Cleopatra A Timewatch Guide

In the history of the ancient world,

there's one woman who eclipses all others.

Her name has become a byword for beauty, luxury and excess

but, more than that, her story is entwined with some of the most

powerful men in Western history.

She is, of course, the last pharaoh of Egypt -

Cleopatra.

Since her death some 2,000 years ago,

Cleopatra has been portrayed as everything

from romantic heroine and victim,

to sexual predator and cold-blooded killer.

Over the years, she's been subject to myth, propaganda,

and more than a little fantasy.

Through two millennia of history, art and fiction,

she has been moulded to the fashions and prejudices of the day.

And, over the centuries, Cleopatra has become a blank canvas

on which successive generations have projected

whatever image suited their own time.

During three decades on British screens,

the BBC History series Timewatch

attempted to interrogate Cleopatra's story.

Along the way, Timewatch took up some of the fiercest debates

that surround Cleopatra -

how she looked, her relationship with men,

and even the thorny issue of her race.

The dominant culture does not see Cleopatra as black

and does not accept Cleopatra as black.

I'll guide you through

the ever-shifting sands of Cleopatra's changing image and,

by looking through the BBC archives,

I'll try to piece together how the myths came about,

and uncover who she really was.

Despite living some 2,000 years ago,

Cleopatra still looms large in our public consciousness.

It's easy to see why.

A young girl who inherited one of the most powerful kingdoms

in the ancient world.

A pharaoh queen who took on the might of the Roman Empire,

along the way seducing two of Rome's greatest generals -

Julius Caesar and Mark Antony.

And a woman who took her own life,

with the help of a poisonous snake.

Over the centuries, Cleopatra's been the subject of works

by everyone from the great Roman poets, Renaissance authors,

through Chaucer, Shakespeare, Victorian music hall and TV drama.

Each, in turn, has left us with a different image of who she was.

Most of us know Cleopatra, and her story,

through the prism of popular culture.

It's easy to forget that Cleopatra was a real woman

who lived through some of the most important events in our history.

Events that would help to shape the Western and Middle Eastern worlds.

I think Cleopatra's legacy is as

one of the very few great women

in ancient history.

One of the very few times we can point to someone and say,

"That woman changed the world."

And the fact that

even a few of those characters exist, um...

makes them extremely important to us.

I think we see Cleopatra differently

every time we look at her,

and when we're looking at her.

So I think we will see her very differently

from people, say, 50 years ago.

It's not necessarily the right Cleopatra, though.

We're always tempted, I think, to put our own interpretation

and see her through the lens of our own history.

We use Cleopatra as we want,

and it reflects our own assumptions,

our own desires about the world,

but it tends to be those desires,

how we would have liked the past to be

and how we'd like the present to be,

rather than, necessarily, how either of them actually are, or were.

Understanding how and why her myth came about is so important

because the reality of her world has been literally buried.

Surprisingly, there's little archaeological evidence

for Cleopatra's life remaining in Egypt.

Cleopatra has fascinated people the world over for centuries

and anything relating to her is deemed newsworthy.

Archaeologists working in the waters off the Egyptian port

of Alexandria have found the remains of a royal city that was home

to Cleopatra and her lover Mark Antony.

They say the city has lain hidden for 2,000 years

on the eastern edge of the ancient harbour.

They believe Cleopatra's palace, located on a peninsula nearby,

looked directly across the bay to Antony's home.

The royal city itself was a network of lavish palaces and temples.

This report from our correspondent in Egypt, Jim Muir.

It's an underwater museum.

For the first time, the whole area

has finally been explored and mapped,

using the most sophisticated modern equipment.

Cleopatra lived on this place, she had palaces on this place

and she plays this unbelievable drama between her,

Julius Caesar, Antony and Octavius exactly on this place.

It's certainly true that between

the Mediterranean Sea

and the modern city of Alexandria,

there's very little left of Cleopatra's city.

We have some descriptions in the ancient sources,

but there's not much that we can actually use

to tell what her life, what her daily life was like,

what life with Antony, in Alexandria, was like.

And I think that does mean that we have to rely a lot more

on the written sources and a lot more on

our kind of ideas of what it should have been like.

Even without much tangible evidence to go on,

Cleopatra is one of the most recognisable names

from the ancient world.

But despite the vast power and influence

she wielded in her own lifetime,

the one thing that's stayed with us down the centuries

is the legend of her incredible beauty.

The idea that Cleopatra was beautiful

is now a central part of her myth.

The overriding impression many of us share is of Cleopatra

as a striking beauty, who used her good looks to seduce powerful men.

This image of Cleopatra has been handed down through the generations,

perhaps reaching its climax in the golden age of Hollywood.

In 1934, the legendary film-maker Cecil B DeMille

joined centuries of other artists, poets and authors

in depicting Cleopatra for his own age.

Cleopatra is a magic name.

A symbol of romance and love...

..of power and passion and intrigue.

Cleopatra has been glorified in all the arts.

And by writers from Plutarch, here, to Shakespeare, to Shaw.

Yet...

she still remains a mystery.

Eternal as the sphinx.

