Vulgar History Podcast
Cleopatra VII
February 26, 2020
Ann Foster:
Hello, and welcome to Season Two of Vulgar History. My name is Ann Foster, and this is a feminist women’s history comedy podcast where I look at the scandalicious stories of women from history, basically, and then we score them at the end to see where they score on a Scandalicious Scale. So, the first season, the theme was Well-Behaved Women Don’t Make History Podcasts and we were looking at six women who are known about because they bucked societal conventions. They were accused serial killers, they were con artists, they were murderesses, they gave birth to rabbits; various things that made them sort of stand out in a way in various different cultures and societies, where the job of a woman, especially an upper-class woman, was just to sort of be quiet and have babies.
This season, we’re looking at a theme of women and leadership. I’m not sure what the catchy title will be for this season, although I guess since I’m recording this episode, I should decide pretty quickly. But it’s something like Women Leaders and the Men Who Whined About It because basically, just in my free time, I like to… Women’s history is a thing I read about all the time for various reasons. And I was starting to notice some weird parallels between the ways that contemporary women political leaders, or just women who are prominent in various ways, are discussed almost word-for-word, like, the same way that people complained about women leaders over 2,000 years ago. And so, I thought it sort of traced the history of some of the more successful, yeah, because these are women leaders who actually accomplished things, they became leaders of things. And just kind of looking at how the various patriarchal societies that they lived in made it even harder for them to be a woman leader and what maybe that tells us about the world we live in today.
The first woman who we’re going to look at is Cleopatra, the main Cleopatra. There were several people called Cleopatra so, just to be clear, the one we’re talking about is, I think, the seventh Cleopatra. But basically, she’s the one everybody knows about at this point. We’re going to get into this in a second but there’s a thing where, in this era of Egyptian history, there weren’t a lot of different names of people, especially within the royal family. In fact, the Cleopatra we’re talking about had an older sister, also called Cleopatra. So, just like, get prepared for some duplicate names.
So, I was thinking about… Like, this season, we’re going to be looking sort of in chronological order, at six different women who had leadership and how the men around them reacted to that and how they kept being leaders, even as men were whining about it, the challenges they faced to become leaders when they were surrounded by men who were grossed out by the idea. And so, I’m starting with Cleopatra and it’s sort of intimidating a little bit. The first season, I did women who, to me, are medium well-known, but Cleopatra is, like, extremely well-known. She’s the first sort of heavy hitter. We’ve looked out on this podcast and I thought, oh, you know, I really wanted to wait until I was really settled into this whole podcast game before I dove into something this, kind of, well-known, this juicy. But then I was like, well I don’t want to not do Cleopatra just because she is famous. That’s sort of, like, reverse judgmental or something. And it’s just a really good place to start because you’ll see, moving ahead from here, how the other the next few women, especially the next two we’re going to be looking at, how Cleopatra’s reign sort of affected the way that they led and the way that they were reacted to by, mostly, their patriarchal society, but I’m going to say, mostly men.
So, that’s what we’re looking at today is the story of Cleopatra. It is long and it is interesting. And she’s someone who, you know, there’s always, like, Cleopatra Halloween costumes. She’s a character on Clone High, there’s the old show Cleopatra 2525 where I think she was, like, reincarnated, like, it’s a name people have. Pam Grier, I think, played Cleopatra Jones in blaxploitation films, like, it’s a name that is imbued with a sort of power. When you think about the name Cleopatra. Even just looking at the Halloween costumes, it’s like glamour and power and gorgeousness. But the story of the woman herself is not something I knew in super detail until I started researching and now, that’s what we’re going to look at today.
So, the thing… Many, many things to know. I’ll just mention that the main source I used for researching Cleopatra was the biography of Cleopatra written by Stacy Schiff, which is very… it’s very readable. I mean, in terms of history books, there’s, like, super academic history books, and there’s kind of like history for kids. And this is a book for… There’s a lot of really great information in it, and it’s also written in a very accessible, sort of, mainstream way, which I think is great because that means more people will maybe enjoy reading it. She has a really long bibliography. Basically, she went through all the sources, and she explained what those sources are, and I’m just going to use her as my source.
Just bear in mind that Cleopatra was a very famous person in her day; she was a queen of Egypt, and she was of Macedonian/Greek descent. I’m bringing that up right now because there’s no known writing about her by the Egyptians, or by the Macedonian/Greeks. So, we don’t know, kind of, how she portrayed herself, what she wanted people to think she was like, or what people from her own country thought of her. The writing we have about her is from several Roman men who just hated her and many of whom, well, some of whom lived at the same time as her and some of whom wrote about her after she had died. So, basically, it’s like, not objective sources but when you look at all of them in combination, you get some facts and that’s what we’re going to try and look at today to see, kind of, what was her deal actually, as much as we know.
I need to do some place-setting into the history of Ancient Egypt, just so you know where she kind of fits into things. So, because the status of Egypt as a country was super, it was kind of a trap for her. She was in this sort of situation where Egypt as a country was not doing amazing and then she became, basically, its queen but Egypt was not at the prime of its time as, like, super, amazing country that everybody wished they could live in.
So, briefly… A bunch of independent villages, combined into the Kingdom of Egypt around the year 3150 BCE. If you haven’t come across this before, some people call eras before 0, “BC” for “Before Christ,” and some people call them “BCE,” which is “Before Common Era.” I tend to use BCE, but just to save us all from me saying acronyms all the time. I’m just going to say numbers from now on, but just bear in mind, this all takes place before the year 0, so all the numbers are going to be getting smaller the later in time we get, basically. So, Egypt, founded, 3150, and then there was the Old Kingdom, and there was the New Kingdom. It became a really successful kingdom because of the Nile River, which flooded every year and that helped with their crops. So, they had amazing crops, which meant that people wanted to trade with them, which meant that they themselves could feed their citizens. So, compared to other nearby areas, Egypt was able to progress in a way other places weren’t because they didn’t have to worry about food and money to the extent that other people did. So, they just started developing this kind of sophisticated cultural identity.
There were some previous women leaders in Egypt. Cleopatra was not the first well-known. There was a woman named Hatshepsut who ruled during what’s known as the New Kingdom Era, which was about 1550 to 1069. So, this is still, like, 1,000 years before Cleopatra. Anyway, it was uncommon for women to hold solo leadership roles in Egyptian society, but Egypt wasn’t grossed out by the idea of women being in control. So, Hatshepsut, for instance, ruled for about 20 years alongside her husband so she was powerful in combination with him. Often in Egyptian scenarios, you had like… There was always a man-woman pair, there was always a king and a queen. And unlike in some other countries where the queen was kind of like just the wife of the king, here the queen, like, got to have power and influence of her own.
