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From History to Myth: Cleopatra's Empire
From: The British Museum
| By:
Susan Walker |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Cleopatra's reputation and image changed as often during her life as they have changed since. Here, British Museum curator Susan Walker gives a helpful overview of Cleopatra's motivations, as she sought powerful alliances with Caesar and Mark Antony, at a time when Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt were entirely dependent on Rome for authorisation of their rule. These alliances were particularly necessary as there was no stable government in Rome, and individual private armies fought each other for domination. It was finally the conflict between Mark Antony and Octavian that resulted in the double suicide of Antony and Cleopatra, and resulted in the lasting Roman interpretation of Cleopatra as an emasculating whore. |
 ontemporaneous images of Cleopatra VII are extremely rare, as after the defeat of Cleopatra and Antony by Octavian , and their subsequent suicides, Octavian had many images of the last queen of Egypt destroyed. However, a man named Archibios, probably a priest, paid Octavian 2,000 talents to save the statues of Cleopatra in Egypt, and Plutarch (at the end of his Life of Antony) tells us that Octavian took the money and agreed to the proposal. It's possible that some of the Egyptian style images of Cleopatra that appeared in Cleopatra: From History to Myth at the British Museum are survivors of Archibios's intervention. To a Roman they would have meant very little: these are sculptures in entirely an Egyptian form, and as such they're emblematic. These images don't necessarily represent Cleopatra as she appeared in real life, they show her as a divine Queen of Egypt. All represent her in Egyptian dress wearing a wig; some with naturalistic Greek curls on the brow beneath, as we see on the coins of Cleopatra; some figures also include a double cornucopia (horn of plenty), most likely referring to the queen's responsibility to guarantee Egypt's prosperity. Above the brow are three cobras, a traditional Egyptian symbol of kingship, but only Cleopatra VII wore three (as opposed to two or one), and the significance of the three is not yet understood. These statues are quite small-scale, the largest is only just over a metre high, and they would have been kept in shrines in religious sanctuaries or even homes, perhaps. We know from a graffito on a temple at Philae that statues of Cleopatra were still being cared for as late as AD 373, when Egypt, and indeed the rest of the Roman Empire was officially Christian. So the cult of Cleopatra as divine ruler of Egypt survived into late antiquity, and, because we've been able to identify these Egyptian-style sculptures, we actually know of rather more statues of Cleopatra than we did a year ago. |
But a lot of Cleopatra's images were destroyed. We do of course have a number of surviving Greek-style images on coins, but that brings to light a second problem, which is that Cleopatra changed her image through her career. She was, after all, Queen of Egypt for 21 years, at a time of enormous political instability in the Roman world at large. All the major public figures of that era changed their portraits, because they were responding to different audiences at various stages of the great political drama of the collapse of the Roman republic. With no stable political system at Rome, there arose instead individual leaders who commanded private armies and who fought each other for political domination. These leaders were operating right the way through the Mediterranean, not just in Rome itself. And they had to appeal to Greeks, they had to appeal to Romans, they had to appeal to Egyptians, they had to appeal to Syrians, Palestinians. Even Caesar has a very unstable portrait. |
When Octavian accepted the name Augustus and declared that he was the first citizen of his own restored republic, all of this competition settled down and an enormous number of images of Augustus were produced, of which, in statues alone, nearly 300 have survived from antiquity, which is more than of any other Roman emperor. And the striking characteristic of these images is that they look astonishingly similar, though these, too, do not correspond to surviving written descriptions of Augustus' personal appearance. With Cleopatra it is very difficult to say what she really looked like, or to create, as an art historian, any sort of clearly visible and viable system of classification of her portraits which would allow an iconography of Cleopatra. |
Fathom: Has time exaggerated her status, or was Cleopatra in fact an extraordinary woman living at an extraordinary time? |
Susan Walker: Yes, Cleopatra was a remarkable individual in a very difficult position, and I don't see her status as exaggerated, though it is distorted by Roman perceptions of her. The Ptolemies, her dynastic line, had ruled Egypt for nearly 300 years, and at first they were very successful. They became a part of Egyptian culture and, critically, religious practice, so they acted like Pharaohs; the Persians who had ruled Egypt before them had tended to govern by remote control. The Ptolemies announced that they would be regarded as Osiris and Isis, even practising brother-sister marriage. They thereby won the respect of the priesthood, the most stable and structured element within ancient Egyptian society, and a key support to successful rule in Egypt. Having secured their position within Egypt, the Ptolemies looked outwards, gaining territories all over the eastern Mediterranean seaboard. They developed Alexander's foundation, Alexandria, as a remarkable cosmopolitan capital city, attracting the best minds of the day. They also drew a huge number of immigrants to Egypt, from Alexander's greater Greek world. |
