Stuff You Should Know - Cleopatra: Ms. Understood

Episode Date: July 9, 2019

One of the great misunderstood figures in history was the last pharaoh of Egypt. Cleopatra’s story is almost always told along with the men in her life, and from the view of the Romans who were threatened by her. Unsurprisingly, there was lot more to her. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Attention world, if you can make it to America, then come see us. We are going out on the road for SYSK Live again, and we are going to start the whole thing off in Chicago on July 24th.

That's right, and if you can't make it to America, maybe make it to Canada, because we're gonna be in Toronto in the next night, or the Danforth Music Hall, then in August, we're gonna do a couple of dates at the Wilbur in Boston, October 29th in Portland, Maine's lovely state theater on August 30th. Yep, and then we're going to be heading down to Florida.

We're gonna be at Plaza Live on October 9th, and then the next night, we're gonna be in New Orleans at the Civic Theater. That's right, and then we're gonna round it out in Brooklyn, October 23, 24, and 25 at the Bell House. Yep, so come see us. You can get tickets and info at SYSKLive.com. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know,

a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry Jerome Rowland over there. Sitting on Frank the Chair is not very happy about that, but still, this is Stuff You Should Know. I thought Jerry's entrance today was unique.

Oh, yeah? Yeah, man, when Matt and Tyler brought her in, rolled up in a carpet, time to ride on the studio floor. Yes, and she said, fire me. We said, Jerry, we don't have that kind of power. It was amazing. It was almost like playing the whole thing in reverse.

She rolled herself back up in the carpet in one swift motion. That's right, and if you were a Cleopatraite, then you got a little chuckle out of that joke. If not, you're probably thinking that we're on drugs or something. Yeah, I guess you could probably think both. But neither is true. What is true is that you're about to be confused

for the next 45 to 55 minutes. That's a great setup, man. We're going to confuse everybody. Yeah, boy, this is dense, and there are a lot of names with numbers that follow. Not even triumbrates. Not even regular numbers. Numbers that are actually letters.

Yeah, Roman style. So here we go. This is going to be good, Chuck. Oh, by the way, if you live in Chicago, or Toronto, or Boston, or Portland, Maine, or Orlando, Florida, or New Orleans, or Brooklyn, New York, you should go to sysklive.com. And check out our tour dates.

We're going to those cities, and you can buy tickets at sysklive.com and get information about things like, is it a 21 and up show? I don't think any of them are. What time are doors? Probably seven, but you better check. That kind of stuff, you can go find that info

by visiting sysklive, and then following the hyperlinks out to other websites on the internet. That's right, if you've never seen us live, come on out. It's a lot of fun. And if you have, just come on back and get a second helping of us. Yep, a second heap in helping of our hospitality. Now, on to Cleopatra.

Good call, by the way. Good call for saying all that. Great. So Cleopatra, she's one of those historical figures that everybody knows about, but if you stop and ask yourself, what do you know about her? You realize you know next to nothing about her.

She was amazingly beautiful. She looked like Liz Taylor. She loved Julius Caesar, and maybe Mark Anthony too. And wait a minute, how did she love both? What's going on here? You just realize you get confused pretty quickly. Was she a feminist icon?

Was she actually just kind of a wily woman who used sexuality to get what she wants? Who knows? The problem is this. She's one of those historical figures that we know very little about, because historians know very little about her. Like she was not extensively documented.

As famous as she is, she was not extensively documented by her own people, the Egyptians. Yeah, which is a little strange because she was beloved by the Egyptians. From what we can tell, yeah. From what we can tell, but most of the information we have is very Greco-Roman,

especially this Plutarch chump. Well, Plutarch actually, he was the first to show any sympathy whatsoever. The guys who came a little before him, they were just all out meanies because the Romans did not like Cleopatra in general. They found her at the very least problematic in that she kept luring away some of their favorite sons

and then usually to the detriment of Rome, or symbolically the idea, if she was a great ruler as she seems to have been, at least above average, if not like one of the better rulers around. If there was this woman who was kind of in the public eye and basically in ancient old-timey Roman news all the time and she was a female who was really good at ruling,

that was a threat to Rome's established patriarchy. That wasn't supposed to be able to happen. And so Rome came up with all of these popular ideas for why she was able to do that. And usually it came down to sex and or magic. And that that was how Cleopatra got through. And so over the last couple of thousand years, it's kind of our idea or image of Cleopatra

has kind of come up from this brew seen through Roman eyes. And it's only very recent that people have really kind of started to dig in and tried to examine her academically and with what small meager firsthand sources and accounts exist. Yeah, I mean, she ruled ancient Egypt. She was the last pharaoh.

