Dan Snow's History Hit - Cleopatra

Episode Date: June 26, 2022

Cleopatra VII was part of a dynasty of Macedonian rulers founded by Ptolemy, who served as general under Alexander the Great during his conquest of Egypt in 332 B.C. Cleopatra served as the dominant ruler in all three of her co-regencies and was a shrewd strategist and an ingenious negotiator. Though her life spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world.Stacy Schiff is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Cleopatra: A Life. Stacy joins Dan on the podcast to reconstruct Cleopatra’s life. From ascension to the throne, her relationships with Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony, to her eventual death, Stacy and Dan chart the life of a ruler who controlled the largest territory of any woman.Produced by Hannah WardMixed and Mastered by Dougal PatmoreIf you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi buddy, welcome to Dan Snow's History here. Talking about Cleopatra today, technically Cleopatra VII. She was the last ruler of an independent Egypt. From the death of Cleopatra, its annexation by the Roman Empire, right up until the modern day, Egypt was always subsumed in one large empire or another. She ruled from 51 BC to 30. She's famous for being very beautiful. We'll find out if that's true.

And for her love affairs with the Roman warlords, Julius Caesar and his protege, Mark Antony. She died at age 39. It's one of the most talked about and fascinating lives of the ancient world. I'm very grateful to Stacey Schiff. She's coming on to talk about it. She won a Pulitzer Prize for her book on Cleopatra. It was the number one bestseller in the US. So she is the person to talk to about Cleopatra, the myths and the reality. If you're interested

in Ptolemaic Egypt, which I expect you are, you've got to hear of the history at TV because we've got documentaries coming thick and fast. Tristan Hughes, the Tristorian, our in-house ancient history legend, has been out in Egypt making documentaries about the Ptolemies, about Alexander the Great and the Greek conquest and the Macedonian conquest of Egypt. So you better go and check those out. If you follow the link in the notes of this podcast, as if by magic, you'll get taken straight to history at TV. It's the world's best history channel. If you click on that link, you'll get two weeks free if you start today. But in the meantime, folks, here's Stacey Schiff. Enjoy. Stacey, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. I'm delighted to join you. First amazing fact about Cleopatra is that she lives closer to today

than to the people who built the pyramids, right? I mean, that just gives you a sense of Egyptian history. It's really hard to get one's arms around the breadth of Egyptian history. I mean, she's 1300 years removed from Nefertiti, with whom I think we confuse her occasionally. So yes, there was an ancient world, even in the ancient world, is the best way to think about it. Since we're on that subject, how did she think about the ancient world?

I mean, did she think it was one long, continuous entity and she was the most recent incarnation of it? Or was it as distant as we regard her to us today? It's very hard to get a sense of anything, by the way, in terms of what's going on in Cleopatra's mind. She's connected to that history, both legitimately and illegitimately, because she doesn't, in fact, descend from the previous pharaohs. But she certainly has a grasp of the traditions and the customs and the affections of her subjects. She's the first ruler of Egypt to learn Egyptian, which tells you a very great deal. First of the Ptolemies to learn Egyptian. So it tells you something about her connection to the people and to the country. Right. Okay. Because this gets down to it, because it may surprise listeners to hear that Cleopatra was part of Ptolemy. Who were what, basically Greek?

Yes. I mean, they're interlopers, actually. I mean, they're a general who is a general under Alexander the Great decides quite wisely that he should annex Egypt. And so shortly after the death of Alexander the Great, he does so and establishes a dynasty, the Ptolemies, who will rule Egypt for the next several hundred years from whom Cleopatra descends. And they are, by and large, Greek aristocrats. So she's Macedonian Greek on every side of the family. And of course, we know that in particular because they practice sibling marriage. So she's thoroughly Macedonian Greek because there's no one really else allowed into the bloodline. Crikey. And she was born sort of 69-ish BC?