Basically, years go by, and Egypt started fading in its significance and its wealth. This is because the whole thing was dependent on the Nile River and that’s nature and you can’t always count on nature to do the same thing every year. So, there were times of drought at which point they weren’t able to get as many crops, so Egypt started doing less great. And then suddenly, it’s the year 332 and the famous Greek teenager, Alexander the Great, stormed in and conquered Egypt. At this point, Egypt had been under the control of the Persians. So, even Alexander the Great and his Greek forces weren’t the first people to take over Egypt. Anyway, so he came in, Alexander the Great, very successful person who you can read about in other places. But basically, Egypt had been under the power of a series of colonizers for a while, but Alexander came in and everyone kind of liked his approach. They were like, “If we’re going to be oppressed and colonized, at least this guy sort of respects and pays attention to our culture a little bit.” Alexander created a new capital city named after him, which is called Alexandria, and then he left the kingdom under the care of his best friend and trusted general Ptolemy.
So, over the next 300 years, Ptolemy’s descendants would rule Egypt as the Ptolemaic dynasty. And so, I mentioned that Alexander kind of respected Egyptian culture a bit. And by that, I mean, it’s a complex thing when somebody comes in to take over someone else’s country, but basically, Alexander and Ptolemy, they didn’t come in to be like, “Okay, guess what? Everything’s like Greece now. Let’s just make change everything to be Greek.” They adopted several cultural practices from the Egyptians, including their deities, their religion, the concept of incestuous brother-sister, royal marriages. They still celebrated all of the old architecture and beautiful buildings and statues, hieroglyphs, et cetera. So, they didn’t try and erase the preexisting Egyptian culture. But at the same time, the Ptolemy rulers didn’t learn how to speak the Egyptian language, which was its own language; it wasn’t Arabic, it was its own language at the time. So, they were kings and queens of Egypt for 300 years, but they conducted all of their business in Greek. So, they adopted some Egyptian stuff, but they were still very much… Even though they’d been there for 300 years, like, the people of Egypt knew that these people were not Egyptian, “They’re not like us.”
And this is where we get into the fact that the Ptolemys only had a couple of names that they liked to use. So basically, in this royal family, all of the boys and men, seemingly, were all named Ptolemy. They’re all named Ptolemy, just with a number afterwards. And the girls had one of three names, which were Cleopatra, Arsinoe, or Berenice. And today’s heroine who we’re looking at, our Cleopatra, she was one of at least four sisters. She was called Cleopatra, she had an older sister also called Cleopatra, she had a sister called Berenice, and a sister called Arsinoe because those are the only names that existed for royal women. And we’re just going to take a little look at the two oldest sisters to get a sense of kind of what life was like in this royal family.
So, brother-sister, incestuous marriage was a thing the Ptolemys have been doing for, like, 300 years, inspired by what Egyptians have been doing before. And it was basically just to ensure like, “the purity” of the family line. So much stuff in history now makes me be like, “Oh, like the Targaryens in Game of Thrones,” where it’s like, “No, the Targaryens in Game of Thrones were inspired by the Ptolemys in Egypt.” But it’s that same sort of thing where it’s just like they were marrying within their family to keep it all sort of because they saw themselves as kind of the descendants of gods. And so, they wanted to keep it within the family. But at the same time, I think just scientifically speaking, if your brother-sister inbreeding for 300 years, eventually, like, I think you’re going to deal with quite a bit of infertility. So, the Ptolemys (the various men who are all named Ptolemy), had mistresses and stuff and sometimes their children would become the new king and queen. So, there’s a large amount of inbreeding, but also there’s like little bits of other genetics coming in, to the point that by the time Cleopatra’s around, was she entirely just of Greek descent? Like, almost definitely not.
Anyway, another reason why the Ptolemys liked to marry within their family and not just in, like, an 18th century, you know, Habsburg cousin marriage way, but like literally marrying brothers to sisters. So they’re doing that to maintain the family line, but also because they were so busy murdering and scheming against each other that introducing other people would make it be, like, even more chaotic somehow.
So, this was a family situation. We’re going to be looking at in later episodes at some Ancient Roman stuff and it’s similar. This was just, like, a time and a place in the world where you were either scheming to murder somebody or someone just murdered you because everyone was always scheming to murder each other. So, like, it’s not being paranoid to assume that your brother and sister are trying to murder you because they probably are and oh, there’s a knife in your back. Like, it’s just, that’s the situation we’re looking at. So, within that context, to do well, you need to be also scheming and murdering other people. So, just bear that in mind, I guess, basically. Just, like, everyone is killing everyone all the time, and in order to thrive, you basically had to kill your siblings before they killed you.
So, Cleopatra, she’s one of four sisters and their father was pharaoh Ptolemy XII, who was the illegitimate son of Ptolemy XI. He himself, it only went up pharaoh because all of his other brothers had been murdered by each other because, like, I can’t stress this enough: In this family, everyone was constantly killing each other, all the time. So, Cleopatra’s mother was also named Cleopatra. So, her mother is Cleopatra V, and their oldest daughter was Cleopatra VI. Again, that’s not our Cleopatra, this is her older sister with the same name. So, the mother died, which is like, thank God, that’s one less Cleopatra in this paragraph. And so, Cleopatra VI, again, not our heroine, her older sister, came in to become the new queen because there had to always be a man-woman pair of king and queens. So, they weren’t married to each other, her and her father. That’s, like, the one step I think, or I don’t think they actually went to. But basically, there had to be a king and a queen. So, with her mother dead, Cleopatra, the older one, came in to become the new queen. But she was very quickly murdered, probably by the next youngest sister who’s called Berenice because Berenice wanted to have this power for herself.
So, Berenice becomes the new queen, and then Ptolemy XII himself left town for, I don’t know, a business trip or something, at which point Berenice just seized the throne for herself. She was just like, “Guess what? I’m not going to share this throne with my father. I’m going to be just the queen, just me. That’s it.” So, in order to get the traditional, sort of, king and queen pairing, she could have married off one of her brothers to become a pair to sort of fight against their father that way. But her two younger brothers were both basically preschoolers so that wasn’t going to give her, like, especially a lot of power or influence. Also, she was like, “Guess what? I’m doing this by myself. I’m Berenice. I’m amazing.”
So, the men around her, basically pressured her to marry someone, because having just a woman in charge made them uncomfortable. So, it was sort of like, a woman could be in charge, shared with a man, or even shared with a little boy. But by herself, everyone was just kind of like, “Oh no, that’s just not what we do.” So, after a few months, Berenice agreed to marry her cousin, Prince Seleucid. But after one week, she basically poisoned him to death because she didn’t like him. And again, just everyone’s killing everyone, all the time. She was not messing around, basically, in terms of killing. She killed, potentially, her sister. Who knows, maybe she killed their mother too? But we do know she killed her husband after one week. So, she chose a new husband, whose name was Archelaus, but she didn’t actually give him any power and continued to be in charge of Egypt basically by herself. Until her father, Ptolemy XII, came back with the full support of the Romans.
So, he took over again, had Berenice executed. So, at this point, there are just two sisters left. Cleopatra, aged 14, and this is from now until quite a while into the story, the only Cleopatra there is anymore. So just, just when Cleopatra anymore. So, she’s 14 years old, and she becomes the new queen because Berenice was killed. So, she, age 14, becomes the new queen of Egypt.
