Cleopatra

• 1. Introduction

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  Cleopatra VII Thea Philopator was the last active Hellenistic pharaoh, and she could speak the Egyptian language when no Ptolemaic ruler before her had bothered to learn it. Her family had governed Egypt for nearly three centuries as Greek-speaking monarchs, descendants of a Macedonian general who served Alexander the Great. Yet her name, drawn from the Greek for glory and father, means glory of her father. She ruled from 51 to 30 BC. When she died, Egypt became a province of Rome, and the Hellenistic period that Alexander had begun came to an end. How did a queen who owed Rome 17.5 million drachmas end up sharing a bed with two of its most powerful men? Why did a woman who had only two known sexual partners become history's byword for seduction? And how much of what survives about her was written by the man who wanted her dead?

• 2. A Kingdom Mortgaged To Rome

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  Marcus Licinius Crassus stood before the Roman Senate in 65 BC and argued that Rome should simply annex Egypt. The bill failed, as did a similar one two years later, but the threat never left. Cleopatra's father, Ptolemy XII, met that danger with bribery, lavishing gifts on Pompey and on Julius Caesar after Caesar became consul in 59 BC. This profligacy bankrupted him, and he turned to a Roman banker named Gaius Rabirius Postumus for loans. Ptolemy XI, and perhaps earlier kings, had willed the Ptolemaic Kingdom to Rome as collateral, handing the Romans legal grounds to seize Egypt whenever they chose. In 58 BC Rome annexed Cyprus and drove Ptolemy XII's own brother to suicide. The king stayed publicly silent on his brother's death, and his subjects, already enraged by his economics, turned against him. He was exiled by force, traveling to Rhodes, then Athens, then the villa of Pompey near Rome, his young daughter Cleopatra reportedly at his side. To get home, Ptolemy XII offered the Roman governor of Syria 10,000 talents to invade Egypt and restore him by force. When he died, that mountain of debt passed to Cleopatra and her brother Ptolemy XIII as their unwanted inheritance.

• 3. The Brother Wars

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  By the 29th of August 51 BC, official documents named Cleopatra as Egypt's sole ruler, evidence that she had pushed her brother Ptolemy XIII aside. She had probably married him, following a Ptolemaic practice of sibling marriage that Greeks loathed but that her dynasty had long normalized. Ptolemy XIII was not powerless. He kept formidable allies, chief among them the eunuch Potheinos, his childhood tutor and regent, along with the commander Achillas and the tutor Theodotus of Chios. By the autumn of 50 BC the boy king had the upper hand, signing documents with his name placed before his sister's. Losing the fight, Cleopatra fled Alexandria and withdrew toward Thebes. She did not stay beaten. By the spring of 48 BC she had traveled to Roman Syria with her younger sister Arsinoe IV to raise an invasion force, then camped outside Pelousion in the eastern Nile Delta, blocked from Alexandria by her brother's troops. Into this stalemate sailed the wreckage of Rome's own civil war. Pompey, fresh from his defeat at the Battle of Pharsalus, chose Egypt as his refuge, trusting his old ties to the Ptolemies. Ptolemy XIII's advisers feared he would turn their kingdom into a battlefield. In a scheme devised by Theodotus, Pompey was lured ashore near Pelousion and stabbed to death on the 28th of September 48 BC. His severed, embalmed head was sent to Caesar as a grim gift.