She was the first woman sovereign to rule all by herself for more than a decade, which was quite an accomplishment. Oh yeah. And how she got there is a very long and sort of convoluted story. Yeah, when you think of Egypt, Chuck, we think of like pharaohs and Isis and Osiris and all of that. Sure.

And we think of Cleopatra too, but Cleopatra was different. She was different from all the pharaohs that came before her. She was different from most of the pharaohs that came before in that she came from a family line that had been established only about 350 years before when Alexander the Great's general Ptolemy said, Alexander died, we're dividing up his kingdom, I'm taking Egypt. And he said, hey, Egyptians, you know how you had this line

of pharaohs that ruled the country? Well, you got a new one and it's me and my descendants. And I'm not Egyptian. I'm actually Macedonian, but I'm in charge here and I'm naming myself Ptolemy the first suitor. I believe it's S-U-T-O-R, which means savior of Egypt. And he established the Ptolemaic line. And from that point on, all of the people who ruled

as pharaohs over Egypt came from Ptolemy and his children. Yeah, I mean, that was a few hundred years worth a pretty good run there. It was a pretty good run, but you don't think of that. Like, you think of Cleopatra as a pharaoh, like any other pharaoh, she wasn't, she was different. She was probably of Macedonian descent because she was descended from Ptolemy,

but they also are not sure was she Egyptian too? Like ethnic Egyptian. Some people believe that she was Sub-Saharan African descent. It's just totally up in the air of exactly what her ethnicity was, but she was definitely not descended from the pharaohs before. But in establishing this line, Ptolemy said,

well, I get that you guys are really big into the idea that kings or pharaohs and queens are divine. So we're going to say that that applies to my line too. And what's this incest you guys are into? We'll give that a try too. In a big way. The Ptolemaic line carried on those customs as well. Yeah, so the Ptolemies, Ptolemies, Ptolemies.

Whatever you want to say, man. They were Greek speakers and observed Greek customs, which if you're living in Egypt, it seems like a bit of a contradiction because people in Egypt weren't Greek. And that kind of caused a separation. Cleopatrick was, was Cleopatrick? Is that what I said?

Yes. Cleopatrick was- It sounds like Cleopatrick sounds like a new comedy coming this fall on NBC. It totally does. Oh boy. Who rules like her local, you know, Brooklyn apartment building or something.

And she comes in, how they introduce her as a character as she comes in rolled up in a carpet. Sure. In the pilot. That she made herself. Man, this thing writes itself. So Cleopatra distinguished herself by coming in and we'll get to all this in more detail,

but she was popular in Egypt because she came in and she was like, hey, what do you need Egypt? I'm going to speak your languages. Right. I'm going to, I'm going to be patriotic for Egypt. And I'm going to speak a lot of languages because I'm super smart. And I don't, in fact, I speak so many languages.

When I go to meet with other leaders of other countries and kingdoms, I'm not even going to need my translators. And I'm not even going to need my advisors around. I can make my own decisions because I'm speaking directly to them in their native tongue. Egyptians love that, but their officials and her, well, I guess her translators didn't really have a say, but her officials were like, this is upsetting.

Well, yeah, because it diminished their power. They said, well, you don't, you know, you're not consulting with us before you start speaking to these other foreign powers, these other leaders. And she's like, well, I don't need to. I speak their language. I can ask them and decide for myself,

whether they're telling the truth or what they actually need or what they should get. So yeah, just the ascension of Cleopatra was different two ways. It diminished the power of the officials that had been established by the time her father died and left the place to her. And she was known as basically a very patriotic pharaoh

in that she spoke Egyptian and followed Egyptian customs way more than any of the Ptolemies before her had. So that was, she was different in that respect, big time, right out of the gate. Yeah, so she assumed the throne as a, I guess even for the time, a young woman of 18 years old, along with her bratty little 10 year old brother,

Ptolemy 13, that guy. There was a tradition there that basically said, if you're a woman, you need a male consort to rule. And by the way, Mariam. Say what? And by the way, Mariam. Yeah, like technically you have to get ceremonially married, but you know, that's kind of where it ends,

unless you don't want it to end there, because we're pretty liberal on that front. Sure. But the kingdom of Egypt that she inherited was not a healthy one. It had floods and famine. It had a bad economy. And it was really up to her to forge alliances

with other places and other men in power to make Egypt what she thought it could be, starting with Julius Caesar. Yeah, so at the time, so her father had kind of mortgaged Egypt over to Rome to help bail the economy out, because things are, it was hard times even before Cleopatra rose power,