But I just want to mention… So, Ptolemy came back with the support of Roman forces. So, this is at a time when Rome was having their own drama. Rome was doing well for itself. They were kind of running around taking over other kingdoms, and they had sort of a decent alliance at this point with Egypt. So, the fact that they were allied with the king meant, sort of, protection for them, meant that things were kind of okay in Egypt, they weren’t at war against the Romans at this point.
So, Cleopatra, age 14, what do we know about her at this point? And the answer is not much. But if you look at what we just went through, she would have seen a lot of murder happening. She would have seen two of her sisters and her mother all die in pretty quick succession. She would have seen her father storm back into town with the Romans. She would have seen, like… She was 14 years old, but she was not in any way naive to the world that she was living in, basically. So, we don’t know a lot about her early years because we don’t have any writing about her from the Egyptians at the time. We only know, the Romans just started writing about her when she started having dealings with people in Rome, which was when she was a few years older than this.
But basically, what we know about her education, for instance, is that it would have been extremely wide-ranging. So, unlike other societies that we’ve looked at, and we will look at in other episodes of this podcast, it sort of flips back and forth, various societies and even within the societies if it’s seen worthwhile to educate girls or not. But, luckily for Cleopatra, she was living at a time when it was seen, especially for royal girls, that she should be educated in every subject that was known at the time. So, math, politics, history, philosophy, reading, writing, she was fluent in potentially up to nine languages, including the language Egyptian, making her the first person in 300 years in her family to ever bother to learn the literal language of their literal subjects. So, she’s maybe savvy in a way.
There’s a conspiracy… Not a conspiracy, but there’s, like, a theory that appeals to me, which could be one of the reasons maybe she learned the Egyptian language could have been that she was at least part Egyptian. Her father’s wife was named Cleopatra, and she died. She had two older sisters, Cleopatra V, also the mother of our Cleopatra, like, it’s possibly not, it possibly could have been another one of Ptolemy’s mistresses. But basically, so if she was half Egyptian, then it would make sense that she would have picked up that language, and she would have wanted to pick up that language, and that would be sort of important to her in a way. But we don’t know that for sure. Spoiler, nobody knows what she looked like at all, really.
What we do know is that she was probably not conventionally beautiful. So, this is… I just want to let that sink in, because she’s famous as this, like, Elizabeth Taylor/Angelina Jolie-looking, like, goddess on earth, basically. But what we know about what she looks like is that there were some coins, and she made, [chuckles] every time she made a political move, she had new coins made with her face on them. So, we don’t know how much the coins look like her actual face. And maybe she wanted to make herself look more manly or something to try and look more… I don’t know. Anyway, the face that’s on the coins has not been done up to make her look traditionally, femininely beautiful. Also, just a lot of the men, these Roman men who were writing about her, did not shy away from talking about how gorgeous people were, like, wait until we get to Mark Antony. If she had been beautiful, they would have written about it probably and nobody really talks about what she looks like.
So, I think it’s easy to assume that she must have been gorgeous because, in our paradigm, it’s sort of assumed that a very successful woman would be gorgeous and able to manipulate men, maybe. And if she’s not gorgeous, then it’s like, well, then how is she able to get so much power? Could it be that she was actually, like, smart and talented? And that just makes people’s brains short-circuit to consider. But basically, we do know that she had a beautiful voice, a beautiful speaking voice, and we know that she had enormous amounts of personal charisma. She had that sort of thing where when you go, she walks into a room, even though, like, she’s the one who’s literally dressed in literal gold, like, all eyes go to her, and she makes people feel special when she talks to them. She had really great just skills, conversational skills. So, she had this personal magnetism, was probably not conventionally beautiful, even for the time. But basically, what she had learned, by age 14 is, I would assume, don’t trust anyone in your family, ever. And if you’re going to try to take over as a woman leader of Egypt, you want to make sure you have powerful allies on your side, because people are not going to take to that very well, presumably.
And so, when she was about 18 years old, she’d been queen for four years. She had not been murdered herself so, like, frankly, that’s an achievement, her father died. He had written in his will that he wanted Cleopatra to marry her younger brother and so that’s what happened. He became her co-ruler, Ptolemy XIII. So, he was also, like, 10 years old or something. So basically, she had been co-ruler with her father and then suddenly she’s 18 years old and being told she has to job share with her, like, tweenage brother/ husband. So, right away, and she had spent four years, I’m going to guess, theorize, making alliances with advisors and that sort of stuff. So, she’s able to work with those people, using preexisting relationships she already had to cut him out of most of the job duties. So, his name was removed from official documents. She minted new coins that showed only her face instead of both of them, and both of these actions were basically declarations of war. Everybody (by everybody, I mean, her brother’s advisors and regents, who were a group of men) got really mad about this, because she had sort of snuck around behind everyone’s back to claim extra power. And she’d also upended the expectation that queens should be subordinate to and supportive of kings. Like, a woman, the whole idea, going back to what her older sister tried to do, it was just shocking, it just, like, did not compute to them. A woman having power on her own, it’s like, “No, she needs to share it with a man.” A woman can have some power, a royal woman, as long as she shares it. And Cleopatra is just like, “Fuck that,” and off she went.
So, she had her own supporters, but her brother had more supporters, and she wound up exiled from Alexandria. So, he was still living there being the pharaoh, and she was sent off into exile. She took her younger sister, Arsinoe, so that she still had one more sister left. I just like picturing them as this, like, sort of Grand Duchess Anastasia and her sister/Little Women/Pride and Prejudice, just this group of four girls who were just, like, each of them more cool than the next. So, she took her little sister, Arsinoe, and they went off to Syria to just kind of figure out what they were going to do. And what she figured out she’s going to do was to take advantage of the currently ongoing Roman Civil War to get them on her side to be her backup to defeat her brother/husband, which brings us to the history of Ancient Rome, which, like, there are year-long university courses in that so we just need to blitz through to catch up to where we are.
So, basically, what you need to know at this point is that Romans, Roman men, Roman society, Roman culture hated women, basically. They sort of, in the sense of, like, the legitimate meaning of misogyny, like, they just do not… So, women in ancient Rome did not have any rights at all. So, first of all, their understanding of medicine of obstetrics was that basically within the womb, everyone was sort of like, starts off as a woman and then just becomes a man. So, people, babies who were born as girls, biologically, with the genitalia of the female sex, were seeing this sort of like men that didn’t quite make it all the way. So, women are seen literally as incomplete men. So, they never had any rights in Ancient Rome. Not just like they couldn’t vote, but like they couldn’t go outside of their houses by themselves. Like, they were always under the control of a male relative. Women were possessions. Ancient Rome at this time was also a place that had slaves. And so, women, slaves, and, like, chickens were all just kind of like things that were owned by men that men could control.
So, Roman men hated women, and Romans, at this point, really, really hated the idea of a hereditary monarchy. So, this is the situation where Rome had been controlled— It was the Roman Republic, which was sort of an, oh my god, [chuckles] this is not my area of expertise, but basically a democracy situation; people were voted into power, they had terms, they weren’t in charge forever. They got to job share. Like, at this point, there was the triumvirate. So, three people sort of were all in charge, but just for a five-year term. So, Cleopatra was a powerful woman who was also from a hereditary monarchy. So, she was basically their worst nightmare.