That's right. What do we know about her? What do we know about her character? Well, a lot about the character comes out in the way she will maneuver over the next several decades. She doesn't realize it, but when we look at her life, we realize that she is born in the twilight of Egypt's sovereignty. This is the end, basically, of a dynasty. And she is fighting tooth and claw against Roman rule. The Romans at this point are gobbling up the Mediterranean world. Her father had done his best to make some peace with the Romans, and she's basically fending them off. And we can talk about

the methods she uses. But essentially, she is born at sort of the end of the road and through all kinds of shrewdness and cunning manages to put off defeat for the next 22 years. And there are few but rather notable examples of female pharaohs of Egypt before. Was this a culture that was perhaps slightly more friendly to women ruling than other cultures? Probably the culture that embraced female power more tightly than any until our own day and possibly even more than our own day. Cleopatra would have had numerous examples of female sovereigns, both in Egypt's past and out of many Asian countries, many countries on the horizon. Women in Egypt had rights that we find hard to imagine today. They could make their own marriages. They could own their own businesses.

They had all sorts of rights upon divorce. They could sue in courts of law. So it was a tremendously egalitarian country in that respect. You mentioned she learned Egyptian. What was her relationship like with her subjects, do we think? It's a twofold question. She learns Egyptian and in fact speaks nine languages. She's immensely well educated. And what she would have had in terms of education would have been the same education as Caesar or Mark Antony or any well-born man from Athens or from Rome, she would have had the education of the aristocrats of the day. She would have read the same texts and been able to speak and declaim with the same power. At the same time, she's more beloved by the people of Egypt than by

the aristocrats of Alexandria. And that's another example of her shrewdness. She rules over a country that is bicultural in many ways. You have this extremely sophisticated Alexandrian elite in the city, and then you have the Egyptian rural dwellers, largely farmers, over whom she rules and who are immensely loyal to Cleopatra, who will ultimately offer to rise up in her defense at the end of her life. The myth that she was particularly physically alluring or beautiful, is this actually based on anything? It's not based on the ancient sources. She definitely becomes a siren and a vixen very quickly after her death. No ancient chronicler speaks of her beauty. There were many beautiful women in the ancient world and many women on whom any number of chroniclers discourse about their beauty, Cleopatra was not one. Plutarch very specifically says that the attraction was in her presence, which was his word, not mine, bewitching. She spoke nine languages, but she spoke more

languages of seduction that she had any number of kinds of flattery at her disposal. But he makes clear that it was not her physical presence that was really the main attraction. And if you look at the portraits on coins, which are the best portraits we have, she's very Semitic looking. She's a hooked nose and very strong cheekbones and kind of sunken eyes. She's by no means what we would today call a classical beauty. So she ends up marrying her brother? She marries her brother on the death of her father, which was the tradition among the Ptolemies. They had practiced sibling marriage of the, I think, 15 previous Ptolemaic marriages, 10 had been between full siblings. So that when the father

dies, this is 51 BC, Cleopatra, who's then 18, is married, at least officially, to her 10-year-old brother. And very quickly thereupon, the two of them are embroiled in a civil war, one against the other. Okay. I imagine that's pretty complicated. Who wins? Ultimately, thanks to Julius Caesar, Cleopatra wins. The brother will be a casualty of that war. I mean, it's a very close call for Caesar who arrives. Essentially, there's an intersection of civil wars at this point. Caesar chases Pompey to the shores of Egypt. Pompey is killed by Cleopatra's brother and his advisors. Cleopatra at this point has been exiled to the desert by her brother's troops. She comes

back at the summons of Julius Caesar to Alexandria. And she and Caesar at this point, in whatever way one likes to imagine it, essentially become allies. And Caesar will find himself besieged in Cleopatra's palace with Cleopatra fighting the first guerrilla war of his career against the Alexandrians. And he will win that war, which is the end of that brother of Cleopatra's. There's a remaining brother. It's a very complicated family. Yeah. So Caesar and Cleopatra at this point, do they become lovers? Evidently so because a child is born nine months later. Yes, they have a child shortly after the Alexandrian War. This is something that Caesar does not mention in his memoirs.

And does Caesar then put her on the throne of Egypt, or is this other spare brother a threat to her rule? Caesar does something which is quite candid. He puts her on the throne, but knowing that the country prefers to see a couple ruling, he puts her on the throne with her surviving brother, at least briefly. And he will leave Egypt in the hands of Cleopatra and her younger brother. And it's clear there which of the two has the upper hand. because in many ways it could have made more sense to put some kind of Roman authority in charge at that point. And that Caesar decides to put Cleopatra in charge is quite telling. We should say the baby that was born, known as Caesarian, it's an urban myth that he was born by Caesarian, or that's where we get the word? There's nothing in the record that connects. We know actually very little about the birth of Caesarian. We know when he was born, and we know that he looked a great deal like Caesar. That's pretty

much the sum of our knowledge, and that he's born at an immensely opportune time for Cleopatra's sake. So Cleopatra is in an unequal partnership with her yet much younger brother on the throne of Egypt. And I guess the triumph is that she's managed to stop the direct imposition of Roman rule on Egypt. That's right. And the fact that she's able to ingratiate herself with the new master of the Roman world is key, as is having given birth to a child who is part Ptolemy and part Roman, which is a first of its kind and something that knits together the two countries. The Julian blood and the Ptolemy blood, that's pretty exciting stuff potentially for an heir.

