Empire: World History - 133. Cleopatra: Queen of the Nile

Episode Date: March 21, 2024

Born in the romantic splendour of Ptolemaic Egypt, not far from the Library of Alexandria, Cleopatra was destined for greatness. She ascended to the throne at 18 and very quickly asserted her authority across Egypt as her extraordinary mind and legendary charisma captivated all. To some she was even a goddess, a living embodiment of the Egyptian goddess Isis. Such was her magnetism that not even the most powerful men of the age were able to resist her. Listen as William and Anita are joined by Stacy Schiff to discuss Cleopatra, her rise to power, and her relationship with the ruler of Rome, Julius Caesar. For bonus episodes, ad-free listening, reading lists, book discounts, a weekly newsletter, and a chat community. Sign up at https://empirepod.supportingcast.fm/ Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Assistant Producer: Anouska Lewis Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mparpoduk.com. Hello and welcome to Empire with me Anita Arndan. And me, William Duremberg. Exciting new series on the horizon. Can you see it? Can you? Because it's a special. Sisters are doing it for themselves. I'm not quite sure what my role in all this is, but...

You just said there and look pretty. You look pretty. That's what you're here for. I had to say, when I first thought this might be an idea for a series, I just knew you would love this idea, and I so knew be your series, Anita. I am tickled to a cellular level. So, I mean, often on this podcast, we take an empire, and we try and take you right from the start of it to its inception to its,

it seems inevitable collapse of the empires that we've done so far. but we often take a little dogleg, don't we? And we have a thematic thought. Well, we did the slavery series, which is one of the most interesting, I think, that we did. And I loved going down into an area, which I absolutely nothing about. And I was embarrassed by how little I knew about slavery. And it was an extraordinary revelation. So as well as doing these big chunks of colonial history in India, in the Ottoman Empire, in Persia, in Russia,

We are planning to do regular thematic and analytical episodes. And this time we have decided. You have to say it need to because this is definitely you are the queen of this. We might even say you are the empress, the rani of this idea. We're going to do great empresses of history. Now, some of these people, you will know the names. I mean, among them, Cleopatra and Queen Victoria. But we've just often found with this is that, you know, you may know the name,

but you may not know the true story. So we're unashamedly going to bring you big names, but we're also going to cover some names that people will not have heard of. I think some of them are going to be new to you all. Like St Helena, I remember reading the Evelyn War novel, Helena, which is his only historical novel. And being thrilled to discover that the mother of Constantine was basically a bar lady from York. A York barmaid. Very, very much love that. And we're going to have people that in India will be incredibly well-known.

but elsewhere in the world, you may not have heard. People like Nurja Ha, Rani of Charsee, these are names that little children are taught in colourful storybooks from a very early age. In India, but are completely unknown in the rest of the world, I think. Yeah. And the reason we're doing it is because a lot of history, I mean, I've said this before,

is written by men about men, and women often fall through the cracks. And even the women who do make it are so sometimes misrepresented or lifted to a level that no human being could ever reach. you know, they've turned into these deities. That's the poor we're paddling in the next few weeks. But also individually, so many of these women have utterly extraordinary stories.

The person I've always wanted to write about, Noor Jahan, the Mughal Empress, the only woman who was a co-emperor along with Jhungir. And in fact, towards the end, she definitely ran the Mughal Empire. And these are stories which should be told, which need to be told, and are extraordinary in themselves, I think. Yeah. And also, we want to use these women, these amazing women. in as a lens to look at the societies in which they live, because there has to be something

pretty extraordinary going on in a society that will bow down and venerate before a woman. You know, it's not a usual thing in a lot of the history that we cover here. And the whole question of whether some societies are more likely to accept an emperor's than others, and yet there are very, very patriarchal societies like the Russian empires we saw that end up with their greatest ruler being Catherine the Great. Indeed. So that's what we're about, but let us tell you where we're starting. very good one. I mean, a really, really good one. One of the great stories of history. And literature

and art and music and movies. We're talking about Cleopatra today. And our very, very special guest is Stacey Schiff, the Pulitzer Prize winning author, biographer of Cleopatra, who is the first great empress in our series. And we are both thrilled. I mean, you two are old friends, aren't you? You've known each other for a long time. We are old friends. And I haven't seen Stacey for a while, And we took rather a long time getting this podcast started the scene because we were just gossiping for the last 15 minutes. Yes, I know. It hasn't given Callum a nosebleed at all.

A stress. He started chewing his pen. It's always a bad sign. He was. I think he's already eaten the pen at this point, actually. There was one less big biero in the world. Look, Cleopatra is just such a massive figure. And it's funny, actually, that we're doing her now,

because I'm just reading with my youngest son, we're doing Asterix, which has, Cleopatra featuring in one of the books. Oh, I'm very envious of that kind of bedtime reading. Oh, it's very, very sweet. But they do keep referring to her pretty nose, which I'm going to press you on a little later since every other pages. She has a very pretty nose.

