In Our Time - Cleopatra

Episode Date: December 2, 2010

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Cleopatra. The last pharaoh to rule Egypt, Cleopatra was a woman of intelligence and charisma, later celebrated as a great beauty. During an eventful life she was ousted from her throne and later restored to it with the help of her lover Julius Caesar. A later relationship with another Roman statesman, Mark Antony - and Cleopatra's subsequent death at her own hands - provided Shakespeare with the raw material for one of his greatest plays. Today Cleopatra is still an object of fascination, her story revealing as much about the Roman world as it does about the end of the age of the Pharaohs.With:Catharine EdwardsProfessor of Classics and Ancient History at Birkbeck, University of LondonMaria WykeProfessor of Latin at University College LondonSusan WalkerKeeper of Antiquities at the Ashmolean Museum at the University of OxfordProducer: Thomas Morris.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, on August the 12th in 30 BC, the last pharaoh of Egypt died, bringing to an end the independence of a civilization which had lasted more than 3,000 years. Egypt's last Pharaoh was also arguably its most famous. Queen Cleopatra the 7th was a powerful and intelligent woman, whose interventions shaped the future of the Roman Empire. Today we remember her for the affair she had with two great Roman generals, Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, and for the tragic manner of her death,

self-inflicted and caused apparently by an asp clasped to her bosom. Shakespeare depicted that event in his play, Anthony and Cleopatra, where he also recalled her celebrated beauty. Age cannot with her, nor custom stale her infinite variety. Many people have become fascinated with the figure of Cleopatra in the centuries since her death. The French philosopher Blaise Pascal argued that if Cleopatra's nose had been shorter, the history of the world would have been different.

We made to discuss the life of Cleopatra are Catherine Edwards, Professor of Classics and Ancient History at Birkbeck University of London, Maria Weik, Professor of Latin at University College London, and Susan Walker, keeper of the antiquities at the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford. Catherine Edwards, this story takes place in the middle of the first century BC. Can you set the scene for us, What about the dominant powers in the Mediterranean where Egypt fits in with Rome at that time?

Right. Well, it's certainly important to bear in mind that Romans had been expanding their power in the Eastern Mediterranean for quite some time. And in fact, they've been involved in Egyptian politics for decades before Cleopatra came to power. Her father had been ousted by other factions within Egypt in the 50s BCE, and it had to have Roman help to get him back into power.

against his enemies in Egypt. So Egyptian and Roman power was very closely intertwined already. When we're talking about Egyptian power, what did that power reside in? Was it already becoming a satellite state of Rome? Did Rome respect it? Was Rome rather fearful of this great empire still? Well, Egypt was a very large and very wealthy state, and I think it's the wealth of Egypt that is almost kind of fabled in the Roman world.

So Egypt is seen as a fantastic place for Romans to make money. We find a lot of Romans going there trying to extract Egyptian wealth. And it's the case, really, that also Romans are rather kind of perplexed by this mysterious state, which is ruled by Macedonian-descended rulers, but who've adopted the custom of brother-sister marriage of the pharaohs. Can you tell us what's going on in Rome? So we'll come back to Egypt and we'll spend a lot of time in Egypt, But what's happening in Rome about this time, about the middle of the first century BC?

Well, politically speaking, Rome has really been in a very fragile state in the first century. We've got civil war breaking out periodically, and particularly coming to a head in the conflict between Pompey and Caesar in the early 40s BCE. And then later on, of course, we get further conflict after the death of Pompey. Caesar is then assassinated in 44. We get a conflict between Caesar's lieutenant, Anthony, and Caesar's claimed heir Octavian. So you have the Republic being threatened with dictatorship and fighting the fact of thinking Caesar would be a dictator, therefore, emperor. And this underlying fight between systems is going on.

Yes, I mean, it's not entirely clear, I think, at what point dictatorship comes to be the alternative to the Republic. We have these very powerful figures, Caesar, Pompey, Anthony, Octavian in conflict with one another. And with Caesar, Caesar appears to be setting himself up as dictator and that does cause a lot of unhappiness amongst others who see their own power threatened.