and that's what she inherited. So Rome already had a pretty big interest in Egypt. Egypt was a client state of Rome. Rather than Rome officially ruling Egypt and saying like we install the governor or all that stuff, they said, you can exist and we're gonna trade with you. But basically, if we tell you to do something, you do it. And that was kind of the relationship

between Rome and Egypt. So it makes sense that she would say, let me get even more... Cozy. Cozy with Rome, but who's in power? That was a really big question at the time, because when she rose to power as co-ruler with her little brother,

who by the way, she basically just rode out of power immediately, that was not an easy question to answer, because at the time Rome was wracked by civil wars. And specifically there was a triumvirate, kind of a shaky power sharing agreement between Julius Caesar Pompey and Crassus, I believe, right? That's right. And that is Pompey, is that how you pronounce it?

We can't say Pompey, cause I'll get confusing. Yeah, it's Pompey. I always said Pompey. It sounds so cute, but he was a murderous general. Give me a little Pompey. Stick that knife in somebody. And also, by the way, later on Octavian, when did he become Augustus?

Oh, that's the big finish, man. We'll get to that eventually. Spoiler, yeah. Cause that got a little confusing, too. All these different names. Yes, but you are correct, Octavian is Augustus, they're one and the same. Right, so.

And are they both Joaquin Phoenix? The Roman Senate was on the side of Pompey. So Julius Caesar, like you said, this sort of deal that they had going on was a really kind of unsteady detente between civil wars. And the Roman Senate supported Pompey and said, Caesar, you gotta give up your army, man.

He said, I'm not doing it. In fact, not only that, but I'm coming to Italy, guys. He leads his people into Italy. Across the Rubicon. Yeah, and declares war against Pompey and his forces. And he wins. He eventually won, quite surprisingly, because Pompey, again, had that Senate backing.

And so he had the senatorial forces, which vastly outnumbered Caesar's forces, but they were just superior forces. And Caesar eventually defeated Pompey. Well, Pompey, being closely aligned with Egypt, fled to Egypt, which is pretty understandable. You can also understand why he would have fled to Egypt. He was the state designated guardian of Ptolemy,

Ptolemy the 12th's kids, which was Cleopatra and Ptolemy the 13th, among others. Here we go. So he went and thought, okay, this'll be great. I'll just sit around and eat grapes for the rest of my days in Egypt. It's not a bad forced retirement. Sure, it was a nice place.

But when he got there, he found that Cleopatra and her sister, Arsenawe. Arsenawe Hall. Had been forced into exile. And that Pompey, the 13th, was in, I'm sorry, Ptolemy the 13th, like it's not confusing enough already, was in power.

This little boy king, boy pharaoh was in power. And Ptolemy thought, Caesar just won. His vanquished enemy just showed up at my doorstep. I'm gonna get killed for harboring this guy. So I'm gonna have Pompey killed. And he did. He had Pompey killed and decapitated in an effort to curry favor with Caesar.

It didn't work though. No, it did not work because Caesar said, hey, hey, hey, I was gonna pardon that guy, you moron. And like become beloved to the Roman citizens. And you just cut his head off. I'm coming for you. And so Caesar crossed into Egypt to invade and basically depose Ptolemy the 13th.

That's right. So he gets to Egypt now, Caesar does. He declares martial law and basically moves in to the royal palace and is like, this is my place now. It's my place. And so Cleopatra at this point is like, all right, here's the deal. I need Caesar support here

if I'm gonna get back on that throne. Right. So I need to curry favor with him. And this is the big carpet scene that we're talking about in every sort of pop culture retelling of Cleopatra's story, which means this is probably true. Cleopatra gets back in there by sneaking in, skirting the enemy lines and the Roman barricades

coming in and under the dead of night, rolled up in a carpet and is then presented to Caesar, unrolled. And he's like, that was fantastic. He just stands up and claps like bravo. Roll her back up there and do it again. I've never seen anything like it. She begs Caesar for aid and it really did

apparently win him over. And he was like, I like the cut of her jib. Right. So they became friends with benefits pretty quickly out of the gate, but from every account of this, it was, and again, it was either a carpet, she was rolled up in a carpet or in like a, some sort of bag like that you'd carry bed clothes in

or whatever, she got Caesar on her side, like almost immediately. And so all of a sudden Cleopatra, who had been forced out of rule by Ptolemy the 13th, was now aligned with the guy who had just invaded Egypt and taken over and declared martial law, which was bad news for Ptolemy. And it was also bad news for Arsinoe who had left.

She had come back with Cleopatra and then left to go have Ptolemy proclaim her queen of Egypt. So she traded sides. And so Cleopatra said, hey, Julius, just a couple of quick favors. I want to get rid of Ptolemy the 13th. I also, who actually they found out later that he drowned fleeing, he drowned in the Nile.

