Cleopatra VII: The Last Pharaoh of Egypt

Almost everything you think you know about Cleopatra was written by men who hated her, in a language she didn't speak, after she was already dead. Strip the Roman polemic and the Hollywood seductress story away and you find someone much more impressive: a Greek queen who held a 300-year-old kingdom together by being smarter than the room.

Cleopatra VII Philopator was born in 69 BCE in Alexandria. She was Macedonian Greek, not Egyptian — descended from Ptolemy, one of Alexander the Great's generals, who had grabbed Egypt when Alexander died and started a dynasty that would last almost three centuries. By the time Cleopatra was born, the Ptolemies had been ruling Egypt for 250 years and had famously never bothered to learn the local language.

Cleopatra learned it. According to Plutarch she also picked up Ethiopian, Trogodyte, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Median, Parthian, "and many others." She was the first Ptolemy in nine generations to address her subjects without an interpreter. People noticed.

The most dysfunctional royal family in history

Ptolemaic family life is hard to overstate. By Cleopatra's generation, brothers married sisters by tradition. Murder was a normal succession tool. Her father, Ptolemy XII, was nicknamed "the Flute Player" because he was a worse king than musician. He fled the country at one point and had to bribe Roman senators (with money he didn't have) to put him back on the throne.

When he died in 51 BCE, Cleopatra was 18. Per the will, she co-ruled with her ten-year-old brother Ptolemy XIII, whom she was also expected to marry. Within three years she'd been driven out of Alexandria by his advisors and was raising an army in Syria to invade her own country.

Smuggled in a carpet — actually a sack

In 48 BCE Julius Caesar arrived in Alexandria chasing his dead rival Pompey. He decided to mediate the Ptolemaic civil war from the palace. Cleopatra needed to get to him before her brother did, but the city was held by her brother's troops and she'd be killed at the gate.

She had a loyal Sicilian named Apollodorus row her into the harbour at night, roll her up in a sack of bedlinen, and carry her past the guards on his shoulder. (The "carpet" version is from a Victorian translation; the original word means a bed-sack.) He dumped the sack at Caesar's feet and untied it. Cleopatra was 21. Caesar was 52. She was on the throne the next morning.

They stayed together for two years. He won the Alexandrian War for her — her brother drowned in the Nile fleeing the battle. She bore his only acknowledged son, Caesarion, and followed Caesar to Rome where she lived openly as his mistress. The Romans hated her. She was foreign, female, royal, and too clever; the trifecta.

Antony, the second bet

Caesar was assassinated in 44 BCE. Cleopatra grabbed Caesarion and went home to Egypt to wait out the inevitable Roman civil war. The winner of round one was Mark Antony, who got the eastern half of the empire and summoned her to Tarsus in 41 BCE to explain why she hadn't backed his side hard enough.

She arrived on a gold-prowed ship with purple sails and silver oars, dressed as Aphrodite, with attendants dressed as nymphs and cupids. The whole city went down to the river to look at her. Antony cancelled his afternoon and went to dinner on her ship. They were lovers within the week.

For ten years they were the most powerful couple in the eastern Mediterranean. They had three children, including twins. He effectively gave her a chunk of Roman territory. They lived between Alexandria and Antioch. Antony's wife back in Italy was the sister of Octavian, Caesar's adopted heir, which made the personal political and the political a slow-motion catastrophe.

"Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety." — Shakespeare, putting words in a Roman general's mouth

The propaganda war that ended everything

Octavian was the better politician of the two Caesarian heirs. While Antony was in Alexandria with Cleopatra, Octavian read Antony's will out loud in the Roman Senate (probably forged, possibly real) — the bit where Antony asked to be buried in Egypt next to her instead of in Rome. The reaction in Italy was nuclear. Octavian declared war on Cleopatra (not on Antony, technically, since civil war between Romans was politically toxic) in 32 BCE.

The combined fleets met at Actium off the western Greek coast in September 31 BCE. Cleopatra had brought sixty Egyptian ships and a chest of treasury. Mid-battle she ran for it — possibly because she could see the line breaking, possibly because the wind shifted and the chance was lost. Antony abandoned his fleet and chased her. The remaining ships surrendered. The army defected to Octavian over the next ten months.

Two suicides, one snake, lots of stories

By August 30 BCE Octavian was outside Alexandria. Antony, hearing a (false) rumour Cleopatra was dead, fell on his sword. He was carried to her, dying, and reportedly died in her arms. She locked herself in her mausoleum with two attendants. Octavian, who had no use for a dead Cleopatra (he wanted to parade her through Rome in chains for his triumph), tried to negotiate. She bought time.

Then she dressed in royal robes, lay on a golden couch, and either took poison or — per the more famous story — was bitten by an asp smuggled in with a basket of figs. Her two attendants died with her. She was 39. The asp story is probably wrong; ancient cobras don't kill that quickly or that cleanly. But it's the version that stuck.

Caesarion was strangled on Octavian's orders a few weeks later. The Ptolemaic dynasty, after 275 years, was over. Egypt became a Roman province. Octavian — soon to be Augustus — was now master of the entire Mediterranean.

What she actually was

The femme fatale story makes for great theatre but it's lazy history. Cleopatra inherited a bankrupt kingdom in the worst geopolitical position in the Mediterranean — a small, ancient state surrounded by an aggressive superpower. She kept it independent for twenty-one years using the only tools she had: alliances, languages, and an absolutely cold-blooded read of Roman politics.

She backed two horses in the Roman civil wars and lost the second one. By the time she lost, she was almost forty, had been queen for half her life, and had outlasted every other Hellenistic monarch. The Roman Empire as we know it begins, in many ways, the morning after her death.

She was the last pharaoh of Egypt. Then there were no more pharaohs.

Recommended reading: Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life; Mary Beard, SPQR.