Forbidden History - Cleopatra and the Fall of Ancient Egypt

Episode Date: October 20, 2026

Cleopatra’s beauty became legend, but her fight for power shaped history. Joined by historian Arran Erwin, we explore her rise to Egypt’s throne, her alliances with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, and the ambition, rivalries and fatal decisions behind one of history’s most famous queens. Cast List: Eric Meyers: Narrator Arran Erwin: Historian of Ancient Rome Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hello, Intact Insurance. Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. Be sure to catch our Patreon exclusive Inner Circle series, featuring live expert interviews and deep dives into your favorite topics. Thanks for supporting the show. It's 48 BCE, and after just three years of ruling over Egypt as queen, Cleopatra has been ousted from her throne and driven from Alexandria in favor of her younger brother. So she is in the desert, she is isolated, she really has no base of support, she has no infrastructure,

she is very much in danger of just simply disappearing in the desert. Her only hope of returning to power lies in finding a powerful backer, and soon a potential candidate arrives at Egypt, fresh from victory over his rival Pompey and the apparent winner of Rome's civil war, Julius Caesar. What happens next will become legend. We're told in one source that simply she did herself up and made herself look fancy and made herself look attractive to him. Another source tells us, of course, the story that she had herself smuggled

into the palace in some laundry or some rugs and then rolled out in front of him sort of disheveled and half-dressed and so on. It's one of the most famous seductions in history, and it works. The pair become lovers, and Caesar has... helps restore her to the throne of Egypt. But something has been lost in the retelling. Cleopatra's relationship with Caesar wasn't simply a seduction. It was part of something much bigger, her extraordinary ability to turn apparent weakness

into political strength. And to understand the woman behind the legend, I'm joined by Dr. Aaron Irvin, Professor of History at Murray State University. What she offers to Caesar on the one head, yes, is sex, but it is also legacy. Aletti's is essentially teaching Cleopatra about leverage, about how to manipulate, about how to get people to act on your behalf. She embraced femininity. She embraced being a woman.

That was her weapon. Welcome to the podcast series that explores the past's darkest corners, sheds light on the lives of intriguing individuals and uncovers the truth buried deep in history's most controversial legacies. I'm Eric Myers and this is forbidden history. Think of Cleopatra and you may well be imagining the ancient Egypt of the pyramids. But in reality, Cleopatra lived closer to the moon landings than she did the building of those awe-inspiring structures. The Egypt of Cleopatra's time is very much not the land of those all-powerful pharaohs. It's independent, but increasingly at the mercy of the all-powerful Roman Republic.

And it's ruled by her family, the Ptolemaic dynasty, as it has been for nearly three centuries. The Ptolemaic dynasty traced its descent from, well, Ptolemy, who was himself one of Alexander the Great's generals. After Alexander the Great died, he had conquered all this territory, but he hadn't done anything with it yet. There wasn't any sort of government or administration, and it was pretty much left to his generals to figure out what they were going to do with the lands that Alexander conquered. And Ptolemy was one of those generals. Ptolemy travels to Egypt and eventually declares himself king. Despite his Greek and Macedonian heritage, he embraces elements of local culture, presenting himself to... to his Egyptian subjects as a traditional pharaoh.

After Ptolemy had established himself, he was stable enough to pass his position as this sort of Greek-Egyptian hybrid ruler down to his son and descendants, and they continued to fulfill that role, both presenting themselves as sort of classical Greeks, but also as traditional Egyptian monarchs as well, all the way down to the time of Cleopatra.

Almost every king in Ptolemy's bloodline will bear his name. But Egypt's position in the world changes. By 168 BCE, a new power dominates the Mediterranean, Rome. Egypt finds that its survival is increasingly dependent on the whims of the Romans. Now, the Tolmetic King at the time was only about 15 years old, so it was a pretty easy choice to submit and become a friend of the Roman. Romans. But as a result of this, Egypt had managed to survive several periods of Roman expansion, but they survived as essentially a subject of the Roman state. And ultimately, really, what had

kept Rome from annexing Egypt were the Romans themselves and their own internal competitions. The Romans were really unwilling to let any one general, one faction, one group, be able to claim Egypt as their own. Infighting is also rife among the Ptolemy. dynasty itself, with successions repeatedly triggering bitter and often bloody struggles for power. Inbreeding was heavily practiced and then bumping off relatives who were your brother slash nephew slash uncle all at the same time. So the family dynamics, yeah, killing siblings, killing relatives. This was considered normal at the time. Cleopatra is born into this hotbed of infighting in 69 BCE.

