Who Was Cleopatra? The Last Queen of Egypt Beyond the Legend

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Because the famous stories about Cleopatra come mostly from Roman writers, historians look hard at sources that did not pass through Roman hands. Her coins show how she chose to present herself, with a prominent nose and chin rather than the idealised beauty of later art. Temple carvings at Dendera in Egypt show her with her son Caesarion in the traditional pose of pharaohs making offerings to the gods, which tells us how she wanted to be seen by Egyptian subjects. Papyrus documents show the ordinary business of her government, such as tax decisions and land grants.

One papyrus from 33 BC grants tax privileges to a Roman associate of Antony, and it ends with a single Greek word meaning let it be done, written in a different hand from the rest. Some scholars think this could be Cleopatra's own signature, though others argue it was added by an official. Plutarch, whose biography of Antony supplies many of the famous scenes, wrote well over a century after her death, but he used earlier accounts, including one by her physician. Reading each source for who wrote it and why is the only way to separate the queen from the propaganda.

Cleopatra's three children by Antony were the twins Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene, born in 40 BC, whose names meant sun and moon, and a younger son, Ptolemy Philadelphus. After Alexandria fell they were taken to Rome and walked in Octavian's triumph of 29 BC, in which an effigy of their mother with the asp was also carried, according to the historian Cassius Dio. They were then raised in the household of Octavia, Octavian's sister and Antony's former wife. The two boys disappear from the record soon afterwards, and nobody knows whether they died young or simply lived quietly out of sight.

Cleopatra Selene had a different fate. Around 25 BC she was married to Juba II, son of a Numidian king whom Caesar had defeated, who had himself been brought up in Rome, and Augustus made the couple rulers of Mauretania in north-west Africa. They built a capital at Iol, renamed Caesarea, the modern town of Cherchell in Algeria, and filled it with Greek and Roman art. Coins issued there carry her name in Greek and images such as the crocodile, a deliberate reminder of Egypt. Their son Ptolemy inherited the throne and was executed by the emperor Caligula in AD 40, which ended Cleopatra's line.

Two famous ancient Egyptian obelisks, one on the Thames Embankment in London and one in Central Park in New York, are known as Cleopatra's Needles. Neither has anything to do with her. They were carved more than a thousand years before her birth, for the pharaoh Thutmose III, and set up at Heliopolis, near modern Cairo.

Centuries later, Roman authorities moved them to Alexandria, where they stood near a temple Cleopatra had begun, which may explain the nickname. London's obelisk was shipped to Britain in 1877 in a specially built cylindrical vessel that nearly sank in a storm, and New York's arrived in 1880. A similar obelisk in Paris, from Luxor, is sometimes given the same name, though it has no connection with Cleopatra either.

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.