Cleopatra could be called one of the first celebrities. Since the first century B.C., people have been fascinated by her, and still are. For example, on Monday 16th March 2009, over the BBC World news, a headline read: “Cleopatra’s mother ‘was African’.” ^[1] (The issue of the colour of Cleopatra’s skin arises because we cannot identify one of her grandmothers, and it is possible she was black.)

Probably the most famous woman from classical antiquity, Cleopatra was not, strictly speaking, Greek or Roman, nor what we would call Egyptian — even though she was the Queen of Egypt. She was a descendant of Ptolemy, one of Alexander the Great’s generals, and therefore Macedonian. And the Greeks, such as the Athenians, viewed them as virtually barbarians.

Anthony and Cleopatra, 1883
(Oil on Panel, 25.75″ X 36.25″)
BY Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema
Private Collection

The way Cleopatra stands out more than any other woman from Greece or Rome is, however, not so surprising when we consider that one of the most striking features of women in classical antiquity for us today is their silence. Not only are our ancient texts silent about them, but silence in a woman was one of her most attractive attributes for male contemporaries.

For instance, Sophocles the Athenian tragedian wrote in his play, Ajax, “Silence is a woman’s glory.” The historian, Thucydides, in his monumental History of the Peloponnesian War, had almost nothing to say about women, although he did record that his great hero, the Athenian general Pericles, addressed them briefly in his speech at the burial of those killed during the first year of the war: “The greatest glory of a woman is to be least talked about by men, whether they are praising you or criticizing you.” Women were there to mourn their fathers, brothers and sons, and they were reminded to keep quiet.

A law in Athens about wills from this era equated listening to women with insanity: “Anyone shall have the right to dispose of his own property by will as he wishes, if he has no legitimate, male children, unless his mind is impaired by lunacy or old age or drugs or disease, or unless he is under the influence of a woman or under constraint or has been deprived of his liberty.”

On similar disparaging lines, we can read in Herodotus’ The Histories that a king of Sparta, Cleomenes “died childless, leaving only a daughter.” (The most recent translation from the Penguin Classics renders this less offensively as he “died without a son to succeed him, leaving only a daughter,” but in fact the Greek word itself means “childless.”)

It is often stated that women were freer during the Roman times, and to some extent this is undeniable, for Roman men themselves commented on how constrained the lives of Greek women were. It is perhaps worth noting, though, that Roman men had three names, two of which placed him in his immediate and wider family, the other being his individual name, corresponding to our “Christian” name.

Gaius Julius Caesar, for instance, was the full name of the famous general. “Gaius” was his personal name. He came from the Julian family, the gens Julia. The “Caesar” part was given to the family perhaps because an ancestor was born by caesarean section (from the Latin verb “to cut,” caedere). There are other explanations for this cognomen “Caesar”: an ancestor had a thick head of hair, something that his more famous descendent did not inherit; an ancestor had grey eyes, or had killed an elephant.

Women, on the other hand, had no individual name. This means that all daughters of the Julian family, for example, would be called Julia. Sometimes, however, they would need to be referred to — so numbers were used, that is, “Julia I, II or III,” or “Julia Minor” and “Julia Major.” They were viewed, as some scholars remarked, as merely fragments of their family, and anonymous fragments at that.

Cleopatra therefore is rather refreshing, being famous and colourful, if not loud, and damaging to the Romans.

One might wonder why ancient sources, normally dismissive about women, chose to tell us more particularly about this one. Yes, she was a queen, and a rich one at that. But I would argue, it was to camouflage the fact that because Rome was fighting a civil war, that we thus are given a detailed picture of this intelligent and powerful woman.

Octavian (later known as the Emperor Augustus), was not particularly concerned with Cleopatra when he fought and defeated her. It was her consort, Mark Antony, who was the danger. Senior in every sense to Octavian, he was older, more experienced, a proven general, extremely popular in Rome and with soldiers — because of his military prowess.

In the aftermath of Caesar’s assassination, Octavian gradually defeated all rivals to supreme power, until only Mark Antony was left. It should be noted that for Antony, Cleopatra being immensely wealthy, was an invaluable ally. Whether or not he was physically attracted to her, it did make political and military sense to have access to her resources. Having defeated him, it was important to Octavian’s later image to depict the war, not as one against a beloved and honoured Roman (which Antony was), but against a foreign enemy. So war was declared against Cleopatra, not Antony. She was “other” in every sense: foreign, eastern, and a woman.

She was beautiful, although our sources differ in exactly how beautiful. Blaise Pascal famously noted, in the 17th century, that “had Cleopatra’s nose been shorter, the face of the whole world would have changed” , implying that if she’d been less attractive there wouldn’t have been a civil war in Rome. (Rather puzzlingly, from some of her coins, she looks quite ugly in modern terms. Her nose is generally represented as large and hooked, such that on some coins, she looks like the caricature of a witch… but then Pascal, too, had a fairly distinctive nose himself.)

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