At one banquet, she had the servers bring her a goblet filled with vinegar. At that moment, she took out one of the pearls from her earrings. It was the biggest pearl in the whole world, and she dropped it into the vinegar, where it instantly dissolved. She picked up the goblet and swallowed it down. She drank it. That is how one ancient writer, Pliny the Elder, whom we've met before in Instant Classics, describes an extravagant party trick by Cleopatra of Egypt, designed to show that she had got money to burn. For that single pearl cost an absolute fortune. It was also designed to impress her lover, the Roman Mark Antony. That's just one slice of the story, the facts and the fiction that swirls around Queen Cleopatra, who ruled Egypt for 22 years in the 1st century BCE. The seductive lover of Julius Caesar, it was said, as well as of Mark Antony, Caesar's would-be successor. She played a part in the Roman civil wars of the period that went a long way beyond the bedroom. And it all ended in her suicide by the bite of a poisonous snake, we're told. And she attracted any number of anecdotes about her riches, her luxury, her extravagant lifestyle. That pearl anecdote is just one. There are so many other stories and clichés like bathing in asses' milk, which is so wonderful for the skin. And she's never been forgotten. William Shakespeare wonderfully recreated her as a tragic femme fatale, and Elizabeth Taylor found her most memorable role in Cleopatra. Sid James and the Carry On team, on the other hand, took her down a peg or two in Carry On Cleo. While Renaissance painters loved depicting that pearl trick, and she's occasionally been elevated as an anti-colonial freedom fighter or Egyptian nationalist. In our five-part series, and surely Cleopatra deserves five parts, uh we're looking at her history and her myth from the 1st century BCE right up to the present day. And we're going to be asking who actually was she? And can we ever strip away those layers of fiction and fantasy to reveal the real Cleopatra? And why has she gripped the modern imagination? What has she got? And why has the color of her skin been so controversial? This is Instant Classics, the podcast that uncovers the ancient stories still shaping the world today. I'm Mary Beard. And I'm Charlotte Higgins. Each week we dive into the myths, the dramas, and the characters of the classical world to discover what they still mean to us now. This week, Cleopatra, the last Egyptian pharaoh. Now, we're using that title because she was, literally, the last ancient ruler of an independent Egypt in the ancient world. And as we'll discover, she did actually present herself, and was she was referred to as being in the direct line of the pharaohs. And so, she sort of counts as the last one. Though, what we're going to see is it is um a bit more complicated than that. Yeah. And I think we need to start by saying, Mary, that having kind of set up the idea that we might shake out the myth from the reality here, I think in the end, I think we have to signal that it's actually impossible to do that entirely. She is one of those characters whose myth is so pervasive, you can't really sort of untangle it from the real person. We're never going to be able to really sort of see totally through the idea of the glamorous Egyptian and queen who fell in love with several important Roman aristocrats. Um and in a way, you know, why would why would we want to? Yeah, I mean, I think for me that her myth, in some ways, is her history. Uh you know, that uh she's inseparable. But but I think we can we can go further all the same without without uh sort of throwing everything away. We can look at some of the bits of her story that often get sort of not particularly lingered on uh in the traditional accounts, traditional popular accounts. And and we can think about um what we can put her back into her context. I think that's what's really um important. And and if you put her back into her context, the you make a kind of different sense of what her life is all about. And you know, that's why we're actually starting our our five-parter with thinking about her in the Egyptian context, where to some extent, she belongs. She's queen of Egypt, right? And you know, we need to ask a bit about what it meant to be queen of Egypt in the 1st century BCE. You know, what kind of job was it? >> Where did she come from? I mean, how did she how how did she end up in that position? I mean, I suppose uh what we need to do is we we need to start with the bare bones of her career. I mean, it's the her CV, it might look a bit dry, um but uh but I think we need to sort of get the the starting point and the end point sort of laid out before we before we dig a bit deeper, right? >> Yeah. Let's get rid of the asses' milk and the poisonous snakes. Well, we'll be coming back to the poisonous snakes and the sex and the asses' milk, but uh okay. So, she's probably born, and I'm going to have to warn everybody, um there's an awful lot that is should have a probably in front of this. We you know, we don't have, you know, a biography, an ancient biography of Cleopatra. We're putting all this together um from disparate references in many different sources. But she's probably born in 69 BCE, and she's born into the ruling dynasty of Egypt at that point, which is the Macedonian Greek dynasty of the Ptolemies. We'll come back to that. And they had taken the place of the traditional Egyptian pharaohs. Right? So, um pharaoh is still a title, it's still very important as an image of power, but she's born into a Macedonian Greek dynasty, and she comes to the throne in 51 BCE, um when her dad dies, a guy called Ptolemy the flute player, um and she I mean, that was not a compliment, you know, it was meant to suggest that, you know, he his mind perhaps wasn't always on the job. Um uh dad died, and in 51, she comes to the throne ruling jointly with her little brother, who is uh Ptolemy the 13th, he's known. Um and that little brother is also her husband. That doesn't go especially well, does it, Mary? Uh the marriage isn't a huge success. The joint rule isn't a huge success. Um uh pretty soon they're