It's time for #EuropeanBios entry number 8, Cleopatra, and it is a treat. It turns out absolutely everything I ever heard about Cleopatra is wrong, the truth is much more interesting, and also her biography was written by a lady who is VERY tired of male historians being sexist.

Cleopatra's biographer is Stacy Schiff, who quotes Aesop: "There are many statues of men slaying lions, but if only the lions were sculptors there might be quite a different set of statues". According to Schiff, Cleopatra's story "is constructed of male fear" and she's spot on.

I don't usually recommend the bios I read, since they are often very dull and I mine them for the funny bits, but Schiff's bio had me laughing out loud as I read. I heartily recommend it. https://twitter.com/seldo/status/1247226236339773441

At every turn historians have portrayed Cleopatra to meet their ends, contradicting each other and often themselves. She is either too voracious or too timid, a calculating seductress or a helpless puppet, a matchless beauty or homely but vain. It's all bullshit, written by men.

Start with the very first thing you think you know about Cleopatra, which is that she was an Egyptian queen. She was not. She was Greek, or more properly Macedonian, part of a parasitic dynasty who had installed themselves as rulers of Egypt 250 years before she was born.

How did a bunch of Macedonians come to rule Egypt? The answer is the town they ruled from: Alexandria, founded by our good friend Alexander the Great, proud Macedonian and my favorite subject of this project so far: https://twitter.com/seldo/status/1233951426314850304

After conquering Egypt and founding Alexandria, Alex left with his boyfriends to conquer the rest of the known world and spread gay drama worldwide. He left behind a friend called Ptolemy to run Egypt which is GREAT news for us because Macedonians are just non-stop drama.

Alexander died less than 10 years later and his empire collapsed immediately. Ptolemy seized power and tried to retroactively gain some legitimacy by declaring that he was actually descended from the ancient Egyptian Pharoahs, but they were all just Macedonians.

The Ptolemys (they were nearly all named Ptolemy) stayed as Macedonian as possible, not marrying any native Egyptians and not even bothering to learn the language. In fact they barely married anyone who wasn't already related to them, which is exactly as gross as it sounds.

This is Cleopatra's family tree; she's Cleopatra the 7th down at the bottom. Ptolemy 5 and Cleopatra 1 have Ptolemy 6 and Cleopatra 2; brother and sister get married and have Cleopatra 3 who marries her uncle Ptolemy 8, making her mom also her sister in law, etc etc.

Brothers and sisters marrying each other and various uncles keeps happening until Cleopatra 5 marries Ptolemy 12 and have Cleopatra 7. What happened to Cleopatra 6? There is no Cleopatra 6; the family tree got so tangled they lost count. No, really, that's how that happened.

You'd think somebody the result of a literally uncountable number of generations of incest might not be the smartest tool in the box, but Cleopatra was brilliant. She spoke 9 languages, including being the first Ptolemy regent to speak Egyptian, and was a brilliant orator.

Cleopatra was also, not to be too blunt about it, white. Race is complicated and silly but probably most people agree Greeks are white and she was definitely Greek, so honestly her being portrayed by Elizabeth Taylor in that movie wasn't actually as dumb as you'd imagine.

Her ability to speak Egyptian and other languages turned out to be a strategic advantage, since she regularly needed to fight wars by commanding mercenaries hired from all over the Mediterranean. Her opponents worked through translators but she could talk to the troops directly.

Her opponents in war were mostly other members of her family. She fought and eventually killed all of her siblings in battle, including her brother Ptolemy 13 and her sisters Arsinoe 4 and Berenice 4 (nearly all the women in her family were called Cleopatra, Arsinoe or Berenice).

At one point in her struggle for power she was fighting her brother, Ptolemy 13, when the Roman general Pompey showed up, seeking help in fighting Julius Caesar. Ptolemy decided Pompey was the losing side and decided to curry favor with Caesar by murdering Pompey instead.

Caesar was less than pleased when he showed up to discover victory had been snatched from him by Ptolemy, who was about 14 years old at the time. Caesar needed Egypt to be stable, so his displeasure with Ptolemy probably helped him decide to back Cleopatra as queen over him.