So, at this point, well, I guess we’re just catching up to this point, 20 years before Cleopatra was born. So, Rome was constantly having civil wars basically. So, 20 years before Cleopatra was born, a man named Sulla took over as sort of emergency emperor during the Civil War era, and that was just supposed to be sort of like for a short term during the emergency, but then the younger men in Rome were like, “Oh! So, one person could be in charge,” and that inspired them to sort of try and want to do that again. So younger men like Julius Caesar and a man named Pompey decided that they’d kind of like to be in charge themselves. Caesar and Pompey didn’t want to share so they began fighting against each other and just kind of kept on fighting. And suddenly, it’s the year 48 BCE and that is where we’re caught up to where Cleopatra was.
So, Cleopatra is in Syria with her younger sister and she’s trying to figure out how to defeat her brother-husband. Caesar and Pompey are at war against each other. So, remember when the Egyptians came, or the Romans came to support Cleopatra’s father? So, there’s still a sort of alliance between Rome and Egypt. So, Pompey fled to Egypt where he thought he could find refuge for a while. But basically, he was stabbed to death upon arrival because that’s just, like, how Egypt welcomed people apparently. So, he was killed. In Egypt, Caesar, even though he’d been at war with Pompey, was sort of upset that Pompey had just been, like, randomly murdered in Egypt. So, he was just like, “Okay, Cleopatra, could you please reconcile with your brother-husband and just, like, calm down and be like a nice little subordinate ally to Rome?” Cleopatra, of course, did not want to do this; she didn’t want to reconcile with her brother, she wanted to defeat her brother. So, she decided what she needed to do was to get Caesar to join her side against Ptolemy.
So, this is where if the people of Egypt had been bigger fans of the Ptolemys, this Greek dynasty that had been in charge of them for 300 years, the Egyptians might have stepped up to offer her assistance to take down her brother. But the fact they didn’t do this is maybe one small clue to the fact they viewed both her and her brother-husband as their oppressor, not as their legitimate rulers. Like, they would be the army, but they weren’t going to, like, revolt for one of them above the other, basically.
So, this is the moment, the famous Cleopatra meets Julius Caesar moment. So, in legends based on some very dramatic writings, some people think she might have hidden herself in a rolled-up carpet, and then had the carpet carried into Julius Caesar’s room, and then she was just, like, “Surprise!” like a showgirl popping out of a giant cake or something. I mean, again, we’re looking at, sort of like, third, fourth-hand information. This may or may not have happened, but we do know for sure that she snuck off without telling her brother, and she secretly met with Caesar, and whatever she said totally worked because he came out of this meeting willing to ally with her against Ptolemy, and then they basically became a couple and that is what happened.
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And we’re back. So, this is where it would be very easy if Cleopatra had been very conventionally beautiful, very sexy, very sexual, it would be an easy way to explain how and why Caesar decided to decide with her right at this point, if she just, like, literally seduced him. But the thing is that she was not conventionally beautiful. She was magnetic and charismatic and interesting and, like, super smart. Also, Julius Caesar had spent his life in Rome, a place where women were not given this much education, women do not have this much power. Someone like Cleopatra would be totally foreign to him. So, just she as a person could have been part of why he was what attracted him to her. And then also just in terms of the seduction side of things is that Cleopatra had been married to her tween-aged brother for the past several years. Before that was co-queen with her father, and so, I don’t think it’s a giant leap to think that perhaps she was not at all very sexually experienced, even though she’s known as this famous, like, seductress, the only men we know for sure she ever had sex with were Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. But basically, she was assertive, she was poised, she had the self-confidence of somebody who had been raised being told that she was literally a goddess and had been queen since she was age 14.
Another thing to consider too is that in the ancient world, a lot of times alliances were sealed with people with marriage alliances and/or babies. So, it could have been she was just thinking, like, we don’t know her psychology, but also this is the Vulgar History podcast so whatever. Like, I don’t think she what her first go-to is like “I’m going to seduce this like 50-year-old man, and then he’ll do what I want.” Like, I don’t think she would think that because that’s not a very foolproof plan and Cleopatra, as we will see, always had like a plan A, a plan B, a plan C. She didn’t do things without having it planned out very well in advance. But basically, she needed somebody to side with her against that. If she had to sleep with Caesar, I’m sure she was up for that. She might have thought, like, having sex with him, having a baby with him would make a sort of alliance. Like, she was technically married to her brother, he was technically married to someone else so they couldn’t marry each other. But basically, having a baby was nothing compared to, like, murdering family members, which is what people are doing around her. So, whatever she did, Caesar was totally on board. So, you’re like, “Okay, this is great. I see where this is going. This is familiar to me from the Shakespeare play.”
But oh no, because there’s time for another plot twist, which is that remember her younger sister, Arsinoe? She was just as badass as her three older sisters. And if you ask me, I think also sort of in like a Little Women/Pride and Prejudice way, just, like, if the younger sibling keeps getting… Just learning from the older ones, the younger siblings just get cooler and better and more and more badass. And so, she was just like, “I think this is my chance, you guys.” So, 15 years old, Arsinoe decides to try and take over Egypt herself with their other brother, whose name is also Ptolemy, to be with as her co-regent. So basically, she’s 15 years old, she decides she’s going to defeat Julius Caesar and take over all of Egypt. And Arsinoe is amazing, and you should watch the Drunk History episode about this.
Anyway, so Arsinoe, what she did is she had this helper, I guess her mentor/pal/palace eunuch, his name is Ganymedes. With his help and support, she declared herself Queen Arsinoe IV and took control of the Egyptian army, which is just, like, 15 years old. These sisters are amazing! She named Ganymedes as her Second in Command. She commanded the Egyptian army in battle against the Romans. She used some clever tactics, like closing off some streets in order to trap Caesar and Cleopatra in the palace. And they were trapped there for an entire year, like, this wasn’t just a short-lived thing. Anyway, Caesar eventually was like, “Okay, I’m going to be defeated by one of history’s coolest teenagers.” Cleopatra was like, “Can you just get rid of my sister?” Whatever. So, what happened here is that there was a final battle, Ptolemy drowned to death, and Ganymedes died in battle. So, Ptolemy, the one who was married to Cleopatra, drowned. Ganymedes, who was Arsinoe’s helper, died in battle.
Eventually, the Egyptian army, who again are just kind of, like, people of Egypt who had been sort of colonized and oppressed for a long time, who were just like, “Can anything just settle down, ever, here?” So, they decided, ultimately, they weren’t on Team Arsinoe. And so, they decided to exchange Arsinoe for Ptolemy, the other one, because those two brothers remember. Basically, all told, what happens is the Egyptian army betrayed Arsinoe. She wound up a Roman prisoner and she’s forced to be included in Julius Caesar’s victory parade, humiliating herself in front of everyone as a captive queen, like, a parade went down the street, a massive parade. I feel like it was something like a multi-day parade, it was very visible, and she was like in a cage in front of everybody and it was just very humiliating for all of her. And then she was sent into exile and we’ll hear about her a bit later. But that’s basically her big, that was her big moment, but back to Cleopatra.