But first of all, I thought it would be really lovely to understand the world to which Cleopatra was born, Ptolemaic Egypt. What was it like? What would she have experienced in those early years? First of all, I'm delighted to join you. What she would have experienced is a world that is a sort of parenthesis in a way. This is the Hellenistic world, which is to say the world defined between the death of Alexander the Great and essentially the death of Cleopatra.

And it is a world that is of Greek culture, particularly in Alexandria, which has assumed the mantle of Athens as the center of civilization in these years, but without the Greeks in the picture. So it's an interesting sort of syncretic moment. She is born in Alexandria, which, as I said, is the center of learning, the seat of civilization, the city you went to if you wanted a doctor or a tutor or a dog trainer, it was really kind of the city of sophistication. And into a dynasty that also is sort of largely invented, it is the brain child, so to speak, of one of Alexander the Great's generals, who founds this dynasty,

the Ptolemaic dynasty. He was a childhood intimate of Alexander the Great's. And his son realizes that there's great currency to be had in transporting Alexander the Great's body. back to Alexandria, the city that his father had founded, and there he begins this dynasty. And it's been a couple of hundred years. There have been, I think, 15 previous marriages. We may or may not want to talk about this, but 10, I think, of those marriages are between siblings. The Tommy's practice sibling marriage. It's not an Egyptian custom. It's not a Greek custom. They just kind of invent it and go full throttle once they started to marry. They're just a very close family. It's a really close family and all the most rancorous

meddlesome ways, exactly. Yeah, also begs the question if you had that much into breeding, that she may not have had the prettiest nose, but again, I'll say we'll keep the nose for a bit later. So in Alexandria, when you say it was the place to go, it was a place where all culture, sophistication, science, literature is bubbling away. Does that give Alexandrians at the time a sense of superiority as well, or a sense of separateness or otherness when it comes to the rest of the world? By all means it does. They are an immensely sophisticated people. They are an immensely sophisticated people. hyperkinetic people, you might have compared them, I guess, at a certain moment to the way New Yorkers are viewed by the rest of America. They're very voluble. They talk fast. They love theater. They have

this mania. In fact, for theater. There are something like 400 theaters in Alexandria. 400 theaters. They are people of firm opinions. They regularly depose and sometimes chop up their rulers. I mean, they're a very restive, very educated group. And it's a city of tremendous, I mean, it's an international city, a city of bubbling creativity. You could meet a Buddhist monk on the streets of Alexandria. You might have a contract that entails seven different nationalities in Alexandria. And part of what accounts for that restiveness is it's a city that binds together to cultures, the sort of aristocratic Greek culture, which is the more learned culture and largely the overseers of the country and the native Egyptians who do not speak the same language, do not

answer to the same laws and often have very different opinions about their pharaohs. Would Cleopatra have grown up thinking of herself as a Greek or an Egyptian or both? You know, I would give anything to know what Cleopatra thought, I have to admit. She thinks of herself, I think quite clearly as a pharaoh. I think quite clearly as a goddess. I think the Ptolemies certainly consider themselves Greek in every way. But she is the first of the Ptolemies, and this is actually really interesting. The first of the Ptolemy is to make the effort to speak Egyptian, to learn Egyptian, the language of the people over who she rules. And part of this is, as Plutarch tells us, because she has this tremendous gift for languages, she speaks nine languages.

But part of that does seem to be an effort to somehow combine the two cultures and to make herself more popular to the people. And that's an issue at the time. There's a divide between the Egyptians upriver and the Greek-dominated Alexandria, if you like, the New Yorkers. sitting on their port? If you look at sort of the legal cases that came Cleopatra's way or the things that she's asked to adjudicate, it's very often a case of, you know, the woman at the baths spilled hot water on her client and burned and scalded his thigh. And, oh, curiously, the client was Greek and the woman at the baths was Egyptian.

It's very often these like petty conflicts in the street, the chickpea seller took my spot, and it's a collision between a Greek and an Egyptian. So there's definitely a friction there at all times. We've just finished a Russian series not too long ago and also with our Iranian series and we've had leaders who call themselves terrible, awesome, great. I'm really interested that her father, Ptolemy the 12th, was known as Ptolemy the Flutist, which doesn't exactly strike terror into the hearts of manabees. And Ptolemy the Bastard, too.