But she's then in Rome, isn't she, remarkably? It's kind of inexplicable, isn't it, in retrospect? She travels to Rome with Caesarian in tow and with great pageantry, obviously, which was the way she traveled, at a time when she must have done so with Caesar's invitation, but at a time when the optics were not

good for him to be consorting in Rome with a foreign queen. We should have mentioned, obviously, Caesar's married at this point. So his wife is living on one side of town, Cleopatra with some pageantry on the other, and toting with her a child who, by all accounts, as everyone knows, is Caesar's. And this is at a moment when, of course, Caesar is under fire for comporting himself as if he is divine in some way. And sort of this fabulously wealthy Eastern potentate turning up to be his partner is not ideal. I think that even if Cleopatra kept a low profile in Rome, and this is supposition on my part, I think it was rather difficult for someone like Cleopatra ever at any point in her life to maintain a low profile. Is she in Rome when Julius Caesar is assassinated?

She is indeed. She is indeed. And she makes a very speedy retreat. She's there for either two years or the better part of two years. She's there for quite a long time. It's unclear whether it's one stay or it's two stays because the winds would have had to have been in her favor to return to Alexandria. She's there when he's murdered. She beats a very quick retreat. Her life is obviously in danger because the two of them have been allied. She doesn't know what's going to happen. Her world has been upended. We have only one account, actually, of her departure, which is Cicero's account. And he's thrilled to see the last of her. He's never taken to her. He's never taken to any Ptolemies, really. But he's just helpless with delight at the fact that she's finally leaving Rome, where he implies that she's caused

such trouble. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about Cleopatra. More coming up. Did you know that beans were once considered to be an aphrodisiac? Or that cornflakes were invented to have precisely the opposite effect? Join me, Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex, scandal and society, a new podcast from History Hit, where I, Kate Lister, ask the questions about the stuff we didn't learn in school or sex ed. We'll be bed-hopping around different time periods from ancient civilizations to the middle ages to renaissance and early modern right up to now. Listen and subscribe to Betwixt the Sheets wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes.

Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to gone medieval from history hit wherever you get your podcasts she returns to egypt and then remarkably she ends up in a relationship with Caesar's protege, Mark Antony. Amazingly opportune, isn't it? She for the next years tries to surf,

I guess you would say, the Roman civil wars, tries to figure out with whom to ally herself. She's called upon to assist various people. Obviously she has a fleet, she has money, She's called upon to assist various people. Obviously, she has a fleet. She has money. She's very useful. And the summons will come from Mark Antony ultimately to please meet him in what is today southern Turkey and to account in some way for why she has backed some of his rivals. And it's to that meeting that she goes with all of the splendor that we know from Shakespeare,

which Shakespeare lifted from Plutarch in her boat with her cupids fanning her and with the lyres strumming and strewing incense upon the shores. And as she would put it, comporting herself like Venus, come to meet Bacchus for the good of Asia. And it works. It works so splendidly. It's amazing what an opulent dinner when the party favors are gem-studded tableware and Ethiopian slaves can work for you.

She just basically pulls out all the stops for Mark Antony. party favors or gem-studded tableware and Ethiopian slaves can work for you. She just basically pulls out all the stops for Mark Antony. He's there, obviously, to ask her to account for her past behavior, but also to solicit aid for the military campaign that he envisions. And there's no better way to advertise your utility to someone in need of a massive military campaign than to highlight your wealth, which is what she does over the next few weeks. And so she helps Mark Antony and Octavian, Caesar's actual successor, get a grip on the Roman Empire. And then Mark Antony is given the eastern half of that empire as his section of it, right? That's right. And it is really sort of to prove his Roman credentials that he decides to pick up where Julius Caesar had left off in an attempt to conquer the East. A giant Parthian campaign is his best guarantee of a hold on Roman power. And it's for that that Cleopatra is utterly essential, because he needs the funding to march off into Parthia. He's criticized, isn't he, for guessing his Roman roots. He lives with her in Egypt and behaves like a kind of Eastern despot.