• 4. Smuggled To Caesar

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  Caesar arrived in Alexandria by early October and, far from being pleased by Pompey's murder, expressed grief and outrage. He took up residence in the royal palace and demanded that both siblings disband their armies and reconcile. Cleopatra first sent emissaries, then came in person. Cassius Dio records that she slipped in to charm Caesar with her wit; Plutarch tells an entirely different story, that she was bound inside a bed sack and smuggled past her brother's guards into the palace. When Ptolemy XIII grasped that his sister was consorting directly with Caesar, he tried to incite a riot, only to be arrested. Caesar then read aloud the will of Ptolemy XII, which named Cleopatra and Ptolemy XIII as joint heirs. Potheinos judged the arrangement favored Cleopatra and reckoned the king's army of 20,000 could crush Caesar's 4,000 unsupported troops. He ordered Achillas to attack. The siege trapped Caesar and Cleopatra together in the palace into 47 BC. Arsinoe IV had herself declared queen and took command, then had her tutor murder Achillas to seize his place. When reinforcements led by Mithridates of Pergamon and Antipater the Idumaean broke through, Ptolemy XIII fled to the Nile by boat. The boat capsized and he drowned. Caesar later paraded Arsinoe through Rome in his triumph before exiling her to the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, a humiliation Cleopatra would not forget.

• 5. The Client Queen In Rome

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  Caesar installed the 12-year-old Ptolemy XIV as joint ruler with the 22-year-old Cleopatra in a nominal sibling marriage, wary of repeating Berenice IV's fate as a lone female monarch. He left three legions in Egypt, later four, under the freedman Rufio, partly to secure her throne and partly to keep watch on her. A son, Caesarion, was born sometime in 47 BC, and Cleopatra made repeated official declarations naming Caesar as the father, even as Caesar himself stayed publicly silent. In late 46 BC the queen visited Rome with Ptolemy XIV, lodging in Caesar's villa across the Tiber. Caesar awarded both the status of friend and ally of the Roman people. The senator Cicero, who knew her personally, came to visit and found her arrogant. Sosigenes of Alexandria, a member of her court, helped Caesar calculate the new Julian calendar that took effect on the 1st of January 45 BC. The most striking honor stood in the Temple of Venus Genetrix, where Caesar erected a golden statue of Cleopatra beside the goddess herself, the first time a living person had been placed next to a deity in a Roman temple. Her presence likely colored the Lupercalia, when Antony tried to set a royal diadem on Caesar's head and Cicero mockingly asked where the crown had come from, a jab at the queen he abhorred. Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March in 44 BC. Cleopatra lingered in Rome until mid-April, hoping in vain to have Caesarion recognized as his heir, but Caesar's will named his grandnephew Octavian instead. A few months later Ptolemy XIV died, allegedly poisoned on her order, and she raised Caesarion to co-ruler as Ptolemy XV.

• 6. Antony And The Eastern Gambit

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  In the summer of 41 BC, Mark Antony established his headquarters at Tarsos in Anatolia and summoned Cleopatra in a series of letters she rebuffed until his envoy Quintus Dellius persuaded her. She sailed up the Kydnos River in her pleasure barge, hosting Antony and his officers for two nights of lavish banquets aboard. There she cleared her name of supporting Caesar's assassins and arranged the execution of her exiled sister Arsinoe at Ephesus. The affair that followed produced three children. By the end of 40 BC she bore twins, Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene II, the Sun and the Moon, names hinting that she hoped Antony would conquer the Parthians as Alexander once had. A third child, Ptolemy Philadelphus, arrived by the summer of 36 BC. Antony's power let him restore former Ptolemaic lands to Cleopatra, and at Antioch he handed her nearly all of Phoenicia, the region of Coele-Syria, territory around Jericho that she leased back to Herod, a slice of the Nabataean Kingdom near the Gulf of Aqaba, and Cyrene along the Libyan coast. Octavian seized on this. He cast Antony as a man neglecting his virtuous Roman wife Octavia, and granted both Octavia and his own wife Livia rare privileges of sacrosanctity, their statues likely raised in the Forum of Caesar to rival the one Caesar had built for the foreign queen.