The downside of incest, of course, is genetic inbreeding, which produced some pretty wacky characters who were not strong enough either, in some cases, physically, and in other cases mentally, to act as rulers. Gradually the system began to collapse with factional intrigue. The courtiers began to manipulate the rulers, and at the same time outside Egypt there was the growing power of Rome, particularly after the defeat of Carthage. In the second century BC, Rome became very dominant in the Mediterranean and intervened in Ptolemaic affairs. By the first century BC the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt were entirely dependent on Rome for authorisation of their rule. Whoever was running Egypt needed a Roman protector. |
Ptolemy XII died in 51 BC and he was succeeded by Cleopatra VII, who was obliged to marry, according to this system that the Ptolemies had adopted, her younger brother. Now, she had two younger brothers, Ptolemy XIII and eventually later Ptolemy XIV. Ptolemy XIII was manipulated by courtiers, notably a man called Pothinos who advanced his position against Cleopatra. The courtiers didn't want Cleopatra. They wanted this young boy who could be their creature. Cleopatra was 17. She was extremely bright; very, very clever, a very gifted linguist and a very shrewd operator. So they ousted Cleopatra, who was sent into exile by 48 BC. |
At that point, Caesar arrived in Alexandria, following Pompey, both men competing for power at Rome. Pompey landed to the east of Alexandria and was met by soldiers supporting Ptolemy XIII, who killed him and brought his pickled head to Caesar in Alexandria, thinking that Caesar would be pleased that they'd killed his enemy. Caesar was horrified. He thought this was a most ignoble and awful thing to have happened, and he demanded to see Ptolemy XIII and Cleopatra. Now, Cleopatra of course had a problem because she'd been exiled from the palace, and she had the Sicilian merchant Apollodorus smuggle her into the palace wrapped up in a bedroll, which later became glamorised as a carpet, and very famously the bedroll was unrolled on the floor to reveal a beautiful young woman, and Caesar, who was very susceptible to women, was absolutely enchanted. So that is the first story that we have in which Cleopatra appears as an enchantress, as a seductress. |
Fathom: What are Cleopatra's motivations? |
Walker: She's trying to secure her own position. She's using Caesar's summons to her own personal advantage. At this point the struggle is with the younger brother, who is killed in the battle that follows--very romantically, it's said: crushed by the weight of his golden armour, he drowned in the Nile. The fighting is fierce (a faction in Alexandria preferring Cleopatra's sister Arsinoe), but eventually Caesar triumphs, Cleopatra is established as Queen of Egypt, and very famously she and her Roman protector embark upon their Nile cruise. |
Now, we don't actually know how far up the Nile they sailed. What we do know is that they took the Roman army and the navy with them. So you have to imagine huge numbers of troops. This voyage is a romantic affair, but it's also an enormous display of power. Caesar then left, leaving Cleopatra with three Roman legions, ostensibly to support her against any disloyal factions in the palace, but actually also to show that Rome was pulling the shots in Egypt. |
Caesar went off to other battles and other women, but he had, it seems, left Cleopatra pregnant, because in 47 BC she gave birth to a son, who was nicknamed by the Alexandrians, who were no respecters of royalty and had a great tendency to give their rulers nicknames, Caesarion, or Little Caesar. |
A year later, Cleopatra, who had been obliged by custom to marry a second younger brother, Ptolemy XIV, went to Rome on her own initiative with her brother-king to seek a treaty of friendship with the Roman people. She also took the baby with her and a considerable entourage. They were very cordially received by Caesar, who set them up in one of his villas on the Janiculum hill, so just across the Tiber outside the city of Rome. This was a discreet arrangement, because at this period Caesar was still married to Calpurnia. Everyone knew about his liaison with Cleopatra, but then he'd had endless other liaisons with foreign queens, and this was not regarded as in any way exceptional. What was exceptional was that Caesar had a statue of Cleopatra set up in his new temple of Venus in his forum. We have no idea what this statue looked like. It survived into the third century AD, when it was observed by the historian Dio Cassius, and it seems as though Octavian, in a sense, remarketed this statue, claiming that he had looted it from Alexandria. And it then became remembered as part of Octavian's great triumph over Cleopatra, but in fact was nothing to do with that, it was a sign Caesar's adoration of Cleopatra. And, it would seem, his recognition of her divinity. |
This was the first time ever at Rome that an image of a living mortal had been set in a temple next to a statue of a goddess. And then Caesar went and did the same thing for himself in the temple of Quirinus (the deified Romulus, legendary founder of Rome) in the Roman forum. So Caesar was very clearly moving towards kingship, and the perception was that Cleopatra was pushing him in that direction. There is a story that he was trying to change the laws of Rome that would allow him to make a marriage to Cleopatra, which of course might not have been recognised in Italy itself but would be recognised in Egypt as a marriage. I think it is clear that Cleopatra had decided, by becoming pregnant by Caesar, to use her femininity to change the nature of that dependent relationship between the Egyptians and Rome, to make a Romano-Egyptian dynasty which would guarantee the future of Egypt. |
Fathom: I suppose Cleopatra's talent for mythologising her romantic/political alliances contributed to their power? |