And Ptolemy the Bastard, yes, which is a little more intimidating. Explain these two monikas. to it. Sure, sure. As I said, there's a very brutal family history. I mean, I think Cleopatra's great-grandmother wages one civil war against her parents and then she wages a second civil war against her own children. I mean, these are people who routinely chopped up their children and delivered them to their husbands as means of sort of, you know, expressing their disapproval. So at a certain point that infighting and that murderous spree comes to a screeching halt and there isn't a legitimate Ptolemy left to ascend to the throne. And at that moment, this is the first century

BC, word is sent to Cleopatra's father, Ptolemy, the 12th, Aletti's the flu player. They desperately need a Ptolemy. He had not been in line for the throne. He may or may not have been educated to rule. And he's brought back from Libya, present-day Libya, to Egypt and installed at the palace. So it's really unclear why he was stuck out there. I mean, but he clearly was not in line. I mean, this is someone who no one had ever anticipated was going to be sitting on the throne. So let's get to this thing of her nose and what she looked like. I'm obsessed with who people really were, because there are so many representations of Cleopatra. Which one is more likely to be the truth, do you think? Well, you know, there are any number of busts which have been said to be Cleopatra. And many of them may well be.

But I think that when you really want an accurate depiction, you have really one resource, and that's the coins. because the coins are images that she would have approved. These are coins she minted. This was a sort of propaganda piece in its day, a coin that she's going to see is circulated within her realm, and it obviously would have been her interest for those coins to represent the truth accurately. So I would look to the coin portraits,

and if you look to the coin portraits of which we have quite a few, you see that Cleopatra looks very Semitic. She's got sort of hollowed cheekbones, very prominent cheekbones, hollowed cheeks, very full lips, a sort of miniature version of her, father's hooked nose, which is probably not what is in Estérix a Cleopet, a very high forehead. She does not look like Elizabeth Taylor, and she just, she looks very severe, in fact, in these portraits. Not a conventional beauty, yeah.

Not a conventional beauty by those standards, exactly. But he also says that she has these sparkly eyes, that she has this extraordinary magnetism. That the conduct of her presence was irresistible, exactly, that she was bewitching, and that it was all personality essentially. But I would say that those coin portraits are accurate. They're consistent one from the next. The engraving is fairly sophisticated in those days. And they do give us a Cleopatra who looks very much like her father. Now, I mean, we only talk about Cleopatra, but she wasn't an only child. I mean, she is groomed for, you know, greatness alongside a sister. I mean, God, fancy being the sister of Cleopatra. If you remember that name, can you tell us what it was like? I think the sister probably

felt the other way. Yes, and actually, I think it's very, you ask the operative question because I think this is extremely revealing about both Clefetcher and the family. There are five siblings at all. In fact, at one point, in her early in her childhood, her father goes to Rome essentially to prop up his government, which was the question of the day. And while he's gone, her older sister usurps the throne. So on the father's return, that sister is eliminated. So she's assassinated by the father. That leaves four at once. The dad kills his own daughter. Wow. Yeah, well, you did warn us. It's not like you didn't warn us. Exactly. I did say, I did say murderous, did not. I did say bloody spree. What about that was unclear? I mean, Plutarch says this was axiomatic. This happened in the best of families.

So yes, everyone, you raised all your children to reign because you didn't know which one of them was going to get knocked off next, basically. So anyway, that sister is eliminated. That puts Cleopatra in line for the throne. So at the death of her father in 51, she, she and a brother, who's 10 years old at the time, is sent to the throne. The fashion of the day being more or less that she should be a ruling couple. And so, as I said, sibling marriage, the two of them are jointly named to the throne. And how old is she at this point? She's 18 at this point.

So she's significantly older than the little brother. And presumably, although he has advisors who are extremely manipulative, she's presumably the one calling the shots, at least initially. the two of them ascend to the throne. They're almost immediately embroiled in a civil war. I think in the Taylor Burton version, isn't it? She's like a snot-nosed little sibling who she can't bear at all. I mean, do they ever talk about the relationship within the family of siblings,

whether they were close and turned against each other, or whether they had any love for each other, or are they actually raised in this way? As we heard in previous series, you know, where they knew only, there would be only one, as Highlander puts it, that one of them would be left standing. I think that's pretty much Plutarch's point, right, when he says this has happened to the best of families. So the short answer to your question about the other sister is actually walks in a triumphant

in Rome and then is sent off for safety, so to speak, to attempt to Ephesus, from which she tries to then undermine her sister years later, and Mark Antony, as a favor to Cleopatra, will see that that sister is murdered. So Cleopatra distinguishes herself among these siblings, and it's quite a distinction for being the only sibling to die by her own design. So she's the only one really who's able to determine basically her last days. Everyone else dies of violent death. And she immediately makes an attempt to woo Upper Egypt, to pull in the native Egyptians and make a trip down the Nile to Thebes. She seems to have understood very early that uprisings were not a good idea and to have taken her role as a benevolent monarch very seriously.