On the silver screen, Cleopatra has been portrayed

by some of the most beautiful actresses in history,

perhaps most memorably by Elizabeth Taylor

in the epic 1960s' re-telling of her story.

-VOICEOVER:

-'Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra,

'siren of the Nile.

'Her stunning beauty and notorious intrigue

'turned the tide of civilisation.'

But where does the Hollywood image of Cleopatra come from?

The beauty myth started with the Romans who, to their dismay,

found that two of their greatest leading men

had fallen under her spell.

In the literature that followed, she's almost, without fail,

been cast as hauntingly alluring.

One of the most influential authors who wrote about Cleopatra's life

was the biographer and historian Plutarch,

who lived in the 1st century AD.

Plutarch is, perhaps, the least flattering of all ancient writers,

but even he paints her as a beguiling figure,

as dramatised in this 1983 Timewatch.

Her own beauty, so we are told,

was not of that incomparable kind,

which instantly captivates the beholder.

But the charm of her presence was irresistible

and there was an attraction, in her person and her talk,

together with a peculiar force of character,

which pervaded her every word and action

and which laid all who associated with her under its spell.

But Plutarch wasn't the only ancient author who wrote about Cleopatra,

and it's often the other Roman writers who've held sway.

Plutarch is unusual in stressing that she wasn't that beautiful,

Dio describes her as the most beautiful of all women,

and that's the tradition that gains the ground, really,

by the time of Chaucer, "She was as fair as is the rose in May,"

and all the rest of it.

I think the interest in Cleopatra's beauty

is, really, a by-product of the way

that she's come to be

a figure of the forbidden.

Especially a figure of the forbidden to men

and, so, she represents all that is forbidden,

but is longed for, because it's repressed.

And, so, of course, she becomes more and more beautiful

the more she's forbidden.

The myth of Cleopatra's beauty is now centre stage

in all retellings of her story, both in fiction and academic study.

To penetrate beneath the veneer of the myth,

some have tried to discover her true face,

using what archaeological evidence there is.

But when new evidence does emerge,

the truth doesn't always seem to match up to the legend.

Now, we know her as the icon of beauty from classical times,

a woman whose charms bewitched Caesar

and brought down the Roman Empire,

but a new discovery suggests Cleopatra was no beauty at all.

She, apparently, had bulging eyes, thin lips and a bad haircut.

Robert Hall reports.

Well, for confirmation of Cleopatra's beauty,

one needs look no further than the Bard.

In his play Antony and Cleopatra,

one of Mark Antony's servants says that his master has been,

"Turned from a triple pillar of the world

"into a strumpet's fool, by his love for Cleopatra."

Well, on this new evidence,

Mark Antony may have been a trifle short-sighted.

This 2,000-year-old coin does rather shatter the image.

Depicting both Mark Antony and Cleopatra,

it does the Egyptian queen no favours at all.

It's very difficult to find out when this idea that Cleopatra

was a great beauty came into vogue,

but Cleopatra has a very low brow, a very hook nose

and she looks as if she's forgotten to put her teeth in.

The image of Cleopatra we can glean from coins, like this,

is a distorted one.

Firstly, because the coins themselves

are of limited artistic value.

Frankly, they were minted rather crudely to our modern eyes.

But more importantly, ancient coins, like this,

were more about disseminating a potent iconography,

rather than showing what their subjects actually looked like.

As coins aren't really that useful

in getting to the true image of Cleopatra,

academics have spent decades searching

for other depictions of her on reliefs,

and, more importantly, statues.

There are a number of likely candidates,

but they need to be matched to known characteristics,

as Oxford University's Professor Smith explained for Timewatch.

If I just turn this into profile.

What one's looking at is the arrangement of the hair,

the centre parting, the hair pulled back

in these broad, melon-like bands here

into a large bun at the back.

This corresponds, precisely, to the formation

of the hair on the coins.

One can tell that the head is of a queen,

because she wears a flat diadem,

that's to say a piece of plain, white cloth -

the symbol of Macedonian kingship.

This combination of hairstyle, diadem

and facial composition means this definitely represents Cleopatra.

But is this what she actually looked like?

As to the features of the face, I think one can say very little.

One doesn't really know if they really looked like this.

We, all of us, want to be able to

get hold of Cleopatra and look at her.

I think that's an effect produced by her mystery

and the story of her power.

But, in fact, there's almost no way of legitimating

any particular object and saying

this is really what Cleopatra looked like,

much as we'd like to feel it.

Each era has tended to look at Cleopatra's beauty

and they've always talked about it.

They rarely ignore the fact of her looks,

whereas nobody cares what Antony looked like, or Julius Caesar.

They never ask what colour skin they had, or hair.

Whether or not they were particularly handsome,

but Cleopatra needs to be beautiful.

And she needs to be beautiful in a way that each era understands

so, as concepts of a woman's figure,

the shape of her face,

her colouring, her hair...as those change,

Cleopatra tends to be adapted so she can be blonde,

she can be dark, she can be anything that imagination conjures up,

because her beauty is largely something of our imagination.

Whether she was beautiful or not,

it was the Romans who set the agenda.

And Roman spin about Cleopatra has endured

right up to the modern day.