Caesar needed a stable Egypt because Egypt was literally keeping Rome alive: it was the only country in the Mediterranean that grew more grain than it consumed, and Rome bought all the excess to feed itself. This made Egypt extremely important, and also extremely rich.

It's worth noting that Egypt was literally thousands of years ahead of everyone else at that time in terms of culture, science, and organization. They ran a gigantic kingdom with clockwork efficiency and to enormous profits, with a centuries-old bureaucracy.

This well-oiled machine had basically continued on auto-pilot for the several centuries since Alexander showed up and installed his bickering, squabbling, parasitic Macedonian royal family, who fought amongst themselves while squandering Egypt's legendary wealth. They sucked.

You may have heard Cleopatra met Caesar by sneaking into his palace wrapped up in a carpet and this is actually true. It was *her* palace, occupied by Caesar, and she had been stuck outside by her brother's army, so she was snuck back into her own home by servants loyal to her.

It really was in a rug though. She was in a sack inside the rug. She probably didn't literally roll out of the rug in front of him though. It's more likely she snuck in, got out of the rug, did her hair and makeup and then showed up dressed to impress.

Cleopatra was very persuasive and Caesar was pissed at Ptolemy anyway, so he took her side in the war. During the war they started banging and by the time they won and Caesar was ready to leave she had given birth to his kid, Ptolemy 15, nicknamed Caesarion for obvious reasons.

Historians have considered the parentage of Caesarion suspect, but this is because the historians in question were Roman men for whom Caesar having a baby with a foreigner was embarrassing. There's actually no doubt at all. Caesarion even looked a lot like Caesar.

Cleopatra very forcefully made this point after Caesar had gone home and finished conquering Rome by showing up in Rome with baby and full retinue in tow. This surprised and embarrassed Caesar, who had been trying to keep the whole thing quiet, but she wasn't having any of that.

Cleopatra hung out in Rome, making sure everybody knew she had Caesar's male heir, for sensible political reasons. Then when Caesar was assassinated, she for similarly sensible political reasons immediately fucked off back to Egypt.

With Caesar dead and Rome a riot of both metaphorical and extremely literal back-stabbing, she had to pick a new ally to keep herself in power and Egypt independent. She picked Mark Antony, who turned out to be a pretty sensible choice out of her available options.

Antony helped her further consolidate power by killing one of her sisters and Ptolemy 13 while Cleopatra herself poisoned another brother or possibly nephew (see family tree above for why that's unclear), Ptolemy 14, eliminating the last of her siblings and leaving her in charge.

She and Antony, consummate politicians and intellectuals, got along famously, as evidenced by her giving birth to twin children of his, imaginatively named Cleopatra and Alexander. Roman historians never questioned their parentage because they liked Antony less than Caesar.

But Antony went back to Rome and married somebody else and had more kids, which cooled things off between them, and then he also lost power in Rome which significantly accelerated that, since when Octavian defeated him he killed himself.

With her primary ally dead and no further Roman generals showing up to be impressed by her, Cleopatra had run out of options. She had seen this downfall coming for a while and had been experimenting with various poisons to escape the shame of being taken to Rome as a prisoner.

That Cleopatra died by a snake bite is poetic fiction; the asp or Egyptian Cobra is the symbol of Egypt. Genuine historical sources are clear that she poisoned herself but are not clear how exactly. She probably injected poison, leaving puncture wounds that led to the snake myth.

Cleopatra was amazing. Egypt had a long history of powerful women but she took on generals from the deeply sexist Roman culture and kept them in check for her whole life, a master work of politics, war and diplomacy the equal of any of the great leaders of history.

As Schiff points out over and over, this is not how she's usually portrayed. Sometimes a sex symbol, sometimes an overrated puppet, historians have resorted to magic as an explanation for how she so often got her way when they would never have asked the question of a male leader.

She was also firmly European, hence her inclusion in this series. Her culture was Greek, her wars and alliances were with Rome and other Mediterranean powers. Her whole fucked-up family is another one of the ripples of historical drama caused by the life of Alexander the Great.

Ultimately, Cleopatra's entire dynasty was a bunch of greedy, power-mad Europeans who invaded and colonized, raped and plundered Egypt. She murdered most of her own family. So while she was definitely an amazing leader, it's important to remember she was not a very nice person.