Difficult Women: Cleopatra, part one

Comin atcha!

Hello readers!

We’re moving into a new series, having now reached the end (for now) of Tudor? I Hardly Knew Her! We’re also moving into a new release schedule, with newsletters coming at you every two weeks rather than the previous weekly model.

The new series will have a broader historical and geographical scope than the Tudors. In Difficult Women, we’ll look at the myths vs. realities of women from history with scandalous and/or bad reputations. Starting with Cleopatra!

As a reminder, this newsletter is a sister publication to Vulgar History, the podcast. Usually, we’re talking about entirely different things in the newsletter vs the podcast. But in a rare moment of synchronicity, this week’s podcast episode is also about Cleopatra. Synchronicity!!

Theda Bara in the film Cleopatra, 1917.

The thing with a historical figure as iconic as Cleopatra is that many people know about her, but fewer people know her actual deal. Every October there are lots of Cleopatra Halloween costumes, every few years there’s a new Cleopatra appearance on a miniseries or movie; she’s inevitably included is most posters and fridge magnet sets and books about Important Women From History. The main things most people may know about her are that she was famously glamorous, she drove at least two Roman men wild with desire, and she died from a snake bite. Guess what! All three may be accurate, but they are also some of the least interesting and least important things about her. So why is that what she’s best known for? THE PATRIARCHY STRIKES AGAIN.

So the thing is that nobody has found any Egyptian or Greek (because she was also Greek, more on that in a bit) writing surviving from Cleopatra’s lifetime. What survives are the writings of several Roman men who truly detested her and included every cruel insult about her they could in their histories of that era. It’s not just a “history written by the victors” scenario but also a “slanderous history written by the misogynist haters who were also the victors” situation. But, between their various catty insults emerges the story of a truly impressive person who accomplished many incredible things and deserves to be remembered for much more than her wigs and who she happened to sleep with.

Ancient Egypt: An Incredibly Brief History

To set the scene and to understand the chaos she was born into, we need to first take a VERY QUICK sojourn into the history of ancient Egypt.

A very, very long time ago, there were a bunch of independent villages and one day, someone unified them into the kingdom of Egypt around 3150 BCE. The famous Pyramids, etc., came around during what’s known as the Old Kingdom, which was the era from approximately 2686–2181 BCE (remember, because this is all before the year 0, the numbers get smaller as time passes chronologically). During this time, Egyptians worshipped their King as a God on earth. Part of this stemmed from their belief that the King was directly responsible for the water level of the Nile, which flooded every year and helped with their crops. Because of the Nile, Egypt could produce excellent crops, which helped feed everyone and set them up to be good trade partners with other places. Compared to other nearby areas, Egypt was doing amazing, sweetie vis-a-vis crops and the overall development of a sophisticated cultural identity.

The centuries went by, passing through the Middle Kingdom era (c. 2030 – 1650 BCE) and into the New Kingdom era (c. 1550 – 1069 BCE). This is when some names you may recognize, such as Hatshepsut, arrive. Although it was uncommon for women to hold solo leadership roles in Egyptian society, they weren’t entirely opposed to the idea, which is how Hatshepsut wound up ruling for about twenty years alongside her husband, Thutmose II (because leadership was usually shared in man-woman pairs of Kings and Queens). During Thutmose II’s reign (after Hatshepsut had died), the word “Pharaoh” started to refer to their monarch. Other notable names from the New Kingdom era included Queen Nefertiti, her stepson Tutankhamun, and the later King Rameses The Great (who reigned for sixty-seven years).

More years passed, and Egypt went from being THE wealthiest and most successful and culturally significant kingdom to being slightly less influential. This had a lot to do with the Nile, which dried up occasionally; without that annual flooding, crops didn’t grow, which meant Egypt lost much of its ability to trade with neighbours. And then, suddenly, it’s the year 332 BCE and famous Greek teenager Alexander The Great stormed in and conquered Egypt (which had, at that point, been under the control of the Persians) (the Egyptian people themselves had been under a series of colonizers for awhile). Alexander created a new capital city named after him, Alexandria, and left the kingdom under the care of his trusted general, Ptolemy.