After his death, there's then the possibility that Anthony may take over this role and then later Octavian. We're talking about a time where the generals are so powerful, they had armies which were virtually of their own. They took these armies to different parts of the known world. Their conquests were in a way theirs. And so there were powerful figures in their own right,

although they all came back to Rome. They always threatened Rome because of the power they had through the army. That's absolutely right. The relationship between generals and their armies is critical. That Pompey, Caesar, they have these enormous armed forces. They're winning great victories for Rome, coming back with massive booty. But they also have to get settlements for their soldiers when they come back. They put pressure on the Senate to provide land for their soldiers.

and they threaten Rome with their troops. And then, of course, when they start to fight each other, they've got the firepower to do it, as it were. Susan Walker, can we go to Egypt now? What sort of Egypt was Cleopatra born into? We've had an indication that it's a wealthy place, it's a granary, a place of a great grain and so on. Can you give us a bit more?

Well, I'm sorry to say that the Egypt that Cleopatra was born into was a state that I think would have been very familiar to many of our politicians today, it was absolutely broke, bankrupt, and an enormous debt to Rome. So Cleopatra comes at the end of a dynasty of Ptolemies, whose rulers, rather confusingly, all called themselves Ptolemy. So her father was Ptolemy the 12th.

Makes it easy in one way, that, isn't it? Well, they ruled over... Alexandria, of course, which was a city built by Alexander the Great, and much developed by the Tolemies, who made it a great centre for learning and culture. And I think that's a very distinguishing feature of this dynasty, that they put a very high value on a Greek education, and develop this rather extraordinary and unexpected, mix of a high level of Greek culture

with Egyptian seocracy and the bit of that that didn't really work in their favour was this brother-sister marriage. Can we come to that in all of this we overlook the priests, well I have overlooked the fact that the priests were still very powerful because we get so entranced by Caesar and Antenicly Patra and Battles and Actium and so on. The priesthood, which we know quite a lot about in the previous two or three thousand years,

was still very powerful there. Can you just tell us what party was still playing in the first century? It was playing a very key role indeed, and throughout the history of Egypt, this is the stable authority within the country. And the Egyptian religion is, in the sense, the glue that binds people together. in the power structure in Egypt.

I'm talking about... Sorry, you mentioned Trump, please. The fairos are very much part of that. They become high priests. They are regarded virtually as gods. Cleopatra's father, Ptolemy, was known as a new Dionysus, who is, of course, a Greek god,

but he was also very much part of this Egyptian ruling cast of priests. So there's a very fundamental link between the royal family and organised religion. How did Cleopatra come to the throne? Was it unusual for a woman to be a pharaoh? She was obviously very able.

She was extremely well educated. She would be educated by the priests, was she? I think she would have been educated by Greek tutors, actually. I'm very much within the Greek cultural centre, the museum, which was actually attached to the royal palace in Alexandria. So she clearly had a very good education.

And many authors mentioned that, many ancient sources say she was able to talk to anybody she needed to talk to, foreign rulers, in their own language. And she was the first of the Ptolemies to take the trouble to learn Egyptian. Perhaps she wanted to know what they were saying about her. But so

she helped her father in the last years of his rule. So in the year or so before he died, she was effectively a co-ruler. And then he wrote a will in which he said that she and the elder

of her two younger brothers should succeed him in the usual brother-sister arrangement. but as I mentioned a moment ago that was the aspect of Egyptian practice that really didn't work terribly well it led to an awful lot of extremely bloody feuds

and that is indeed what happened with Cleopatra and her younger brother. So how old was she when she? She was 17, 18 when her father died and the younger brother whom she was... And the younger brother was about well very

just on the edge of adolescence 1112 how can we Maria Maria Weike how can we piece together the events of Cleopatra's life what sources are we going to be drawing from for the rest of this program

what reliable sources because after her death masses of stuff came out but maybe and that was quite near her death so those are sources too so anyway I've talked too much over to you well even the sources from her own lifetime

are not entirely reliable the tantalizing thing about Cleopatra is that so little evidence survives from Egypt itself about her. There are some documents, there are temple reliefs, there are coins that she minted where we can see how she wanted to represent her own features to her population. But by far the largest amount of evidence for Cleopatra, even contemporary evidence, comes from Rome. and of course Rome is her enemy and Rome is going to defeat her and much of what survives is in terms of Rome's perspective