So Ptolemy the 13th is taken care of. The only person left out of all, I think, five or six kids in Cleopatra's family, there's one left, Arsinoe, her younger sister. She's like, I can't have her running around. She's already shown that she's duplicitous. Get rid of her. So Caesar, to kind of show off that he has taken over Egypt,

parades Arsinoe through the town, through I suppose Alexandria, in chains showing that he's vanquished her. And he, to his surprise, found that this aroused the sympathy of the people living in the town. And so he ends up sparing Arsinoe's life, which we'll come back into play later.

And he vanquishes her in exile to the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, which we talked about in the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World episode. But so just put a pin in that, Chuck, that Arsinoe is alive. She just lives in Turkey in exile now. That's right.

And she is the only person who can challenge Cleopatra's claim to the Egyptian throne. All right, let's take a break. Okay. Let's get our ducks in a row. All right. Come back, talk more about that carpet trick. I'll look at this.

["Hail to the King"] On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling

of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it, and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when

questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help.

This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast

and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. OK, so Ptolemy's dead, little brother's dead. Sister is vanquished. Yes. Caesar at this point needs to, he needs money.

He needs to fund his return to Rome and return to power. And Cleopatra's dad incurred a lot of debts via Egypt. And he's like, hey, listen, I gotta, like, get this money back. And he said, you're pretty cool. That carpet trick was awesome. Just gangbusters. Gangbusters. So I need, it's fine.

You can rule Egypt. The two of us here were great. We have the same, you know, I feel like we're on the same level, which was a very big deal to, for someone like Julie Caesar to say that about a female ruler. And he stayed there for a while and they had a kid. His name was Ptolemy Caesar. He was, you know, later fully acknowledged from Caesar

that he was his child, but it was kind of like the love child thing. Right. He said, yeah, that's my kid and he's great, good looking kid, but he is not my official heir. No, but his name, like I said, was Ptolemy Caesar. They called him Cesarean or Little Caesar or Pizza Pizza. Right. I'm sure you saw that coming from a mile away.

If you hadn't said it, I would have said it myself. So all of a sudden Cleopatra is there. She's really sort of solidified her position on every front. Right, right. So she's got the backing of Julius Caesar, who's named himself dictator for life by this time. She got her brother out of the way and sister out of the way for now. And, and this is, this is, it's really tough to overstate this.

She has borne an heir. She's the only, she's the pharaoh. She's the ruler of Egypt and she's now born an heir, a male heir, who is not only a male heir and going to be the next pharaoh, but he is the blood descendant of Julius Caesar himself. So Egypt is real happy with Cleopatra at this moment. Rome is not so happy, but it doesn't matter because Caesar's like the top dog in charge of everything and things are going well for a little while.

So much so that Caesar or that Cleopatra and little Caesar go visit big Caesar in Rome for a little while and set up household right across the river from Caesar's house and at Caesar's house, if you had happened to go across the way and peek in one of the windows, you'd find, oh, Caesar has another family. He's got a wife and kids and they're not super happy with him for having run around on them and had another kid with Cleopatra, but what are you going to do? She's the ruler of Egypt and by the way,

she's spending the summer across the river from us. That's right. So as a ruler, things are going pretty great for Cleopatra. Like I mentioned earlier, they really liked her. She was, she related to the people, they related to her. Like you said, she lived the Egyptian lifestyle. She, whenever she had portraits drawn of herself, she was like, did the Egyptian thing because it's great and the people love it.

She was identified on a papyrus in 35 BC as she who loves her country. Yeah, Philopater in Greek, she who loves her country. That's right, but she was a fully Egyptian pharaoh and very patriotic and that just further like cemented her position as someone beloved by the Egyptians. And it's at this point that it's like, it's pretty obvious that it's a real shame that you didn't get any writings from the Egyptians, you know? Yeah, yeah, there was, there were some busts, I believe, of her possibly that may have been lost.

There was a coin that turned up, but for the most part, like they didn't really document her rule, which again, it's really, really weird. But there are some like, like it was a massive bureaucracy that she operated. It was not just Egypt, but it was a huge chunk of Northeast Africa and Southwest Mediterranean that she ruled over. And, you know, being in league with Caesar definitely didn't hurt things. So the empire kept expanding. She, but on her own, this is the thing, like it's not lost on us.

Everybody who's listening, that we're telling the story through the fact that Caesar is a huge part of her life or that Rome, whatever Rome's doing. This is the documentary evidence we have. But there's also other evidence too, very sparse evidence, but there is evidence that like with or without Caesar, like she was afforded like a bigger opportunity by being in league with Caesar. But she took that and ran with it on her own without the direct aid of Caesar. So she expanded her empire.