For the next three hundred years, Ptolemy’s descendants would rule Egypt as the Ptolemaic dynasty. Although the Ptolemies adopted several cultural practices from the Egyptians, including their deities and the concept of incestuous brother-sister royal marriages, the Egyptian people never forgot that these were conquerors. For their part, the Ptolemies didn’t even go to the effort of learning the Egyptian language* (*which was a dialect during this period), conducting all of their business in Greek. So it’s a conquest situation, where the Egyptian people were oppressed, and the Ptolemies were oppressors, and bear that in mind for what happens later.

Also, note that the Ptolemies seem to have only had a handful of acceptable names. All the boys and men were named Ptolemy, and the girls and women were all named either Cleopatra, Arsinoe, or Berenike. And wouldn’t you know it, today’s heroine was one of four sisters: Cleopatra (not our heroine), Berenike, Cleopatra (our heroine), and Arsinoe. And it’s worth looking at the two oldest sisters to understand this family dynamic.

… And Peggy! The Royal Ptolemy Sisters

As previously noted, the Ptolemies were intent on inbreeding to maintain the purity of their family line and also probably because they were so busy murdering and scheming against one another that introducing other people would make it all too chaotic. This was a wildly ambitious and competitive family where, when they weren’t marrying uncle to niece or brother to sister, wives were killing husbands, and brothers were killing fathers. Just EVERYONE killing EVERYONE all the time to the point that if you weren’t paranoid, you were probably about to be murdered. To survive, you had to gather enough supporters around you for protection; to thrive, you had to kill your siblings before they killed you.

This generation’s father was Pharaoh Ptolemy XII, the illegitimate son of Ptolemy XI. He’d only wound up Pharaoh because all of XI’s other sons had been murdered by each other because — this cannot be stressed enough — this family was very prone to murdering one another. XII’s wife was named Cleopatra V, and their eldest daughter (not today’s heroine, remember) was named Cleopatra VI. When Cleopatra V died (murdered??), Cleopatra VI swooped in to take over because of the whole “there has to be a man-woman pair of King+Queen at all times” thing. However, Cleopatra VI was very quickly murdered, potentially by the next youngest sister, Berenike. Imagine Jo and Amy March, but in The Hunger Games, that’s what these siblings were like.

Upon the death of Cleopatra VI, Ptolemy XII took on his daughter Berenike as the new Queen. And then he went on a business trip out of town, at which point Berenike SEIZED THE THRONE FOR HERSELF. To get the traditional King and Queen pairing, you’d think she would marry one of her brothers at this point, but her two younger brothers, both named Ptolemy, were preschoolers, so that wasn’t what she wanted to do. And so Berenike decided to go this alone as a solo female Queen of Egypt.

This freaked out a lot of people, primarily men, who pressured her to marry someone because having a woman in charge made them very uncomfortable. So, after a few months, Berenike decided to marry her cousin, Prince Seleucid. But clearly, she changed her mind because he died after one week, seemingly poisoned BY HER. Berenike was NOT messing around vis-a-vis killing anyone who got in her way or annoyed her. She then chose a new husband, Archelaos, but she never allowed him to be co-regent and remained entirely in charge of Egypt herself. Until Ptolemy XII came back to town, with the full support of Roman forces!!

And so Ptolemy XII took over again and had Berenike executed. And it’s at this point that his third daughter, Cleopatra VII (our heroine), enters the scene, aged fourteen, the new Queen of Egypt.

Cleopatra, Comin’ Atcha!

Because we mainly depend on Roman writings to learn about Cleopatra, she’s first mentioned when she begins dealing with powerful Roman men. So we don’t know much about her early years specifically, but based on how she turned out and what’s known about Egyptian society at the time, we can assume several things. She was exceptionally well educated in every subject known at the time, including math, politics, history, philosophy, reading, and writing. She was fluent in as many as nine languages, including Egyptian, because, for a welcome change, she figured she’d give a shit about the language of her literal subjects.