And her reign is in fact distinguished by the fact that there are almost no uprisings. There's very little discontent among the populace during Cleopatra's reign, which does speak to her grasp of strategy. It is also true that she's very good at opening the royal granaries when there's famine. She's very good at figuring out a currency crisis. And she's a remarkably sophisticated thinker. But she does seem to have grasped early on that one of the ways of maintaining, her hold on the throne was going to be to make both populations happy.

You mentioned that she had all these languages. Presumably if she's in Alexandria, she'll have had a very, very fancy education. The education is one thing to which we can speak with some precision, in fact. Nothing else about Patriot's childhood is available to us, except the education. Because the education in those days, in an almost sort of Napoleonic way, was very consistent from address to address to address. If you were a high-born citizen of the Hellenistic world, you read the same text at the same time in the same manner, whether you were growing up in Athens or Alexandria or Rome. So her education,

which would have been the education of Mark Antony or the education of Caesar, began with the Fables of Esop. It continued, Homer was the Bible of the day. She knew her Euripides. She had read Herodotus and Thucydides. It was possible in those days to have read almost everything, in fact. And remember that Cleopatra is brought up in the shadow of the great library, which about which we know many facts which are probably not true, but one fact that is presumably true is that it is the biggest library of the ancient world. So she has every scroll, every text available to her through her childhood and does seem to have been educated in this extremely regimented and almost draconian fashion. She would have been taught how to declaim and how to, her rhetoric would have been immensely polished

and the languages as well along the way. And just does archaeology tell us about the splendor in which she lived. I mean, again, so many of our opinions of who she is will be set by that Elizabeth Taylor portrayal and that enormous lavish set that she always appeared on. But was it a gilded cage that she was in? Did she eat off, you know, gem-encrusted plates and wear the finest robes? I mean, what do we know of that? We know a lot about the gem-encrusted plates for the simple reason that Romans landed in Alexandria, took one look around and universally said, I could not possibly describe this place. and then went on for 50 pages describing the place. And those descriptions.

And so we have some incredibly detailed descriptions of indeed the splendor. And this was an issue that I think gets obscured by the whole question of Cleopatra's reign. There is immense scorn and envy on the part of Rome when they look at Alexandria because they cannot get over the luxury. It is mind-boggling, just jaw-dropping luxury. And yes, we're talking about walls of alabaster and just, indeed, gem and crust, indeed, gem and crust, plates and onyx and ebony and everything is decorated no matter where you look and you know things like tortoise shell are used in ways you could not possibly have imagined and moreover there's a scientific sophistication we're talking about automatic doors and things no one had seen elsewhere in the

ancient world automatic doors explain that statement how i wish i know the physics behind it but there are all kinds of automatic machines in cleopatra's day and and i should say you know when we say the center of learning we're talking about a center of learning where kind of concepts that will then be lost are understood. I mean, Cleopatra would have grown up knowing the world was round. She would have known the value of pie. She would have understood latitude and longitude. All of these questions were questions that had already been resolved in her day that go missing for quite a long time. I spent a long time wandering around the streets of Alexandria with E.M. Forster's guidebook in my hand. And what's so extraordinary about Alexandria is you

read these accounts of this extraordinary city with its automatic doors and the library and everything else. And there is almost nothing left. It is a city of memory, said Foster. It's funny we didn't meet because I did that same tour. And yes, it's devastating, isn't it? Because, I mean, only that one Roman road, sort of the sense of a straight Roman road is left to you. And that amazing sort of weird catacomb,

which some donkey fell down and you go down these steps. And suddenly you're in a kind of weird hybrid dining room where there's a Egyptian crocodile squeezed into a Roman legionary outfit and feasting couches on every side where you can imagine these couples celebrating the death or the anniversaries of their family or their loved ones. But nothing else. I just want to talk about the Egyptian crocodile for one minute though because the crocodiles were mummified and some of the stuffing, some of the papyrus that was used to stuff them has turned out to be some of the best material we have on these years because it survived. Oh, it's amazing.

Otherwise, pretty much there is no architectural trace of Cleopatra's life, but nor is there really any trace on papyrus because of the climate. So thank goodness for those mummified crocodiles. I just want to salute them here while we're speaking about them. No, no, this is mind-blowing. Actually, Nile crocodile wadding is what a great deal of our histories based on. I just love it. So wait, the last, we left Cleopatra as a ruler. So, you know, here she is swishing about through automatic doors and eating off jewel-encrusted plates and having, you know, one sister has gone. and one brother is sort of, you know, fomenting against her with his advisors. She's managed to get over two famines caused by drought. But then things start going south for her. Is it because she starts to face off against Rome,

a belief in her own divinity in face off against Rome? Is that the start of her real trouble? So, yes, I think there are a number of missteps, and I think that the most serious of those missteps indeed seems to be that she came to the rescue of Pompey, who was in the middle of his own war, with Julius Caesar at this moment. The regulating of the relationship with Rome was a tricky part. And if you look at Cleopatra retrospectively, you realize that essentially she's already in the shadow

of an ascendant Rome and her days are numbered. Obviously, she didn't see it that way. But how to both palliate Rome and do so in a fashion that didn't demean you in front of your own people was the question of the day. And she seems to have bungled that slightly, and that gives her brother and his manipulative advisors to the upper hand. Well, look, that seems like a really good point to take a break because you've just set the scene for all sorts of rolled up carpets and arrivals of Caesar. Join us after the break when we find out what happens next. Welcome back.