Julius Caesar says next to nothing about her surprisingly there's no life of Cleopatra from that period, there's no biography of her, we just get what we learn of Cleopatra from the Romans there's a few gossipy letters of Cicero

when she comes to visit Rome telling us how much he detested her. Might be mutual. I wouldn't be surprised. And there's also some coins of Mark Antony that interestingly represent her as the queen of a

client kingdom of Rome. So that's how she's represented on his coinage. But interestingly, after she dies, there's almost nothing about her in the sort of official documentation of Rome. She's an embarrassment because she's an enemy who was, unfortunately, in their perspective a woman

and therefore not a sufficiently dangerous enemy. Nonetheless, they've constructed this propaganda about her. Octavian presents... Who eventually defeated Mark Antony and became Augustus, yeah. Exactly. He was Caesar's great nephew

and Caesar left everything to him and he was a friend of Mark Anten until... I'm right. He's like, well done. Yes, exactly. Octavian is the person who's going to defeat her at the Battle of Actium and Octavian is the person who's going to become Augustus and the Emperor of Rome but he constructs a narrative about her that

suggests that this is going to be not a civil war this isn't going to be a fight between him and Mark Antony for control for succession after Julius Caesar this is a primal battle between Rome and Egypt the West and the East man against woman and in the ancient context it has to be Rome liberty manhood that wins. That's his propaganda. And most of the literature that comes after that is buying into or playing with that perspective on her. And so the poets are the ones who write about

her after her death rather than any kind of official discourse. And they tend to use a lot of that image of her as an inebriated whore. And then after that, we start to find her in the historians about Rome, but of course she only comes into those histories as at the moments when she meets Julius Caesar or she meets Mark Antony and usually to demonstrate the way in which the mighty Romans fall to the enticements of the East, particularly in Mark Antony's case. So there's another theme here that the feminization of Mark Antony is the feminization of Rome, which is intolerable. It's amazing how well she came through given the way she was black straightforward black propaganda by Octavia.

I mean, they went for it, didn't they? This was a disgusting, as you say, a whore disgraceful, lure of the east. But doesn't that make us so interesting, don't you think? If you represent her in that way. I think I'm making a more interesting man second. I'm just saying it's interesting that she came through as a more intelligent, thoughtful, all the sort of stuff we're going to talk about, given that sort of bad start she had in the annals.

in the annals. Let's move to Catherine Edwards in in 48 BC. Cleopatra met Julie's Caesar's Alexandria under rather strange circumstances. Why did he come there and what was he after?

Caesar was after money that had been promised to the Triumvir's for their earlier help in restoring Cleopatra's father. So he was he was in Egypt looking for money and looking for assistance against the Pompeians.

But Cleopatra's brother was kind of blockaded Caesar to prevent Caesar's troops from joining him. And it's when Caesar is subject to this blockade that Cleopatra allegedly has herself smuggled into the royal palace in Alexandria, wrapped in perhaps a carpet in order to secure a meeting with Caesar, trusting in her own power. powers of persuasion. And so she has this momentous meeting with Caesar. This isn't the only one of Caesar's relationships with exotic queens. He has several that Suetonius tells us about, that Cleopatra is the one that has the biggest impact. And she persuades Caesar to support her against her younger brother, Ptolemy, whose advisors have been secretly plotting against her. So she needs room and help. Sorry, we mustn't bypass the alleged, the

theatricality, but also the persistent theatricality in stories about clearly. It isn't, it's just she leaps out of a carpet, a 21-year-old beauty and this 52-year-old man scribbling and his guests across the room thinks, well, that's a carpet. And

he goes on from there, as it were. So these gestures keep happening, so there was something in them. And we know that the city was full of theatricalities and she was played a part in them and loved all this stuff and so on. That's absolutely right. we do get these succession of scenes where Cleopatra is a spectacle and presents herself as a spectacle.

One of the most striking of those is when she goes to meet Mark Antony, years later, in Tarsus, he summoned her to call her to account allegedly for helping Cassius, one of the assassins of Caesar. But she decks herself out in the most extraordinary way, as Plutarch describes her as like a picture of Aphrodite. So she's playing on traditions of representation, it seems, at least according to Plutarch in his by. biography of Mark Anthony. Can we stick with Caesar a moment? She is married to her brother. By that time, has that marriage been consummated?

Have they had children? Well, her brother's still quite young at this point. I know that was what was going to worry me, yes. We can only speculate. But the usual thing was for brothers and sisters to breathe. It was indeed, yes. To keep the royal blood pure. Yes, that's right.

