You already know who she is. Or do you? See, Cleopatra is one of the single most famous figures in history, easily the most famous woman of the ancient world, and she has been since her own time. But she was always controvertial, and as such the myth of her looms a lot larger than the actual woman. Here, I will try to uncover who she really was before Rome and Shakespeare got their pop-culture-defining paws all over her.
Last of the Ptolemies, descended from Alexander the Great's general, she had a frankly disgusting family tree (see below STATS) on account of her ancestors taking a little too eagerly to the Egyptian custom of sister-marriage. Parentage is a little shaky that long ago, especially for women, but judging on what we have, her father's parents were full siblings, her maternal grandfather was their brother too, and her maternal grandmother was his niece (her paternal grandfather's daughter). This made her parents full cousins and half-siblings. Yuck.
But despite a truly fucked genome, Cleopatra received the best education possible, probably one of the best in the world, with the famous Library of Alexandria at her young fingertips. She was probably one of the best educated women in the world at the time, and was a sharply intelligent young woman. Even if she did not quite speak nine languages, she definitely spoke more than you or I, and was probably smarter than us too.
Content warning: boring political history incoming.
Cleo's father, Ptolemy 12, was exiled from Egypt after his citizens grew sick and tired of him suckling Rome's buttocks. Her older sisters, Berenike 4 send agents to Rome to request they put her in charge instead. Brutal. Ptolemy 12 then sent assassins to kill those agents so the message never arrived.
When our queen was 14 her father's rich Roman allies (including Pompey of triumvirate fame) paid the govenor of Syria to invade Egypt and restore him to power. Guess who was a part of that campaign? None other than Mark Antony, who would claim years later that this was when he fell for Cleo. Yucky!
So Papa Ptolemy 12 is back on the throne, has her sister killed for opposing him, and designates Cleo and her brother Ptolemy 13 as joint heirs (and also maybe husband and wife. Yucky!). His rich Roman friends come and rob Egyptian people so bad they get put in protective custody and shipped back home. In May 52 BCE Cleo became regent for her ailing father, who died a year later
But by August 51, three months after her and her 12 year old brother Ptolemy 13 get the throne, she is listed as the sole ruler in official documents. Slay. Inheriting her father's debts, she owed Rome about 17 million drachmae. Ancient currency conversions are always an estimate at best, but you don't need to be an economist to know that it was a metric fuckton of money. Egypt was generally a mess, with low Nile flooding causing a bad harvest and subsequent famine, and then her brother gets in a mood.
Though the siblings were probably married in Ptolemaic tradition, there's no hard evidence for it, and even if they were, it didn't stop them fighting. By then the triumvirate is crumbling and Ptolemy 13 is winning against his sister after a short-lived alliance, signing his name first in documents in 50 BCE and dating his sole reign to 49 BCE. Pompey Jr asks the pharoahs for aid for his father, which they grant, but by 48 Cleo had fled to Thebes. She travelled to Syria with her sister Arsinoe for an army, but her brother's forces blocked her from Alexandria.
Meanwhile, Caesar landed in Egypt to chase Pompey and handed him his ass at the battle of Pharsalus. Pompey planned to hide in Egypt and use Ptolemy 13 as shelter. The kid's advisors, however, thought it was a bad idea to get too involved in a Roman civil war, so they ambushed Pompey and killed him. When presented with his old bro's severed head, Caesar was, shockingly, not very happy. He demanded the siblings to stop fighting, which Ptolemy 13 refused.
Cleo knows a thing or two about Caesar, mainly that he's a huge sket, and goes to ask for aid personally. She successfully charmed him and they began an affair. Ptolemy, realising that his siter was fucking Mr Rome, tried to get the people to riot, but Caesar was such a great orator that he calmed them down (our sources are almost exclusively Roman, so yes they do paint Caesar as the Ultra Chad Hero, I'm sorry). He tried oto arrange a peace using the late Ptolemy 12's will, but baby Ptolemy 13 didn't like this and hostilities resumed.