Above all, it suited them to cast her as so beautiful

she was irresistible, because, that way,

it didn't suggest their great men were weak.

In fact, the Romans went so far as to paint her

as a dangerous sexual predator,

who preyed on the men who fell into her clutches.

Her carefully-planned seduction of Julius Caesar,

the most powerful man in Rome,

has become a key part of her story in all subsequent eras.

From Queen Cleopatra.

May I?

If Cleopatra did set out to seduce Caesar, then she had good reason to.

She had just been deposed from her throne.

If she couldn't win Caesar's support, she was as good as dead.

Observe, Caesar!

A most unusual design.

Well...!

Greetings to Caesar from Egypt.

'She strikes me as a young woman who knew

'exactly how to get what she wanted.'

And just captivates him,

and captivates him in a paternal way.

I really don't think it had anything to do with sex.

I think that came later.

It's a great story - Cleopatra tricking her way

into Caesar's chamber and then using all her feminine charms

to get him into bed.

But when you dig a little deeper,

you start to draw some rather different conclusions.

Cleopatra was just 22 and in a desperate situation,

fearing for her life and extremely vulnerable.

Caesar was 52, and at the height of his power,

a well-known womaniser with previous form in bedding queens.

I know who I think probably did the seducing.

We learn a lot about Cleopatra's sexual activity from the Romans

and they have some explaining to do,

because Caesar should be a hero to them

and, yet, he, quite clearly, has this slightly seedy episode

in his life, when he's consorting with an enemy of Rome.

Although, at the time, she wasn't an enemy of Rome.

The best way for them to explain this is that she seduces him away

from everything that's proper.

He's seduced away from Roman life, from Roman wives,

from Roman motherhood

and into a very Eastern louche way of behaving.

You can put all the blame on Cleopatra -

it makes him the innocent man,

who is tempted away by the woman.

Even if Cleopatra did use her sexuality,

it was a successful strategy.

She regained her throne and saved her own life.

But she was cast as a villain by the Roman people,

who were scandalised by her relationship with Caesar,

which, as Timewatch examined, soon went beyond a mere affair.

In early 47BC, she took Caesar on a cruise up the Nile

to see and be seen.

The Ptolomies had a state barge.

It was rather like a floating Parthenon,

it even had five restaurants in it, three Greek and two Egyptian.

There was a tradition of impressing visiting Romans, senators,

high-up people in the army.

So Cleopatra's invitation to Caesar to go up the Nile with her,

and see the delights of her country, was not entirely unusual.

What was different about it was that, at the end of the trip,

Cleopatra becomes pregnant.

Cleopatra bore Julius Caesar a son, Caesarion,

and, over the next few years,

she made at least one visit to Rome,

where the presence of the Egyptian queen

outraged the republican Roman people.

But what's often been overlooked by historians, down the ages,

is Cleopatra's role as a mother,

which Caesar himself seems to have believed was central to who she was.

One thing that is very remarkable,

and it's difficult to know exactly how much to make of it,

but there is some evidence of Caesar, in Rome,

putting up a statue of Cleopatra in the temple of Venus Genetrix.

Venus is a remarkable person to choose.

That is the Venus who brings forth life,

Venus who is also the mother.

And he had that statue covered in gold.

Now that image holds together the notions

of a fully sexual woman,

who is also a maternal woman,

in a way that the culture we have inherited does not permit.

If we look sideways to the figure of the Virgin Mary, in Christianity,

you can see it very clearly,

because the Virgin Mary is a mother,

she is maternal,

but she is, specifically, not a fully sexual woman.

She keeps apart two notions which are held together

in the name and the body of Cleopatra.

Cleopatra the mother is one of the bits of the story

that tends to get lost soonest.

It's been a little bit more fashionable, lately,

in that people have talked about this sort of sense of her...

Makes her human, you know?

She's a mother, she has these children, she cares for them,

she wants them to succeed her,

even if she can't remain in power in Egypt, so all of these attempts.

But it, on the whole, it tends to get left out,

it doesn't really feature.

And the children, particularly, if they appear at all,

will tend to be just as babies, as infants.

That's fine, that can still be glamorous,

that can still show a human side of her.

The children, as they get a bit older,

present more of a problem, because they're a complication

to the story and, throughout the ages,

people tend to like their stories simple.

The idea of Cleopatra as a mother

has been almost airbrushed from history.

But it would have been of crucial importance at the time,

because this appears to be the image

Julius Caesar himself wanted to cultivate.

But Caesar's branding exercise failed

and, in time, the Roman public would turn against both Cleopatra

and the fusion of motherhood and sexuality she represented.

Roman spin was only too keen to dismiss her

for using her sexuality to get her own way.

By Late Antiquity, she was cast as little more than a prostitute.

These ideas are still with us today,

having travelled via the Roman authors

into Renaissance art and culture,

through prudish, disapproving Victorians,

all the way to our Hollywood image of Cleopatra

as highly sexualised and immoral.

While she may have used her feminine charm to get what she wanted,

there's also evidence that she would use more sinister means

to hold on to power.

The image of Cleopatra the killer queen

has often emerged in the retelling of her story.

In this BBC documentary,

German archaeologists made a link between a tomb in Turkey

and Cleopatra's murdered sister, Arsinoe.