So when we left Stacey just before the break, we have the shadow of Rome looming over. Can you give us a little bit of the background to the Civil War? Who is Julius Caesar? Who is Pompey? Why are they fighting? and what's it to Cleopatra? Cleopatra's father has to deal with the riddle of how to essentially make peace between Egypt and Rome. Rome is on its mission to gobble up the world.

When Cleopatra is in her youth, Caesar is telling his men essentially that if they do not plunder riches and conquer countries, they are not real Romans. And there is Egypt, which is essentially the jewel of the Mediterranean world, and moreover the granary of the Mediterranean world sitting right there within its sights. So it's incumbent on the ruler of Egypt to hold off the Romans as best he can while at the same time courting them. And Cleopatra's father had spent a great deal of time doing precisely that in Rome. He handed out all sorts of extravagant gifts to all of the right people to essentially keep things at a slow boil between Egypt and Rome. And that is really what Cleopatra is dealing with when the Roman Civil Wars essentially arrive on her doorstep.

Caesar has routed Pompey who has had. a great deal of support from the Ptolemies and who sails for refuge to the coast of Egypt. And it is off the coast of Egypt where Cleopache's brother and his advisors are assembled trying to figure out how and if to wreak this Roman general that he's murdered. Their thinking being that to let him set foot on Egyptian soil is possibly to offend Caesar and they don't really know what they're going to do with him if he does set foot there. So the easiest thing is to murder him. the logic, as it was expressed at the time being, dead men don't bite. So this leaves Theopatra

a little short change because she has been, she's essentially allied herself with Pompey and his son. So when you say that sort of murdered man doesn't bite or you put it in a much better way than that, how do they get rid of him? How do they get rid of Pompey? What do they do they do? Pompi's buried in a very shallow grave on the coast. And then the question becomes what to do about Julian Caesar. But do they behead him? Do they stab him? I'm sorry to be it gory, but I really want, I'm sorry, Stacey. She does this, Stacey. I'm sorry, I apologize.

You're not familiar with this podcast, but it is wretchedly in bad taste, so I want to know exactly. The beauty of this story is there are so many beheadings. I can give you a beheading pretty much in every decade. Yes, he's beheaded in full sight of the coast and then buried on Egyptian soil. But how do they get close enough to do it? I mean, do they get sort of pal up to him and say as if they're going to be friends?

Because you have to get, he's quite an important man. He's not an idiot. How do they get close enough to a lot? off his head. And even if he's a defeated general, presumably he's got a few soldiers around him. Remember that he's expecting an affectionate welcome. He has no reason to expect that he's in danger at this moment and has absolutely no idea how he's going to be received, but the assumption would be being a Roman general at all, not necessarily knowing if the news has travelled, that you would be warmly welcomed by these people who have previously been your allies. It's a very dangerous

world at this moment. And as I said, this is a very rancorous family. Yeah, I should cocoa. I mean, the dangerous. Okay, so they've locked off his head. they bury him in a shallow grave. When Caesar gets to hear about this, what's his reaction? Caesar cries. Yes, this is not what they're expecting either, is it? No, this is not what he's expecting. It's quite brutal, as you've played out. It's very gory. And the two of them had been related by marriage. So this is his brother-in-law. And whether they're crocodile tears or whether the sincere tears, he seems deeply moved by what has happened. He then lands in Alexandria and has to somehow defend himself against a people who may not have been

entirely happy at the arrival of a Roman genre. So Stacey, give us, for those of us that don't know the whole background to Julius Caesar, give us a quick pen portrait of this man. How old is he? He's conquered Gaul. What else has he done? He's 52. He is pretty much at the height of his power at this moment. He has indeed swept across the continent going from victory to victory. He's beloved by his man. He's established himself as an immensely congenial, resourceful, and multitasking. leader and seems at this point, obviously, to have won a civil war at which he has been laboring for some time. He's beloved by his men is obviously not welcomed with a great affection by the people of Egypt. And the most crucial part about Julia Caesar, and of course the part you really

want to know, which is that he has not only won his way across Europe to battle, but he has slept his way across Europe. And obviously, and he has known at this point as a great seducer with a specialty in aristocratic wives. And he's known as every man's woman and every woman's man. So there's a very storied, colorful sexual past here as well. Every man's woman. What does that mean? Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. So what, you're saying that his pendulum swung both ways?

