A
superb depiction of Cleopatra taking her own life, unlikely to have been by
the handling of a snake, but could well have been by an asp in a basket of
fruit. Most probably with a concoction of drugs to ease the pain.
More than 2,000 years after her death in 30
BCE, the
ancient Egyptian queen
Cleopatra still looms large in the popular imagination. The
question all historians are asked about is her beauty. What historical
evidence is there to support the notion that she was the most beautiful
woman that ever lived?
For
sure, she knew how to dress and present herself. She wore scanty clothing,
revealing her femininity, including proudly presenting her bare breasts,
likely window dressing to disadvantage any man daring to take a peek. And
doubtless, having so ensnared her quarry, she was skilled in foreplay, such
as to arouse her partners, even involuntarily in themselves, almost
powerless to resist.
Despite what is known of her brilliance and charm, in mass media depictions what often comes to the forefront is Cleopatra as a ravishingly seductive proto-femme fatale.
Today many historians subscribe to the theory that Cleopatra’s looks -
however pleasing they might have been - were ancillary to her considerable intelligence, learning, foresight, and strategic skills. The image of her as a sultry seductress likely stems from a narrative originally pushed by
Octavian (Augustus) to rationalize his rivalry and conflict with fellow Roman
Marc Antony, who was portrayed as having been manipulated by a foreign temptress. What’s more, casting
Cleopatra as an evil beauty conveniently downplayed her competence and significance as a ruler.
Cleopatra was about twenty-one years old at the time of seducing Julius Caesar. Seven years later, in 41 BC, she met Antony at Tarsus on the river Cydnus, confident that, once again, she could allay the suspicions of an imperious Roman (indeed, it was then that she conceived her twin children by him). Plutarch records:
"Judging by the proofs which she had had before this of the effect of her beauty upon Caius Caesar and Gnaeus the son of Pompey, she had hopes that she would more easily bring Antony to her feet. For Caesar and Pompey had known her when she was still a girl and inexperienced in affairs, but she was going to visit Antony at the very time when women have the most brilliant beauty and are at the acme of intellectual power. Therefore...she went putting her greatest confidence in herself, and in the charms and sorceries of her own person" (Life of Antony, XXV.3–4).
And yet, it is a later passage, where the praise is more faint, that is cited when the queen's appearance is disparaged.
"For her beauty, as we are told, was in itself not altogether incomparable, nor such as to strike those who saw her; but converse with her had an irresistible charm, and her presence, combined with the persuasiveness of her discourse and the character which was somehow diffused about her behaviour towards others, had something stimulating about it. There was sweetness also in the tones of her voice; and her tongue, like an instrument of many strings, she could readily turn to whatever language she pleased" (XXVII.2-3).
 
Plutarch remarks that the Romans pitied Antony for having callously evicted his dutiful wife Octavia from their house, "especially those who had seen Cleopatra and knew that neither in youthfulness nor beauty was she superior to Octavia" (LVII.3). But here, he seems to have confused Octavia minor (Antony's wife) with Octavia major, Octavian's older half sister of the same name—or failed to realize that there even were two sisters (Suetonius, Life of Augustus, IV.1). In fact, both Cleopatra and the younger Octavia were the same age. He does criticize the queen when she refused to have Antony killed or given up, as "a woman who was haughty and astonishingly proud in the matter of beauty" (Life of Antony, LXXIII.1) but is forced to admit, in a final comment on Cleopatra's appearance, that, even in mourning for her dead lover, her charm and "the boldness of her beauty were not altogether extinguished" (LXXXIII.2).
Florus, too, comments on "the beauty of the damsel, which was enhanced by the fact that, being so fair, she seemed to have been wronged" (II.13.56). Appian remarks on the "beautiful image of Cleopatra by the side of the goddess" (II.102) in the Temple of Venus Genetrix, and Antony being "amazed at her wit as well as her good looks" (V.1.8). Cicero, who could have provided a contemporary description when Cleopatra was in Rome, does not mention her appearance. Writing three months after the assassination of Caesar and with the queen safely away from Rome and back in Alexandria, he instead vents his indignation at her arrogance, petulantly complaining that he did not receive a promised gift from her (Letters to Atticus, XV.15).