Although her father, Ptolemy Aolites, he was an illegitimate product. of his father's relationship, not with his sister. So there was a bit of blood from outside the line coming in there. But yes, it was standard practice for Vitolemies to marry their brothers and sisters and to reproduce. And Caesar, they had a child. Can you tell us about the consequences of this meeting, Susan Walker, Caesar and Cleopatra?

Well, the consequence was indeed a child, or so we are very much led to believe because Cleopatra did have a son most probably in June of 47 BC so in the following year after this meeting and this boy was very widely known as Caesarian or Little Caesar by the irreverent Alexandrians

who were much given to giving their rulers nicknames and it's It was widely thought that this was indeed Caesar's son. So this was quite a problem stacking up for the future, though for the present, as it were, he was a good investment for Cleopatra because he was, of course, a tie to Caesar. They also enjoyed Caesar and Cleopatra and Nile Cruz,

but it wasn't your average Nile crews. I mean, they took a lot of the Roman army with them. And so it was really more of a display of force and really assigned to people outside Alexandria, people living along the banks of the Nile, that this alliance between Cleopatra and Caesar was serious business. But not for the first time, sex went with power politics of Cleopatra

because there she popped out as we know she met him somehow or other we are given to understand she seduced him they had a child but also in the course of that Caesar got rid of her brother and made her the sole ruler and so she got a lot out of this

because she'd been banished by her brother so she knew what she was doing politically in that sense in that sense, isn't she? Effectively actually what Caesar did was restore the status quo ante and the brother was killed in battles that followed and then there was

a second younger brother who ruled with Cleopatra and Cleopatra went to Rome in 46 BC and may have stayed there for two years it's not entirely certain whether she went

home again in between visits but she might have stayed, she was certainly there again at the time that Caesar was assassinated on the Iads of March in 44 BC. Mary White, what's the reaction in Rome to the affair between Caesar and Cleopatra?

Well, the Romans are scandalised. She comes to Rome in a sense as the ruler of a client kingdom. She comes with her husband. But of course, Romans are aware of the child

and the relationship with Julie Caesar. They notice that, for example, she's not kept in Caesar's official residence in Rome, but across the river on the other side of the Tiber. She receives visits about which Cicero writes as such peak later on. And he, in fact, writes... You mean visits from Cesar? A visits from leading persons in Rome? From leading persons in Rome.

Cicero goes to see her, but he describes in a letter, in fact, written after she's had to leave Rome. he talks about his pleasure in discovering that she's had to take flight, as he describes it, after the death of Julius Caesar, because she's clearly perceived as being so tied to him when she should have a relationship with the Roman state, not with one particular person. And he says, Regina Modi, I detest the Queen because she is very arrogant, her staff are very insolent, and worst of all, she offered him some interesting presence which she never delivered. So he was particularly distressed about that. But it's quite...

He doesn't seem to be an entirely reliable witness. No. You can see all sorts of reasons for saying, hold on. But one of the scandals for Romans is not particularly the relationship, but what Cleopatra represents, because Cleopatra is a monarch. Cleopatra is divine. And Romans are concerned about Julius Caesar.

And subsequent historians think, was it Cleopatra? who gave him the idea that he would want to become a god, that he would want to be sole ruler of Rome. And Romans look at Cleopatra and think this could be the way that our own world might go. Catherine, anyway, so they live together in Rome. And we've begun to talk about the sort of disturbance that she was bringing there. Can we elaborate on that? It's been suggested that she might have been there for two years.

It's quite a stretch, isn't it? especially when things are going on as they were in Rome, so many antagonisms, the great generals against each other, all this manoeuvring. Do you know more about the part she played in that? Because she couldn't keep her finger out of any pie, could you? So she must have played a part. She does seem to have thought very carefully about who she should be aligning herself with.

But I think part of the reason, I mean, Maria's underlined some of the kind of, if you like, culture clashes between Cleopatra's style of presentation, which was really, in some ways, the traditional Ptolemaic style of self-presentation. I mean, she's not in a way doing anything new in Egyptian terms, but the problem is doing that in Rome. And one of the difficulties for Romans is the way in which the physical body of Cleopatra

is the kind of focus of her power. And that's the way in which she erased herself and wants people to look at her in a way that is completely alien to women's self-presentation in Republican Rome. Does Calpania, Caesar's wife, who there, and she will be gathering great support, one imagines, and great sympathy, one imagines. Is that what was going on? Or was it taking for granted that you could bring a queen back from Egypt and put her in a villa across the tiber? I think it's highly problematic that you bring a queen back from Egypt and put her in a villa across the tiber. And we see, interestingly, very similar kind of tensions with Mark Anthony later on, his wife, Fulvia, and then even worse, when he's married to Octavian sister, Octavia, in 40. And that's in the... sort of he's already begun his relationship with Cleopatra, he's got twin children by her,