Her father is Egypt's ruler, Ptolemy the 12th, better known as Aletis. Like his forebears, his path to power had been long and difficult. So Ptolemy the 12th, otherwise known by his nickname of Aletis, was Cleopatra's father. He was, however, the illegitimate child of a former ruler, Ptolemy the 9th. Now, Ptolemy the Ninth had a number of different claimants. You can see just in the numbering Ptolemy the 9th to Ptolemy the 12th. There's a whole bunch of Ptolemy's in between, but they're all in that one single generation. Alletes had come out on top because he had realized that true power lay in Rome.

He therefore worked to secure Roman backing for his kingship. And he had gone about obtaining it in a clever way, using their own culture to manipulate them. He indebted himself heavily to a few key Romans. He essentially took out a loan of roughly 6,000 talents. And to put that in context of talent, is roughly speaking 200 pounds of precious metal. So 6,000 talents, roughly the entire income, it's estimated, of the kingdom of Egypt in a single year. In Roman culture, getting into debt is one of the worst things a person could do. a person could do. Such as they're discussed for the practice, they even have a law that allows

creditors to cut off body parts of people who miss their repayments. Aletti's had known this, but he had also known that the Romans couldn't touch him. From the Roman point of view, they were like, pf, this guy's awful. What a bad king. But the other thing that this does, of course, is it creates a situation where the Romans aren't going to get paid, unless Aletis is king in Egypt. The Romans, they can't drag the king of Egypt into the form and cut pieces off of him. So their only choice, and Aletis realizes this and uses this as leverage against the Romans, their only choice really is to continue to support his claim, is to continue to support him in Egypt. It was a clever ploy, but while it had secured him the throne,

it had also left him in debt. And so Cleopatra grows up as her father is raising taxes on the Egyptian people and becoming more and more unpopular. Soon, one of Aletti's other daughters spots an opportunity and moves against her own father. Aletti's oldest daughter, Bernicke the fourth, she actually takes the throne away from him. Alates is incredibly unpopular and Berenekhi is able to use that unpopular against Aletis. Aletti's fearing for his life, flees to Rome. and to the people most invested in his success, his creditors. Tellingly, of all his children, it's the young Cleopatra that he chooses to take with him.

It's from this early period, it becomes clear that Aletti's is looking at Cleopatra as his direct heir. Because he has two other sons and one other daughter, besides Berenicke, who is trying to kill him at the moment, of course, He has these other children that he leaves behind in Egypt, but it is Cleopatra that he brings with him. It's at this moment that we get the first evidence of Cleopatra's character and personality. She's not even 10 years old yet when she first arrives in the city of Rome, but even then the Romans comment on how she is very charming,

she is incredibly intelligent. There are numerous discussions of her ability with languages by the end of her life she will know at least 10, possibly upwards of 13 different languages. She is literate in at least three of those languages, and this was seen as remarkable even in the ancient world. Cleopatra is about to learn a new skill in Rome, for she is with her father as he tries to secure Roman backing

to reclaim his throne. Aletti's is essentially teaching Cleopatra about leverage, about how to manipulate, about how to get people to act on your behalf. And that's exactly what Aletis is doing with Rome. Aletis persuades and heavily bribes a Roman commander called Aulis Gabinius, who marches his forces to Egypt and puts Aletis back in power. Aletis deals swiftly with Barinicay, having her executed before making it clear that Cleopatra will be his true successor, despite him having two sons. But

While he may be back on his throne, his Roman backers are not going to let him forget who put him there. Now, eventually, most of Ghibinus' forces leave, but they do leave behind a group of Roman troops that go by the nickname of the Gibinyani, who are sort of there as enforcers to support Aletis on the throne, but also to kind of make sure that Rome has a voice, that Aletis doesn't forget who put him in charge there. By the time of his death four years later, Aletis has left a huge impression on his daughter. On the one hand, he's shown her that weakness can be strength, if cleverly harnessed. But on the other, that losing the support of your own people

can cost you your throne, potentially even your life. And these two lessons will shape Cleopatra into the ruler she would become. In 51 BCE, at the age of roughly 18, Cleopatra ascends the throne as Cleopatra the 7th, and it soon becomes clear what her first priority should be. The Gabiniani, those Roman soldiers, who had put her father back in power,

are still in Alexandria, and they are very unpopular with her people. They exercise a tremendous amount of control. This is, you could almost think of them as a group of sort of just drunken, violent dudes who are hanging out, beating up on people, terrorizing the people of Alexandria. Cleopatra needs to do something about them, but her hands appear tied. She wants them out of the city before they drain her own popularity.