What did you see?

Just describe what the scene was like.

Erm, I was very excited

and I crawled through this small entrance there

-and came in and I saw the bones.

-Right.

The long bones from the legs

and they clearly were partly in the one niche

and partly in the other niche.

I immediately saw it. We now have, at least,

the skeleton of the owner of this grave chamber.

How fantastic, you know, that there was someone in here,

-obviously, of some kind of significance.

-Mm-hm.

-And to, then, immediately wonder...

-Mm-hm.

-..you know, who, why?

-Why was somebody worth this?

-Mm-hm.

What was their story? It's great.

Determined to discover the identity of this mysterious skeleton,

Hilke had little to go on.

It was incomplete.

She decided to search ancient records

for a woman important enough to buried in such an unusual tomb.

In the Roman accounts, she found a reference

to the horrific murder of Princess Arsinoe, Cleopatra's sister.

In the city of Ephesus, at the behest of Cleopatra,

Mark Antony had her sister dragged from the Temple of Artemis

and there, in this holy place...

..the young Arsinoe

was put to death.

If Cassius Dio was right,

and if Hilke had, indeed, stumbled on the bones of Arsinoe,

then this was a huge find.

The first ever remains of anyone from Cleopatra's family.

Proof not only of a shocking murder,

but also the first forensic evidence

that Cleopatra was a ruthless killer.

This recent documentary all too readily casts Cleopatra

as a stereotypical power-crazed murderess,

portraying her motivations and actions

as simple elements in an ancient murder mystery.

But 20 years previously, Timewatch also explored

this image of Cleopatra as ruthless, but in a very different way.

It delved into the context of her world,

where murder was a birthright, not a choice,

and it was very much kill or be killed.

Cleopatra's family was descended from a Macedonian general

who once saved the life of Alexander the Great.

The Ptolemies had ruled Egypt for 250 years,

squandering wealth and empire,

becoming more ruthless, more outrageous.

Mothers murdered sons, uncles raped nieces,

grandfathers married granddaughters.

Cleopatra comes from a long line

of incestuous marriages,

which, I think, are partly to do with tradition,

partly to do with keeping it in the family,

and, above all, I think the fact that the women

are more and more demanding of their share in power.

And one automatic way to gain that is not only to be

the sister of the ruling king, but to be his wife, as well.

If you can get both functions,

then you're really doing very well indeed.

And that may well be a factor in the way the Ptolemaic women

get more and more powerful.

To be a Ptolemy was to live in fear

and the people you feared most

were your own family.

You couldn't trust your brothers,

your sisters, your parents.

You couldn't trust your own children,

once they were old enough to be independent.

And Cleopatra lived in that environment.

The only way to survive was to make sure

that no-one else ever had the capacity to kill you.

And, in the main, the only way to do that permanently was to kill them.

So, to some extent, she's a creature of her time,

she was in this environment, she couldn't have been anything else.

But, it is worth reminding ourselves,

we shouldn't view this in too romantic a haze, you know.

However much we feel about her, however much we might be sympathetic

to this strong, independent-minded woman in a world dominated by men,

Cleopatra couldn't afford to be nice.

I think that you've got to appreciate the realities

of politics, in her world.

And it's naive to wring your hands

over what happened at that time.

And I would suggest, you know, people should look sideways

to House of Cards.

You know, it's not any better.

Judged by our modern moral code,

Cleopatra certainly has blood on her hands.

But this was an age where killing your rivals

was par for the course, even if they were your own relatives.

In Cleopatra's world, if you wanted to survive,

you did what you had to do, even if that meant killing your own sister.

Over the centuries, Cleopatra has been cast as a killer,

a seductress and, of course, a beauty,

but one of the most enduring images of her

is as a tragically doomed lover.

And, for this image,

we have one rather well-known playwright to thank.

Our separation so abides and flies

That thou, residing here, goes yet with me.

William Shakespeare has a lot to answer for

when it comes to how we view Cleopatra.

His play, Antony and Cleopatra, has almost come to define

the persona and the story we most closely associate with her today.

He transformed her image from the whoring foreigner

of the Romans to the tragic romantic heroine of the English Renaissance,

seen through the lens of her doomed love affair with Mark Antony.

However, the reality of their relationship is rather different

and Cleopatra was anything but a star-crossed lover.

After Caesar's murder, Cleopatra needed a new protector.

So she turned to Caesar's protege,

Mark Antony, who now ruled the eastern half of the Roman world.

They met at Tarsus, in modern day Turkey.

And we'll go to Tarsus...

..in a barge,

the most beautiful ever seen.

'Cleopatra's famous arrival at Tarsus, in a golden barge,

'was designed to appeal to Antony's love of luxury.'

Cleopatra knew exactly what she was doing

and what Antony could deliver for her.

I'm sure that, when they meet at Tarsus in 41,

both have very real political agendas.

Both really need to use the other

for their own political positions,

they need to strengthen their own political positions

in different ways.

And I've no doubts at all that Cleopatra comes out

a lot stronger on the throne, even, than she was before.

'Wowed by the spectacle of Tarsus, and Cleopatra's immense wealth,

'Mark Antony fell into bed with her

'and their relationship is cemented

'when she bears Antony several children.'

