Meet Cleopatra: Everything We Know Comes From Her Enemies

A Greek queen who learned Egyptian

Cleopatra VII was Macedonian Greek, the last of the Ptolemies — a dynasty that had ruled Egypt for nearly three centuries without, by Plutarch's account, a single member bothering to learn the language of the country. She was the first of her line who did.

She came to the throne at about eighteen, on her father's death, as co-regent with a ten-year-old brother she was expected to marry. Within three years he had driven her out of Alexandria and she was raising an army on the eastern frontier.

The grain, not the barge

The story everyone knows is the seduction: smuggled to Caesar past her brother's guards, rolled inside a bed-sack. Plutarch tells it, and it may well be true.

What the story leaves out is why Caesar cared. Egypt fed Rome. The grain fleet that sailed from Alexandria was the difference between a fed city and a riot, and whoever ruled Egypt held that tap. Both of her Roman alliances were state strategy before they were anything else, and she conducted them as a head of state conducting them — she kept her throne, her treasury and her country's independence for two decades while every other eastern kingdom was being annexed.

Governed as a pharaoh

At home she did what no Ptolemy had done: she ruled as an Egyptian. She restored temples, presented herself as Isis, and appeared in Egyptian dress on Egyptian monuments. The temple reliefs at Dendera show her as pharaoh, not as a Greek queen supervising one.

Ancient writers also credit her with technical works — on cosmetics, on weights and measures — and say she dealt with ambassadors from many peoples without an interpreter.

What Octavian needed her to be

Actium finished it. The fleets broke, the war was effectively over the moment she and Antony withdrew, and within a year Egypt was a Roman province.

Then the winner wrote the history. Almost every ancient source about Cleopatra is Augustan — produced after Octavian had beaten her and needed posterity to remember a foreign seductress who unmanned a Roman general, rather than a rival head of state who had nearly outmanoeuvred him. Even Plutarch, no enemy, says plainly that her beauty was not incomparable and that what actually held people was her presence and her conversation.

The asp is his own uncertain report. He says frankly that nobody knew how the poison entered her body.

Why they belong at your table

Seat her when you are the smaller party in a negotiation and the other side holds the army. She played a weak hand for twenty-one years against the most powerful state in the world, and she will ask what you actually control that they need.