Men have long vilified Cleopatra, but she's earned royal treatment
Cleopatra has always been a player in other people's dramas, if in different roles: she can be a coquette or a feminist, a martyr or a villain, a goddess or a fallen Woman, even blond or black, writes Louisa Thomas
Horace called her the fatale monstrum - the
fatal monster. Chaucer made her virtuous. Shakespeare turned her into a
romantic heroine. In her own day, legions of Egyptians thought she was the reincarnation
of the goddess Isis, while her nemesis, the Roman Octavian, called her a whore.
It is
that description - Cleopatra as a vamp, a seductress whose machinations led to
the downfall of Julius Caesar and Marc Antony - that dominates the countless depictions
in art, literature, theater, film and, not least, history books.
It is hard to know just who she was. When she
died in 30 B.C., she left no writings behind, and much of her city, Alexandria,
now lies beneath the Mediterranean and a sea of modern buildings. But the shards
of evidence the Egyptologist Joyce Tyldesley pieces together in her engaging
new biography, "Cleopatra:
The Last Queen of Egypt," reveal why it
is so easy, and so tempting, to misconstrue her story. Her death marked the end
of ancient Egypt and the birth of the Roman Empire.
For her, sex really was politics: her two
most important political allies, Antony d Caesar, were also her lovers. Their
deaths made it possible for her enemies to turn her legend into a cautionary
tale about the unfitness and danger of having women as leaders. In the year of
Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, untangling the legend of Cleopatra has a
special urgency.
Cleopatra was, of course, more than a
mistress; she was a queen-an ambitious and ruthless one. When her brother who
was also her co-ruler and probably her husband, in an arrangement typical among
Egyptian monarchs-moved against her, she had him killed. She liked to throw
decadent feasts to impress visiting dignitaries.
With her lover and ally Antony at her side,
she was a major player in Rome's civil war. Soon after Antony's suicide,
following a devastating defeat to Octavian at the Battle of Actium, she died
too, killing herself, according to the official story, by the bite of an asp.
The official story-Octavian's version,
promoted in speeches, rumors, pamphlets, and the deft use of symbols-says that
Cleopatra corrupted the innocent Caesar and Antony in order to ruin Rome and
advance herself. (This is not so different from the depiction in the HBO series
"Rome"-Cleopatra, a druggy strumpet, offers herself as Caesar's
"slave," while secretly conniving for control.) The archeological
record is thin, but it suggests something else: that Cleopatra was a competent
ruler in difficult times, dealing with internal unrest and unstable neighbours.
Tyldesley wants to "put Cleopatra back
into her own, predominantly Egyptian context-to see her as a ruler of Egypt,
not as a consort of Romans. In this view, sex was one of the few tools
available to women, and her use of it was "sensible." not
"weak." In fact, Tyldesley writes that Cleopatra "probably had
no more than two, consecutive relationships."
Octavian was heavily invested in portraying
Cleopatra as a harlot. Antony was his former ally; a power struggle tore them
apart. Cleopatra, as a female and a foreigner, was a more obvious enemy. She
became a scapegoat - dark to Rome's pure light, woman to Rome's man, a monarch
to Rome's republic.
Cicero met her at Caesar's house and found
her intelligent but arrogant. "I hate the queen!" he wrote. The
historian Plutarch, whose vivid and fascinating "Lives'' continues to
shape popular perceptions of antiquity, lived a century later, but he hated her
too.
His Cleopatra is devious and immoral. In one
typically dramatic but probably fantastic scene in Plutarch's telling,
Cleopatra had herself smuggled into Caesar's presence for the first time in a
bundle of bedsheets. Later depictions - including the 1963 Elizabeth Taylor
version-have her falling to his feet, tousled and sexy, as he unrolls an
anachronistic Persian rug.
These portrayals of Cleopatra tell more about
their own times than about the Egyptian queen herself (though she probably did
have a flair for the dramatic). She has become a kind of Rorschach test.
Renaissance painters depicted her as their pale blond vision of beauty, but in
the 19th century, an era of imperialism, she was dark and exotic. Romantics
loved the femme fatale, Cleopatra, while early cinematic portrayals appealed to
both men and women by making her smart and funny, and scantily clad.
Many scholars today fixate on Cleopatra's
looks (her profile, seen on coins, features a huge nose) and skin color (the
Ptolemies were from a Macedonian line, but Cleopatra's maternal ancestry and
the race of her paternal grandmother are disputed).
As Tyldesley points out, these squabbles are
largely about society's obsession with beauty and race. To regard Cleopatra as
an Egyptian ruler instead of a male myth, and to assess her using scholarly and
archeological tools, is a worthy goal. It seems long overdue.
(Louisa Thomas)
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