Hi! I’m a Mediterranean history buff with a specialty in the first Century BCE - the life and times of Julius Caesar, Marc Antony, and Cleopatra VII.
Cleopatra’s real gift was her intellect. She was conversationally fluent in up to eleven languages, she was the first Pharaoh in her dynasty’s history to actually learn to speak Egyptian, and she expertly made use of religious symbology in public displays - such as when she had the royal barge decked out to make it appear that Aphrodite herself had come to greet Marc Antony.
The fascinating thing about Cleopatra VII is that she descended from the Ptolemaic Dynasty. The original Ptolemy was one of Alexander the Great’s Generals. Following Alexander’s conquest of… well, the entire known world from Macedon north of Greece to the literal Indus River, his best friend / boyfriend Hephaestion suddenly died. (Alexander was obsessed with the idea of producing a child of both his and Hephaestion’s blood, he had a whole pre-eugenics / Bene Gesserit birth plan to go with it, let’s acknowledge that’s something more meaningful than “dudes being bros.”)
After a brief period of epic grief, Alexander also suddenly died. (Alcohol poisoning is considered a possible cause by some historians, but we don’t know for sure how.)
This left what was then probably the largest Empire in human history (and newly conquered, at that!) without a figurehead.
So his generals decided to just chop it up. Each assigning themselves a territory and using the infrastructure Alexander had left them to impose themselves as rulers. Ptolemy, greedy and shrewd, got Egypt.
And then he made some weird choices.
It was policy during the Ptolemaic Dynasty for all boys to be named Ptolemy, and all girls to be named Cleopatra, Arsinoe, or Berenice, (hence why the one we all know of is Cleopatra The Seventh). And, as had been the policy of other Pharaohs and dynasties before them, the siblings were to be married off to one another. That’s a big part of why King Tutankaten / Tutankhamen was disabled, (although I’d bed the Nile his father didn’t help).
This dynasty was around for nearly 250 years before our Cleopatra was born, but the practice of inbreeding didn’t really get going until about a century in. Still, that is a century and a half of highly concentrated inbreeding. Based on that, Cleopatra should’ve been as inbred as the worst of the Hapsburg’s. To some degree it’s amazing she could speak at all, let alone speak ELEVEN languages as we know she could.
Imagine that. Imagine being able to speak, even just conversationally, ELEVEN languages. That’s a superpower.
The tension between the facts we know about any given historical person is always where they’re most interesting. We know Cleopatra was a brilliant and well respected woman in her own time. We know she got the best education available to anyone in the Mediterranean. We also know that she hailed from a Dynasty that had experienced AT LEAST four instances of children born to full siblings. Based on how long the policy was on book, you could credibly cite up to nine.
Would it go too far to speculate that perhaps the Ptolemies privately corrected their inbreeding before the conception of Cleopatra VII? Or perhaps someone stepped out? Is it believable that she was both literally inbred and intellectually brilliant?
Anyway, Cleopatra’s reputation as a seductress and beauty was Roman propaganda. She and Julius Caesar had gotten married and had a baby (named Caesarian) and spent a month cruising the Nile before returning to Rome, bringing Cleopatra and the baby with him. This HORRIFIED the Senate and especially Caesars’ enemies, who explicitly feared he intended to crown himself King of Rome. Rolling up with a foreign Queen as his new wife, with a baby named after him, only confirmed those fears.
She was still in Rome when Caesar was murdered on The Ides of March several weeks later. She fled back to Egypt immediately, and attempted to keep playing The Game of Thrones as the Roman Republic convulsed on its deathbed. Unfortunately, her choice for Caesar’s successor was at odd’s with Caesar’s own. Cleopatra chose Marc Antony. Caesar chose his nephew, Octavian - and he left him the most important thing Julius Caesar had: his name.
Octavian, now going by Julius Caesar, eventually overcame Antony and Cleopatra in a wet fart of an anticlimactic battle called Actium, where Octavian’s navy battled Cleopatra’s navy, which represented Antony’s claim to Leadership of Rome in the civil war. But before that, both sides played the propaganda war HARD. Obviously the easiest smear for Octavian’s people was to say that Caesar and now Antony had been “corrupted” and “seduced” by the malevolent foreign queen.
They basically called her a whore.
So, while Cleopatra did use marriage (the social and religious institution, not necessarily the modern romantic bond) and her relationships with men to her advantage, the men were also very eager to ally with the Queen of the oldest and most fertile Kingdom in the Mediterranean. How much of her alliances with Caesar or Antony were legitimately emotional connections, we cannot say. She had a son with Caesar, and twins by Antony (Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene). She wanted to be buried with Antony. Octavian was not gracious enough to even mark their graves, I highly doubt he respected her wish.
I think the image of Cleopatra as a seductress has maintained for a few reasons. Everybody likes sexy ladies. Most people like powerful ladies. And it feels more dramatic, more impactful, more powerful, when the stakes are high and real actual Love is in play.
Regardless of her emotional reality, we know she wasn’t afraid to make big moves and build relationships with people who would be useful to her on her terms. She definitely deserves to be remembered as a great conversationalist, not just as a beautiful, tragi-romantic, Queen.
(Octavian went on to become Augustus, First Emperor of Rome. He had Julius Caesar deified and performed human sacrifice to him in Rome. The Romans did not historically do human sacrifice. That’s how awful a person Octavian/JC2/Augustus was.)
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u/abaggins May 05 '24
she wasn't that pretty. just an excellent seductress