 
Reviled by the Augustan poets and vilified as a foreign seductress, Cleopatra was called a meretrix regina, "whore queen" by (Propertius, Poems, III.11.39; Pliny uses the same phrase, Natural History, IX.58.119); a "fatal monster" by Horace (Odes, I.37.21); and "Egypt's shame" by Lucan (Pharsalia, X.59). If she truly had not been attractive, one suspects that her detractors would have said so. On the contrary, Lucan repeatedly refers to her beauty, even as she is criticized for it. Just as Helen's "harmful beauty" had brought ruin to Troy so did that of Cleopatra inflame Rome's civil war (X.61). It is her appearance (forma) that she relies upon in pleading her case to Caesar (X.82), simulating grief but without tears so as to remain attractive (X.84) and allowing her "impure beauty" to aid her entreaty (X.105). Later, there is an extravagant banquet, where the "harmful beauty" (X.138) of the queen again is exhibited—this time, she is daubed in make-up, weighted down with a fortune in pearls around her neck and jewels in her hair, and her white breasts visible beneath the sheer fabric of her oriental dress (X.139ff).
As to Cleopatra's
proportions, the only hint comes from Plutarch's famous description of her being smuggled into the palace bundled in an oversized sack one autumn night in 48
BC - which argues that at least she was petite. "It was by this device of Cleopatra's, it is said, that Caesar was first captivated, for she showed herself to be a bold coquette" (Life of
Julius
Caesar, XLIX.3). And it was there that the young Ptolemy XIII found them early the next morning, aghast that Caesar already had been seduced by his half-sister. Nine months later, her son Caesarian was born.
The legend of her beauty is based in part on her famous seduction of both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, both powerful Roman leaders. But what did she really look like? Is there any solid basis to the claims of unparalleled physical beauty?
What does the historical and archaeological evidence tells us.
Writing another two centuries after Cleopatra’s reign, the Roman historian Cassius Dio describes Cleopatra as “a woman of surpassing beauty” who was “brilliant to look upon.” Yet Greek historian Plutarch, writing more than a century earlier than Dio, maintains that “her beauty… was in itself not altogether incomparable, nor such as to strike those who saw her.” As neither are contemporary accounts, there is no good reason to believe one over the other, or even to believe either of them at all.
There remain no busts that can be reliably attributed to
Cleopatra, but we do have various images of her surviving on ancient coinage. In these images, she is depicted as anywhere from average-looking to hook-nosed and manly. However, it must be remembered that coins in the ancient world were a powerful piece of political propaganda. The deliberate portrayal of Cleopatra with masculine features not dissimilar to her ancestral male rulers the Ptolemies was not an attempt to capture a true likeness, but rather to help legitimise the rule of a young female queen.
Keep in mind that ancient ideals of beauty were quite different to those of the modern Western world. For example, ancient Greek depictions of the beautiful love goddess Aphrodite invariably show a full-bodied woman with a prominent nose; a woman who modern society would probably advise to lose weight and get a nose job! Asking whether Cleopatra was beautiful is perhaps then a fruitless question, if beauty is truly in the eyes of the culture in which it is beheld.
Or maybe all we need do is move beyond beauty as a purely physical concept. Dio also tells us that Cleopatra had ‘a most delicious voice and a knowledge of how to make herself agreeable to everyone.” Likewise, Plutarch states that conversation with Cleopatra “had an irresistible charm, and her presence, combined with the persuasiveness of her discourse and the character which was somehow diffused about her behaviour towards others, had something stimulating about it.” He wrote that “there was sweetness also in the tones of her voice; and her tongue, like an instrument of many strings, she could readily turn to whatever language she pleased.”
The message is clear: Cleopatra’s allure had little to do with her physical appearance and a lot to do with her intellect, character and, apparently, the tone of her voice. When you consider how deeply involved both Caesar and Antony became with her, it is obvious that there must have been something more at play than just a sexy young body. After all, both were notorious womanisers and would surely not have fallen for Cleopatra on the basis of sex alone.
She must have offered something else, no other woman at the time could
offer. Such as speaking nine languages.
It seems likely that Cleopatra’s physical appearance was not more or less attractive than the next woman, yet through her wit, charm and daring she captivated not only two of the most powerful men of the ancient world, but the collective imagination of the entire world for all centuries that followed. That the most renowned beauty in human history was beautiful in character more so than in appearance could be an important lesson for our modern fixation on the purely physical.
THE TELEGRAPH 10 MAY 2023 - NOT EGYPTIAN AND NO GREAT BEAUTY - WHAT CLEOPATRA ACTUALLY LOOKED LIKE
Cleopatra has been making waves. More than 2,000 years after her death, the face that sunk the Roman Republic is once again causing a diplomatic ruckus.
Last month, the Egyptian antiquities ministry launched a remarkable attack on Netflix over the streamer’s new series Queen Cleopatra. Their contention wasn’t that the Jada Pinkett Smith-produced documentary was a bit naff – it most certainly is – but that it was a “falsification of Egyptian history and a blatant historical misconception”.