So, right now, it’s the year 48. Julius Caesar’s term as consul is due to expire. Because remember, it was just, like, a five-year thing. But he was, like, inspired by Sulla so many decades before he got one extra year as emergency dictator, because he was like, “Who else but me can settle the dynastic troubles in Egypt? Because I’m sleeping with Cleopatra.” So, he appointed Cleopatra co-ruler, alongside yet another Ptolemy brother, sorry, “Tolemy.” It’s spelled with a P at the beginning so it’s like ‘pterodactyl’ and it’s hard for me to not say the P, Ptolemy, Ptolemy XIV.
So, she, Cleopatra, at this point age 22, pregnant with the baby of Julius Caesar, in order to rule Egypt had to marry her 12-year-old brother. It’s, like, she is never not having to marry her 12-year-old brother, all of whom are named Ptolemy. Basically, she was technically married to this little boy, but she lived with Caesar as long as he was in Alexandria. Caesar was out of town when her son was born on June 23rd in the year 47 BCE. The son was named Caesarean, or potentially it’s pronounced [phonetic] kai-zare-ee-an. But basically, it’s a Greek name that means basically Caesar, junior. And she told everybody that the father of this child was Julius Caesar. Julius Caesar never officially acknowledged Caesarean as his son for various reasons, mostly because he was married to someone else, and Cleopatra was married to someone else, and this was all kind of messy. But basically, she had just given birth to a son who was maybe going to be the next emperor of Rome, because Rome is headed in sort of a dynastic sort of direction instead of a voting-people-in direction. So, Cleopatra and her brother-husband went to Rome. They left baby Caesarean behind because it was, like, 47 BCE and it’s hard enough travelling with a baby now, imagine then, with no antibiotics or whatever.
Anyways, they moved into a villa just across from where Julius Caesar lived with his wife in Rome and everyone kind of found this weird. But Julius Caesar at this point was just going full, like, narcissistic, dictator-type thing. He was very doing his own thing and not caring what other people thought. And that’s not going to end well for him. But this is an example of the sort of stuff he had done. So, Caesar at this point was busy overseeing the construction of a new temple to the goddess Venus, which included a huge gold-plated statue of the goddess Venus. And he was like, “You know what this this temple needs? Is a giant gold statue of Cleopatra, my lover, as well.” So, the temple put up a giant statue of Venus next to that giant statue of the queen of Egypt, and everyone was just kind of like “Okay? This is all getting kind of weird.”
And then comes the Ides of March, famously, where Caesar was stabbed to death by a bunch of his former friends who were just kind of mad at his, like, self-declaring himself emperor for the rest of all time, et cetera. Cleopatra was like, “Okay, so great. My baby son is going to be the new emperor of Rome, right?” And the Romans were like, “Actually, no.” And in fact, Julius Caesar had adopted his kid named Octavian and so we think that person’s going to maybe take over. So, Cleopatra just kind of packed up her things and pieced out of Rome, heading back to Egypt to regroup.
But knowing what we know about Cleopatra, like I’m sure that when by the time you’re 14, you’ve seen so many of your family members kill their family members, like, I’m sure she was like saddened, maybe surprised at the details, but like, not shocked that Caesar ended up getting stabbed. So, I’m sure she already had other plans. She had figured out kind of who had power in Rome, who could maybe be her new ally with him gone. And then wouldn’t you know, while en route back to Egypt, her brother-husband, died of some sort of illness/was probably poisoned, probably by her. With him out of the way, there are no more little brothers, thank god, finally. So, her co-regent becomes her son, 3-year-old Caesarean. So, she was now basically the solo queen of Egypt, like, there’s still the male-female pairing of king and queen, but the king in this instance was 3 years old. So basically, she was in charge, but she still needed the assistance of Rome to stay in power because there were people in Egypt who didn’t love this whole turn of events.
Basically, this is when and why she turned to a guy named Mark Antony. So, Mark Antony is like, just get ready. I love, I love reading about Mark Antony. He’s just, like, heartthrob and himbo of the ages. So, what had happened is that Julius Caesar was assassinated partially because he wanted to be solo emperor and people were mad about that. So, they didn’t want to make his heir, Octavian, the new emperor on his own, instead, they said like what was set up and by they, I mean the senators of Rome, they set up a triumvirate of three leaders. So, Octavian, who was this, like, teenage asshole, Caesar’s former right-hand man, Mark Antony, who was this really successful war general, and a third guy named Lepidus. So, these three men weren’t super psyched to share power with each other because first Sulla and then Caesar had made everyone kind of think, like, being solo emperor was kind of where it’s at.
So, they sort of divided up most of the Roman Empire. Octavian controlled most of the Western bits. Antony controlled most of the Eastern bits. Lepidus is just like, “Who cares?” and the whole thing drilled down to basically Octavian versus Mark Antony and one or the other was going to kill the other because basically they weren’t going to share. And you remember when I mentioned how people weren’t really writing about Cleopatra being gorgeous, even though they wrote about other people being gorgeous? Mark Antony is one of the people who is written about being gorgeous. He had, “Mighty thighs, a perfect face, curly hair,” total dreamboat, just, like, amazingly sexy, good-looking guy. He’s also really good as a war general. So, he’s like accomplished, smart, good-looking, thighs, wearing his, like, little Roman miniskirt. Basically, he was gorgeous and also really well accomplished and also really, really, really popular. And Octavian was kind of this, like, sickly, skinny, teen, oh, he had blonde hair. Mark Antony had dark hair and Romans liked dark hair better. So, Octavian was just kind of this useless, little skinny kid. Mark Antony was this, like, Brad Pitt-type, thighs, god person. And so, Octavian needed to figure out a way to turn everybody against this like dreamboat.
Basically, here’s what happened is that Mark Antony was fighting against Octavian, but he needed funding to help support his side of the war. Cleopatra needed Romans to be on her side to just sort of maintain her amount of power. So, Mark Antony contacted Cleopatra to see if she could maybe help fund what he was up to. So, he sent an invitation for her to come visit him. And she was like, “Mmm, thanks but no thanks,” and like, totally turned him down. And he kept inviting her and she kept refusing because she’s just like Cleopatra goes where Cleopatra decides to go. She does not answer other people’s invitations. Finally, she was like, “Guess what? Okay, I’ll come and visit you.”
So, bear in mind that purple was the most expensive and rarest dye in this place and time, because it had to be made from a slime of thousands of sea snails, which meant it took forever to, like, make the dye, it took forever to dye things. So, the fact that Cleopatra sailed up to meet Mark Antony in a ship with purple sails was just, like, the equivalent of, like, flying in on a plane made of gold and diamonds, basically. So also, the oarsmen were using silver ores, like, made literally out of silver. So, it’s just like giant knives glinting in the Mediterranean sunshine. This boat that’s just like money, basically. She’s like, “Oh, you want me to fund your little war? I don’t know. Can I spare that much money? I don’t know. What do my purple sails and my silver ores think?”