• 7. Donations And Propaganda War

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  Antony marched into Armenia in 34 BC, defeated its forces, and captured the king and royal family. He then staged a military parade through Alexandria dressed as Dionysus, riding a chariot to present his prisoners to Cleopatra, who sat on a golden throne above a silver dais. Rome heard of it as a perversion of time-honored rites enjoyed by an Egyptian queen. Soon after, at the gymnasium, Cleopatra dressed as Isis and declared herself Queen of Kings, with Caesarion as King of Kings. Alexander Helios was named king of Armenia, Media, and Parthia, the two-year-old Ptolemy Philadelphus king of Syria and Cilicia, and Cleopatra Selene II given Crete and Cyrene. These grants became known as the Donations of Alexandria. The accusations that followed have shaped popular views of Cleopatra ever since. She was said to have bewitched Antony with sorcery, as dangerous as Homer's Helen of Troy. Pliny the Elder claimed she once dissolved a pearl worth tens of millions of sesterces in vinegar to win a dinner-party bet. A charge that Antony stole books from the Library of Pergamum to restock Alexandria was later admitted to be an outright fabrication. One papyrus document received on the 23rd of February 33 BC, later reused to wrap a mummy, grants tax exemptions in Egypt and carries a subscription reading make it happen, possibly Cleopatra's own autograph.

• 8. Actium And The Asp

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  On the 2nd of September 31 BC, Octavian's fleet under Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa met Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium. Cleopatra commanded 60 ships aboard her flagship the Antonias, positioned at the rear of the fleet in what was likely an attempt by Antony's officers to sideline her. When the moment came, she used the sails kept on board to drive through the combat in a strategic withdrawal toward the Peloponnese. Antony followed, boarding her ship with its distinctive purple sails, and the two fled toward Tainaron while the battle raged on without them. Defeat unraveled everything. Cleopatra's plan to take her fleet from the Mediterranean into the Red Sea and sail perhaps to India collapsed when the Nabataean king Malichus I burned her ships. Octavian invaded Egypt in the spring of 30 BC, and on the 1st of August 30 BC Antony's fleet surrendered. Believing a false message that Cleopatra had died, Antony stabbed himself in the stomach. He was carried still dying to her tomb. When Cleopatra finally met Octavian, she told him bluntly, I will not be led in a triumph, a rare record of her exact words preserved by Livy. Warned that he meant to parade her in Rome, she chose death on the 12th of August 30 BC, at age 39, attended by her servants Eiras and Charmion. Her physician Olympos never explained the cause. Popular belief holds that an asp or Egyptian cobra bit her, though no snake was found with her body. Plutarch suggests a toxin scratched in with an implement, Dio a needle, Strabo an ointment. Tiny puncture wounds marked her arm. Octavian had Caesarion executed around the 29th of August 30 BC, persuaded by the philosopher Arius Didymus that there was room for only one Caesar in the world.

  Almost 50 ancient works of Roman historiography mention Cleopatra, yet most offer only terse accounts of Actium, her suicide, and Augustan propaganda about her flaws. The fullest surviving portrait comes from Plutarch's Life of Antonius, written a century after her death but drawing on primary sources, including her physician Olympos and Quintus Dellius, the confidant of both Antony and Cleopatra. Plutarch described her as having a stronger personality and more charming wit than physical beauty. Her own surviving coinage, struck for every regnal year from 51 to 30 BC, tells a different story than the Roman authors. Cleopatra was the only Ptolemaic queen to issue coins in her own name, and the first foreign queen to appear on Roman currency. On coins minted with Antony she gave herself a strong, almost masculine face, a deliberate echo of her father Ptolemy XII and her Macedonian ancestors, presenting herself as a legitimate successor rather than a soft, idealized beauty. Her children carried the line onward. Cleopatra Selene II married Juba II and ruled Mauretania, naming her own son Ptolemy in honor of their dynasty. That Ptolemy of Mauretania was the last known monarch of the Ptolemaic line, executed by the emperor Caligula in 40 AD. Long after, in 373 AD, an Egyptian scribe named Petesenufe recorded that he had overlaid the figure of Cleopatra with gold, proof that a cult in her honor still burned three and a half centuries after her death.