Netflix’s crime? Casting a black actress, British soap star Adele James, as the notorious queen. So with all the forbearance of Italians confronted with a plate of seafood linguine showered in parmesan, Egyptian MPs promptly called for Netflix to be banned entirely. The casting, they argued, was “an attack on family values”. The story of Cleopatra, of course, is otherwise flush with cosy household homilies.
Yet not three years ago, internet opinion-havers were up in arms for precisely the opposite reason. That was when it was announced Israeli actress
Gal Gadot would be playing Cleopatra in an as-yet-unreleased film helmed by Patty Jenkins, who directed Gadot in Wonder Woman. Gadot’s take promised to “bring the story of Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, to the big screen in a way she’s never been seen before... To tell her story for the first time through women's eyes.”
Despite this laudable intention, some outraged commentators accused the film’s backers of white-washing one of the most famous women in history. The very criticism Netflix’s film purported to address.
So what did Cleopatra look like? Awkwardly for both Netflix and the Egyptian government, no one really knows. What we think we know of Cleopatra is largely a fantasy of a succession of male writers – Plutarch, Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw – constructed over millennia. The evidence we do have about her appearance is flimsy, at best.
“The actual facts that we have about Cleopatra, the contemporary evidence, is pretty sparse,” says Toby Wilkinson, Professor of Egyptology and Deputy Vice Chancellor at the University of Lincoln.
“Most of what we have is other peoples’ views of her which were hugely coloured by their particular political stance and then the whole web of myths that grew up around her, which are of course more powerful in a sense than the few historical facts that we’ve got.”
No contemporary accounts of Cleopatra survive and none of those from which our traditional conceptions of her are drawn are considered particularly objective. Cleopatra as we remember her today – an Egyptian queen, an astonishing beauty, a great seducer of men, a tragic figure who took her own life with a snake – proves to be more fiction than history.
After all, she wasn’t even really an Egyptian. The Ptolemies, ruling dynasty of which she was a member, styled themselves as Egyptian on public monuments, hence the persistent surviving image of Cleopatra in Egyptian dress (and the famous Elizabeth Taylor look). But they were in fact foreign invaders who strictly maintained the ethnic integrity of their own line - up to and including frequent incestuous marriages. According to her most recent biographer, Stacy Schiff, ethnically Cleopatra was “approximately as Egyptian as
Elizabeth Taylor”.
The Ptolemies were actually from Macedonia, a powerful state on the fringes of what we now call Ancient Greece. Alexander the Great, who invaded Egypt and overthrew its Persian rulers in 332 BC, was born there. In the power struggle following Alexander’s death, one of his most powerful generals,
Ptolemy, seized Alexandria and declared himself Pharaoh. His descendants ruled there for the next three centuries – Cleopatra was the last of the line.
“There wasn’t really a concept of being Greek at that point. The Ptolemies would have identified themselves very strongly with their Macedonian homeland,” says Wilkinson.
We have very little idea what Macedonians looked like. “They probably wouldn’t have looked much like the modern Greeks,” says Wilkinson. In other words, neither Gal Gadot or Adele James are “accurate” casting for Cleopatra – because no one has a clue what “accurate” looks like. Given this context, talk of “white washing” – or its opposite – is meaningless.
A bigger problem for casting directors is Gadot and James’s beauty. For centuries, Cleopatra’s reputation as an astonishing beauty has been maintained but its provenance is dodgy at best. The legend seems to have originated with the
Roman historian Cassius Dio, who declared her “a woman of surpassing beauty.” But Dio was born nearly two hundred years after Cleopatra’s death and his account of her appearance seems to have been motivated more by political considerations than anything relating to her actual appearance.
Cleopatra inherited a dynasty well on the way to calamity. The Roman Empire had turned its sights towards the fantastically wealthy corner of Africa on its doorstep and her father Ptolemy XII had been forced to effectively mortgage Egypt for the pay-offs necessary to keep the Romans at bay. When Cleopatra took the throne, at the age of 21, the imperative to fend off the Romans had only increased.
“What does a woman ruler in that position do? What cards does she have left to play?” poses Wilkinson, in explaining the tactics behind Cleopatra’s famous love affairs with two different Roman rulers: first Julius Caesar, then
Mark
Anthony. (Curiously, because she had children with both men, this extraordinary fact is one of the few pieces of Cleopatra’s personal history whose truth we can be sure of.)