So, Antony is just, like, hanging out waiting for this meeting. And then Cleopatra makes comes like sailing up on the ship. She was dressed up like the goddess Isis, covered in jewels, surrounded by incense so you could literally smell the decadence of what was happening. She had little children dressed like cupids running around her with little bows and arrows, which is like, who are these children? Where do they come from? I don’t know. But basically, she just, like, swans in, I’m picturing it’s just, like, the most Rihanna thing. I’m picturing her lying sideways on a sofa because that’s how she’s always drawn but also it’s like, how else could you make that entrance?
Basically, so her boat is like sailing up to meet Mark Antony. And he’s like, “Okay, great.” This is, like, more than expected. But her boat just keeps going. It sails right past him. And Mark Antony is just like, what just happened? So basically, he’s like, [uncertain tone] “Okay…” So, he went up her ship like docks and she goes over to her ship. And she’s like, “That’s how it works. You come to my ship. I don’t come to you. I’m motherfucking Cleopatra.” So, he went over to her ship and she was like, “Hey, we’re just having this opulent feast. Why don’t you just have some wine and music and jewels and just, like, hang out here for like literally 48 hours?” Two days later, a deal was struck where she had helped support him in his battle against Octavian and he was completely in love with her and, like, of course he was.
So, also during this sex summit, Cleopatra got Antony to agree to have Arsinoe put to death because she was sort of a threat to her still as the only other surviving sibling. Arsinoe, still alive, just living in this sort of place in Rome. Antony arranged for Arsinoe to be murdered. So, Arsinoe was murdered on the front steps of this temple where she’d been living in, sort of, sanctuary. And this kind of rubbed the people of Rome the wrong way because they really took sanctuary and religion really seriously. But anyway, Arsinoe, RIP. Cleopatra, now the only surviving member of her immediate sibling group.
So, she and Mark Antony almost immediately seem to have begun a physical affair and like, can you blame her? Like, he was just gorgeousness personified. Can you blame him? She was just literally goddess. Even just in reading this stuff, reading third-hand accounts of them together, it’s just, like, they have palpable sexual chemistry. And also, she’d been married to her tween-aged brother, her like, 12-year-old brother. She had a child with Julius Caesar who was, like, 50 when she was like 20. And now she’s got this man who’s like a similar age to her who’s also like literally a sex god. They were both into it. Bear in mind, of course, that Mark Antony was married to someone else because everyone in the story is, but that didn’t stop them.
Anyway, so Mark Antony had always been known for throwing these amazing, luxurious, decadent parties. Cleopatra was just, like, ready to let loose because she’d spent her entire life waiting to be murdered by her siblings. They were now all dead and she was on top of the world. And so, they just started throwing parties all the time. They started a sort of club called “The Inimitable Livers,” like the body organ that like gets affected when you drink a lot of alcohol. So, it’s basically just a bunch of people who could drink a lot. And they spent literally days in bed together and were just, like, being amazing, all the time. They weren’t just, like, shirking their responsibilities either. They were also being successful leaders, just being amazing, doing amazing, having this amazing sex life, just… Good for them.
So, what happened is that Cleopatra, at this point, who had always been very careful and very good about planning for contingencies, she seems to have underestimated Octavian, who still had it out for Antony. While they were just, like, having this power couple dream life, Octavian was just like, I don’t know, maybe fleshing out a bit from his, like, sort of sickly skinniness and becoming more powerful. Little did they know.
So, in around the year 40, Cleopatra gave birth to boy-girl twins. The daughter was named Cleopatra, because that’s… of course, and the boy was named Alexander after Alexander the Great, who was actually one of Mark Antony’s ancestors. Antony actually acknowledged these as his children, which Caesar never did with Caesarean. Shortly after the twins were born, Antony’s wife died. She probably wasn’t poisoned, I think she just died. To try and make peace between the two warring Roman factions, Antony agreed to marry Octavian’s sister, who is named Octavia. So, he married someone else, even though Cleopatra had just had his children. So, Cleopatra was just, like, raising three small children, and suddenly her time was being taken up by King Herod of Judea, who is from the Bible, the one who you might know from his greatest hits, including demanding that all babies be killed in case one of them was Jesus and, sort of, inventing Christmas. So, the thing is that Egypt and Judea were both kingdoms allied with Rome, they were geographically close to each other. And Cleopatra was friends with Herod’s mother-in-law against Herod so Herod was distracting her. He’s an asshole, whatever.
Cleopatra goes to visit Antony in the year 37. The twins were at this point three years old. It was the first time he met them, and he enjoyed meeting them. And then later on, Cleopatra gave birth to another child with Mark Antony as the father and this was his son named Ptolemy, because this story needs a Ptolemy again. But this one’s called Ptolemy Philadelphus. So, Cleopatra is just, like, having these children. She put all of her eggs in the basket of supporting Mark Antony as the next Emperor of Rome. And the reason she’s doing this is because she thought he was going to win and if her lover/ baby daddy was the leader of Rome, then that’s great for her. So, everything depended on Octavian not winning.
But tragically, Mark Antony had started to do less well in his military stuff and his psychological state was becoming sort of undone. It all sort of came to a head when Cleopatra and Antony staged a huge festival slash party called the Donations of Alexandria. So, this was sort of a big party where, like, Antony was not doing amazing vis à vis military victories, but he had just had one military victory, so they threw this party to try and… Like, for PR to make everybody think Antony was doing great so they would all keep supporting him.
So, his campaigns in Parthia and Armenia. So, his campaign in Parthia had not gone well, but the one in Armenia had gone well and so they just wanted to sort of focus on that. So, this is similar to… Do you remember when Arsinoe was marched through the streets of Rome as a prisoner of war? This was sort of a similar thing, except they were marching the Armenian royal family in front of everybody as prisoners of war. They were told to kneel before Cleopatra, the Armenian royal family, and they did not, which made her freak out. And that just kind of made the whole thing not look as good for them as they were pretending like things were… Anyway, for the grand finale, Mark Antony dressed up in a costume, dressed up like Dionysus, the Roman god of wine. And Cleopatra dressed up as the Roman goddess of love Aphrodite/also sort of as the Egyptian goddess of life and magic, Isis. Her son Caesarean was dressed up as the god Horus, who is the son of Isis. And then everyone in Cleopatra’s family got a new name and/or title.
So, she herself, Cleopatra, was proclaimed Queen of Kings, Queen of Egypt, as well as Queen of Cyprus, Libya, and central Syria. Alexander, the boy twin was given the middle name Helios, which means ‘the Sun,’ and was named King of Armenia, Midea, and Parthia. So, now he’s Alexander Helios. Her daughter, Cleopatra, was given the middle name Selene, which means ‘the Moon’ so Cleopatra Selene, and she became Queen of Cyrenaica, and Libya. Ptolemy Philadelphus was named King of Syria and Cicilia. And Caesarean was proclaimed King of Kings, as well as the legitimate heir of Julius Caesar. So, this is just like a full mic drop. Just like, “Our family is the royal family. We’re in charge of everything. Here we go.” There’s some speculation that potentially Cleopatra and Antony were officially married during this event. And certainly, they were acting like he wasn’t married to anyone else, even though he was still married to Octavian’s sister, which just kind of made even more bad feelings for everybody.