and then he kind of takes up again with Cleopatra once Octavia has gone back to Rome pregnant with their child. I was being a bit flippant that I didn't mean to be. Was there a sort of moral feeling in Rome that it was a bad thing for a leading person like Caesar, sitting in him from him, to have his mysteries visible, dominant one imagines interfering, having a salon, taking on Caesar, Cicero, sorry, and so on so forth, was that considered to be a bad thing? or whether a moral repugnance? I think there must be very mixed feelings about it.

On the one hand, of course, it is a demonstration of Rome's power that Rome can attract to itself, great rulers from the East, who are Rome's clients. And kind of Rome is incorporating into itself these sort of exotic elements from distant parts of the world, including people. So Cleopatra's presence in Rome, in some ways, reflects well on Rome itself, perhaps. And, of course, there's a permanent memento of Cleopatra's relations,

relationship with Caesar in terms of the the gilded statue of Cleopatra that he sets up in the temple of Venus genotrix. So that that sort of sense of Cleopatra being incorporated into Rome is interesting. And yet at the same time, obviously,

it is a total affront to Caesar's wife, to Roman matronhood generally that this exotic Eastern presence should be in their midst. I wonder why Shakespeare didn't put her in the play. Anyway, Susan, Susan Walker,

after the assassination of Caesar, she more or less fled back to Egypt. And what was her fate there? Did she go, was she back in command and get on with it? Yes, she was indeed, and her younger brother, Tollamy the 14th, very conveniently died of a mysterious illness. We just happened to go back in me.

Exactly, which allowed a little Kaiserian, who by then was three years old, to become her co-ruler. And he was very assiduously promoted by Cleopatra as her co-ruler. So again, stressing this link with Caesar was still very important when she went home. She had a very hard time. Egypt was in great difficulties. because the Nile had not flooded adequately, thereby ensuring good harvests and good crops. So there was famine, there were problems with feeding people

in the great city of Alexandria, which had a population of about half a million at that time. And we do have papyri surviving, which show that Cleopatra was very diligent and assiduous, at ensuring that the food supplies got through, that people didn't pilfer crops, that correct taxes were paid, and corruption was stamped on, maladministration, so on.

So she seems to have been trying very hard to run Egypt in rather a difficult period. That's another aspect again, which doesn't get referred to, that, as you said, and you know all about this. She seems to be, using your words, diligent and assiduous ruler, who got down there and tried to make things work. That's certainly how she was regarded in Egypt,

and this bad press that we've spoken about in relation to perceptions of Cleopatra in Rome is entirely lacking in Egypt, both in contemporary terms and indeed later on. She's seen very positively. And then Mark Anthony heaves up, Maria. He's come to Egypt on the way to greater conquest. He is almost a god in terms of his military prowess.

isn't he's not Caesar and says he hasn't got Caesar's finances he hasn't got Caesar's backing so he needs allies more than the Caesar ever did and he sees Egypt as a possible ally but they meet they famously meet and according to Shakespeare they're famously meet and according to a lot of other people he basically

can you tell us about that meeting and what it's signified yes I mean the meeting has taken on a sort of mythic status by now not least because of the way that Shakespeare described it and Shakespeare borrowed his description from the Greek historian Plutarch.

And Plutarch tells us that Anthony summoned Cleopatra to Tarsus, which is off the coast of Turkey. And she was to come to explain herself, as Catherine said, that she was supposed to have been on the wrong side in the Civil War. But it seems clear that actually what he wanted from her was her support, her ships, troops to help him in his campaigns in the East. and perhaps to inherit from Caesar the relationship in a political and economic sense with Egypt, but perhaps also in other senses too.

But he summons her to Tarsus and she arrives not on a military ship, but on her royal barge. And we're told that it was like a burnished throne. It burned on the water. The poop was beaten gold. Purple were the sails. so Shakespeare says. He's borrowing this from Plutarch. The idea is that she arrives,

not in a military ship, but in some spectacle, some vision, as Catherine said, where mermaids are the ship's crew, where little cupids are rowing the boat with silver oars and where censuses are releasing perfume into the air. Sounds great.

