Who was Cleopatra? The last pharaoh of Egypt

Cleopatra VII was the last active ruler of ancient Egypt, the queen who reigned from 51 BC until her death in 30 BC. She belonged to the Ptolemies, a Greek-speaking dynasty founded by one of Alexander the Great's generals, and she spent her reign keeping Egypt independent of Rome by allying with two of its most powerful men, Julius Caesar and then Mark Antony. When Antony lost, Egypt became a Roman province.

In short

• Cleopatra was a Ptolemy: Macedonian Greek by descent, ruling Egypt as pharaoh, and the first of her line known to have learned Egyptian.
• Her alliances with Caesar and Antony were politics as much as romance: Rome had the armies, and Egypt had the grain and the gold.
• Almost everything written about her comes from Romans who had beaten her, so the famous image is part portrait, part propaganda.

Where did Cleopatra come from?

When Alexander the Great died in 323 BC, his generals split his empire. One of them, Ptolemy, took Egypt, and his descendants ruled it from Alexandria for nearly three hundred years. They kept Greek as the language of the court, married brothers to sisters in the Egyptian royal tradition, and presented themselves to Egyptians as pharaohs, with temples, titles and statues in the old style.

Cleopatra was born around 69 BC, a daughter of Ptolemy XII. Who her mother was is not recorded for certain, which is why her ancestry is debated: most of her family tree was Macedonian Greek, but one or more of her grandmothers or her mother may have come from elsewhere. The honest answer is that the sources don't settle it. What they do record is her ability. Plutarch, writing more than a century after her death, says in his Life of Antony that she could talk with many peoples without an interpreter, while "the kings of Egypt before her had not even made an effort to learn the native language".

How did she rule, and why did she need Rome?

By her time, Egypt was rich but weak. Rome dominated the eastern Mediterranean, and her father had kept his throne by paying Roman politicians huge sums. She became queen in 51 BC at about 18, sharing the throne, as custom required, with her younger brother Ptolemy XIII. His advisers soon drove her out, and in 48 BC she was raising an army on the border.

That year, Julius Caesar arrived in Alexandria chasing his rival Pompey, whom Ptolemy's court had already had killed. Cleopatra got herself into the palace to meet Caesar, and he backed her. After a war in Alexandria in which Ptolemy XIII drowned, Caesar restored her to the throne, and in 47 BC she bore a son, Ptolemy Caesar, known as Caesarion, whom she said was Caesar's. She was living in Rome when Caesar was assassinated in March 44 BC.

The alliance gave each side what it lacked: Cleopatra got Roman protection for her throne, and Caesar got Egypt's wealth and a secure ally in the east. The same logic drew in Mark Antony, who controlled Rome's eastern provinces after Caesar's death. They met at Tarsus in 41 BC, and she had three children with him. In 34 BC, at a ceremony known as the Donations of Alexandria, Antony proclaimed her and her children rulers of lands across the eastern Mediterranean, some of them Roman territory.

How did Cleopatra lose Egypt?

Antony's rival in Rome was Caesar's adopted heir, Octavian. In 32 BC, the Roman Senate declared war, and the historian Cassius Dio records that it was declared on Cleopatra, not Antony: the proceedings "were nominally directed against Cleopatra, but really against Antony". Fighting a foreign queen let Octavian present a Roman civil war as a war against Egypt.

The decisive battle was fought at sea off Actium, in western Greece, on 2 September 31 BC. Plutarch describes "the sixty ships of Cleopatra" raising their sails and breaking away through the fighting, and Antony following her. Whether she fled in panic or broke out as planned is still argued; either way, the fleet left behind surrendered. Octavian took Alexandria on 1 August 30 BC. Antony killed himself, and Cleopatra died days later, at 39. Octavian had Caesarion killed and made Egypt a Roman province run by his own appointee.

Her death is usually told with a snake, an asp, smuggled in a basket of figs. Plutarch tells that story and others, and then admits: "But the truth of the matter no one knows."

When did Cleopatra live, measured against other things?

Cleopatra's Egypt was already ancient to her. A short timeline shows how far.

Date	Event	Years before Cleopatra's death in 30 BC
About 2560 BC	The Great Pyramid of Giza is built	About 2,530
1279 to 1213 BC	Reign of Ramesses II	About 1,200
332 BC	Alexander the Great takes Egypt	302
30 BC	Cleopatra dies; Egypt becomes Roman	0

The pyramid at Giza was about 2,530 years old when she died. The Moon landing in 1969 came about 2,000 years after her death (from 30 BC to AD 1969 is 1,998 years, since there was no year zero). So Cleopatra lived closer in time to the first people on the Moon than to the building of the Great Pyramid.

How much of her story is true?

The sources are lopsided. No history she commissioned survives. The main accounts were written by Romans long after her death: Plutarch around AD 100, Cassius Dio around AD 200, both drawing on writers from Octavian's side. Roman poets of Octavian's time cast her as a drunken, scheming foreign queen; the poet Horace called her a "fatal monster" in an ode celebrating her death. Later art and film built on that picture, from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra to the 1963 Hollywood film starring Elizabeth Taylor.

A few things come straight from her time. Her coins show her portrait, with a strong nose and her hair tied back, closer to a ruler's image than a film star's. A papyrus of 33 BC granting tax privileges to one of Antony's generals ends with a Greek word meaning "let it be done", which some scholars think she wrote herself. Egyptian temple reliefs show her as a traditional pharaoh making offerings to the gods.

Still argued

Two questions are contested. Her looks: Plutarch says her beauty "was in itself not altogether incomparable", and that her charm lay in her conversation, while the coins are stylized and hard to read as portraits. Her ancestry: because her mother and one grandmother are not securely identified, scholars disagree over whether she had any non-Greek ancestry, and the evidence can't settle it. Most agree she was Greek in language and culture and Egyptian in the role she played.

Cleopatra's fall closed some three thousand years of rule by pharaohs and helped make Octavian, as Augustus, the first emperor of the Roman Empire. Her story is also a lesson in how history is written: when only the winners' accounts survive, historians read them for what they reveal about the winners. A similar problem runs through older stories such as the Trojan War, where legend and evidence have to be pulled apart.

Check yourself

• Why did Cleopatra need Roman allies, and what did Caesar and Antony get from her?
• Why did Octavian declare war on Cleopatra rather than on Antony?
• What makes the ancient accounts of Cleopatra hard to trust, and what evidence comes from her own time?

Sources

• Life of Antony, in Parallel Lives — Plutarch, translated by Bernadotte Perrin, LacusCurtius, University of Chicago
• Roman History, Book 50 — Cassius Dio, translated by Earnest Cary, LacusCurtius, University of Chicago
• Cleopatra VII — Joshua J. Mark, World History Encyclopedia