Is that what you're suggesting? I'm trying to understand that. That would be what the ancient text would seem to suggest. I love what you're fixing on Indiana. It's very highbrow this podcast of yours. I appreciate this. No, no, no, it is. It is the highest of highbrow.

Yes, only shortlisted podcast. But again, this is not unusual. for Romans. They were very happy with pendulums swinging in both directions. It's just how they swing, isn't it? And you're not allowed to be the passive partner. And it's also that Caesar tended to do it in royal family. So it was a little more obvious, exactly. But a man of tremendous sexual charisma and immensely good-looking, deep black, piercing eyes, curly hair, fair-haired, broad-shouldered, you know, a man who deserved the swagger with which he actually apparently walked across a room. You know, obviously you historians just take this as red, but we, the general public, are just clutching at pearls here.

We did not know this about Caesar. I have to say, I didn't know that either. No. Oh, well, thank you. I'm so much. I've actually learned a thing. Okay, so he then, I mean, it does really remind me, actually, when you say he sort of cries at the news of the death of somebody he actually wasn't getting on very well with. It's kind of, you know, won't someone rid me of this meddlesome priest and then really sort of like getting very alarmed and unhappy when someone does rid you of the person you were moaning about.

But he summons both Cleopatra and Ptolemy to appear before him. I mean, they must have been bricking it because word must have reached them. This is not a happy Caesar. I'm not sure that they're at both summoned. So Caesar lands in Alexandria. He basically closets himself in the palace. It would be with him at this point actually to align himself with Cleopatra's brother. Cleopatra's brother has an army.

He's advised by these rather astute advisors. He's in the city of Alexandria. Cleopatra at this point is camped out in the desert near what is today Port Said with a bunch of mercenaries whom she has raised on her own. She's very much, she very much has the losing hand at this point. So it's an interesting situation and that Caesar would have been well advised to leave Cleopatra alone at this point and to negotiate with the brother. It's unclear whether Cleopatra is summoned or whether she takes it upon herself at this point to get to the palace. But yes, the famous carpet rolling scene of Elizabeth Taylor's. In the real version was very likely Cleopatra having been rowed under the palace gates by one of her retainers, who helps her to crawl into a leather traveler's bag, which he slings over his shoulder. And in that bag, quietly, he slips her back into her own palace. We're presumably less well-dressed and less well-coffed than Elizabeth Taylor. She will then appear before Julius Caesar to make her case, in contradistinction to her brothers.

Whose account do we have of this? Is this Plutarch that's giving this story? It is. And there are many fewer details than we should like. And he's a contemporary? No, and this is crucial. Fulchuk is born 76 years after Cleopatra dies. So he's writing of this at approximately the same remove that we would be writing about Abraham Lake.

And I think it's really essential to put into perspective. He's our best source. We have a lot of sources, but he's one of the closest. There are very few contemporaneous sources generally with Cleopatra, and they are all of them inimical to Cleopatra. One of them is Julius Caesar, in fact. And one point, there's an astonishing banquet in the palace where one of the cooks, one of the royal cooks invites a friend of his,

who's a medical student to come see the over-the-top preparations. And that medical student goes on to become a prominent doctor who then tells his story to a friend, and that friend tells it to his grandson, and the grandson is Plutarch. So I just want to... Insert that because it gives you a sense of where, you know, we're talking about events that are definitely distanced, where the observer is quite distant from the event he's describing. But there's also a baton pass.

I mean, you've described a real, you know, there's a relay race. I mean, you've described a provenance that means it's not just conjured from nothing, yeah. By the standards of antiquity, that's not bad veracity. Well, also, this is an oral culture, right? So we assume they were better at the game of telephone than we are. but this is closer in any event than worse. For example, Dio was writing at a remove of two centuries, or Svetonius was writing 150 years later or Josephus.

So Plutarch, yes, is our closer observer in some ways, and also is neither smitten by Cleopatra nor feels an enmity toward Egypt, as many of the other chroniclers do. Okay, Pluto may not have been smitten by Cleopatra, but what's Caesar genuinely smitten by Cleopatra? We're talking about she's a, you know, a gutsy team. You know, what chutzpher to say, right, I'm going to get myself through my brother's blockade and I'm going to make my case myself.

She's 18. I mean, let's not forget how young she was. And she's presented, you know, before this royal, you know, lover and a fighter who's like in his 50s. I mean, what do we know of that first meeting in actual source material? In actual source material, I'm sorry to disappoint you, but we know next to nothing. But we do know is the following. I know, I'm so sorry to have to stick to the facts. We know she gets pregnant pretty quickly, yes?