Ultimately, this whole event, the Donations of Alexandria, seemed to the people of Rome who were like… They were never into sort of luxury and glamour in the way that Egyptian culture had sort of had these beautiful gold… Like, they just thought it was tacky; Egyptian culture to them was tacky. Roman culture was all sort of like stated; oi was like white columns, it was just like plain togas. They were also all killing each other and all having sex with each other, but they were pretending like they were actually very morally upright. So, Octavian sort of latched on to this being like, “I’m Octavian. I’m like you, Rome. I’m like really serious and monastic and Mark Antony is decadent.” It didn’t help that he dressed up like the god of wine for this party.
Anyway, so if you’re wondering how a PR campaign is run in Ancient Rome in a time before the invention of the printing press, the answer is hand calligraphy flyers. So, Octavian just started having a bunch of flyers printed up or calligraphied for everybody to read that basically just said like “Mark Antony is decadent. He’s terrible. He likes luxury. Unlike I Octavian, I’m just super straightforward.” Mark Antony wrote a letter back that also got printed on a flyer for everybody to read that was like, “Dear Octavian. Yeah, I’m fucking Cleopatra. Who cares? I know that you’re fucking lots of sex workers, et cetera. Like, what are we even doing? You suck. Love, Mark Antony.” It gives a pretty baller move. It was pretty excellent. Like, he literally said something in the letter, I don’t have it in front of me, but it’s something like… This is the thing people have found. It’s a letter that says like “Dear Octavian. Yeah. So what if I’m fucking Cleopatra? You wish.” Anyway, so just a lot of flyers.
This is where a lot of the big rumours we still know about Cleopatra came into existence like that she’s sexy and manipulating men with her beauty, or she’s using witchcraft, or she is just using seduction to destroy Caesar and Antony because she wants to destroy Rome. Also, she’s too powerful and smart. It’s unnatural for a woman. Mark Antony does whatever she says, which is gross because women aren’t people and men should be in charge, et cetera. Just the whole idea that she was, like, either beautiful and blinded them with sex, or if she wasn’t beautiful and she blinded them with witchcraft and basically just… Misogyny, basically. But it was a way to bring down Mark Antony by bringing down her as well.
And honestly, the whole thing about like, “Did she ruin his life?” is totally backwards because really, he was kind of ruining her life, really. Like when they started hooking up, he was this Roman hero who seemed destined to become the next emperor. But then his hard drinking and partying lifestyle caught up with him as did… Maybe, you know, is it CTE? That, like, brain injury that happens with football players/PTSD from being in war constantly his whole life. He was just having some psychological issues and he was sort of falling apart, basically. The whole deal of the relationship was based on him being this amazing military leader and her financing him. But he was losing battles so it was starting to look like a poor investment on Cleopatra’s part, but she couldn’t really extricate herself from this.
Meanwhile, her whole life wasn’t about Rome. Like, during this whole time, she’d been running Egypt, literally like a boss. Her history there… She had forward-thinking decisions about taxes and budgeting, she was doing her best to lead a country that was entirely dependent on whether the now flooded or not every year. Like, she was governing Egypt as well as dealing with this whole Roman situation. Anyway, so what happened is that the whole thing with the whole five-year job expiry thing is that Mark Antony’s time as a consul expired, but Octavian got re-elected. So, now Mark Antony was no longer a consul from the Roman triumvirate, he’s now just, like, a regular Roman guy. So, the fact that he continued to battle against Octavian with Cleopatra’s funding became sort of illegal, just like a private citizen waging war against a country. So, Octavian used sort of a legal loophole; he had Rome declare war on Cleopatra for providing military support to a Roman citizen who was not a consul. So, now the war wasn’t just Octavian versus Antony; it was all of Rome versus Antony and Cleopatra was in this kind of, like, awkward situation.
So, this war was mostly waged at sea and Cleopatra and Antony initially were doing well there because they had more ships than Octavian did. But the thing is that their ships are kind of like a combination of mercenary ships and, like, allies from various places, whereas Octavian’s ships were full of, like, very well-trained Roman troops and soldiers. It all came down to the Battle of Actium, which began on September 2nd in the year 31 BCE. Basically, the battle ended when a bunch of people from Cleopatra and Antony’s troops defected from their team to Octavian’s team, and then Cleopatra and Antony fled the scene. Cleopatra headed back to Egypt where, again, the people of Egypt weren’t there like “Oh my god, our queen, we’re here and we’ll support you,” et cetera. This is where the whole, like, 300 years of oppression meant that the people of Egypt weren’t super interested in standing up to her to fight Octavian. They would do their job and be royal guards, but they weren’t prepared to lay down their lives and fight for her as they might have done for someone from a different dynasty. So, Cleopatra was now trapped in Egypt. It seemed inevitable that Octavian was going to capture her, but you know never count her out, she started figuring out a new scheme.
So, she knew that Octavian wanted to keep her alive so he could march her through in one of these, like, humiliation parades and she was determined that she would not let that happen. She also knew that he was intent on looting her treasure, all the gold and things that she had in her, you know, little secret caves and whatever. So, she sent him a message saying that she was prepared to light herself and offer treasure on fire. This got his attention and so he sent a representative to negotiate with her. The negotiations obviously didn’t go well, and it ended with Octavian deciding to invade Egypt. Mark Antony was taken prisoner in his attempt to protect Cleopatra, and he died by suicide while in captivity. He was 53 years old at this point.
Octavian permitted Cleopatra to attend Antony’s funeral, so she participated in the mourning rituals of the time which basically meant screaming for hours and beating and clawing at your own skin. As a result of this, she wound up with a bunch of infected septic wounds. She stopped eating, possibly in sort of like a slow suicide attempt, trying to die on her own terms rather than by execution or after having to be in the humiliation parade. Octavian was not into that and eventually, she healed up but during this time, pre-humiliation parade, Cleopatra ended up dying, aged 39, sometime that same month. Two of her loyal maid servants Iris and Charmian died with her.
This is where there’s the rumour of the whole asp to the breast thing and she did probably die of poison although the rumours of a snake bite are probably false. Cleopatra had always been really organized, really decisive. If she’s going to kill herself, she wouldn’t leave it to chance, like, what if the snake didn’t bite her in the right place? What if she didn’t die of the venom? Like, there’s too many chances. So, allegedly poison was smuggled to her in a basket of figs, which would be a terrible way to sneak a venomous snake in to see someone, so it’s probably more likely the figs themselves are poisoned or there’s a vial of something in there. Anyway, RIP, basically.