It was Cleopatra’s relationship with Mark Anthony that made early historical accounts of her life so susceptible to political motivation. Cleopatra sided with Anthony in the civil war between the three Triumvirs who ruled the empire after Caesar, which resulted in both their deaths, Rome’s defeat of
Egypt and Octavius Caesar’s accession to emperor in 27 BC.
The Roman historians who wrote the first accounts of Cleopatra were therefore writing from the other side of history.
“It served their purposes either to belittle or to exoticise Egypt in order to bolster the Roman claim and Roman triumph in having conquered Egypt,” says Wilkinson. “You never get an unbiased account of Cleopatra.”
For instance, it suited Dio to portray her as a great beauty because it fitted into his broader construction of Anthony as enslaved to a seductive sexual temptress. The image simultaneously emasculated Anthony and cast him as a traitor, in thrall to Egypt, not Rome. Hence Dio’s account of Cleopatra as scheming and sexually voracious.
But the closer to anyone who actually saw Cleopatra we get, the flimsier the idea that she was a great beauty seems to look.
“All we’ve got to go on are some statues which are inevitably idealising and coinage, which is probably more accurate, which shows her with a very pronounced aquiline nose and a pointed chin. She does not look what we would consider to be beautiful in 21st century aesthetics,” says Wilkinson, diplomatically.
The closest to contemporary written account of Cleopatra’s appearance that we have comes from the Roman historian Plutarch, who has this to say: “Her beauty, as we are told, was in itself not altogether incomparable, nor such as to strike those who saw her.”
“She was considered powerful and of course that brings its own attraction,” says Wilkinson.
“Why did Julius Caesar sail up the Nile with Cleopatra? Not necessarily because she was beautiful in a conventional sense but because she held the keys to Egypt. That was what made her alluring.”
He continues: “The idea that you can do a film of Cleopatra that is somehow ‘accurate’... I mean, whose accuracy? Whose version of the truth are you following?” says Wilkinson.
It’s a question both Netflix and the Egyptian government would do well to ponder. For centuries, Cleopatra has been tussled over by competing powers, her image moulded to suit the agendas of the times. In a sense, then, Netflix’s series is just the latest in a long line of mythmakers to burnish the myth of Cleopatra – at the expense of the real-life ruler.
Could the real Cleopatra please stand up? Poor woman, even she doesn’t know who she is anymore.
If reviled in Rome, Cleopatra did find favor in the East, where Zenobia of Palmyra boasted she "herself to be of the family of the Cleopatras and the Ptolemies" (Historia Augusta, The Thirty Pretenders, XXX.1) and no more ready to surrender in her defiance of Rome than Cleopatra (Aurelian, XXVII.2). Even late in the seventh century AD, John Bishop of Nikiu praised Cleopatra, not only as "a very beautiful young girl" (Chronicle, LXIV.7) but "the most illustrious and wise amongst women" (LXVII.9). (He also considered Hypatia to have been devoted to "magic, astrolabes and instruments of music" and beguiling people with her satanic wiles, LXXXIV.87.) In 1361, Boccaccio could dismiss the queen as "famous for nothing but her beauty" (De Mulieribus Claris).
Cleopatra VII
Philopator was (for sure) the daughter of Ptolemy XII Auletes (80-52BC), Pharaoh of Egypt and
(quite likely) Cleopatra V Tryphaena. There is a marked difference in facial
features between the busts and temple relief's. The one thing the Egyptian
carvings have in common, are the bare breasts. The signature tune of Egypt's
last Pharaoh Queen.
MINTED
Cleopatra's coin portraits, surprising though they may be to those who have grown up with
the ‘Hollywood Cleopatra’, are the only certain images we have of her. That hasn’t stopped people from attempting to dismiss them as inaccurate and overly
stylized – hoping against hope that there could have been another face of Cleopatra, a hidden one whose face would better match our expectations.
There is though, no reason to think these coin portraits are wrong. At the time, a warts-and-all approach to portraiture was in vogue in the
Mediterranean world, and it seems that Cleopatra’s image was no exception to this trend. Features like large noses or determined chins may have been slightly exaggerated, but only because those features were the most recognisable attributes of the individual being
portrayed, cartoon fashion. In this sense they were intended to be realistic.
Coin portraits of Cleopatra’s father, very much rarer than those of Cleopatra herself, show him with a prominent nose and sloping forehead, so these physical characteristics may well have been family traits. Her lovers don’t match modern popular conceptions either: Julius Caesar has scrawny neck and
bald head, hidden with a crown, and Mark Antony’s jutting chin and broken nose
looks nothing like Richard Burton’s features. Daniel Craig on the other
hand!
