“If the name is indelible, the image is blurry,” wrote Stacy Schiff, one of Cleopatra’s many biographers. Poets, playwrights and politicians have been putting words in Cleopatra’s mouth for two millennia, but the last queen of Egypt is nevertheless elusive. Synonymous with Elizabeth Taylor and widely considered the first femme fatale, very little is known about the woman.
Why was she so alluring?
A remarkably accomplished woman, she was a master of languages and spoke at least eight—Koine (a Hellenistic dialect of Greek), Ethiopian, Aramaic (the language of the Hebrews), Arabic, Median, Parthian, Latin and of course Egyptian, a notoriously difficult tongue. She was the only member of her family—the rulers of Egypt—to learn the common language of her people. Furthermore, Cleopatra wrote scrolls on medicine and cosmetics. The library of Alexandria was her pride and joy, and no doubt she wept when fire ravaged it. However, as a wedding present Mark Antony looted the library of Pergamon in present-day Turkey and gifted her 200,000-ish scrolls to refurbish her collection.
Her talent with words stretched beyond her abilities to communicate. Her chief asset, supposedly, was her charm. But what exactly does that mean? Beauty standards change with time, and Cleopatra has been depicted according to the beauty stadards of every era. But what did she actually look like? Plutarch wrote about a hundred years after her death that she was not an exceptionally beautiful woman. A hundred years after that, Cassius Dio wrote that she was extraordinarily beautiful. Keep in mind that Plutarch was a Greek philosopher, as was Cleopatra. Cassius Dio was a Roman historian, politician and orator, and the Romans were consistent in their portrayal of the last queen of Egypt as a femme fatale. He also said she could command the attention of a room and make herself agreeable to everyone.
How did she come to power?
She may have been queen of Egypt, but she was Macedonian Greek through and through. For the whole story, we have to go back a ways. 300 years earlier, Alexander the Great lay dying in Babylon. He was only 33 years old and his son an infant. His attendants crowded around him, and when the time drew near, they asked him to name a successor. He said his empire should go to “the strongest.” Well, that had a few of his generals scratching their heads, and several generations would pass before the dust settled and the strongest made themselves apparent.
Cassander took Macedonia and killed Alexander’s infant son, the boy who might grow up to rival him. Antigonous took Asia Minor but soon lost it to Seleucus, who had already taken the largest slice for himself—the recently defeated kingdom of Persia. And Ptolemy took Egypt. Ptolemy kidnapped Alexander’s embalmed body off the road from Babylon and took it to Egypt, where he displayed it first in Memphis before transporting it down the Nile to Alexandria. Ptolemy adopted Egyptian customs, like royal brother-sister incest, and that’s how, 300 years later, his dynasty came to an end with Cleopatra, who had not one drop of Egyptian blood in her veins.
Out of six children, Cleopatra was fifth in line and never supposed to ascend the throne. However, Ptolemaic women, particularly those of her generation, were ruthless in their ambition. Each of her siblings in turn occupied the throne at one point and each met a grisly end. Cleopatra’s elder sister wrested the throne from their father and ruled for two years while he raised an army to take it back from her. Her younger brother and co-ruler also tried to take it from her. Despite their testy relationship, upon ascension they took the names Theos and Thea Philophater, which in Greek mean “brother and sister-loving gods”. Cleopatra went down in history as the woman who survived her family’s unquenchable blood thirst by spilling more blood.
Why did she go down in history?
Cleopatra’s relationship with Mark Antony started off as one of convenience. Antony needed the backing of the then-richest woman in the world to fund his military campaigns in Parthia. Cleopatra needed the friendship of a Roman politician with substantial influence in the senate. After Caesar’s assassination on the Ides of March, Octavius and Antony were the most powerful men in Rome. But Octavius was young and inexperienced, not to mention a rival claimant to her son as Caesar’s heir. Antony was the convenient choice, and in 41 BCE she sailed to meet him in Tarsus on a gold barge and hash out the terms of their alliance.
Five years later, Antony’s relationship with Octavius had become strained. Antony and Octavius’s sister were married, but he left her and Rome in 36 BCE to live in Egypt with Cleopatra until the end of their days. In 34 BCE they staged the Donations of Alexandria, which was their first step down the path of ruin. Cleopatra’s and Antony made their twins, Alexander and Selene, rulers of Armenia, Media and Parthia, and of Cyrenaica and Libya respectively. To their youngest, Ptolemy, only two years old at the time, they gave Syria, Phoenicia and Cilicia. Cleopatra’s eldest son, Ptolemy Caesar, Antony recognized as Caesar’s legitimate heir and the co-ruler of Egypt.
These donations understandably enraged Octavius. First, Antony bowled over his sister. Then he shacked up with the woman who tried to claim his inheritance for her son, and now the pair of them were trying to parcel out Roman territories to their children. He sailed to Actium and vanquished their forces in a pitched naval battle, then pursued them back to Egypt, driving them both to suicide. As Stacy Schiff put it, “Catastrophe reliably cements a reputation, and Cleopatra’s end was sudden and sensational.”
Only her daughter would survive to adulthood. Octavius hunted down and slaughtered her son with Julius Caesar after she sent him to India to escape the advancing Roman legions. Her sons with Mark Antony would both go to Rome as prisoners and die there. But her daughter, Selene, married another political prisoner, Juba, and they later ruled Mauretania as king and queen. Cleopatra’s lineage was lost within a few generations, but 300 years later another warrior queen hailing from Syria, Zenobia, claimed to be her descendant when she rode into battle against Rome.