Cleopatra VII

Their life

The last pharaoh of Egypt, a shrewd and highly educated ruler who spoke many languages and preserved her kingdom's independence through alliances with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony against the rising power of Rome — until her final defeat, which she met on her own terms.

Known for

• Last active pharaoh of Egypt
• Alliances with Caesar and Mark Antony
• Fluent in many languages
• including Egyptian
• Battle of Actium and its aftermath
• Mother of Caesarion

The road they walked

Cleopatra VII Philopator was born around 69 BC into the Ptolemaic dynasty, a line of Macedonian Greek kings descended from Ptolemy I, one of Alexander the Great's generals, who had ruled Egypt for nearly three centuries without ever fully becoming Egyptian themselves. She was reportedly the first of her line to bother learning the Egyptian language, along with, by ancient accounts, several others including Ethiopian, Hebrew, and Aramaic — a small fact that says a great deal about how she understood power in a kingdom of multiple peoples. She grew up in Alexandria, then the intellectual capital of the Mediterranean world, home to the Great Library and Museum, in a court famous for wealth, learning, and murderous family politics; several of her own relatives died at the hands of siblings or spouses in the ordinary business of Ptolemaic succession.

She inherited a kingdom that was rich but no longer independent in any real sense — Rome's shadow lay over the eastern Mediterranean, and Egypt's grain and gold made it a prize the Republic's generals could not ignore. Cleopatra came to the throne at eighteen alongside her young brother-husband Ptolemy XIII, was driven out by his court within a few years, and returned to power only by attaching her fortunes to Julius Caesar, who arrived in Alexandria in 48 BC pursuing his rival Pompey. Her alliance with Caesar, and later with Mark Antony after Caesar's assassination, was never simple romance in the way later ages imagined it; it was statecraft, conducted by a ruler fluent in the language of Roman politics who understood that Egypt's survival depended on backing the right Roman. She bore Caesar a son, Caesarion, and later three children with Antony, and used those unions to expand and defend Ptolemaic territory even as Rome's internal wars made her position steadily more precarious.

Her downfall came wrapped in Rome's civil war between Antony and Octavian, the future Augustus, who framed the conflict as a struggle to save Rome from a foreign queen. Defeated at the naval Battle of Actium in 31 BC, Cleopatra and Antony fled to Alexandria, and within a year, with Octavian's forces closing in and no path left to negotiate her kingdom's survival, both took their own lives rather than be paraded through Rome in triumph. Egypt became a Roman province the following year, ending nearly three thousand years of pharaonic rule, and Cleopatra's memory passed almost immediately into Roman propaganda, then into Shakespeare, then into myth — obscuring for centuries the sharper historical reality of a multilingual, politically formidable monarch who held off Roman annexation longer than almost any of her contemporaries.

How their story ended

Cleopatra died in 30 BC at about thirty-nine, by suicide, after Octavian's forces took Alexandria and Antony had already killed himself believing her dead. Ancient sources, chiefly Plutarch, say she died from the bite of an asp smuggled into her chamber, though some historians have suggested poison instead, since no certain physical evidence survives to settle the method. She arranged her death, by all accounts, deliberately and with attention to ceremony — dressed in royal regalia — denying Octavian the propaganda victory of marching Egypt's last queen through the streets of Rome in chains.

In their words

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Tables where Cleopatra sits

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