She started trading to further and further areas like Arabia. There's potential evidence that they were trading as far away as India at the time. And she was really good from what we could tell at figuring out what somebody needed and making them dependent on her for it. One of the ways she would do that was like she identified people who could help her too. Like later on after Caesar died, there would be a general who was really important. He was stationed in Egypt, so it was really good for her to be on good terms with them. So she basically gave him a tax break that said, hey, you can bring in 5,000 amphora of wine

from Rome every year tax-free. You can export 10,000 bags of wheat tax-free. That must have been an enormous amount of money that this guy saved. And the way that she would do this in her own style was found later on. So on this royal decree saying that this is the case, in her handwriting, she wrote Genesthoi, which is Greek for make it so. And they found this. There's like a document out there that has Cleopatra's handwriting on it.

But it was basically to make sure that this guy felt taken care of so he would remain her ally. And that's how she operated. She knew very clearly how to make people like her or how to make them dependent on her. And then under that, she signed her name and then put TCB with a lightning bolt through it. You know what's cool is that document, they found it accidentally. It was used as lining for a sarcophagus that a mummy was found in.

And somehow they found this thing and figured out this is Cleopatra's handwriting. Amazing. It is pretty amazing to have that relic exist in the world still. So later on, 46 BCE, Caesar returned to Rome. And then Cleopatra, like you said, went there at some point to visit. And this is where the big acknowledgement that little Caesar was his son, but not the heir. That's where that finally happened.

And Caesar was murdered, very famously. I don't know if you people have heard about that. But he was stabbed in the back quite literally on my birthday. Cleopatra goes back to Egypt, Ptolemy 14 dies soon after this. And that means little Caesar is all of a sudden, co-regent with mommy as Ptolemy 25. I'm sorry, 15. Right. Ptolemy 15, right?

So now little Caesar is officially the heir. I think by this time he was like 13 or 16 or something like that. He was getting up there in years. No, I'm sorry. That was later on. So yeah, he was a little kid still. He was three. He was three.

Okay. So after Caesar dies, like everything's kind of up in the air. This is a pretty big surprise to everybody. But Caesar had boys, right? He had people that loved him. One of which was Octavian, who was his grand-nephew, I think, who Caesar allegedly adopted. There was also another one named Mark Antony, who was Caesar's kind of right-hand man. And they said, Hey, you know what?

This is not cool. We're going to get Brutus and Cassius, who orchestrated this assassination. And another civil war erupted in Rome. Yeah. We can't leave out Lepetus because this was the official second triumvirate. Okay. You're right. And you can't be a triumvirate without Lepetus.

No. Got to have that third guy in there. It's just a duumvirate. No one likes those. That's right. So 42 BC, there was the Battle of Philippi and the forces of Mark Antony and Octavian defeated Brutus and Cassius. And then that means Mark Antony can emerge as ruler of the east, which included Egypt,

very importantly, and Octavian held the west on the west side. But both of them said we need the support of Egypt, which is a very big deal. Cleopatra basically was summoned by Mark Antony. And she was like, you know what? Summoned to Sicily. And she was like, I'm going to Cleopatra. I'm going to come when I want to come. Which was sort of a bold move at the time.

Yeah. Yeah. Because he was basically accusing her of potentially having given aid to Brutus and Cassius during the civil war. And she's saying, not only am I not even responding to the allegation, I'm not even going to show up to talk to you until I want to. But when she does show up, apparently she made another very grand entrance. And this one was memorialized by William Shakespeare in the play Mark Antony and Cleopatra, appropriately.

And she shows up in this town called Tarsus in modern day Turkey on a barge, a royal barge. And these barges, by the way, dude, these are like, this is not what you think of as like a barge, you know? I guess it is kind of what you think of as a barge, but larger and more opulent. How about that? Yeah. I mean, it was, she came in to make a statement. Right.

There were, she was dressed as Aphrodite. There were purple, purple sails, there were lutes playing. She basically had a band. She was laying on a couch on clouds of incense. And Mark Antony, just like Julie Caesar was like, whoa, wow, we really know how to make an entrance. Yeah. And he said, you know what, I'd like to dine with you.

Can you come here and dine with me? And she said, no, why don't you come upon this ship and you dine with me? He very famously said, can you come here and dine with me? And he did get aboard that ship and he did dine with her and he was very much taken with her. Yeah. And she, you know, ultimately, I think she very much loved him in the end, but she early on at the very least knew what she needed from him.

