Cleopatra VII
The last pharaoh of Egypt, a Greek-speaking Ptolemaic ruler who allied with Caesar and Antony to keep Rome from swallowing her kingdom.
Cleopatra VII has spent two thousand years being remembered for the wrong things. The eyeliner, the golden barge, the snakebite: most of it is Roman propaganda finished off by Hollywood set dressing. The woman underneath was a working head of state who ruled Egypt for twenty-one years, is said to have spoken as many as nine languages, and played the deadliest men in Rome against one another to keep her kingdom off Rome's map. She came remarkably close to winning.
A Greek queen of Egypt
Despite ruling from Alexandria and being worshipped as the living goddess Isis, Cleopatra was not Egyptian by blood. She was the last of the Ptolemies, a Macedonian Greek dynasty founded by one of Alexander the Great's generals, who had governed Egypt for nearly three centuries while stubbornly speaking Greek. Cleopatra was the exception: the only Ptolemaic ruler known to have bothered learning the Egyptian language. Born in 69 BC, she took the throne at eighteen in 51 BC, ruling in name beside a series of younger brothers she was expected to marry and soon had to fight. The prize she inherited was the richest kingdom in the Mediterranean, and the last great one Rome had not yet swallowed.
Betting a kingdom on Roman men
Her strategy was cold and consistent: attach Egypt to whichever Roman held the most power. First came Julius Caesar, who fathered her son Caesarion around 47 BC after she reportedly had herself smuggled past her enemies to reach him and won back the throne her brother had seized. When Caesar was assassinated she backed Mark Antony, bearing him three children, including the twins Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene, and bankrolling his eastern wars with Egyptian grain and gold. This was never simple romance. It was a survival plan for a dynasty ringed by Roman legions, run by a ruler who understood that Egypt could stay independent only as the indispensable partner of Rome's strongest man.
The propaganda war she lost
Octavian, Caesar's heir and Antony's rival, saw the opening. Rather than fight another Roman civil war, he recast the struggle as Rome against a scheming foreign queen, painting Antony as her bewitched puppet who had gone soft and un-Roman in the East. The story worked. After the defeat at the naval Battle of Actium in 31 BC, Antony killed himself, and in 30 BC, at thirty-nine, so did Cleopatra, by tradition through the bite of an asp, though many historians suspect poison. She chose death over being marched through Rome in Octavian's triumph. Egypt became a Roman province, the Hellenistic age that began with Alexander ended, and Octavian went on to become the emperor Augustus. Cleopatra had written herself into the center of Roman power; the men who outlived her wrote her back out, and Shakespeare and the movies buried the stateswoman under the seductress.