Walker: Cleopatra had an enormous gift for showmanship. We've already seen that with the bedroll story with Caesar, and interestingly, her relationship with Mark Antony began in a very similar way. In 41 BC she was summoned to see Antony at Tarsus, in what is now south-east Turkey. She was again at a disadvantage, she was suspected of having helped Antony's enemies, and Antony also needed Egypt to use as a base for his operations in the east. And so Cleopatra got out of a potential difficulty by famously arriving at Tarsus dressed as Aphrodite, attended by little boys dressed as cupids, she and her entourage sailing in a golden barge with purple sails. She turned the whole thing into a spectacle and Antony was smitten just as Caesar had been. They had an affair; the result was twins. Antony, though, cynically deserted Cleopatra to make a strategic marriage with Octavian's sister, Octavia, by whom, very importantly, he had two daughters, both of them called, significantly, Antonia, the elder and the younger. Having had these two daughters he then deserted Octavia and went back to Cleopatra in 37 BC and they then stayed together as a couple until their suicides seven years later. |
Now, this relationship is in many respects similar to the Caesar relationship, except that Cleopatra is in a much stronger position within Egypt itself. What she's looking for now is to reconstruct as much as she could of the Ptolemaic empire. And this she did--Caesar had already given her Cyprus; Antony gave her coastal Syria and Gaza. What really upset the Romans, apart from Antony's desertion of Octavia, was what happened in 34 BC, when Antony celebrated a triumph over the king of Armenia, and he did this in Alexandria, which was absolutely against the rules: triumphs were sacred events that happened in Rome. In the stadium of Alexandria, a very remarkable ceremony happened in which the territories were given to his children by Cleopatra. Alexander Helios, his twin son, then aged 6, was made Prince of Armenia, and given authority over eastern territories. His younger brother, Ptolemaios, who was aged only 2, was made ruler of Syria and lord of territories to the west as far as the Hellespont, so that's all of Asia Minor. Alexander's twin, Cleopatra Selene, also aged six, was given Crete and Cyrenaica in what is now eastern Libya. Cleopatra and Caesarion, the child by Caesar, remained as rulers of Egypt but with these extra territories, and they were given very grand titles. They were called Queen of Kings and King of Kings. |
This is what set the alarm bells ringing in Rome. At this point, Octavian became very angry indeed and he began to wage a propaganda war against Cleopatra. Now, he couldn't attack Cleopatra's relationship with Caesar, because he was Caesar's heir. (He was Caesar's great nephew.) Octavian was a very cold and calculating person, very ambitious and extremely cruel. We have his story because he won, and he lived 44 years after Cleopatra and Antony had died. During this period, in the late 30s BC, he began to paint Cleopatra as the foreign threat to Rome, and in really very violent language. It's very gender-specific and it's directed against her sexuality and specifically against her relationship with Antony. |
Octavian defeated Antony and Cleopatra and took Egypt, and Caesarion was murdered by his troops. Cleopatra was painted as a whore, a harlot who had seduced Antony and made him un-Roman and unmanly. Manliness was equated with Roman identity, femininity was equated with the corrupt Orient. And this is how this myth of Cleopatra came about. This is fundamental to our understanding of Cleopatra, because Octavian's version is what we have, albeit mediated through Plutarch, who wrote biographies of Antony and indeed of Caesar. Plutarch was a Greek intellectual whose family had been directly affected by this war between Octavian and Cleopatra, but who could see things from a Greek point of view. So his account of what happened is rather more balanced than the other Roman writers and historians who wrote about Antony and Cleopatra. And Plutarch was writing at the very beginning of the second century AD, at a time when Greek culture was much more acceptable to the Romans than it was at the time of Antony and Cleopatra. They were much less nervous by then of Greece. Plutarch ultimately inspired Boccaccio and eventually Shakespeare and Dryden, and that's the story that of course we have today. The Shakespeare play in particular is really very close to Plutarch's account of what happened. |
Fathom: But didn't any of the public rally in Antony's favour? |
Walker: They liked Antony, and this is another point to bear in mind, that because of course we have Octavian's viewpoint: he said that all of Italy, tota Italia, is supporting me,' but actually a lot of people supported Antony. He was much older than Octavian, he was very well known, he was very respected as a soldier and he was a genial, likeable guy. Even the consuls of 31 BC went to fight for Antony and Cleopatra. So this notion that all of Italy is behind Octavian is really not true. The relationship with Antony is absolutely critical to our understanding of Cleopatra because it became the focus of Roman rage against her. What we have lost is the Egyptian perception of Cleopatra, which was much more favourable and recognised her enormous qualities as a queen. She was described by a Bishop John of Nikiou in the seventh century AD--he's a Coptic bishop--as a very wise ruler. Three centuries later we have an Arab historian Al-Masudi writing about Cleopatra as the last of the wise Greeks. So in Egypt there was a different perception, and as I said earlier, we have these sculptures surviving, these statues. We know that she was worshipped, we know that she was long admired. We know that her coins continued to circulate for years after her death. And that is the perception that we've lost and we need to bring that back into focus. |
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