It's a little bit the same problem that Caesar must have had. It's very difficult to find yourself in the company of an Eastern queen, Cleopatra's suspect from the start. She's exotic. She represents the untrustworthy, cunning East. And Marc Antony embraces this with splendour. trustworthy, cunning East. And Mark Antony embraces this with splendor. I mean, there's every reason to be associated with this woman who is not only in some strange way descended from Alexander the Great, to whom everyone wants to be related, but who also has had a relationship with Caesar. So for Mark Antony, this is sort of a double dose of glory. And moreover, it's very tempting to disappear into Egyptian splendor. This was a country that did luxury better than

any country in the ancient world at the time. How many children do they have? They have three children. Cleopatra does manage to have children at the most propitious times. She has twins immediately after the meeting in Tarsus, she has twins, and then she has another son later. So they will have three children together. But the slight issue there is that Mark Antony is married to Octavian's sister, isn't he? It's very inconvenient. Yes, Mark Antony is married to several different women in the course of the relationship with Cleopatra. And that's one example we have of her shrewdness.

At one point, she's very much intent on holding Mark Antony off from going back to his wife. And she does a really kind of exceptional beating her chest, crying her eyes out, keeping herself from food, starving herself to impress upon Mark Antony how much she loves him and how little reason he has to go back to his wife. And that's part of the reason given for the almost inevitable clash between Mark Antony and Octavian for the total control of the Roman Empire. But his relationship with Cleopatra is one of the kind of reasons given, is it? Octavian will do as much with that relationship as Mark Antony himself is able to do. It allows Octavian to declare war on Mark Antony, his brother-in-law, without declaring war on Mark Antony, because it allows Octavian to declare war, officially speaking, on Cleopatra. So yes, she serves Octavian's purposes admirably. And I don't think that's something that

we can think that Mark Antony would have seen coming. So the last great civil war of this turbulent period ends in this cleractic naval battle at Actium. What does Cleopatra add to Mark Antony's military capability? She's able to not only supply funds and ships, but she's able, and this is partly due to the linguistic skills, to enlist the support of other allies in the East so that that military camp is a really multi-ethnic, very, very heterogeneous camp of different bands of people, some of whom Cleopatra has managed to summon. There's a real tussle over whether Actium should be a land battle or a naval battle. Cleopatra, of course, because she's more comfortable on the sea, would prefer for it to be a naval battle. And she seems to be in most of the strategy meetings over how Mark Antony is going to somehow manage to bust out of Actium where he's managed to isolate himself.

And what happens? It doesn't end particularly well. Actium's a very difficult battle to unravel because we have very few specifics about it. There seems to have been a plan in which Cleopatra would make her way with the lifting winds at the end of the day through Octavian's battle lines and make her way back to Egypt. It's unclear whether Mark Antony was meant to follow her and whether Mark Antony's men knew about this plan. So as they go out to sea, Cleopatra will make a sprint for freedom and Mark Antony will follow her. Something goes wrong. We know Mark Antony is very displeased with the results. We also know that Octavian will clean up entirely and that Mark Antony's forces will

surrender. But the problem, as you point out in your wonderful book, is that all of the sources here are written by the winners, the eventual winners, who portray this moment as sort of flighty, cunning, duplicitous Eastern woman disappears from the battle at the key point. I mean, we just cannot get closer to what was actually going on. That's the problem, isn't it? They do something else which distorts the record, which is that for Octavian's needs, that battle or that skirmish or that whatever it was is inflated to enormous proportions because he needs to have this massive victory at which he has defeated his rival and this duplicitous woman. So what may have been a somewhat minor incident is also turned

into an epic battle. Octavian, who of course we should say becomes the Emperor Augustus, in case anyone's confused. Sorry for assuming that. Augustus was no stranger to having the various histories loosely defined, written about how the whole of human history was heading towards this great moment of his sort of apogee. And I think that's where Cleopatra possibly most suffers, is that the Latin poets will take over with the life of a Greek woman. And that's just no contest. They return to Egypt. What happens to Mark Antony? Mark Antony goes into a tailspin after Actium. And here you really see the difference in the two characters. Mark Antony sulks and builds a little hut for himself in which he lives alone like a hermit. sulks and builds a little hut for himself in which he lives alone like a hermit. And at one point tries to turn a sort of minor skirmish into a major victory. He's really sort of not at his best at this moment. He's pretty much shrinking. Cleopatra, on the other hand, is at her most

