Titans of History

CLEOPATRA

69–30 BC

Fool! Don’t you see now that I could have poisoned you a hundred times had I been able to live without you.

Cleopatra VII was the last pharaoh-queen of Egypt but she was Greek, not Egyptian, and using the prestige of her royal dynasty, her own political acumen and her sexual charisma, she tried to regain her family’s lost empire—and nearly succeeded. She was descended from Ptolemy, one of Alexander the Great’s generals, who conquered his own Mediterranean empire, based on Egypt.

The Ptolemies had fused the Egyptian pantheon of gods with that of the Greeks while adopting the ancient pharaonic practice of sibling marriage. In 51BC, the teenage Cleopatra VII co-inherited the throne with her brother-husband Ptolemy XIII, but the ambitious, cunning queen, at age eighteen, made clear her intention to rule alone. Forced into exile by her brother, she sought the support of Julius Caesar.

In 48 BC, Caesar arrived in Egypt in pursuit of his defeated rival for supremacy in the Roman empire, Pompey, who was killed by the Egyptians. But Caesar, now dictator of Rome, was drawn into the Egyptian civil war by Cleopatra. He was fifty-two, she was twenty-one, the heir of the oldest dynasty of the Western world. She was probably not beautiful—her nose was aquiline, her chin pointed—but she possessed a ruthless aura like Caesar himself and shared a taste for sexual theater and adventurous politics.

Cleopatra smuggled herself into Caesar’s presence rolled up in a laundry bag (not a carpet). As soon as the highly intelligent and seductive queen tumbled out at his feet, Caesar was bewitched. Often in danger of defeat and hampered by meager forces, Caesar managed to rout her enemies and restore Cleopatra. As he fled the lovers’ combined army, Ptolemy XIII drowned in the Nile. Cleopatra’s youngest brother became Ptolemy XIV and her new husband.

Bearing a son by Caesar called Caesarion, the Egyptian queen lived openly as Caesar’s consort in Rome, causing a scandal. It was rumored that Caesar intended to become king of Rome and make Cleopatra his queen. On the Ides of March in 44 BC Caesar was murdered by his political enemies, and Cleopatra fled.

Back in Egypt, Cleopatra set about re-establishing her influence. The swashbuckling general Mark Antony, one of the Triumvirate who now ruled the republic, summoned Cleopatra to his presence. Her breathtaking entrance—reclining, dressed as Venus on a gold-burnished barge—captivated Antony as effectively as she had hooked Caesar. Mark Antony was assigned the imperium of the east, while Caesar’s adopted heir Octavian ruled the west. But Antony soon embraced a Hellenistic eastern vision of kingship, encouraged by Cleopatra, which was very different from the Roman tradition of austere dignity. She was determined to use Roman backing to reestablish the Ptolemaic empire.

Antony treated Cleopatra not as a protected sovereign but as an independent monarch. He gave her vast tracts of Syria, Lebanon and Cyprus, and appointed their children the monarchs of half a dozen countries. Antony saw Cleopatra as the co-founder of his eastern dynasty, and her new Egyptian territories as a key cornerstone to support his Roman empire in his wars against the Parthians. But Rome could not allow the re-emergence of an independent Ptolemaic empire. Pressed by Octavian, half-brother to Antony’s abandoned Roman wife, the Senate in Rome declared war on Egypt.

The lovers who had designated themselves gods were vanquished by Octavian at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC. Antony committed suicide, and Cleopatra, rather than facing the shame of being paraded in chains through Rome, had a venomous snake smuggled to her in a basket of figs. When Octavian’s soldiers came for her, they found the queen laid out on her golden bed, the pinpricks of an asp’s deadly fangs on her arm. Cleopatra had wanted to be the greatest of her dynasty, but she turned out to be its memorable last. She gambled her bid for empire on her relationship with a general who rarely won a battle—and she lost everything.