Conspiracy corner: there may have been another reason for her to learn the Egyptian language: that she was potentially at least part Egyptian. The Ptolemies had been intermarrying among their Greek family for three hundred years. Still, genetically, there’s no way any of them would have children after that long without introducing any foreign DNA. Cleopatra’s father, remember, was an illegitimate child. Undoubtedly, other nationalities had also been introduced earlier in the family tree. And although XII had been married to a woman named Cleopatra V, it’s unclear if that woman was our Cleopatra’s mother. Nobody knows who her mother was. As such, it’s possible that she was half-Egyptian.

It is almost certain that Cleopatra was probably not conventionally beautiful. This point is essential, so let’s repeat: Cleopatra was probably not conventionally beautiful. From the coins found from her lifetime, she’s presented as undoubtedly impressive but is not styled to resemble the beautiful faces of statues from that era. Considering the influence and power she would later amass, it’s somehow easier to assume she must have been gorgeous because that could explain why people agreed to work with her. But isn’t it more interesting to know that she may not have been beautiful and that her magnetism, charisma, intelligence, and wit won people over to her side?

She also clearly learned from the death of her two older sisters that a) her immediate family was not at all trustworthy, and b) if she was going to stage a coup, she had to make sure she had powerful allies on her side. And so she waited for her chance.

And surprise! When she was around eighteen years old, having been Queen and successfully not having been murdered for four years, her father died. As per his will, Cleopatra was married to her younger brother, who became her co-ruler Pharoah Ptolemy XIII. Can you blame Cleopatra, this brilliant and capable person, for deciding she’d rather not job-share with her tweenage brother-husband? She set to work immediately, cutting him out of most job duties, including removing his name from official documents and minting new coins that showed only her face instead of both. These were MAJOR declarations of war, and Ptolemy XIII’s advisors and regents (because Ptolemy himself was still a kid) got highly pissed off about all of this. Not only had she snuck around everyone’s back to claim extra power, but she’d upended the expectation that Queens should be subordinate to and supportive of Kings: a woman wasn’t expected to rule on her own, which was SHOCKING to them.

And so, although she had her supporters, her brother had more supporters, and they exiled her from Alexandria. Cleopatra was like, “Screw you, I didn’t want to be here anyway!” and grabbed her younger sister Arsinoe (yes! Another sister! Don’t worry, she’s going to be fantastic also) and took off to Syria, probably scheming all the way because she was not going to accept this turn of events. Her plan involved taking advantage of the Roman civil war to get the backup she needed to defeat her brother-husband.

Ancient Rome: An Incredibly Brief History

There’s no time to get into ancient Rome's very long and complicated history, so we’ll cut right to the point right now: Roman men hated a) women and b) the entire idea of hereditary monarchy. As a woman and a Queen, Cleopatra was their worst nightmare. Women in ancient Roman society were considered property/children for their whole lives and had no rights at all. Romans’ medical and philosophical understanding of the concept of sex was that women were mutated, incomplete men who hadn’t fully turned into men in the womb. Women had slightly less rights than barnyard chickens. It was a BAD SCENE.

Also, since 509 BCE, Rome had been ruled by a non-King-based system where sometimes two and sometimes three consuls ruled simultaneously for no more than five years per person to ensure no one person would ever become too powerful. Not just anybody could become a consul, you had to be descended from one of the oldest noble families in Rome (which is not entirely unlike a hereditary monarchy, but don’t tell them that). The point is that there was more than one person in charge. That didn’t stop several civil wars from breaking out, though.

There was yet another Roman civil war twenty years before Cleopatra was born. In this one, a man named Sulla took over as sort of emergency Emperor because the multiple-consuls model wasn’t working too well in a time of great crisis. Having seen this in action, younger men like Julius Caesar and Pompey decided they’d each like to have that sort of power themselves. As they didn’t want to share, Caesar and Pompey began fighting against each other and just kept on fighting, and suddenly it’s 48 BCE, and we’re caught up to where Cleopatra was (on the run with her sister, at war against her brother-husband).