Caesar killed Ptolemy 13's advisor, the eunuch Potheinos, and took the boy king captive, but Arsinoe, the little sister, seized power and seiged Cleo and Caesar's palace. During this seige is preusmably when Cleopatra fell pregnant with Caesar's child.
In early 47 BCE Caesar's reinforcements arrived and brought hell. They caught Ptolemy and Arsinoe ont he Nile, Ptolemy 13 tried to flee and drowned when his boat capsized, and Arsinoe was captured and paraded in Caesar's triumph. cleo stayed in the palalce for this, probably to hide her scandalous pregnancy from the public.
With Cleo on the throne, she took her 12 year old brother Ptolemy 14 as a nominal hisband and coruler, but lived privately with Caesar. In April, Caesar left Egypt to sort some business, and left Cleo in Egypt. Their son Caesarion was born that June, and while Caesar could not publically claim parentage due to his marraige to a noblewoman back in Rome, Cleopatra was very open about her son's father.
Cleopatra and Ptolemy 14 visited Rome in 46, staying in Caesar's house. I imagine they did not bring the baby. She stayed in Rome until the month after Caesar's infamous death, possibly hoping for her son to be recognised as heir. Ptolemy 14 followed soon after, rumoured to be posioned by his sister so Caesarion could become co-ruler. Whether this was a lucky coincidence embellished my Roman propaganda, or whether Cleo really was a cutthroat girlboss remains uncertain. Hilariously, Cleo received aid requests for both assassins and loyalists to Caesar, lying to the assassin that she was simply just too busy in Egypt, while sending troops to the loyalists. Those troops never made it past Palestine, though.
She went to Greece with a fleet to help Octavian and Antony catch the assassins, but was too late and they'd already done it when she arrived. Antony, ruling the eastern half of the empire, summond Cleopatra to his base in Anatolia in 41, but she procrastinated until the year after, when his envoy convinced her. She cleared up some confusion about the troops in Palestine, had Arsinoe and a pesky officiant executed as well. Birds and stones, etc. Before she left Anatolia she invited Antony to visit, which he did in November 41 BCE.
Her people liked Antony for his help with Papa Ptolemy 12, and for showing up without an army, unlike literally ever other Roman leader thus far. He chilled there until spring 40, when he had to settle some nonsense in Syria, and the pair were apart until 37 BCE. They wrote letters during the separation, and Cleo also possibly sent a spy with him to keep an eye. Lol.
She gave birth to twins and unlike Caesar, Antony acknowledged them as his, despite his wife in Rome. That wife, however, was in a mess of her own with Octavian, getting seiged and exiled in 40, dying soon after. Octavian and Antony reconciled after, and he married Octavian's sister, imaginatively named Octavia. This, alongside Octavia's two children with him, pissed Cleo off mightily.
She had some political drama with Herod of biblical infanticide fame while Antony was away, but her position was secure. Antony summoned her to Antioch in 37, when he met their twins, Alexandros Helios and Cleopatra Selene, for the first time. She got some more territory and regional stability for it, but this endangered Antony as this territory was tchnically Roman, and he was ceding it to a foreign queen. She went back to Egypt, pregnant again, while Antony tried to invade the Parthian empire and failed catastrophically. He got drunk and sad and went back to Egypt rather than facing the ire of Rome.
Octavian was steadily eliminating his enemies, and Antony was next. Everytihng he and Cleo did was fuel for propaganda back in Rome. When they held a military procession after defeating Armenia? Perversion of the Roman triumph. Not that this bothered Cleopatra, who dressed up as Isis and named her children as kings of various Roman territories. Inject it.
The propaganda war with Octavian is the source of Cleo's image as a vain, arrogant, and conspicuously lavish queen, because it suited Octavian to portray her as a corrupting force on Good Roman Men. Just before the triumvirate power ran out, Antony declared Caesarion as Caesa'rs heir over Octavian, and war began in full. This culminated in the historically seismic Battle of Actium, which Cleopatra lost after a strategic retreat.