But she also desperately needs that Roman backing that they represent. Soon an apparent solution will come her way. But so too were the first major test of her reign. In 53 BCE, two years before Cleopatra had ascended the throne, a Roman army had been defeated by the Parthian Empire at the Battle of Cary in northern Mesopotamia. The survivors, led by a commander called Cassius Longinus, withdrew to Roman Syria in order to defend from an eventual Parthian counterattack. By the time Cleopatra ascends the throne, that counterattack comes, and Longinus decides

he needs reinforcements. Soon messengers arrive in Alexandria, with orders that the Gabiniani leave Egypt and come to his aid. Out of nowhere, Cleopatra appears to have a solution to her problem. But perhaps because they're enjoying their time terrorizing the citizens of Alexandria, the Gabiniani ignore the order. And so, to get them out, Cleopatra enacts a devious scheme. Cleopatra, it seems somehow, we don't know the exact details, but somehow convinces the

Ghibiniani to murder the messengers from Syria so that we have now Roman on Roman violence, but Roman on Roman violence that was apparently inspired in some way through Cleopatra's machinations. Now, Cleopatra uses the murder of the diplomats as an excuse to arrest the Ghibini and then send them to Syria, but to send them to Syria as prisoners. For Cleopatra, this seems to be a win-win. The Ghibiniani are out of Egypt, and not only that, she's shown Rome that she, like her father, is loyal to them. It's the first sign that some of her father's cunning has stayed with her. But the scheme is about to backfire in a spectacular fashion.

It turns out that Cassius is able to repel the Parthian invasion by himself so that when the Gabiniani arrive, Cassius doesn't need them anymore. And Cassius takes offense that Cleopatra would involve herself in matters of Roman law, would arrest Roman citizens, would even send them as prisoners for murdering Roman diplomats in the first place. And so Cassius decides to send the Ghibini back to Alexandria, against any and all of Cleopatra's plans to try to free herself from this situation. Worse still, the Ghibini that return are in no mood to support Cleopatra. Instead, they throw their backing behind a palace coup

that forces Cleopatra to flee and prop up her younger brother, Ptolemy the 13th, as ruler of Egypt. Cleopatra's first taste of power has been a bitter one, but the failure of her plan has taught her valuable lessons. I think more than anything else, it's just too complicated. She's relying on too many other people thinking like she thinks. And part of it, I think, too, is just simply the fact that she is a woman, that she is a woman trying to deal with these Roman authorities,

and for these Roman authorities, she is inherently lesser. No matter who that male Roman is. the Romans are going to side with the man. The attitude of the male Romans is a harsh lesson for a young queen. But it's also one she will never forget. For like her father before her, she will harness her apparent weakness as a strength, using Roman sexism to manipulate them for her own ends.

Now out in the Egyptian countryside, Cleopatra first uses her popularity to assemble a force to fight in her name. But as it's mainly composed of peasants and farmers, it's easily defeated. She soon concludes that the only way she can regain her throne is through Roman backing. And when Julius Caesar arrives in Egypt, she has the perfect candidate. Caesar was a famous womanizer among the Roman. Not just famous womanizer, but he was also famous for relationships that he had with men as well. So Caesar was just simply famous for, we might say, just being.

a horn dog, if you will. During the triumph over gall, Caesar's men were said to have sung, Citizens, Lock Away Your Wives, we've returned with the bald man-hor. And this was something his men were singing during the triumph. Caesar has the potential to be the ultimate champion for her cause, if Cleopatra can just win him over. And to do so, she will use his reputation as a womanizer as a tool against him, not only to entice him, but to ensure he doesn't think too much about her own aspirations. Whether or not the story that she smuggled herself into the palace inside a rug is true, when she meets Caesar, she presents herself as a mere, attractive woman.

Don't think that's an accident. I think that's exactly what she wants him to be thinking, and really all that she wants him to be thinking. If she wasn't a woman, if she was a man, obviously there would be a tremendous scrutiny to her actions. To what are her goals? What is she trying to accomplish? Why is she using me this way? Why is she contacting?