It does, isn't it? And she comes as Venus. You know, what an invitation. But what is very clear in the narrative, is that she will not get off the boat to go and meet Aunt Mark Antony. The story is told that he was left sitting in the square at Tarsus while everyone else went to see her ship. And so it's a picture of his humiliation

because eventually he has to get up and he has to go and he has to get onto her boat. And of course that's the whole beginning of the process in which he subsumed into the world of Cleopatra and is very clearly an example of how she construct, a certain story and invites him to enter into it. So he becomes Dionysus to her Venus, her Aphrodite. And then he's going to come back with her to Egypt

to celebrate this wild world of feasting and dining that they have. Within a few years they have three children. But Catherine, one of the important things about that meeting, which Mary has described very vividly, is that it gave Octavian a chance to cast Mark Antony in a different light. He was no longer, because perhaps of that, warn the thing, but there are the, no longer the great warrior, the great Roman, he was something

else, wasn't he? That's right. We do see an increasing intensification of the propaganda war between Octavian and Anthony, particularly in the latter years of the 30s BCE. Most notoriously, Anthony does go off and he wins some military successes in the East in between his sort of time with Cleopatra. He wins a victory against Armenia. But he comes back to celebrate that in Alexandria and has a kind of pageant there where he and Cleopatra decked out in divine robes. And we have the so-called donations of Alexandria, where Cleopatra is set up as queen of kings and her son, Kaisarian, who is allegedly the son of Julius Caesar,

is set up as king of kings. And the three children of Cleopatra and Mark Anthony are then kind of rulers beneath them, to whom are accorded different parts of the... of the Roman Empire, really, that Mark Anthony is just conquered. And that is, at least that's the story that we get in Plutarch's life and elsewhere. And that obviously works very much to the advantage of Octavian back in Rome, who can present Mark Anthony as giving away the territories of the Roman people, as well as kind of frishering away, in between frishering away his time with Cleopatra and feasting.

And losing his masculinity. And definitely losing his masculinity. That's very important in a warrior society. It is indeed. An organised warrior society, such as a room. Susan Walker, we then have a war.

The Octavian turns against Anthony, not least because Anthony had married his sister and was having children with Cleopatra, and that might have been, anyway, they go to war.

And there's the Battle of Actium, the Great Battle of Action. Can you tell us about that battle? Well, it wasn't so much a as a sort of skirmish really off the northwest coast of Greece, in which Cleopatra insisted on taking part rather against Anthony's wishes because he knew she would bring very heavy ships and all her treasures and jewels and absolutely everything and retainers

and she would be an encumbrance. but in fact she and Anthony managed to slip through the Roman naval lines and get back to Alexandria and they were pursued of course by a gripper who was the Roman naval commander who was Octavian's right-hand man What do you say slip through after defeat? Well there wasn't really much of an encounter I mean it was a bit of a damp squib actium

it's always portrayed in later literature and painting is this great encounter but really it wasn't it was a rout I mean they were routed I mean they absolutely failed to defeat Octavian and Agrippa but they did escape and managed to get back to Alexandria and the real defeat that then comes in Alexandria with this very unfortunate drama of the suicides of Anthony and Cleopatra after Cleopatra had tried to plead for terms with Octavian.

I mean, she wasn't going to give up, but a whole series of disasters, personal disasters following her. So Octavian persecuted her. He was determined to get them. That was the idea of it. Sorry, excuse me. He was determined to get them. Yes. Can you tell us about this, the end.

so they fled, they've gone back to Egypt. What have they been going back to Egypt for? To regroup, to skulk, or what have they gone back for? Well, you get the sense that they've gone back to regroup, that they don't see themselves as completely defeated. But what overlays this story, as Susan was suggesting, is the versions that have survived, in some ways are so much more interesting than the reality

that, you know, Actium was a damp swim. Yes, I've just lost my battle. Yes, empty was a dach swim. It was a whole year before Octavian arrived in Egypt to confront Mark Antony. But, for example, the poet Horace writes about actium, and famously in a lyric poem that starts non-kestbibendom, now is the time for drinking, suggesting that the tyrant has fallen. This is describing the actual battle.