Thank you. That's my point. But you have a sexually experienced man of 52, and you have a probably virginal young woman at 21 at this point. But the assumption has always been that she seduces him. Now, I would argue that perhaps it went the other way. In any event, they meet in October and the following summer she has a bait, which is Caesar's song. So there was a fairly instantaneous sexual act.

they do seem to be very quickly allied against her brother. He very early on does seem to have agreed that Cleopatra was the more viable alternative. At one point, he does try to fold the brother into some kind of government. He tries to get the two of them to reconcile. And essentially, the brother runs out of the palace in tears and ultimately tries to undo everything Caesar has attempted. Yeah, but when you say, you know, her brother ran out in tears, we're talking about a little boy. I mean, that's really very easy to visualize, yeah, about 12 years old. It's 12 or 13 at this point, exactly.

Yes, I mean, on the other hand, Alexander the Great was a general at what, 60 and master of the world at 20? One grew up quickly in these years. No, fair, fair point. Okay, so do we know at all? I mean, you say that Caesar thought that Cleopatra was the more viable ally. Do we know whether it was Cleopatra who asked him to do away with her brother or he did it on his own back to, quell uprisings in Alexandria? What was the calculus behind that? That brother will be sacrificed to the Alexandrian war. Caesar and Cleopatra are then together

while Caesar wages the Alexandria war for which we have his account, and the brother is a victim of that conflict. So in fact, in that case, you don't have a Roman doing Cleopatra's bidding and knocking off one of the siblings. That's a fair war casualty with the brother. Stacey, at this point, Julius Caesar has rampaged through Europe. It's not going to be long before Rome takes over Egypt anyway. Is there any reason to believe that but for Cleopatra, Julius Caesar might have just absorbed Egypt into the Roman Empire at this point? It's a perfectly fair question. You know, one tries to read it in the context of what one is thinking at the time. Egypt was understood to be very ashamed to lose and very difficult to govern.

So there was a question. It's very far away. And it's hard to get across the Mediterranean. And interestingly, you know, in that direction, the other direction would have been worse. It's a very vexed question for something which I hinted earlier, which is that Egyptian decadence, Eastern decadence, was something that Rome was very eager to keep at a distance and made more sense to leave Egypt in the hands of a client, king or queen or even in the hands of a Roman pro-consul of some kind than it did to meld it more closely into the empire. No one's really thinking in those terms of combining things. It really has this almost radioactive aura around it because the way of life is so deeply offensive in so many ways to Roman culture.

The very power given to women, the sex and excess of the East, these are things that are just anathema to a good Roman. And the more this can be, Rome can be isolated from those forces, the better. What we perhaps underestimate today, because we've had so many sort of Roman dramas on the telly, where Rome itself is depicted as decadent, how Puritanical first century Rome is. And you've got people like Pliny, only a generation later, who are very austere figures who dislike fancy food, who dislike fancy clothes, who want martial Romans to remain austere and battle-ready and not seduced by luxury. And not just puritanical, but deeply provincial. And I think that's something that one loses sight of very quickly, which is that Rome at this point is a muddy backwater. There are no monumental buildings. There is no pantheon. There are none of the great Roman landmarks, which we know. Exactly. It's a shanty town. It's a town of muddy streets, of very little culture. It was very difficult as Cicero made clear to buy a book there. Alexandria is the center of the world. And that's a reversal, I think, of the way we think of it, because to us, Alexandria somehow seems exotic and simpler, and it is Rome that is the sophisticated center. Yeah. So, look, she's pregnant. Does he stick around, Caesar, to see his baby born, or is he off before the baby arrives? He leaves several weeks before the baby is born, but I should say he leaves having, the Alexandria

war ends in March, and he leaves him this summer. And it is inexplicable what he is doing. nowhere is it explained why he stays for those extra months. They are obviously months of, he's a man of a tremendous intellectual curiosity. These are months in which the two of them explore Egypt. They go to Upper Egypt in this tremendous procession, which in a way is Cleopatra advertising to her people, the military alliance that she has just made with Rome and advertising the fecundity of her country to Caesar. So it's a very smart political mission. And Caesar would have wanted, as did every ancient, to visit the Nile. Part of the problem with Egypt is that everyone was curious about it, but everyone was just a little bit diffident about going there.

So there were scientific reasons, there were intellectual reasons, there were probably political reasons to have stayed. From a Roman point of view, it was not smart that Caesar spent as long as he did there. And tongues did begin to wag at Rome about, you know, what's he doing with that Egyptian queen? The war is over? Why is he not yet home? So in the end, he does leave several weeks before Caesarian, as their child was named, is born. Yeah. And, you know, and also his wife, Karpani, is probably not that impressed either, I would have thought. We're spending one more moment, and it might be a good place to stop after this before we get Cleopatra to Rome.