They were her ticket.

They were Egypt's ticket...

out of patronage,

out of dependence,

out of obligation.

And, so, she was willing to sacrifice,

if you consider it a sacrifice,

and I don't think she did, this was a tool - her body was a tool.

You want a son? I'll give you a son.

You want twins?

I'll give you twins.

Give me Egypt.

We like to think of Cleopatra very much as someone

who is passionate,

and who is ruled by her heart.

And it's something that

the Romans also promoted.

They weren't particularly keen on portraying her

as an astute, sensible politician.

They wanted to show her as a weak woman

who was falling into all the feminine traps

of not thinking logically, being ruled by her heart.

We like that, too. We still find it difficult to accept powerful women

who behave in a logical way.

With Antony and Cleopatra,

the romance always tends to loom large.

After all, there aren't many romances

between two people who were important political leaders.

And it's the politics that tends to suffer, as a result,

because when you're looking at the human drama,

you're looking at the passion, you're looking at their suicides,

so close to each other after they've suffered defeat,

then it's all about that, but you forget the context of it all.

Cleopatra depended, throughout her life, on having Roman backing.

She needed to make sure

that she stayed alive, which meant staying queen.

The only way to do that was to get the Romans to back you.

Egypt was not meaningfully independent at this point,

it was very much part of Rome's sphere of influence.

The problem is the Romans keep having civil wars,

so you never know which lot of Romans

you've got to get to support you.

Seemingly under her spell,

Mark Antony openly pushed Cleopatra's agenda.

The historian Plutarch summed up

how the Romans now viewed their relationship.

Such being Antony's nature, the love for Cleopatra

that now entered his life

came as the final and crowning mischief that could befall him.

It excited, to the point of madness,

many passions, that had, hitherto, lain concealed,

and stifled and corrupted all those qualities in him

that were still capable of resisting temptation.

Now this coin, minted at Antioch, exemplifies Roman fears.

It shows, on one side, Antony

and, on the other, Cleopatra.

In two successive settlements, Antony redrew the map of the East.

In 37BC, he gave to Cleopatra

what had once comprised the Ptolemaic Empire -

the richest cities of the Middle East.

Three years later, in a triumphal ceremony in Alexandria,

he recognised, as his own, the children Cleopatra had borne by him.

He gave their daughter, named Cleopatra the Moon, aged six,

Libya and Crete.

Her twin, Alexander the Sun, was made ruler of Media.

Their other son, Ptolemy Philadelphus,

was made king of Asia Minor.

Cleopatra had reached the zenith of her power.

She'd saved Egypt and her children would now rule

most of the Eastern Mediterranean.

Now, she hadn't done all this

just by being the romantic heroine of Shakespeare,

or the sexy temptress the Romans liked to write her off as.

Instead, the evidence suggests that she was a hard-headed

and canny politician who knew how to get what she wanted.

But this isn't the enduring image we're left with,

because the romantic fantasy is, quite simply,

an easier story to sell.

For nearly two millennia,

mostly male authors have defined Cleopatra,

almost exclusively, through her relationships with powerful men,

rather than judging her on her own merit.

What's often missed in the retelling of Cleopatra's story

is her real skill as a leader and ruler.

Her father had squandered a fortune bribing Rome not to invade,

so, when she came to the throne,

Cleopatra found her country almost bankrupt.

But she'd been raised to rule.

She had a very clear understanding of how to govern her country

and how to get her economy back on track.

In fact, she knew her country intimately

and knew how to make Egypt work to her advantage.

The key was to align herself with the temples,

which were a powerhouse of the economy.

I think it's very significant

that within, perhaps, a month of coming to the throne

Cleopatra has gone south,

she's sailed right up to Armant.

She's to be seen as she goes up there, in her royal barge.

You can imagine people coming to the banks and watching as she went by,

and she ends up for what's a very important religious ceremony

in which she herself takes part.

From the temples comes wealth, so Cleopatra realises

that keeping in with Egyptian religion

is not simply a marvellous theatrical event,

it is the key to getting the economy moving again.

So she makes donations to temples,

she takes an interest in the things that go on there

and, above all, she cultivates them,

almost literally, as a source of wealth and a source of support.

But Cleopatra knew that the prosperity of the temples,

and of Egypt, depended on the River Nile.

If it came high enough, then the harvest was secure.

CHANTING

But several times in Cleopatra's reign, the Nile failed to flood.

With starvation and unrest looming,

she issued a series of royal decrees

giving the peasants protection while getting the harvest in,

alleviating their tax burden,

making sure that the corn supply to Alexandria was secure.

Without her country, she couldn't survive,

but I think she identifies with that country enough

to realise that it's not a matter of just using the country,

that the country is her - that she's intimately bound up with Egypt

and the future of Egypt, vis-a-vis Rome,

which is a very major problem,

depends on the unity of the queen and country together.

Economic know-how, strategic thinking and savvy management

aren't necessarily the attributes we'd associate with Cleopatra.

We certainly don't inherit a picture of her as a competent ruler

from the modern stereotypes or the classical accounts,

but perhaps we should.