Yeah, because again, this guy's the Roman ruler of Egypt, basically. And her job is to make it so Rome doesn't ever officially rule Egypt. So at the very least, it stays at arms length enough so Egypt can be a client state. But she also needs to make sure that she doesn't go to war with them because they would probably crush Egypt. So she's dancing this real fine line. And again, just like with Caesar, she basically said, hey, guy, I like the, I like the cut of your jib.

Let's figure out an alliance and let's also do it a lot too. And it's like you said, though, it's like you said that like whether it was because she needed something from him and he also was very much dazzled by her wealth as well or her display of wealth. But there does seem to have been, unless it's just totally fabricated, a real love story between the two of them. Yeah. I mean, they had three kids together.

Right. So he goes back to Egypt and he's not too far behind at this point. He's like, all right, I got to get over there to Egypt and see my lady. And his wife, Fulvia, said, wait a minute, I'm your lady and we have kids together. And he says, yeah, but you know what, I'm going to go over there anyway because, you know, that's just kind of how things worked back then. Sure. There's a before text.

That's right. He spent the winter of 4041 there in Alexandria. They were getting along famously. They formed a drinking group called the inimitable livers where they had these big, huge parties and feasts. And this is one of the very famous legends of Cleopatra came about when she took a pearl and dissolved it. It was a very expensive pearl valued at 10 million simoleons, which was enough to maintain

10,000 Roman soldiers for a full year. That's a lot of dough. That's a lot of dough. And just to prove her wealth, she dissolves this thing in a cup of vinegar and drinks it. And Mark Antony was like, oh my gosh, this lady. Spoiling. Amazing.

Did you see what she just did? She just drank a pearl. She's just wasted so much money. I'm so turned on right now. So they have twins, Alexander Achelios and Cleopatra Selene. And this is kind of the boom time for Cleopatra and Egypt. She's really solidified her stronghold and everything is sort of going her way at this point.

Yeah. In part because Mark Antony said, I got to get back to Rome. I'd like to show up really victorious. You know, one of those barges you've got, I'd love to have one of those. I need some money from you. And with Caesar before, again, Cleopatra's father, Ptolemy XII, had kind of mortgaged Egypt to Rome. This had not happened.

Egypt had kind of gotten out of that economic funk when Cleopatra had taken over. And she had started to steer it even better in better directions. So now this was just straight up Mark Antony borrowing from Egypt, which helped put him in her pocket. And she said, I would like to expand my empire. He said, done. So he gave to Cleopatra a lot of Roman holdings that Egypt had formerly held. And the empire just expanded by a pretty decent proportion overnight, just with the sweep

of Mark Antony's hand in exchange for her setting him up to go back to Roman style, which he did. All right. So let's take a break. Okay. And we're going to come back and talk about the cracks that start to form right after this. From the podcast, Paydude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the

cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to blockbuster?

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on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands

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Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step, not another one, kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. So Chuck, no good time can go on forever. It turns out in Cleopatra's story, definitely brings that one home too. That's right. So you didn't like that set up? No, I thought it was great. It was like, I put the ball on the orange cone and it just kind of fell over.

So Mark Antony does a very controversial thing. He declares little Caesar rightful heir rather than Octavian, right to Julius Caesar. That's correct. And he awarded land to each of his children with Cleopatra. We mentioned the twins, we did not mention Ptolemy Philadelphos, who's the third kid. And this really upset Octavian as it probably should. So he knew that the Roman people were kind of sick of hearing about Cleopatra. They were sick of hearing about all of these wars going on that these generals are carrying

out. And he knew that it was sort of the perfect time to mount a propaganda campaign to turn everyone against them. Yeah, because the Romans were like, had another civil war between two powerful generals that are co-ruling. Come on. And Octavian had the really good idea of saying, okay, okay, I can't turn everybody against Mark Antony directly, but I can turn them against Cleopatra really easily.

So I'll just start this propaganda campaign that says Cleopatra is a threat to Rome. She has, using her wiles or her magic or whatever, convinced Mark Antony to give up chunks of Rome and to declare her son Caesar's rightful heir, we got to get rid of Cleopatra. Poor Mark Antony is just her mesmerized puppet, basically. So we achieved the same end, turning people on Mark Antony, but rather than doing it directly, he uses Cleopatra and their kind of suspicion of her being a foreign temptress as the crux through which he does it. Yeah.

And some of this stuff was true. Some of it was made up. Octavian said, hey, listen, I've got his will. And you know what he's done? He's turned over Roman possessions to Cleopatra. And you know what, he's going to make Alexandria in Egypt the capital of Rome. You can just hear the gasp. Oh yeah.