Cleopatra has been defeated. And in Horace's view, he syncopates the whole history into this one moment as Cleopatra escapes back to Egypt. he uses the propaganda of Augustus and describes her as a fatale monstrum, a deadly marvel, an extraordinary omen. And then he describes Octavian pursuing her immediately, but says he's a hunter pursuing a dove, a hunter pursuing a hare or hawk pursuing a dove. And then the rest of the poem offers this beautiful account of Cleopatra as dove, as a kind of innocent victim of Rome's pursuit,

and she arrives immediately back in Egypt, and she decides, according to the poem, immediately that she will not succumb to the humiliation of a Roman triumph because the tradition in Rome is when you defeat your enemy, you either kill them on the battlefield, or you capture them and you take them back, and you parade them in your triumph, and then you kill them afterwards.

And we're told in the poem that she would not submit to such humiliations, and at the end, Horace describes her in the most dignified terms as a non-humilist mulier, a woman who was not humble, a woman who was prepared to face ruin and her snakes and to kill herself rather than be humiliated. Catherine, how far does that accord with other sources? That's wonderful description of the Horace poem, but what about other sources?

I mean, poems might be the great records of the past, but still. Well, that's certainly one of the sources that's closest in time. But I think all the sources agree in focusing on Cleopatra's death as an absolutely critical moment. And in some ways, it's a moment that allows Romans to have a kind of admiration for Cleopatra's bravery. And that's very important.

Romans are very preoccupied with the manner of people's deaths. Can I go back two steps first? Mark Anthony, as we understand, had attempted to take his own life, made a bit of a bush of it, but she dragged him up. He died in her arm. And that had paid a part.

Why did he do that then if he was regrouping? Well, he was told that she was dead, so he was misinformed and killed himself, as you say, not very cleanly, but that does allow Cleopatra to go to him and he dies in her arms. And then she plans her own death in this very sort of calculated manner, a manner that also seems to focus on spectacle yet again. She takes her time, she has a feast, and then the figs, the basket of figs arrives with the asp in it, or was it perhaps? a poisoned hair pin, there's a certain amount of uncertainty about the exact method of her death. I think most sources prefer the snake. And then she gets the asp to bite her in the arm, according to most ancient sources, although later sources go for a different part of the body.

And then she dies. And her bravery is celebrated in all the sources, but of course it does mean she's conveniently out of the way, and Octavian doesn't have to deal with. the rather ambiguous thing, which is a female enemy, he claims that he's disappointed not to have her in his triumph. Instead, apparently he has a model of her dead body put on display in the triumph, which is another fascinating example of Cleopatra as spectacle in the city of Rome.

We have a vision, oh vision, yes, Susan Walker, of her as a great beauty. That's the way she's come down. But she wasn't always described by that, particularly, not by the medieval Arab scholars. Her intelligence and her intellect were more praised more often, weren't they? That's right. And indeed, Plutarch says that what was really remarkable about Cleopatra was not so much her beauty as the intelligence of her company. She had a very beautiful voice, which I think is a quality we perhaps underrate these days in estimations of celebrity. and she clearly had masses of charisma, a sort of person who would light up a room.

So enormous personal charm. I said a light to a room by this. Enormous personal charm. But yes, certainly in the Arab sources, she is regarded as an intellectual. And that goes back to this cultural heritage that she was born with, to the level of her education, her linguistic skills,

and her skills as a ruler, and a perception that right the way through she had been manoeuvring Egypt into a much more favourable position with Rome through her alliances with Caesar and Antony, and in particular the donations of land that Catherine talked about earlier, were terribly important because this was a sort of arc of territory from Syria, Iran, eastern Turkey, all the way through to Sireneica in what is now Eastern Libya,

which formed an arc of protection around Egypt. So if you were building, as it were, a defence force around Egypt, these would be the countries. So she got us out of the defensive wall out of it. Yes, absolutely. Finally, is there any sense in which we're going to find out more about Cleopatra? Are you playing with what has been discovered and that's what there is to play with?

Well, I think we can hope there's been some years of excavations, for example, in Alexandria, particularly in the harbour. And lots of excitement in past years, you know, if a boat is found, one always hopes it is the boat and if there's a tomb found, it could be the tomb of Anthony and Cleopatra

because they were supposed to be buried together. So we can just hope that more might yet come because what we have at the moment is just a hugely fascinating story and not enough facts. Oh, that was terrific. Thank you very much. Thank you, Susan Walker, Catherine Edwards, Maria White. Next week, Thomas Edison, the most prolific inventor in history, one of the architects of the modern world.

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