Recent biographies and histories are starting to acknowledge

the successful aspects of her rule.

Not only was Cleopatra a great administrator,

she was also adept at her own brand management,

especially in how she projected her image to her subjects.

At Dendera, a huge temple complex in the south of Egypt,

Cleopatra carried on building the great temple started by her father.

Here she mapped the future of her dynasty through her son, Caesarion.

By studying the iconography at Dendera,

modern historians have discovered that Cleopatra was, in fact,

a brilliant propagandist, especially when it came to showing

how ordinary Egyptians should see her.

But famous as this wall is,

its hieroglyphs have never been translated.

John Ray has studied them for Timewatch

and believes their significance goes

beyond that of conventional temple inscriptions.

Egyptian hieroglyphs were about ideas,

rather like crossword puzzle clues, that are designed

to make you think about them - you have to tease out their meaning.

Cleopatra's name appears high up,

but buried further down the wall is a string of epithets

describing her qualities.

Great of strength.

Might, power.

She wants to be seen as somebody who is a world power.

As a performer on the stage in her own right.

There she is, great of might.

And here, behind the two goddesses,

we have a quite simple and, rather pleasant, title -

good of counsel. Good of policy.

She wants to show herself as a wise ruler,

as a capable ruler, as somebody whose rule over Egypt

is good for the Egyptians themselves.

The scenes on Egyptian temple walls are highly conventional.

The monarch makes offerings, for the people, to the deities.

But John Ray has discovered a deliberate telling irony

in Cleopatra's choice of goddess.

The relief suggest that Cleopatra's position is a mirror image

of that of the goddess Isis, and therefore deserves the same respect.

Now Isis is an interesting lady.

She accompanies Osiris everywhere,

until Osiris is put to death by his enemies.

So, out of the union of Isis and the dead god, Osiris,

came the new king.

We're beginning, I think, to see

the reason for some of the figures on this wall.

Cleopatra stands at the end, behind her son, Caesarion,

and she's like the goddess Isis

that she's standing and facing on this wall - she's a single mother.

There is a coded message here

saying that the queen and the gods are in the same situation.

Cleopatra, I think, is playing a very big game,

she is dynastic to her fingertips.

She, obviously, had a feeling of destiny that she wanted to restore

the country back to being the centre point of a Mediterranean empire.

In the Western tradition, her skill and intelligence is often missing

from her story, or simply seen as another part of her deviousness.

However, that's not how all cultures see this Egyptian queen.

In the Islamic world, which was largely free of Roman propaganda

about Cleopatra, she's seen in a very different light.

Islamic authors hail her as a "virtuous scholar"

and focus on her positive traits -

her skill as an administrator, her comfort discussing science

with some of the great thinkers of the day

and as a polymath,

who could master everything, from mathematics to philosophy.

The Islamic historian Al-Masudi, who lived in the 10th century,

wrote a positive account of her intellectual ability

and described Cleopatra as,

"A sage, a philosopher,

"who elevated the ranks of scholars and enjoyed their company."

She wrote books on medicine, charms and cosmetics,

in addition to many other books ascribed to her,

which are known to those who practise medicine.

It's surprising to realise how,

in a culture different and separate from our own,

the Cleopatra we all think we know

is someone altogether different.

In the Eastern world, Cleopatra is not only acknowledged

as an intellectual, but also as having a clear vision

for her country and a burning desire to make it

a world power once again.

Well, she's certainly... I mean, Cleopatra's seen

in a much more positive light,

in the medieval Arabic sources.

She's seen as a very great ruler,

a very clever woman,

a great architect, scientist.

She's supposed to have been a doctor, of some kind,

conducted medical experiments, and so on.

And there are a lot of reasons for that.

There's a difference in a culture that can appreciate a woman ruler

in that way.

But I think it's also interesting

that these sources are often from Egypt itself

and, so, in a sense, she's a national heroine by that stage.

In the 1920s, some Arabs even embraced Cleopatra

as an icon of their nationalist cause.

The Egyptian playwright Ahmad Shawqi

painted the queen as a nationalist heroine,

who dedicated her life to defending her country

from the evils of Roman imperialism.

When he wrote his play, The Death of Cleopatra,

Egypt was under British colonial rule,

so it made perfect sense to adopt Cleopatra

who also had resisted Western imperialism.

Just as Cleopatra became an icon for Arab nationalists in the 1920s,

later in the 20th century, she also became the subject

of a fierce debate about racial identity.

When Timewatch explored Cleopatra's life in the 1990s,

it did so amidst the backdrop of an academic tussle

over the mystery of her race.

As a child, Shelley Haley was told by her grandmother

that Cleopatra was black.

Shelley remembered this years later.

I was teaching at Howard University,

which is a historically black college,

and I was teaching Women in the Ancient World,

and we were talking about Cleopatra.

And the students in the class kept asking me,

"Was she black? Was she black? Was she black?"

And I kept saying, "No, no, no.

"She was Greek, she was Greek, she was Greek."

And I can remember this, as if it was yesterday...thinking,

"OK. Today in class, I'm bringing in The Cambridge Ancient History,

"so the students could see that there's a direct line

"from Ptolemy to Cleopatra VII."