resourceful. She's trying to figure out some way out of what is clearly going to be a trap because Octavian at some point or other is clearly going to head to Alexandria. And she starts casting about, she's thinking about sailing to India. She's thinking about Spain. She's trying to drag boats across what is today the Suez Canal. I mean, she's launching these exceptionally bold and ambitious projects in her desperation, but you can see a very resourceful mind at work in those last months. But in the end, the net tightens, and the old cliche is that she commits suicide isn't with snakes or something, but what do you think is more likely to have happened? No ancient chronicler actually says snakes. The snakes come a little bit later. She barricades herself in a mausoleum that she's built. She knows her time

is short. She knows that Octavian is en route. She knows that she's in grave danger of being taken back to Rome and paraded through the streets as a prisoner of war. And she needs to do everything in her power to prevent that from happening. At a certain point, Mark Antony kills himself or tries to kill himself, kills himself slowly. And Cleopatra realizes that essentially the game is over. At that point, she presumably resorts to poison of some kind. We know that she dies calmly. There are no paroxysms. She dies at the same time as two of her ladies-in-waiting. A snake would be unlikely to have killed three women, I think, at the same time and in the

same manner. She's a woman who goes for very crisp decisions, and I don't think you would entrust your fate at that point to a snake of any kind. And it made sense that a snake gets tied up in the story when you think about it as both a symbol of Egypt and as something that we tend to associate with women who are great sinners. Yes, that makes sense. When you put a woman together with a snake, you're saying something, right? Yeah. And Octavian is a little bit fooled himself. He first calls in the men who are supposed to be able to suck snake venom out of a

victim in order to save her. And that may have been what allowed the misconception that in some way an asp was involved. She is the last independent ruler of Egypt for, I mean... Until the modern day, exactly. Yeah, until the modern day. How should we think about her? It's so interesting to think about these women who wield real power in a world often dominated by men. What is your judgment on her as a leader? Everything that we know, and of course,

there's a limit to what we have on the record, but everything we know points to an immensely shrewd and capable and protean thinker, in fact. She's delivered pretty much a losing hand, and she plays it like a winning hand at all times. Even when she comes back from Rome, she comports herself as if she's somehow won a great victory. She's a master at propaganda. She's beloved by her people. She steers her country through famine and plague. She figures out ways to properly depreciate and renumber the currency. I mean, there's an enormous vitality there. And there's also clearly an enormous aptitude for what she had been raised to do, which was to say to rule

a country. We are still obsessed with Cleopatra. Now, why is that? Is it subsequent portrayals, or is it something about her? Oh, I think it has to do with the fact that she's turned into a powerful enchantress in some way. I think it has very little to do with the actual details of the reign. I think we remember her as the person who seduced Marc Antony and Julius Caesar. I think we think of her as a seductress. She pretty much embodies that. I think Elizabeth Taylor has helped tremendously. But I think the personal trumps the political, and I think the erotic trumps the personal. And the relationships with these men and the sort of sense that she alone embodies that seductive Eastern power is really the reason why we go back to her and again and again, as do the holes in the record. The fact that we don't know the complete story,

I think, leaves something that we always go back to claw at because we don't have all the details and we can't know the truth. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and telling us all about it. What is your book called? It is called Cleopatra, A Life. about it. What is your book called? It is called Cleopatra, A Life. Everyone, make sure you go and get it. It's won every prize going. It's the number one national bestseller. Stacey Schiff, thank you very much for coming on the podcast and talking all about Cleopatra. Thanks so much, Dan. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thank you for making it to the end of this episode of Dan Snow's

History. I really appreciate listening to this podcast. I love doing these podcasts. It's a highlight of my career. It's the best thing I've ever done. And your support, your listening is obviously crucial for that project. If you did feel like doing me a favour, if you go to wherever you get your podcasts and give it a review, give a rating, obviously a good one, ideally, then that would be fantastic and feel free to share it. We obviously depend on listeners, depend on more and more people finding out about it,

depend on good reviews to keep the listeners coming in. Really appreciate it. Thank you.