What do I really have to gain? And it is because Cleopatra is a woman, because again, she's using those weaknesses to her advantage, just as Aletti's had done previously. As a beautiful woman, some 30 years younger than he, part of what she can offer Caesar is rather obvious. But she also has something far more special up her sleeve. The chance for him to forge a relationship with someone of royal blood, maybe even to father a royal child. This is sort of this long-standing fantasy that we begin to recognize among the Roman aristocracy. this idea of marrying into the old Hellenistic bloodlines, right, of having actual royalty as your descendants. And so what she offers to Caesar, on the one hand, yes, it's sex, but it is also legacy.

It is a royal bloodline. And in Cleopatra, we have literally every Hellenistic royal bloodline. And so she is also offering to Caesar, again, the ultimate legacy, the ultimate ancestors. the ultimate ancestry. Caesar is clearly won over by her, and the pair soon become lovers. For Cleopatra, their personal relationship works out exactly as she'd planned.

Caesar and his forces helped restore her to the Egyptian throne, and her relationship with him is about to take her to the very heart of Roman power. With Cleopatra secure on the throne, Caesar leaves to deal with his remaining enemies. By the following year, he is back in Rome, ruling as dictator. Cleopatra knows that his support is still vital to hold on to power. Their bond is strengthened when she gives birth to their son, who will be called Caesarian.

The next year, mother and child travel to Rome, making sure to arrive in style. So when Cleopatra arrives in Rome, she is not like smuggled into the city. but she arrives on this massive, elaborate barge that sails up the Tiber River, and she is greeted by various guests and senators and so on. She reportedly comes off the boat, dressed as the goddess Isis, and covered in gold, and she's got band servants and soldiers, and this whole entourage that comes with her. For much of the next two years, Cleopatra remains in Rome as Caesar accumulates unprecedented power. But despite all her carefully laid plans, the politics of the

Roman state are something she cannot control. In 44 BCE, a group of senators, fearful that Caesar intends to make himself king, murder him during a meeting of the Senate. Over night, Cleopatra has lost her crucial ally. How she reacts personally, we may never know. But we do know that In the immediate aftermath, she chooses to remain in Rome to see what happens next. She does stay in Rome for an extended period after Caesar's assassination, and she is still there several days later, even for the funeral. And I think to an extent there is a desire on her part to see how things are going to play out. Is there going to be a place for her to step in? Can she use this situation to her advantage?

She does have Caesar's son. But it soon becomes clear that Roman politics are not moving in the direction she's hoping, leaving her vulnerable to her siblings back in Egypt. So she returns home where she brutally secures her position. She goes back to Egypt and in some way deals with her younger brother. She still has, you know, Ptolemy the 14th. She also has a younger sister by the name of Arsenault, who briefly tries to be something of pain and kind of seems to be moving to gather support to possibly act against Cleopatra.

And Cleopatra has her assassinated. So a lot of her actions after Caesar's death are kind of killing off her own family members. After eliminating rivals, she makes Caesarian, then three years old, her co-ruler, securing the succession around her own child. So she kind of eliminates every other possible show in town. And so the other link to power is Caeserian, Caesar's son. And the only way, of course, to get to him is going to be through her. So she is solidifying herself.

She is eliminating rivals. She is also creating the situation where Rome, whoever comes out of Rome, is going to have to work with her in order to exercise any degree of control over Egypt. Cleopatra now appears safe from challengers to her throne at home, but her position is still subject to the whims of the all-powerful Roman Republic. With Caesar dead, her next objective will be to find another way to keep Rome on her side. By 43 BCE, the chaos that had followed Caesar's murder is over, and politics have stabilized. The Roman Republic is now ruled by the Second Triumvirate, a political alliance between three of Caesar's supporters, experienced general and consul, Mark Antony,

Caesar's adopted son and heir, Octavian, and Rome's chief priest, Marcus Lepidus. Between the three of them, they divide up the realm. Mark Antony heads east, where the major problem is still the Parthian Empire, and as soon as he prepares a military expedition against them, he summons Cleopatra, hoping to gain access to Egypt's military resources. Cleopatra spies her opportunity to secure a new supporter and ensures she makes an impression upon her arrival. She arrives with a massive display of gold, wealth, solid gold statues.