I went over to the library and I got volume 9

of The Cambridge Ancient History

and I brought it into class and I opened it up

and I unfolded the genealogy.

And I said, "There! See?"

And what I saw, where my finger landed,

was on the question mark...

for her grandmother.

And it was like...

it was like stepping outside of yourself...

..and realising...

"Oh, my goodness. Maybe...

"..my grandmother was right."

If Cleopatra's black,

then it opens up a whole new avenue

to interpret her.

And we can use the methodologies of feminist thought

to project backwards

and see if we can't start to untangle the complexity

that Cleopatra was.

The dominant culture does not see Cleopatra as black

and doesn't accept Cleopatra as black.

Why isn't there a countercharge against these people

that's taking it from the context of Roman and Greek, or whatever?

-That's a very good question.

-Why...

Why don't they have the burden of proof to prove that she was white?

-Cos they don't know either.

-Right.

Well, in the '80s and '90s...

..in the face of the bold assertions

of Cleopatra's European origins...

African-Americans were, of course, outraged

and felt they had to step up to the plate about this.

And, also, there was a development, a boom in African-American studies,

which meant there was a much more substantial intellectual backing

for arguing the case.

I mean, a lot of nonsense has been

written and spoken, on both sides.

But you can see what's at stake - the identity.

It's a question of identity - the identity of the classicists

who want to uphold the superiority

of what they are teaching and discussing

and the identity of the African-Americans who want to uph...

who are desperately, and appropriately,

trying to regain the dignity they've been robbed of.

If Cleopatra had been black,

I find it amazing that the Romans,

who found everything else to throw against her that they could,

never bothered to mention the fact.

It's true that we don't know, for sure, who her mother was.

It's true that we don't know, for sure, who her father's mother was.

And there was a tradition that her father's mother was...

was a concubine, rather than the queen.

That, in itself, is disputable,

it's very hard to be sure about that.

But, in all the propaganda thrown around,

wouldn't somebody have said that she had a slightly dusky appearance?

We don't know if Cleopatra was black,

but was colour an issue then?

In a contemporary painting of a ceremony to Isis,

the goddess with whom Cleopatra identified,

black priests and white serve as equals.

It seems quite likely that they wouldn't have been very interested,

themselves, in what "race" Cleopatra was.

I put it in inverted commas.

You can argue that her family was Macedonian,

but, then, you leave out of account

the fact that there were all those queens and all those children.

Now, even in perfectly ordinary families nowadays,

with rather modest access to...

to sexual pleasure...

..it can be quite difficult to know who the fathers of children are.

You know, the American expression,

"Mama's baby, Papa's maybe."

That, you know, paternity is uncertain.

In 2009, the discovery of this skeleton,

believed to be Arsinoe, Cleopatra's sister,

once again raised the issue of her race.

Until recently, Cleopatra's dynasty

was thought to be Greek, European, Caucasian.

But some scholars now believe Cleopatra and her siblings

had African blood.

Could the answer be in this skull?

The distance from the forehead to the back of the skull is long,

in relation to the overall height of the cranium,

and that's something that you see quite frequently

in certain populations, one of which is ancient Egyptians.

Another would be... black African groups

will also show that characteristic.

This one certainly looks more white European,

but it has got this long head shape.

It could suggest a mixture of ancestry.

Our revelation backs up the controversial theory

that the princess, and therefore her sister Cleopatra,

also had African blood.

The issue of Cleopatra's race is a fascinating one,

and, in the Western world, especially the US,

it's one that's laden with symbolism

set against a backdrop of colonialism and slavery.

It is one of those striking things that tells us

far more about our own preoccupations

when we start wondering

about whether or not Cleopatra was black, was brown,

was dark-skinned, light-skinned,

what colour hair she had.

It's very interesting that, in the ancient world,

nobody seems concerned with that at all.

And those aspects of race are not big -

the Greeks and the Romans don't talk about them, really.

They have all sorts of other prejudices about peoples

and their societies, but it's not the physical aspect.

But we have this sense that it's important...

But it is striking that people will argue

about Cleopatra's ethnicity, the shape of her face, her colouring

and reconstructions of her tend to vary,

depending on the preoccupations and the prejudices

of the person doing it at the time.

Erm...

the truth is we don't know.

The fact that we still argue about her beauty,

race or sexuality is a testament to her enduring appeal.

But a key part of her legend is down to the fact

that she took her own life in such a dramatic and tragic style.

In fact, her legendary suicide

became almost inevitable as events played out.

In 31BC, Cleopatra and Mark Antony went to war

with the Western half of the Roman Empire under Octavian.

Their forces met in a decisive naval battle at Actium in Greece.

Cleopatra and Mark Antony lost.

Antony was doomed, so he took his own life.

Cleopatra was now alone and vulnerable.

She, too, knew her own end was near.

Cleopatra realised...

..that her vision for Egypt

was dead.

It was dead.

Egypt is the centre. That's...

that is her whole life.

Other things can happen around the perimeter,

but Egypt's always at the centre.

Cleopatra spent her life

fighting the Romans.

Octavian's now won.

Antony's dead.

What choice is there left to her?

She could be taken alive, taken to Rome.