Pompey wound up fleeing to Egypt, where he thought he could find refuge for a while, but SURPRISE, he was stabbed to death basically upon arrival because that’s just how fast things happened when Ptolemies were around. Although Caesar had been at war with Pompey, he wasn’t a fan of this assassination and ordered Cleopatra and her brother-husband to reconcile and get out of his way. Cleopatra had no intention of doing so, so she headed off to try and convince Caesar to join her side against her brother-husband. (Note: this is where, if the people of Egypt had been bigger fans of the Ptolemies, they might have stepped up to offer her assistance. That they didn’t is maybe one small clue to the fact that they viewed both her and her brother-husband as their oppressor, not as their legitimate rulers).

Anyway, this is the bit where, in legends based on some very melodramatic writings, she may have hidden herself in a rolled-up carpet to sneak into Caesar’s room to SEDUCE HIM. That may or may not have happened. But for sure, she snuck off without telling her brother-husband, and whatever she said to Caesar worked: he was now willing to ally with her against Ptolemy XIII. And a power couple emerged!

Cleopatra: The Caesar Years

This is where Cleopatra being very beautiful and very sexy would be an easy way to explain how she so quickly won Caesar over to her side. But remember: Cleopatra was not conventionally attractive. And, having been married to her tweenage brother for the past several years, she was likely not very sexually experienced (in fact, let’s just state for the record now, the only men we know she ever slept with were Julius Caesar and Mark Antony). She was extraordinarily well educated, possessed almost supernatural amounts of personal charm and charisma, and was unlike any woman Julius Caesar had ever encountered. Not only was she assertive, extremely well educated and overflowing with charisma, but she was also self-assured and likely the sort of spoiled one becomes when one spends one’s formative years being told you’re a Goddess and you’re made Queen at age fourteen.

Did she go to Caesar willing to seduce him? And if she did, was it to manipulate him with her sexy ways, or was it because this was the Ancient world, and often alliances were sealed with marriages and/or babies? What’s definite here is that she knew without the support of Egyptian forces and with most of the palace supporting her brother-husband, she needed to find an outside source of support for her claim to the throne. And if that meant sleeping with the enemy, she was all in. Again, remember what her family and entire childhood and teen years had been like: she knew that to succeed, you had to do WHATEVER it took, and having a baby was nothing compared to murdering a family member. So she went full Ptolemy and won Caesar over to her side.

But then, twist!! Because Cleopatra’s younger sister Arsinoe was just as badass as her three older sisters, she also knew that you have to shoot your shot when you get the chance. Just fifteen years old, Arsinoe decided to try and take over Egypt herself with their other brother, also named Ptolemy, as her co-regent. These Ptolemy sisters, honestly!! It’s just like Little Women, but in ancient Egypt, with brother-sister marriage and murder.

A Brief Note on Arsinoe IV

As anyone who has read Little Women and/or Pride and Prejudice knows, one should never underestimate a younger sister. Arsinoe had spent time on the run with Cleopatra and learned firsthand how badass a young woman could be. She was like, “So what if I’m just fifteen? I am fully prepared to DEFEAT JULIUS CAESAR!! Let’s do this!!”

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Here’s what went down. Arsinoe fled down with her mentor/eunuch/pal, Ganymedes, and declared herself Queen Arsinoe IV and took control over the Egyptian army. She also named Ganymedes as her second in command. She commanded the Egyptian army in battle against the Romans, utilizing clever tactics like closing off some streets to trap Caesar and Cleopatra in the palace, where they were trapped for an entire year. Ultimately, Caesar recognized he was about to be defeated by one of history’s coolest teenagers, so he removed his identifiable cloak and armour and swam away. During this time, Ptolemy XIII drowned, and Ganymedes died in battle.

The Egyptian army then decided they weren’t big fans of Queen Arsinoe anymore. So they decided to exchange Arsinoe for Ptolemy XIV (her brother-husband, who at this point was being held captive by the Romans because everything is chaos). And so, Arsinoe wound up a Roman prisoner. She was forced to be included in Caesar’s victory parade, humiliating herself in front of everyone as a captive Queen, and then was sent into exile. Pour one out for Arsinoe, teen Queen of Egypt: she was a real one.