There are towers, apparently, that are just covered in solid gold on the top of her ships. It is a display of wealth of power. power and resources, and then Cleopatra steps out by herself. Again, dressed as the goddess, ISIS, in this case, showing on the one hand, Mark Antony, this is everything that I have at my disposal, and by the way, I happen to be available. It is, again, playing into a known womanizer, where Mark Antony had had a reputation really from his early teens. And so, while giving Mark Anthony the resources she has at her disposal,

she also offers him the same thing she had offered Caesar, sex, legacy, and royalty. Correspondence between Mark Antony and Octavian shows that he is easily won over, and also that they both underestimate her. And so explicitly, the initial thought was Antony and Octavian are going to use Cleopatra. She's wealthy, she's connected. Let's take advantage of this woman. And of course Cleopatra flips that on its head, ends up getting Antony to work on her behalf, ends up using Antony's sort of Roman-ness to her advantage,

and ends up using her position as a woman, using her position, again, being underestimated by these two Roman men, to her advantage in terms of turning them to her will and her designs and her best interests. Antony and Cleopatra have three children together, and they begin building a future around their new dynasty. And this is where we get into, in 36, an event known as the donations of Antioch, and then in 33, we have, in 34 BCE, we have what's called the donations of Alexandria. And these are these large-scale ceremonies, where Cleopatra and Antony together are making it clear

how it is that they're going to divide the eastern Mediterranean. up between their children. By dividing the Eastern Mediterranean in this way, the pair are rebuilding a Ptolemaic empire around their family, granting Cleopatra and her children, including Cysarian, territories across Rome's eastern sphere. But these actions cause tensions between the pair and Octavian. Octavian, by that point, has been playing off of really his name,

his name, his legal connection to Caesar. And so Octavian is presenting himself as the son of a god, as the son of Caesar, as the direct heir of Caesar. And then Antony is able to present, by the way, this is the biological son of Caesar, Caeserion. And Caesarian's title in the donations of Alexandria is King of Kings, the idea that he is the ruler, he is the true ruler, the ultimate ruler, the actual ruler of all of these different territories. The second triumvirate collapses, with Octavian and Antony emerging as rivals for supremacy. Octavian comes up with a scheme to discredit his rival once and for all. It's not until we get to 32 BCE, where either Octavian or more likely Octavian's companion, Macinus, comes up with a scheme to break into the Temple of Vesta and to steal Markiol

Antony's will. Octavian then publicly reads out Mark Anthony's will on the floor of the Roman Senate. And in this will, Antony has left the city of Rome itself to Caesarian, has left significant portions of the Eastern Roman Empire to his children with Cleopatra. And his will essentially outlines what everybody had always been afraid of with Caesar, the establishment of a royal dynasty. and specifically a dynasty that would place a monarch over Rome. There are questions to this day whether this will was accurate.

But notably, Antony never challenges it. With the will made public, Octavian then changes tactics, turning his fire towards Cleopatra, using her status as a powerful woman to mount one of the most effective smear campaigns in history. he begins to argue that Antony has been corrupted, he has been unmanned, that his masculinity essentially has been stolen, and he has been in sorcery by this evil plotting woman, Cleopatra. The threat that Cleopatra comes to represent them is not military, it's not economic, it's not political, it's gender. Cleopatra has been able to take one of the most renowned manliest Romans, who's not military, who's not military, it's not political, it's gender.

has been in all of these battles, all of these wars, has had all of these women, and she has managed to strip his masculinity away and turn him into a tool to subjugate him. He then goes one step further, arguing that Cleopatra has not only stripped away Mark Anthony's masculinity, she's also going to do the same to Roman society. Look at what she has done to the best Roman. How do any of us stand a chance? This is This is the threat. This is the threat that Cleopatra represents. By 31 BCE, Antony and Octavian are effectively fighting for control of the Roman world.

Cleopatra backs Antony with Egypt's resources and navy, and their forces assemble at the Bay of Actium on the western coast of Greece. Octavian's forces are commanded by his friend Agrippa, who is a much more effective military commander than Octavian is. Agrippa's forces, Agrippa's Navy. This is a naval battle at the sea is made up of a bunch of smaller ships, smaller, faster, lighter ships. Whereas Cleopatra's Navy is a bunch of what are called quinkereams, massive sort of Hellenistic, we might almost think of them as the equivalent of like battleships or aircraft carriers today. They have massive siege towers on top of them

as well. But of course they're very slow, they're unwieldy, they're not very maneuverable. The narrow waters around Actium give Octavian smaller, more agile ships a clear advantage. Cleopatra, watching on from her flagship, soon realizes that her navy is outmaneuvered and turns around and leaves. Antony, realizing she's retreating, turns his ship around and does the same. But among the rest of the Navy, confusion reigns. The rest of the ships are just sort of lost as to what exactly is going on. These maneuvers by the two command ships take their entire force by surprise, and in the confusion, Octavian's forces, again commanded by Agrippa,