Paraded, in triumph, for all the Romans to see -

this Eastern queen there...

captive.

She's not prepared to let that happen.

And the death that she chooses

is a death which makes a very strong statement.

The royal snake of Egypt was the cobra, or asp,

whose bite conferred eternal life.

This would be an Egyptian death.

Plutarch wrote that she summoned a snake expert

who smuggled one past her guards, in a basket of figs.

His equivalent today is Nasr Tolba.

HE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE

Cleopatra lived and died in Alexandria,

which is the habitat of the most vicious cobra of all -

the coastal cobra.

Its fangs are very sharp and it can bite up to ten people,

killing them easily and quickly.

HE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE

I definitely would have given her

the same kind of cobra, as opposed to other types of poison

taken via the mouth to the gut.

The cobra's venom goes straight into the bloodstream

and, so, is far more effective.

For that reason, if I was with that great woman,

and wanted to do her a favour, I would have given her a cobra,

as a means of easy, quick and painless death.

And dying in this way,

she's achieving immortality the Egyptian way.

So it's not just the Romans that she's cheating,

she's almost cheating death itself.

We don't really know what happened when Cleopatra died.

She goes into a room

and she dies in it.

It's generally accepted that she killed herself

and this is what the Romans think, although they don't know how.

The story of the snake, kind of, develops later

and, then, it becomes two snakes.

It's also been suggested that she might have been killed,

that it was convenient for Octavian to get rid of her

rather than having an enemy hanging round,

and there's a lot of sense in that one, too.

Personally, I think she probably did commit suicide

because she had a very Macedonian-Greek upbringing

and, to the Greeks, suicide is a very viable option,

it's not an opting out, it's a positive action.

And I think that's what she did.

But, again, like so much about Cleopatra,

we probably will never know.

Part of Cleopatra's mystique does rely

on the fact that she killed herself,

she took her own life,

and, of course, that meant she died relatively young -

she's only in her late 30s.

So, like all great beauties, all romantic figures,

if people obsess about their appearance,

it's easier if they die before they get too old.

And Cleopatra the grandmother

somehow doesn't fit with the modern stereotype.

When Rome learned it had won the wealth of Egypt,

interest rates fell from 12% to 4%.

Octavian continued building at Dendera,

adding a shrine to Isis opposite the reliefs of Cleopatra.

He allowed her three remaining children to live in peace.

In Rome, her goldclad statue as Venus stood for 300 years.

Octavian now called himself Augustus,

transporting a huge obelisk to Rome

telling the people he had conquered Egypt on their behalf.

But he couldn't forget Cleopatra and he made sure we never will.

Augustus founded his reign on her defeat in a very specific way

that, when he was about to have a month named in his honour,

instead of choosing the month of September,

which would have been normal -

the ninth month, because that was month he was born in -

he chose to have the eighth month,

which was the month in which Cleopatra committed suicide,

to have that month named after him.

And we're still living in that moment,

in the sense that the eighth month we call August,

so we're still celebrating the death of Cleopatra every year.

Cleopatra becomes a dream. Cleopatra becomes an alternative.

And she's, obviously, especially appealing

for anyone who decides they don't really like what actually happened.

So you get all sorts of claims

about how wonderful the world would have been

if Antony and Cleopatra had only won.

No real basis for them. A, because, obviously, they lost,

but, also, she didn't champion any particular causes,

she wasn't particularly popular with her own people,

because she couldn't afford to be,

she didn't have time to waste on that sort of thing.

She didn't really make any major contributions

to Greco-Roman culture in a wider sense,

apart from being spectacular

and dying in this way.

So our legacy is very much of the fame

and the romance and the drama.

There's very little that's concrete about her,

because, in the end, she lost.

In a sense, she's left us

with a puzzle,

because our scepticism,

as we go into the evidence for what we've been told about her,

draws us on to unpicking what is propaganda

and to seeking more deeply

into what is actually evidence.

I think you could see Cleopatra as a blank canvas

that people have projected

their own images onto,

but the truth is there's so much evidence from the Roman sources,

so many opinions about her, so much information about her,

that I think what we're actually tempted to do

is to project Roman views onto that canvas she left us.

We might never know the real Cleopatra.

Two millennia of myth, propaganda and dramatic licence

may well have buried the truth forever.

But, over time, even that fictional character -

who she is, what she represents, has changed.

To the Romans, an evil Eastern harlot, crushed by moral Rome.

To the Islamic world, an enlightened ruler and a scholar.

But for audiences watching everything from Shakespeare

to Hollywood blockbusters,

one image has tended to hold sway -

the archetypal femme fatale, beautiful and sexy,

but with a romantic, tragic twist.

Everyone has a different image of Cleopatra in their mind's eye.

A strong woman of colour, a star-crossed lover,

a scheming seductress, or a ravishing beauty.

But it's important to remember that, underneath these superficial labels,

Cleopatra was a real woman.

A woman who ruled one of the greatest civilisations

in the ancient world.

A woman who died trying to save her kingdom from Roman domination.

And the fact that it was the writings of her Roman enemies

that guaranteed her fame is, perhaps, the ultimate testament to

just how remarkable a woman she really was.