generals, took the richest province of the dead conqueror's empire. They ruled from Alexandria, a Greek city on the coast, spoke Greek, married their own siblings in the manner of the pharaohs to keep the line pure, and murdered each other with regularity. Cleopatra, born in 69 BC, was the first of them in nearly three centuries to learn Egyptian; she was said to speak nine languages, and she presented herself to her Egyptian subjects as the goddess Isis and to the Greeks as a Hellenistic monarch. At eighteen, on her father's death in 51 BC, she inherited the throne jointly with her ten-year-old brother and husband, Ptolemy XIII, whose advisers drove her out within three years.
Caesar
She came back by way of Rome. In 48 BC Julius Caesar, pursuing his rival Pompey, arrived in Alexandria to find that Ptolemy's court had murdered Pompey to please him, and Cleopatra, banished, had herself smuggled into the palace to meet him, by tradition rolled in a carpet, more probably in a laundry bag. She was twenty-one and he was fifty-two. Caesar took her side in the civil war that followed, Ptolemy drowned in the Nile, and Cleopatra was restored to the throne with another younger brother as nominal co-ruler. She bore Caesar a son, Caesarion, followed him to Rome, where she lived in his villa across the Tiber to the scandal of the city, and was there when he was assassinated in March 44 BC. She went home and had her brother poisoned so that her son could be co-ruler instead.
Antony
Caesar's death left Rome divided between his heir Octavian and his lieutenant Mark Antony, and Antony took the east. In 41 BC he summoned Cleopatra to Tarsus to answer for her conduct in the war, and she arrived by barge up the river dressed as Venus, in a scene Plutarch describes and Shakespeare copied, and he went back to Alexandria with her for the winter. The alliance lasted eleven years and produced three children. Cleopatra gave Antony money, ships and grain for his campaigns; Antony gave her Cyprus, Crete and parts of Syria and Lebanon, restoring most of the old Ptolemaic empire, and in 34 BC at a ceremony in Alexandria declared her Queen of Kings and Caesarion the true heir of Caesar. That was the provocation Octavian needed. He read Antony's will to the Senate, declared war on Cleopatra, not Antony, and met their fleet at Actium in September 31 BC. The main events:
- •51 BC: Cleopatra, aged eighteen, becomes queen with her brother
- •48 BC: Caesar arrives in Alexandria and restores her
- •44 BC: Caesar is murdered; she returns to Egypt
- •41 BC: she meets Antony at Tarsus
- •31 BC: Actium; her fleet withdraws and Antony follows, abandoning his army
- •30 BC: Octavian takes Alexandria; Antony and then Cleopatra kill themselves; Egypt becomes a Roman province
The end
When Octavian entered Alexandria in August 30 BC, Antony, told falsely that Cleopatra was dead, fell on his sword and was carried to her to die. She was captured and, knowing Octavian meant to lead her through Rome in his triumph, killed herself nine days later at thirty-nine. The asp is Plutarch's story, and even he reports alternatives; a cobra large enough to kill quickly is hard to hide in a basket of figs, and a poison drunk or applied is at least as likely. Octavian had Caesarion killed, since two sons of Caesar were one too many, took the other children to Rome, and used Egypt's treasury to pay his army and become Augustus, the first emperor. Egypt was his personal possession, and its grain fed Rome for four centuries.
What the Romans made of her
The Cleopatra of legend, the seductress who unmanned Antony with luxury and lust, was the invention of Octavian's war. Roman poets wrote of a drunken Egyptian queen plotting to rule the Capitol with her eunuchs and her gods with animal heads, and the portrait served to make a Roman civil war look like a foreign one. The sources agree that she was not a great beauty; Plutarch says her charm was in her conversation and her voice, and her coins show a strong nose and chin. What she certainly was, was a capable ruler who kept her country's independence for two decades in a world being swallowed by Rome, managed its economy through famine, and chose her allies with a clear eye until the last choice failed. The two thousand years of paintings and films that followed have mostly kept Octavian's version, and the search for the tomb where she and Antony were buried together, somewhere under modern Alexandria or the temple of Taposiris Magna to its west, has not yet found her.
The takeaway
Cleopatra VII was the last ruler of the Greek Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt, queen from 51 to 30 BC, who preserved her kingdom's independence through alliances with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, bore children to both, and died by her own hand after Octavian defeated Antony at Actium and took Alexandria. The image of her as a seductress was Octavian's propaganda; the record shows a multilingual, politically skilled monarch whose defeat turned Egypt into the property of the first Roman emperor.