But when she does do this great grand tour, look at me, I am now the Queen of Egypt, how grand are we talking? I mean, just describe what the scenes would have been like. We're talking about ships of unimaginable splendor. So we're talking about barges that would have had on them, stables and grottoes and libraries and gymnasia. and amphitheaters. This is the kind of oligarch ship of its day.

Exactly. Exactly. With the support yachts, as they're called today, with supporting a flotilla, have made 400 boats as well that are floating alongside and behind it, up the Nile. For a minor bureaucrat who traveled

throughout Egypt, it was incumbent on people to come up with, 300 goats and 200 pings to feed him. You can imagine what the provisions must have been like for a delegation like this. It was important for Cleopasher to be seen by her people. Obviously, this is a day in which that constitutes, you know, solidarity building and advertising. And presumably the two of them made quite a show of she and her, in her tiny splendor and

Caesar in his broad-shouldered presence. It must have made quite a show at waving to the people alongside the shore as they traveled along. And it's an extended tour we know. Other than that, there aren't a lot of details. I love the idea of the state boat. Is it the Thalamegos? Yeah.

I'm kind of minded of the kind of parades that happen, you know, and trooping the color and stuff, or, you know, royal weddings when people line the streets and these great golden carriages go by, just to remind everybody, we are here, we are here and we are important. I think for the people of Egypt to have had a glimpse of their pharaoh would have been a kind of wanted to a lifetime opportunity. It wasn't often that anyone in Alexandria traveled into the depths of Egypt. And as we said, Cleopatra was very astute about the fact that this was necessary. And the things they see, just you said how Rome has none. of the monuments that we associate with Rome. But Egypt has all the monuments that we associate with Egypt already. It's got the pyramids. It's got the temples of Memphis, the lakeside shrines to crocodile gods, the locks and the dams that enable the Egyptians to reclaim farmland from the Nile, the colossia of Memnon, the Valley of the Kings. That's all there already, and it's already old.

It's so already old that there's already graffiti on the pyramids, which should make us feel better about the world in which we live. It's already old, and it's of tremendous, it's of enduring mystery. I mean, the Nile is thought to be the source of life in these days. And everything associated with the Nile is understood to have special powers so that you might send water from the Nile to your daughter if you're hoping that she was going to get pregnant soon. And there were all sorts of lore associated with this. People were understood to have twins more often in Egypt than elsewhere in the world. Elsewhere in the world, pregnancy was meant to take less long. Skulls were meant to be harder. there were all sorts of preachers who were described in the ancient literature, which were associated

with the Nile, which sound like they're out of Hieronymus Bosch. I mean, there's a tremendous sense that the Nile is this life-giving, mysterious force, and an enormous curiosity to see it, obviously on the part of a Roman. Yeah. So she also, you know, she's cemented her position, this great propaganda tour of her realm with Caesar and her, and then he leaves her. She has her maybe at the same time as a festival of ISIS, which makes her claim to be an embodiment of ISIS even stronger as well. I mean, is that something that the people accept or something that she wishes to project? Both of the above. And I should go back after step, ISIS is this sort of consolidated version of Hera and Demeter and Athena all kind of rolled together.

She's essentially kind of a precursor to the Virgin Mary. Her cult is very strong in Egypt. And her iconography goes in to become the iconography of the Virgin Mary in Christian art. through Coptic intermediaries. Which is why I said there was a myth at one point that Cleopatra was the mother of the Virgin Mary, a myth I've always loved. And ISIS is beloved by the people of Egypt very much frowned upon in Rome, partly because it is a female goddess, who is the life-giving goddess, the goddess of the alphabet, the goddess of marriage, the goddess of children, the goddess of maternal affection.

And it is perhaps, we don't know that this aligns perfectly, but is it perhaps a reason why women in Egypt are able to assume roles of authority very easily without anyone, questioning. And Egyptian laws extremely liberal toward women. Egyptian women had very often served in positions of power, and ISIS reigns supreme. So there may actually be some association there. There may be some reason why ISIS empowers women in a certain way. But an Egyptian woman had rights that no woman elsewhere in the ancient world would have had, and the women would not have for 2,000 more years, like the right to divorce and the right to own property and the right to inherit equally with her brothers on the death of a parent.

this may have been in some way fallout of the ISIS cult, in fact. So yes, Cleopatra cements her relationship with ISIS when Caesarian is born, because it fits very neatly with the existing iconography. But she would have had no trouble anyway convincing her people that she was a goddess. This was very much part of the ideology. Correct, correct. Farrow was a god or a goddess, exactly. Right. We've got now a consolidation of power, an identification with a goddess, you know,

proper feminism 101. She's got power. She's got wealth. She's got the image. She's got the gods on her side. Join us for the next podcast when we follow Cleopatra as she travels to Rome. Till then, it's goodbye for me, Anita Arndand. And goodbye for me, William Durember.