After Actium, it was a lost cause. They made a few more attempts to raise troops and fight, but nothing worked. Everyone knows what follows. Cleo made arrangements for her children and gave Octavian one last offer, to let her children inherit Egypt, and for Antony to live in exile. In August of 30 BCE, with Octavian closing in, she locked herself in a tomb and threatened to burn herself alive with her treasures. Antony, thinking she was already dead, stabbed himself. She embalmed and buried her husband before Octavian took Alexandria, capturing her three children with Antony.
According to Livy, Cleopatra met with Octavian and told him 'I will not be led in a triumph'. He promised to keep her alive but made no promises for her children or kingdom. Cleo got word that she would be sent to Rome, and killed herself. Most sources say poison, but specifics vary. She was given a royal burial beside Antony, but their tomb has never been found.
Like everyone with taste, Cleopatra fascinates me. The mystique, the drama, the gaslighting gatekeeping girlbossing. But mostly the enigma. How much of her story is even true, and how much was a construct of Roman men who despised her? The events of her life are mostly agreed upon, but beneath them, we are left with only the vaguest notion of who she was. Her concern, always, was Egypt, and we know she was a highly capable and politically savvy monarch. While I think that her relationship with Caesar was mostly strategic, I believe she truly loved Antony.
But history does her a grave injustice. She was a proud queen of an ancient dynasty in an even more ancient kingdom, and everything she did was first and foremost to retain that kingdom. What would she think, I wonder, if she knew there was never another pharoah? What would she think to know that the world is still enamoured with her, but that the picture of their adoration is horribly alien?
She is the most tantalising paradox to historians. There is no shortage of her in the historical record, and any discussion of late republican Rome is haunted by her. But beyond that, she evades us. Cassius Dio speaks of her excellent wit, Cicero hated her as arrogant. Everywhere she contradicts and refuses to be pinned down. She is an eternal thought experiment, a trail with no end. Even her final resting place eludes us, and to me that is the perfect capsule of it all. She cannot fully be known by us, uncovered, understood. Just like her refusal to patrake in Octavian's triumph, Cleopatra still has the last laugh.
Here's the question everybody cares about; so was she actually gorgeous? Some say yes, she must have been to seduce two of Rome's greatest, others argue no, she was plain and enticed them through dark, booby magic.
In all honesty, we have little idea how Cleo looked, with the Berlin bust being probably the closest we can get (pictured below).
Her ethnicity is also a huge debate with its own Wikipedia page, but as a white girl, I'll keep my opinion short. Her family was Macedonian and very inbred, so she was likely mostly Greek, but her family did intermarry with the Persian Selucid dynasy. Fundamentally I take Mary Beard's position, that as ancient lineage is shaky, and many female ancestors are little more than guesswork (male Pharoahs had many concubines), there is a chance that she had mixed ancestry, but we will never know until her body is found, which is also pretty unlikely at this point.
To summise, it was unlikely she was a 10/10 baddie by mdoern standard, but as queen, she had access to beauty regimens most didn't. Moreover, because she was wildly inbred, and some other Ptolemies are described as.... mid, to say the least. Likely she was pretty, well grommed and better dressed, but probably not Aphrodite incarnate.
But she was brilliantly intelligent and undeniably charismatic. Her beauty is something that men specifically need to be true, because how else can they explain Caesar and Antony's obsession with her? To acknowledge their heroes adored her wit and conversation skills undermines the idea of the strong stoic chad brougth down by vicious, weaponised femininity. To recognise her mind and not her face as the chief appeal presents both relationships as a partnership of equals, which goes against the traditional view of her. In Roman sources, she ensnared and enslaved these men to their ruin, not simply charmed them. She has to be beautiful for the story to work. But history is rarely so neat.