And it was a big deal. So in 32 BC, the Roman Senate got involved. They stripped Mark Antony of his titles. And Octavian says, all right, Cleopatra, it's time for us to go at it. We're going to war. Your charms will not work on me. And they had not worked. And I think Cleopatra knew this all along.

So this all fed into the narrative that Cleopatra was from Egypt and from a different culture that they don't align with. She lives there. She's super wealthy. And she's doing these dealings with the Far East and India. And at the time, those places were, I guess, in Rome, seen as just very sort of controversial and weird. And they thought they practiced in the occult and alchemy and all these strange things.

And she's doing business with them. And she's a bad, bad lady. Right. Right. So yeah, it was just foreign and weird. This is basically how Rome viewed Egypt, right? So the idea that that was going to be their new seat of power did not sit very well with them.

Whether that was true or not, I don't know. But it worked. It got the Roman Senate and the people turned against Mark Antony so much so that Octavian was able to launch an assault on Egypt and on Cleopatra and Mark Antony, which was successful. Right. And this article makes it kind of sound like it happened almost overnight. I think it took place over the course of a year or so between when Rome turned on Mark Antony and when Octavian was at Egypt's door.

But at some point, Mark Antony during the siege, during this war between Egypt and Rome, which is something Cleopatra had avoided the whole time, basically her whole reign was about preventing this from happening. Mark Antony decided that he had lost his place of honor in the world and that he should take his own life. He also, according to legend, heard that Cleopatra had taken her life. And so in response and because he had lost his place of honor, he killed himself basically through Hari Kuri, which is like stabbing yourself with your sword, disemboweling yourself.

That's what he did with his own sword and was at death's door, I guess, when he heard, oh, wait, wait, that was just a rumor Cleopatra didn't actually kill herself. Yeah. And supposedly if you believe the legend, Octavian did allow him to be brought to Cleopatra and he died in her arms and she tore at her clothes and smeared his blood all over her face and shrieked out, he is my master and husband and commander. And that's if you believe the legend, of course. Yeah.

It sounds a little trumped up to me, but you never know. So Octavian at this point is in a pretty good position. He says, he's got it right where he wants her and he knows it and she knows it. And he said, listen, I want you to come back to Rome and you're going to be a captive and I'm going to kind of parade you through the streets as a symbol of our victory. And she knew that this would be like just the great humiliation of her life and career. So she said, all right, I need a little time to prepare myself, which, you know, the writing is on the wall here that she is going to die a noble death by taking her own life, but

she didn't do it right away, it took about a week because she was still trying to save things up until the very end, which is pretty remarkable. So on August 12, 30 BC, Antony is buried, Cleopatra meets with Octavian. She closes herself in a chamber with two of her servants and we're not exactly sure how she got it depends on the legend that you choose to believe, but she got poisoned and committed suicide along with her servants. And apparently, and this is from Plutarch's records, one of the Roman officers burst in as this was happening and yelled a fine deed this and one of the servants was basically

like, yeah, it is a fine thing because she went out on her own terms jerk. Yeah, basically, that's an eggist paraphrasing, sure. She said, nothing could be finer for this lady, the descendant of so many kings. Right. That was Charmian and the other servant was Iris, I-R-A-S. And like you said, like they're not quite sure how she got that poison. And so a legend grew up that she had used an asp, a cobra, and it allowed it to bite her so that she could die.

But if you kind of put two and two together, supposedly she sent a note to Octavian to stall for time, but he figured out what she was doing fast enough that there was maybe a course of minutes that transpired between that she would have had to have taken this poison and died and it takes like an hour or something like that to die from a cobra bite. So people say probably not cobra, but where would she have gotten that poison since she was under such close guard? And one theory that's emerged is, do you remember when Caesar paraded Arsenae through the streets and ended up generating sympathy for her unintentionally?

Yes. Supposedly Octavian remembered that and according to this theory, and didn't want to do the same thing by parading Cleopatra through the street. So he never had any intention of doing that. And instead went to her and said, look, I can kill you or you can take your own life. You seem like the kind of lady who'd want to take her own life. If you do this, we'll celebrate it, that kind of thing, and that's how she got the poison because she was kind of allowed to be given that option.