The coins were minted in a variety of places in the eastern Mediterranean, from
Alexandria in Egypt to the port of Patras in Greece. Mark Antony bestowed on Cleopatra a number of eastern cities and territories, and coins were issued in those places in the name of the new ruler. Though the portraits found on the coins vary in style from artist to artist, they are generally consistent in detail, which suggests that the artists were following guidelines when they engraved the dies to strike the coins. It’s likely that they were copying an official image that the queen herself had approved – nose and chin included.
In Hollywood movies, Cleopatra has been played by an array of stunning actresses.
Elizabeth Taylor, who was put under the “gaze” as the
“Queen of the
Nile” in the best-known film version of the ruler’s story to date, Cleopatra (1963), is a mainstay on short lists of moviedom’s most attractive leading ladies. One of cinema’s first sex symbols, Theda Bara, invested her Cleopatra with dark sensuality in the lost silent classic
Cleopatra (1917). Before the Production Code reined in sexual suggestiveness, a scantily clad Claudette Colbert caused a sensation in
Cecil B. DeMille’s epic Cleopatra (1934), and Vivian Leigh was the beguiling queen in
Caesar and Cleopatra (1945).
In 2023, Gal
Gadot is limbering up to play the part.
So,
how did this image of Cleopatra come to be?
The obsession with Cleopatra as a stunner started much earlier than movies: it started in literature and drama. In his play
Antony and
Cleopatra, William Shakespeare indelibly etched the queen’s portrait with these words:
"Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety. Other women cloy
The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies."
In his novel Cleopatra (1889), H. Rider Haggard was more direct in his description of the queen, who is a “Thing of Flame”:
"Then I looked upon…that face which seduced Caesar….I looked upon the flawless Grecian features, the rounded chin, the full, rich lips, the chiselled nostrils, and the ears fashioned like delicate shells. I saw the forehead, low, broad, and lovely, the crisped, dark hair falling in heavy waves that sparkled in the sun, the arched eyebrows, and the long, bent lashes. There before me was the grandeur of her Imperial shape. There burnt the wonderful eyes, hued like the Cyprian violet."
REFERENCE
Plutarch's Parallel Lives (1916) translated by B. Perrin (Loeb Classical Library); Dio Cassius: Roman History (1916) translated by Earnest Cary and Herbert B. Foster (Loeb Classical Library); Appian: The Civil Wars (1913) translated by Horace White (Loeb Classical Library); Cicero: Letters to Atticus (1999) translated by D. R. Shackleton Bailey (Loeb Classical Library); Florus: Epitome of Roman History (1929) translated by Edward Seymour Forster (Loeb Classical Library); Lucan: Civil War (1992) translated by Susan H. Braund (World's Classics); The Myths of Hyginus (1960) translated by Mary Grant; Callimachus: Aetia (2012) edited by Annette Harder; "XVII.–The Problem of Octavia Minor and Octavia Maior" (1948) by Mary White Singer, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, 79, 268-274.
Cleopatra of Egypt: From History to Myth (2001) edited by Susan Walker and Peter Higgs; "Meretrix Regina: Augustan Cleoptras" by Maria Wyke, in Augustus (2009) edited by Jonathan Edmondson; Cleopatra and Rome (2005) by Diana E. E. Kleiner; Cleopatra Reassessed (2003) edited by Susan Walker and Sally-Ann Ashton (British Museum, Occasional Paper No. 103); "Caspar Vopel's Ventures in Sixteenth-Century Celestial Cartography" (2010) by Elly Dekker, Imago Mundi, 62(pt. 2), 161-190; "Berenice and Her Lock" (2011) by Dee L. Clayman, Transactions of the American Philological Association, 141(2), 229-246; "Callimachus' Lock of Berenice: Fantasy, Romance, and Propaganda' (1992) by Kathryn Gutzwiller, The American Journal of Philology, 113(3), 359-385.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/queen-cleopatra-netflix-black-real-history-egypt/
Bradford, E. 1971. Cleopatra, Corgi Books.
Cassius Dio. c. 200 CE. Book XLII, Roman History, trans. H.B. Foster, 1905.
Flamarion, E. 1997. Cleopatra: From History to Legend, Thames & Hudson.
Fletcher, J. 2008. Cleopatra the Great: The Woman Behind The Legend, Hodder & Stoughton.
Goldsworthy, A. 2010. Antony and Cleopatra, Orion Publishing Group.
Plutarch. c. 100 CE. Life of Antony, Parallel Lives, Loeb Classical Library, 1920.
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