Cleopatra: The Caesar Years, Continued

So by now, it’s the year 48 BCE, and Julius Caesar’s term as consul was due to expire. He managed to get one extra year as Emergency Dictator because who else but him would be able to settle the dynastic troubles in Egypt? And so he appointed Cleopatra co-ruler alongside her other, even younger brother, Ptolemy XIV. Did she have to sibling marry him? Yes, because that’s just how these things were done. She was 22 and pregnant with Julius Caesar’s baby, and to rule Egypt, she had to marry her 12-year-old brother. Sometimes, that’s just how things go. But re: her love life, Cleopatra continued to live with Caesar as long as he was in town. Also, FYI: Caesar was already married to someone else, a Roman woman named Calpurnia.

Julius was out of town when Cleopatra’s son was born on June 23, 47 BCE. She named him Caesarion, which means Caesar Jr., and told everyone that Julius Caesar was his father. Caesar never officially acknowledged Caesarian as his son for various reasons, mostly because he was married to someone else. This was all messy, but they both loved drama, so you know they were living for it.

Cleopatra and her new brother-husband hung out in Rome, leaving baby Caesarion behind. They moved into a villa just across from where Caesar lived with his wife, which sounds awkward and which Caesar’s advisors found odd. But Caesar had always done his own thing, never mind what other people think* (*this is part of why he winds up murdered in the next paragraph). For instance, Caesar was busy overseeing the construction of a new temple for the goddess Venus, which included a colossal gold statue of the goddess herself. And he was like, “Sculptors! I need you to make a second statue, also in gold, of my lover, Cleopatra!” They put that statue next to the one of Venus, which stayed there for two hundred more years because it was just that gorgeous a piece of art.

But then came the Ides of March Scenario, which is when Caesar was stabbed to death by a bunch of his former friends who were mad about his whole “doing what I want, don’t care what you think, I’m dictator for life” routine. Cleopatra was like, “Great, so my son with Caesar, Caesarion, will become the next Emperor, right?” And the Romans were like, “Actually, we all hate you, and also Caesar named his adopted son Octavian as his heir so…” and so Cleopatra packed up her things and peaced out of Rome, headed back to Egypt to regroup. Knowing what we know about Cleopatra, it’s unclear if she was unprepared for this contingency. She likely had sussed out who was who in Rome, who hated who, and which dude would be her best option to get what she wanted.

While en route back to Egypt, Cleopatra’s brother-husband Ptolemy XIV died, maybe from illness. This is not suspicious at all except for the part where it’s suspicious as fuck, so I think it’s pretty apparent she probably poisoned him. Because guess what, with him out of the way and no more little brothers waiting in the wings, her only choice for her co-regent was her son, three-year-old Caesarion! Would you look at that, she was now for all intents and purposes the solo queen of Egypt. And yet, without the support of the people of Egypt, she knew she’d need another assist from Rome if she were going to stay in power.

It is a fact universally acknowledged that if a woman can get on without a man, she will do so. So the fact that Cleopatra moved onto her Plan B indicates that she knew in her politically-savvy, resilient survivor’s mind that the odds were too great for her to tackle this next stage of her Queenship on her own.

Which is why she turned to Mark Antony.

Next Time: Cleopatra: The Mark Antony Years ft. Thick Thighs Endanger Lives

VULGAR HISTORY A LA CARTE is a feminist women’s history comedy newsletter. It is the companion publication to the Vulgar History podcast. Click here to hear the latest episode of the podcast.

Ann Foster is a a writer and podcaster. She’s currently writing a nonfiction biography of Caroline of Brunswick. Don’t know who that is? You will soon! She’s represented by Amy Bishop-Wycisk at Trellis Literary Management.

References

Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff

When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt by Kara Cooney

Agrippina: The Most Extraordinary Woman of the Roman World by Emma Southon

6 things you (probably) didn’t know about Cleopatra (BBC History Extra)

Episode LX: Cleopatra (Emperors of Rome podcast)

Cleopatra: Ms. Understood (Stuff You Should Know podcast)

Cleopatra’s Little Sister vs. The World (Drunk History)

Cleopatra VII: Scholar, Patron, Queen (Ancient Research Center in Egypt)

The Virtuous Scholar: Cleopatra seduced through intellectual prowess not physical beauty, says new book (University College London)

Cleopatra: Scientist, Not Seductress? (Seeker.com)