That's just a theory, but no one knows. All we know is that Cleopatra almost certainly did take her own life, most likely through poison of some sort. That's right. So she was buried next to Mark Antony, which was according to her wishes, of course. And you know, because we don't have writings from Egyptians, it's mainly like we said from the Roman perspective, she's viewed through different lenses. Some people have portrayed her, like we said earlier, as super capable and dynamic and

super smart and other people have portrayed her as just like leaning on her while as a woman and being more cunning than strategic. I think somewhere in the middle is probably the truth. She probably did what she had to do on certain occasions, but that certainly doesn't mean she also wasn't like a brilliant leader on her own terms. Right. And this article actually points out, it's pretty ironic that were it not for the propagandists who were working for Octavian, who were trying to basically disassemble any good memory of

her and paint her as a terrible person who almost brought down Rome, were it not for Octavian to save Rome itself, she would have. Were it not for those biographers, she may have been lost to history. Like there's a lot of pharaohs in Egypt's history that we just don't know anything about. And she could have ended up being one of them, even though she was a successful pharaoh for Egypt, we may never have known about her. Were it not for these guys like Lucan and Plutarch, who wrote about her and commemorated or memorialized her?

Yeah, and I think, I mean, I don't think there's any disputing the fact that she was at the very least one of the more charming and intelligent rulers of the time. She just had sort of a way about her from all the readings where like you couldn't help but be captivated by her when you're in her presence. Her speaking voice has always been written about. And I think she had that just certain indefinable quality. There's been a lot of debate on her looks over the years, but to me that's, I don't even know why people still talk about that stuff.

It's funny because people do, and both men and women do, like whenever somebody shows a picture of what she probably looked like in real life based on like a coin came out or came to light in 2007, and people were like, whoa, she's not pretty. How could she possibly have achieved all this if she wasn't pretty? There's just a bunch wrong with that, but this one historian put it really, really well. The impact she made on the ancient world is overlooked because the world has this obsession when it comes to women. People can only judge them on whether they were beautiful.

Nobody ever said, Mark Antony, how handsome was he? And that's really just, it just really drives the point home really well, I think, that people are obsessed with this idea of that she was beautiful, and it really does undermine like whatever she was capable of. And when people think like that, you're just carrying on a 2,000-year-old tradition that began in Rome around the time of Octavian. I'm not going to talk about it. So you asked about Octavian becoming a guestess, right?

No, I didn't ask. I was just, yes. You were setting me up for it? Tell that story. I want to tell the story. You don't mind? I don't. So Cleopatra killed herself on August 12th of 30 BCE, and Octavian decided to commemorate

this extraordinary triumph over Cleopatra in Egypt and over Mark Antony and his ascension to full ruler of Rome by taking the name Augustus. So when we're marking the month of August, the eighth month of the year, we're actually commemorating the defeat and the death of Cleopatra. Amazing. It is amazing. You knew that all along, huh? All I know is that we have four live shows in August to commemorate this event.

Well, where would you get tickets if you were going to go, Chuck? SYSK Live. If you lived in one particular city that you had to pick to go get tickets as many people as possible, what would that city be? For Chicago and Portland, Maine. Okay, great. Well, you heard Chuck, everybody, do it for Cleopatra, she wills it. That's right.

If you want to know more about Cleopatra, just go start reading up. There's apparently a whole slate of really good biographies that have come out recently, so you've got plenty of stuff to work with, and since I said that, it's time for a listener mail. Hey guys, want to reach out and let you know that my stepson loves listening to your show. We share custody with my husband's ex-wife and not to go into those complicated details, to be able to spend as much time as I possibly can with him, driving to school and pick him up from school, can take anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes.

Zach is ADHD and on an IEP, and the typical school environment can be challenging for him. He's worked really hard this year building skills and has come quite a long way in the fourth grade. Way to go, Zach. Yeah, man, but when we find an alternative way to foster this love of learning that he enjoys, we really embrace it. He really loves listening to stuff you should know during the long car rides.

Way to go, Zach, again. He is a super smart kiddo and is especially engaged in the topics you guys cover. His latest favorite was a tinnish cases of really bad luck. So his dad and I strived to model our values, one of the great, one of great importance is that time together and experience is Trump material goods. With his 10-year milestone birthday approaching, I've been thinking about this quite a bit and I thought maybe, just maybe, Josh and Chuck could give him a shout out. It would be the highlight of his decade and a killer birthday present from a killer step

mom to her beloved kiddo. That is for Mandy. So Zach, buddy, the happiest, happiest of birthdays to you as you turn 10. That is a very big deal because you are a double digit human being now and it sounds like you are doing great and sailing toward your teenage years with confidence and intelligence. Yep. Congratulations on your big 1-0, Zach. It's a big one.

Yes, it is. Happy birthday. Wow, that was a nice one, Chuck. Well done. Thanks. If you want to get in touch with us like Mandy did, that's pretty rare that we do that kind of thing, but you never know. I guess you could take a shot, right?

Yes. All right, you can go on to StuffYouShouldKnow.com and check out our social links. That's probably not going to help much. So if you really want to get something like this done, you should write us an email. You can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. All podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. Find a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.