From history to myth

Cleopatra VII of Alexandria was a legend in her lifetime and has remained an icon for the two thousand years since her death. The current exhibition at the British Museum explores the 'real' Cleopatra, not just the mythical queen of countless tales and dramas. Jill Kamil reports from London
Ask most people what they know about Cleopatra and you will probably be told of an Egyptian seductress who ruled Egypt, and wooed and won two great Roman statesmen. She has fascinated people for generations. She is among the most celebrated of all queens, but the ideas of most of us about her are sketchy, drawn from the dramas she inspired -- among them Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, Bernard Shaw's Cleopatra and no less than 32 operas. She has been played on stage and screen by Isabella Glyn (1849), Theda Bara (1917), Dame Edith Evans (1947), Dame Peggy Ashcroft (1953) and Elizabeth Taylor (1961). "No blood was in her veins, but the sun's blood. Sweet Hathor lived in her eyes and her dimpled knees," were words spoken by her lover Julius Caesar, but had the producers of these epics been able to consult ancient sources, they might have come up with an even more complex and fascinating portrait.
The daughter of Ptolemy XII Neos Dionysos, also known as Auletes (the flute player), and the seventh queen of Egypt with that name, Cleopatra was a woman of great intelligence and ambition who came to the throne at the age of 17 in 51 BC, and supposedly killed herself with the aid of an asp 21 years later. She chose this fate -- or so says Shakespeare -- rather than be captured and paraded through Rome in Octavian's triumph after he defeated Mark Antony, the last of her lovers.
The London exhibition, mounted in the new Joseph Hotung Gallery at the British Museum -- which forms part of the new Queen Elizabeth II Great Court development opened last December -- has drawn together masterpieces from museums around the world. One of the most impressive objects is a contemporary full-length statue of Queen Cleopatra, on loan from the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg. She is a true Egyptian queen, wearing on her forehead the triple uraeus, her curves clearly revealed beneath the lightest of cotton shifts. Thus she stands as an idealised incarnation of wisdom and beauty.
Three marble heads and a gold plaque from the principle sanctuary of Serapis are here exhibited together for the first time, and with them are other kings and their royal consorts: Ptolemy III and Berenika II in limestone, Ptolemy IV and Arsino� III offering gifts to the gods, and a greywacke head of a statue of a Ptolemaic Queen -- perhaps Cleopatra I or II -- which shows a striking resemblance to the coin portraiture of Cleopatra VII. Objects are on loan from the Vatican, New York's Metropolitan Museum, the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San José, California, from the Louvre and elsewhere, with the largest collection coming from our own Graeco-Roman Museum in Alexandria. They include statues, busts, stelae, gems, coins, pottery, agate drinking cups, and a gilded silver goblet.
Cleopatra shared a co-regency (and a marriage) with her brother Ptolemy XIII under the guardianship of the Roman Senate, and rivalry between them led Ptolemy to banish his sister-wife from Egypt. She went to Syria with the aim of raising an army and recovering the throne by force, but when the aging Julius Caesar came to Alexandria in 48 BC, Cleopatra saw an opportunity to forestall her country's loss of independence and, at the same time, strengthen her own position in Egypt.
Ptolemy XIII drowned in Lake Mareotis while trying to flee a battle between his forces and Caesar's, and Cleopatra was restored as co-ruler with her youngest brother, Ptolemy XIV. She herself had no trouble in conquering Caesar. In 47 BC they made their celebrated cruise up the Nile to visit the ancient monuments in Upper Egypt. She further aided her country's -- and her own -- cause by bearing Caesar a son, Caesarion (later Ptolemy XV). This laid the groundwork for the myth of Cleopatra as a seductress.
After her confinement Cleopatra, accompanied by her brother and her son, followed her lover to Rome, where she spent the last year of Caesar's life living in seclusion in a villa on the banks of the Tiber. Regarded as the ruler's mistress, a mere foreign queen, she was not well received in Roman society and on his assassination hurried back to Alexandria to ensure the safety of her throne under the new regime. Almost at once Ptolemy XIV died -- some suspected he was poisoned by his sister -- and Cleopatra appointed her young son as her co-ruler.
One of the most extraordinary artefacts on show is a colossal head of what is believed to be Caesarion, recovered in 1977 from the Eastern Harbour in Alexandria. At first it was thought to be the head of Octavian, but it so closely resembles Cleopatra that it is now believed to be her son.
In 41 BC Mark Antony came to Egypt as Roman governor, and thus began one of the most celebrated love affairs in history. Cleopatra bore him three children, including twins. Antony and his supporters in Rome managed to restore to Cleopatra several portions of the former Ptolemaic empire. He also gave to their joint offspring substantial areas of the Roman East.
The most historically important exhibit, from the Staatliche Egyptian Museum in Berlin, is an original royal ordinance signed by the queen and dated 23 February, in the year 33 BC (or the Roman equivalent of that day). The papyrus text was reused as mummy cartonnage, found nearly a century ago by a German exhibition working at Abu Sir, south of Giza, and only recently transcribed.
The letter grants "Publius Canidius (an aide to Mark Antony) and his heirs the right to an annual exportation of 10,000 artabas (about 300 tons) of wheat and an annual importation of 5,000 Coan amphoras (about 34,500 gallons) of wine, without anyone exacting anything in taxes from him or any other expense whatsoever." Tax exemption was also granted on all the land he owned in Egypt, and the text is most specific: " ... he shall not pay any taxes, either to the state account or to the account of me and my children in any way, in perpetuity." Furthermore, Cleopatra granted Canidius' tenants exemption from personal liabilities and stated that neither farm animals nor ships he used for transport on the Nile could be commandeered by the army. "Let it be written to those to whom it may concern, so that knowing it they can act accordingly," it is written at behest, followed by, in what appears to be Cleopatra's own handwriting, the command: "Make it so."
"The text of the ordinance was written first by one scribe, Cleopatra's approval was then added, and the date of the document's receipt in Alexandria was noted by another official," says Peter van Minnen of the University of Groningen, who worked on the text. "It is clearly not a copy because it is written in different hands. The appendix 'Make it so' is known on only two other documents, one of Ptolemy X in 99 BC and the other of the Roman emperor Theodosius II in the fifth century AD.
Cleopatra was clearly a consummate mistress of the art of fascination, but she was clearly not as beautiful as many of the actresses who portrayed her. Nor was she the capricious, pleasure-loving coquette depicted on the screen. In the words of the Greek writer Plutarch, who lived between 50-120 AD, she "could easily turn her tongue, like a many-stringed instrument, to any language she pleased." She was the first Ptolemaic ruler to learn the Egyptian language, which she spoke as fluently as her native Greek.
And as for her death from the bite of a poisonous asp, this is more fiction than fact. The asp was the uraeus on the royal crown, the symbol of royalty. Cleopatra was the last monarch to bear the title "Lord of the Two Lands" and to wear the crown bearing this symbol. Caesarion, her son and co-regent since 43 BC, who was still in his teens, was murdered shortly afterwards. The last of the Ptolemies was dead, Octavian became sole ruler and Egypt was now a province of the Roman empire.
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