How the seven Cleopatras set a new model for female power in ancient Egypt

Mae West’s succinct summation of the life of Cleopatra focuses, naturally, on the queen’s infamy – something that Mae West knew all about (her co-star W.C. Fields, incidentally, once described West as ‘a plumber’s idea of Cleopatra’). The colourful set-pieces of Cleopatra’s notorious life — unrolled in a carpet at the feet of Julius Caesar; sailing up the River Cydnus in her enormous love-boat on a mission to seduce Marc Antony; and, of course, her dramatic suicide by fatal snakebite — were stage-managed masterpieces created for lasting effect. ‘What a time she had’ indeed. The queen (like Mae West herself) was a brilliant self-publicist, one of history’s brightest and best. Consequently, those enduring scenes from the life of Cleopatra are burned into our imaginations; we have replayed them over and over again to the point where Cleopatra inhabits an illusory, larger-than-life world which is, at one and the same time, antiquated and contemporary, peculiar yet desirable.

The queen was, of course, already a legend in her lifetime, but there are few historical figures whose long-lasting reception has been as heavily distorted as Cleopatra’s. Her life and deeds were for a long time known to us only from accounts created by her enemies, the Romans. The greatest Roman poets degraded her by castigating her as a ‘harmful virago’ (Virgil) and a ‘mad queen’ (Horace). For her foes, the historical Cleopatra (c. 69–30 bce) was a malicious temptress, treacherous and conspiratorial, foreign, incestuous, daring, lying, two-timing, sumptuous, luxurious, indecent, vain and greedy. She was the regina meretrix, as Propertius called her in a memorable moniker — ‘queen of whores.’ In Roman eyes she was the fatale monstrum, ‘the ultimate monster.’ Many of the slurs have stuck. We want Cleopatra to be a vamp.

An incarnation of the mores and fancies of the age

Her storyline plays out like a great soap opera, a costume drama of epic proportions, and it is little wonder that through many centuries the Egyptian queen has become an incarnation of the mores and fancies of the age. Each and every generation has claimed, shaped, moulded and invented its own — singular — Cleopatra, one suited to the climate of the times. In recent decades alone, Cleopatra has been cast as a victim, a femme fatale, a heroine and a romantic. She has been claimed from history as a gay icon and as a feminist superstar. Cleopatra has appeared as a champion of the #MeToo movement and a powerful cultural idol for Black Lives Matter.

Ever since her asp-induced suicide, Cleopatra has been celebrated in the arts of the West. She appears in countless paintings: in oil on canvas, in watercolours on paper, and in graphic design posters. She has been celebrated on the stage by Shakespeare and Shaw and has had music composed for her by Handel (in his sublime Giulio Cesare), Massenet and Samuel Barber; authors from Chaucer and Rabelais to Gautier and Colleen McCullough have written her into novels, poems and essays, and Cleopatra has been used to advertise everything from soap to cigarettes. Of course, Cleopatra has been a very popular icon with moviemakers, and perhaps it is the cinematic image of the Queen of the Nile which dominates our perception of her.

Cleopatra has been so ornamented with superlatives and so loaded with adjectives reflecting what is seen as her exceptionalism and her dynamism that she almost disappears beneath their weight. She is the ‘most famous queen of Egypt’; she is the ‘most exotically beautiful,’ she is Cleopatra ‘the Great.’ While we yearn for Cleopatra to be the violet-eyed Elizabeth Taylor, shimmering in a variety of low-cut gold-lamé gowns, the historical woman behind the legend was radically different. No great beauty, yet a woman of some physical charm, high intellect and spellbinding charisma, Cleopatra was a consummate politician who put the safety and longevity of her royal house at the forefront of all her policies. She was the only one of the foreign Macedonian Ptolemaic rulers to have learned the Egyptian language (Greek was her mother tongue).

An unnoticed fact in popular culture

A recent discovery of an administrative papyrus which records a tax exemption on the sale of imported wine to a Roman merchant called Publius Canidius, a good friend of Marc Antony, includes a word scribbled in Greek in Cleopatra’s own hand: ginesthoi, she wrote, ‘So be it.’ The papyrus is hardly evidence for her devotion to bureaucratic detail but it does show that the queen was happy to grant lucrative favours to Antony’s friends. Cleopatra’s true talent lay in politics which, more than any previous Ptolemaic ruler, she transformed into global politics. She was very receptive to the model of ancient pharaonic sovereignty and liked to link herself to Egypt’s rich historical heritage — but she also dreamed of the expansion of Hellenism throughout the world, and she used the two most powerful Romans of the day, Julius Caesar and Marc Antony, to further her aspirations.

But Cleopatra — the Liz Taylor Cleopatra whom we think we know so well — was, in reality, the seventh (and final) Egyptian queen to bear the name. ‘Cleopatra’ had become the royal name par excellence amongst the queens of the Ptolemaic dynasty, the last ruling family of Egypt. The fact that there were six other Cleopatras largely goes unnoticed in popular culture and even in scholarship, mainly because the appearance of six other Cleopatras does not suit the standard narrative of the ‘Cleopatra story,’ which is intent on making Cleopatra VII (which is how she should be referred to) into a singularly unique woman, progressively ahead of her time. Much of Cleopatra VII’s success in popular contemporary understanding is built on the premise of her exceptionality and the notion that, in an ancient world of nameless, faceless and silent women, Cleopatra alone dared to take on the patriarchy, represented most strongly by Rome. It is a compelling narrative, but it is not quite true.

The forgotten queens of Egypt

It would be wrong to strip Cleopatra VII of the cultural kudos she has acquired over time (the accolades were hard-won and worthy of respect), but to do justice to the historical queen Cleopatra VII, we must, at the very least, try to place her firmly into the context of her world. Cleopatra VII’s dynamic quest for authority in a male-dominated culture was not exclusively hers; it had been anticipated for a century and a half by a line of ancestral Cleopatras — the mother, grandmothers and great-grandmothers of Cleopatra VII. They had made a success of holding and maintaining regnal power on the throne, which made it possible for Cleopatra VII to sit at the helm of governance and rule Egypt in her own authority, without the need of a male superior.

The fact of the matter is this: for all her extraordinary accomplishments (and they are extraordinary indeed), Cleopatra was the last vestige of a royal dynasty of other outstanding, capable and imposing Cleopatras who wielded absolute power and courted unrivalled authority. Cleopatra VII may well be the best known to us, but she can only be truly comprehended when she is encountered alongside the other women of her family. When taken as a collective, the seven Cleopatras set a new model for female power in antiquity. Together the Cleopatras created for themselves a space in which to exercise supreme power, and by masquerading as compliant wives, daughters and sisters, they dominated the political world of men, for they easily outstripped the Ptolemaic kings in vigour, finesse, ambition, rigour, vision and ability. The final century and a half of three millennia of male rulership in Egypt was a golden age for royal women, a period when queens finally came into their own. This is the story of Cleopatra VII and the other great Cleopatras, the forgotten queens of Egypt.

Excerpted from The Cleopatras: The Forgotten Queens of Egypt by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones (pp. 473, Rs 699), with permission from Hachette India