And just of interest if you look at Ancient Roman history and mythology women dying by suicide is a weirdly common theme of women sort of wanting to not be a bother and just sort of, like, delicately and politely removing themselves from narratives, and this is kind of how Romans wanted women to behave, in this kind of quiet way. It seems kind of antithetical to how Cleopatra behaved. So, the news of her suicide came from Octavian and was written about by these other same Roman men who hated her, and they wanted to please Octavian. So, it’s possible that the whole suicide thing is a cover-up story concocted by Octavian and his men to try and hide something else that happened. Like, maybe Octavian did kill her, maybe she was able to rally up supporters, staged a big coup and tried to escape and was killed in the battle. Basically, we know she died age 39. We know it is said it was suicide but whatever the manner of her death, she almost certainly died on her own terms, and it really pissed off Octavian and so at least her death was the final “Fuck you” to this guy who, spoiler, for later episodes, really sucked.
Her legacy is sort of bittersweet. So, her son Caesarean was renamed Ptolemy XV, and he reigned for only 18 days as the new pharaoh of Egypt. So, Octavian tricked him to come and visit. Octavian was like “Hey Ptolemy, why don’t you come and visit me? I’m totally not going to murder you.” And then he in fact murdered him. “Upon the death of Caesarean, the Ptolemaic dynasty came to an end and Egypt was absorbed as a province of the Roman Empire.” Cleopatra Selene, her daughter, married King Juba II of Numidia and Mauretania with whom she had one daughter and one son. She had a son whose name was Ptolemy because that is just, like, the name of every little boy in the story. Anyway, this son Ptolemy grandson of Cleopatra was later murdered by his cousin, his cousin who was Caligula the emperor who, spoiler, we’re going to be talking about also in a later podcast.
300 years later Syria’s Queen Zenobia who faced off against the Roman Empire in her own badass story that maybe we’ll look at another time claimed to be a descendant of Cleopatra Selene. “The fates of Alexander Helios and Ptolemy Philadelphus, Cleopatra’s other two sons, are unknown although they seem to have been sent to Rome to be raised by Antony’s widow/Octavian’s sister Octavia following the death of their parents.” I mean, I would not be surprised if they were murdered but who knows? Octavian renamed himself Augustus and became the first official non-emergency Roman emperor. He renamed the month of August after himself, Augustus because that was the month in which he had defeated Cleopatra. It’s still called August and that makes me hate August because I hate Augustus and what a dick thing to celebrate.
Anyway, much of the legend of Cleopatra developed based on the Roman writings around the time of her downfall and they describe her as this witch/slut/seductress/femme fatale who singlehandedly destroyed Mark Antony’s life in this, like, sexy way. Although these are the most widely known sources of information about her life a few other things have been found that explore a bit more about not just her love life but her political career and persona. Some medieval Arabic writings seem to have been drawn from Greek sources that may present Cleopatra similarly to how she wanted herself to be portrayed. So, these sources don’t refer at all to her beauty or lack of beauty or even to her love affairs. The focus instead is on her as a scholar. She’s depicted as a scholar known as “Cleopatra the Wise” or “the virtuous scholar,” a woman revered for her intelligence and inventiveness with keen interests in philosophy, alchemy, mathematics, and medicine. So, that is the saga of Cleopatra. It’s such a story and I can’t even…
So, time to score her on our various scales. So, the Scandalicious Scale has got four categories. The first category is Scandaliciousness, so this is sort of the quality of the scandal surrounding them. I feel like in this instance, scandaliciousness would be things like her brother has been coincidentally dying just at the convenient time for her to want him to be gone. Scandaliciousness is like her having a child with a Roman emperor and then he supported her or, like, her having these children with Mark Antony. But it’s tricky because okay scandaliciousness killing her brother, mega scandaliciousness. She was surrounded by scandaliciousness; lots of other people killing other people but she had children with two different men, both of whom she was seemingly, like, committed to. And yes, she was married to her brother at the same time which is medium scandaliciousness but it’s not like… They were little boys at the time and it was sort of had to be that way for various reasons. Honestly, when you actually look at the facts of this whole story, I think the Scandaliciousness score is, like, not super high. I’m going to give her a 5 for Scandaliciousness I think.
The next category is Scheminess and this is where, like, I think it has to be a 10. I mean, she took over Egypt, she convinced Julius Caesar to side with her, she then got Mark Antony to decide with her, she seemingly killed her brother, she had Arsinoe killed. Her plans, she had plans, they were good plans, she had backup plans, she executed those plans. 10 for Scheminess for sure.
Significance is an interesting one because she is certainly a famous name. People know about her and her involvement with Julius Caesar. Her story is certainly captivating. At the same time, she did more than I think anyone else could have in this era being the pharaoh of Egypt. But it was it seemed sort of inevitable that Egypt would eventually be subsumed into the Roman Empire. It was also sort of obvious, not obvious, but like, that Octavian was probably going to end up winning against Mark Antony. Her significance, like, she backed Mark Antony who didn’t win. Cultural significance, she had children. Her daughter went on to marry the king of another place but, like, in terms of like did she change the world? It’s tricky I don’t want to give her too little credit but at the same time, like, she did amazing stuff she’s significant to me, I think a lot of people see her as an inspiration. But in terms of, like, success in the various cool things she was doing, I don’t know. I’m going to give her a 6 for Significance.
The final category is the Sexism Bonus which is giving bonus points based on how much sexism held people back, how much did that play a role in what they were or were not able to do? I mean, she faced, come on. I mean, like, the Roman Empire is, like, famously misogynistic. Even in Egypt where she was allowed to be educated and to be co-ruler she still couldn’t be the queen on her own. The way that Octavian used, sort of, slut-shaming against her/against Mark Antony… It’s pretty high. I’m going to give her a 7 for that.
So, the total here is 28. So, in terms of where that fits her… and this is all just, like, subjective scale it’s the same score as Lucy Hay and one below Elizabeth Báthory. So, I think she’s up there, she’s up there at the top. I don’t know, I feel like we’re not saying, “Who is the coolest woman?” We’re not saying like, “Who’s better than another one?” We’re just saying, like, in terms of this scale, where do people rank? And she ranks pretty high. I don’t know how many people are going to get any higher than that.
And now, it’s time for some facts and information. So, I have my first little sponsor which is exciting, which is Audible, where you can listen to audiobooks and I do a lot of my research through audiobooks because that way you can just be, like, learning facts while you’re doing the dishes, while you’re out walking, while you’re doing your laundry, et cetera. One of the sources I use for this is a book called When Women Ruled the World by Kara Cooney, which is a book all about Cleopatra and some other Egyptian queens and you can get that on Audible.com. So, the thing is if you go to AudibleTrial.com/VulgarHistory, then you get your 30-day free trial, and a couple little dollars go to me to support this podcast which is very appreciated, and I’m really excited about this season!
Vulgar History is hosted, written, and researched by Ann Foster, that’s me! The editor is Cristina Lumague. Theme music is by the Severn Duo. The Vulgar History show image is by Deborah Wong. Transcripts are written by Aveline Malek. Find transcripts of recent episodes at VulgarHistory.com.
References:
Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff
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