are able to very quickly swarm over the larger ships, take them out, destroy them, occupy them. The Battle of Actium ends up becoming a route, primarily because Cleopatra doesn't communicate her intentions to the rest of the Navy. She just turns around and leaves, and Antony reportedly doesn't catch up to her until they have both reached Alexandria. And we don't know what that conversation was like, but it probably was not a very friendly conversation, once the two of them caught up with each other. With Antony and Cleopatra in Alexandria, Octavian follows up with his Navy and sits off the coast. Antony gives a series of public speeches

and prepares to defend the city from attack. But the attack never comes. Octavian knows that he's won. He doesn't have to invade. He just has to sit and wait, and he knows this, and that's all he's going to do. So Antony is prepared to die in a blaze of glory that never actually happens.

Octavian doesn't give him that opportunity. Shortly after, perhaps because he hears rumors that Cleopatra has committed suicide, Antony takes his own life. Cleopatra, however, is very much alive. Some sources suggest she even meets with her enemy. We don't know whether or not that story is there to just simply discredit Cleopatra as sort of tossing him aside.

Reportedly, though, when she does meet with Octavian, she attempts to work out a deal. She attempts to seduce him. She attempts to offer him Egypt. She attempts all of these different strategies that have in the past, won her these sort of Roman patrons and Roman men and Roman protectors, and none of it works on Octavian, because Octavian knows that he's won

and knows that he really doesn't need her anymore. By now, Octavian is in contact with the aristocracy throughout the rest of Egypt and is preparing to take over. Cleopatra is simply in his way. She soon learns that Octavian plans to have her executed in Rome as part of his triumph. The war was against her. She was the target.

She was the evil one. She was the force that Octavian was saving the world from. And so he's going to have her publicly killed to show that the war is over with. And so Cleopatra decides to deny him that, at the very least, and take her own life. One source has it that she is bitten by an asp on her chest. Another that she drinks poison. Whether either is true is debatable. We're not really sure what to do with any of these stories.

It's certainly possible that this is how she did it, but this also falls in line with a number of tropes about evil women in Roman literature, as well as in Roman law. It plays into these Roman ideas about likewise female fear that she's not willing to stab herself or cut her throat, die like a man, if you will, and instead takes this easy way out. However, she does kill herself, though. she does kill herself, she does at least deny Octavian that one last bit of victory of having

her publicly executed. Cleopatra's death and the legends surrounding it would eventually overshadow much of what she achieved in life. But for 21 years, she had not simply survived. She had succeeded in a political world overwhelmingly stacked against her. From her father, Cleopatra had seen how apparent weakness could be turned into strength, and she would take that lesson further than he ever had. In a Roman world that underestimated women, Cleopatra found ways to turn that very prejudice to her advantage. What might have left her powerless became one of the sources of her power.

Cleopatra embraced her position as a woman, as a female figure of authority, and used that to her advantage, she used that to sort of lean into the fact that all of her opponents and potential patrons were going to underestimate her. And rather than correct them and show them how powerful she was, she let them believe whatever they wanted as long as they did what she wanted to do. There was, however, a cruel irony to Cleopatra's greatest strength. For years, she had found ways to exploit a Roman world that underestimated women. But in the end, those same prejudice resulted in her ultimate downfall.

They used her own story against her. They used her own leverage against her. And she had been doing this, and again, been taught to do this her entire life, to use weakness as a strength. And all Octavian and Macynus did was, again, use that strategy to undo her. Rome defeated Cleopatra. But perhaps its final victory came afterwards.

Octavian's portrait trail of the dangerous, seductive queen, outlived them both. Two thousand years later, its echoes still shaped the Cleopatra we think we know. Thanks for exploring the past with us today. If you like this episode, don't forget to leave a comment below, and feel free to leave us a rating or review. Your feedback helps us reach more listeners like you.

Thanks for listening. Unlock unlimited free grocery delivery with PC Express Pass. Shop online and get the same low No Frills prices delivered. Get your first year of PC Express Pass for just $2.50 a month. Learn more at nofrills.ca. Hold music. Not what you want to hear when a pipe dispersed in your basement is flooding. That's why Intact Insurance answers 2 million claim calls per year within 20 seconds. So instead of hearing this lovely track, you'll hear this in seconds. Hello, Intact Insurance.