More important for many ancient writers than her physical appearance was her intellectual ability. She was clever and knew how to seduce men; she could speak many languages and understood people. Plutarch, a Greek writer from the first to second century A.D., who in his Life of Antony gives us the most extensive narrative about Cleopatra, remarked that Plato talked of four kinds of flattery, but Cleopatra knew a thousand. And, he says, she used them on Antony.

As a celebrity, Cleopatra has everything going for her: brains, beauty, birth, wealth and famous lovers. For men throughout the ages she has proved endlessly fascinating and terrifying.

Despite the different angle of the Arabic writers, there are common elements in their descriptions with the Roman writers, although they never mention her appearance, nor her preoccupation with seduction. For them, she is a virtuous scholar. Al-Mas’udi, a 10th century A.D. Arabic writer, “She was wise, tried her hand at philosophy and was a close companion to wise men. She has works, both bearing her name and ascribed to her, of medicine, magic, and science, known to those versed in medicine.”

As a celebrity, Cleopatra has everything going for her: brains, beauty, birth, wealth and famous lovers. For men throughout the ages she has proved endlessly fascinating and terrifying. One story which is revived every now and then, the first instance of it being in the work of a 4th century A.D. historian, is that she had sex with men, and then killed them the next morning. They were prepared to pay such a price for the privilege of sleeping with her.

Cleopatra Testing Poison on Condemned Prisoners, 1887
(165 x 290 cm)
BY Alexandre Cabanel
Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp, Belgium

For women who are tempted to idolise her for her power, it is perhaps salutary to remember that she died young. This is in fact why we are able to build a relatively sympathetic portrait of her from our existing Roman sources. They liked her for doing the right thing, and killing herself. Suicide was an honourable way out for losers in the Roman world. Caesar’s assassins all killed themselves when they realised their defeat. Cleopatra’s death saved Octavian from having to decide what to do with her. In one of the first Latin plays we have, by Plautus, a character comments about a dead woman that she had “obliged her husband for the first time.” In her death, Cleopatra was obliging to the Roman establishment.

Plutarch, in depicting Antony as a typical Roman soldier, brave and generous but basically stupid, drew a foil for him in the wily, seductive and attractive Cleopatra, who was more than a match for him in every sense. In doing so, he let the reader glimpse at the life of a woman from that time. Not a typical woman by any means, but a woman nevertheless. Similarly in his Life of Crassus, he had described a slave at greater length than we normally find in ancient sources. That slave was Spartacus, who is more famous today than the general who eventually defeated him, Marcus Licinius Crassus. A slave and a woman, both enemies of Rome, have captured the popular imagination thanks to Plutarch’s skill, and, I would add, his antipathy to some Romans.

And so was Cleopatra black?

This is the question most usually asked about her identity these days, and it provokes much passion. There is a tradition that she was black. Given that her family had been in Egypt for more than two and a half centuries by the time she came to the throne, and that we do not know the identity of one grandmother, some would say, even of her mother, there is at least a possibility that she had some African blood in her. Perhaps most disturbing in this debate is the vehemence with which this is sometimes denied. As Mary Hamer says in her Signs of Cleopatra,^[2] “It makes no difference, as far as I can see, whether Cleopatra was black or not. But it does matter if Cleopatra may indeed have been of mixed race and people insist that she was white.”

I read somewhere that the poems of Sappho had been written by a man, and I presumed that the person putting forward this theory could not believe that a woman from antiquity could have written poetry. Fortunately no one has ever suggested Cleopatra was a man. But then in antiquity, when a woman was described as more like a man, this was the highest praise men could bestow.

Cleopatra, 1917 BY Fox Film Corporation

LINKS BBC History: Cleopatra Cleopatra, 1917 DIRECTED BY J. Gordon Edwards Cleopatra, 1934 DIRECTED BY Cecil B. DeMille Cleopatra, 1963 DIRECTED BY Joseph L. Mankiewicz