fighting each other. Um and uh into that fight comes Julius Caesar, and we'll come back to what he's doing in uh in a later episode. Um Julius Caesar supports comes down on the side of Cleopatra, and the brother is killed, and she then rules jointly with her even younger brother, Ptolemy the 14th, to whom she's also married. All right. Until his death, suspiciously, um in 44 BC, and then she rules jointly with her son, a young son, um by Julius Caesar, it's said, to whom she's not married, let's be clear, um uh in in a new royal partnership. We've nearly got it to to the end, because in the aftermath of Caesar's assassination uh in 44 BC, Cleopatra from Egypt backs the supporters of Caesar, not the people who had killed him. But when, in a few years, those supporters turn on each other, Cleopatra backs the wrong side. She takes the side of Mark Antony against Octavian, who's going to be the future Emperor Augustus, and Antony and Cleopatra are defeated in a naval battle in 31 BCE. Octavian is victorious, and Mark Antony and Cleopatra both take their own lives. But she got a lot of she she she managed to get a lot in to quite a short life, frankly, didn't she? I mean, it was it was it was eventful. The problem of telling it is just as, you know, it's just, you You too much is happening in Cleopatra's TV, even though there's huge gaps. Even that's that's put together around all kinds of things that we don't know, you know, like what she did when she was a child or whatever. Yeah. Mary, it's easy to see that there are a ton of questions suggested by that very kind of bare-bones outline. And and I guess the first question would be, you know, who who is this family, this dynasty of the Ptolemies who are ruling Egypt at the time? This is this is the this is the family of which Cleopatra is to which Cleopatra is the heir. You know, who who are they? Where do they come from? Cuz this all goes back to in fact Alexander the Great, right? Who died in 323 BCE. So, this going back several hundred years. That's right. And what what Alexander's done in a rather short career of pretty bloody conquest, he has conquered Egypt throwing out the ruling Persian dynasty from there at the time. The pharaohs have already been sidelined. He's conquered swaths of territory from Egypt going far into the east. But what happens is he dies. Massive conquest, not quite clear how much control he's got over these territories he's conquered, but he dies. And his mates and his subordinates then decide that they're going to carve up what he had conquered between them. And as it parcelly out to what would become different dynasties. And Ptolemy comes from Macedonia, northern Greece, is right-hand man of Alexander, and he gets the Egypt bit of of Alexander's conquests. And what Alexander done is I mean, not only as it were thrown out the the Persians, but he'd also started to build a new capital of Egypt in the city of Alexandria which where Alexandria is now. And Ptolemy is going to make that his capital. So, there's a kind of total of reformation of the Egyptian geopolitics with a new dynasty in a new capital city on the coast Alexandria. And Ptolemy Ptolemy is quite good at the PR, and he has a massive PR coup because he manages to get the dead body of Alexander Yeah. >> and to take it back to Alexandria, the city that Alexander had started to found, and to bury it there. So, you know, his you know, his brand is all focused on the fact that this is you know, we are the successors of Alexander the Great. And you can see, I mean, even in that very short summary that uh there's always going to be a tension here. You know, the the pharaohs have sort of gone. Um but there is still a huge amount of power and symbolism and architecture, etc., resting on old pharaonic Egypt. And there is a tension between that and the new Greek Macedonian Greek dynasty that the Ptolemies are. All right? So, it's a it's a diverse country and it's it's got fissures between the different strands. And you get this sort of hybrid idea of this Macedonian Greek dynasty of rulers who are also hitching themselves to the symbolic and ancestral and you know, historic power of the the pharaohs. So, they're both Greeks and Egyptian pharaohs at least symbolically in this sort of intriguing way. And and they also behave they behave a bit like pharaohs in the sense that there is this tradition of brothers and sisters marrying each other, which is a confusing a confusing and strange habit. And they >> >> they are also confusing Mary cuz they're all called the same names, right? They're all called called they're like called called Ptolemy, Cleopatra, Berenice, Berenike and if you want to pronounce it in a Greek way, and Arsinoe. So, it's just bewildering. A family you know, I I would recommend no one bothered with a family tree of the Ptolemies because it's a load of the same names kind of repeating one another and you can't tell whether you're dealing with Cleopatra the VI or Cleopatra the VII cuz technically all Cleopatra is Cleopatra the VII, but I I think it's it's not the best place to start. Right. >> >> There are things that strike us very um as very odd. And I think that we've already seen with Cleopatra the the idea of No. She when she has a joint ruler as part of this dynastic succession. In two cases, there are younger brother and she marries them. She or she is married off to them. They're not even in their teens probably. It's always been a puzzle quite how to understand that. Oh, for sure. And I have my question, Mary. I mean, I've always been puzzled about this is how, you know, if you set up this this it's very easy to see how it might look like a good idea to keep keep it in the family. You know, if you're marrying within a dynastic family, that excludes literally excludes other powerful families and you're keeping it in the family. The downs and and holding all the power into the dynasty. The downside, Mary, is very obviously genetic because if you if you're literally marrying brothers to sisters, that dynasty is going to last not a very long time and there's a reason there's a taboo against against close family marriages. So, my question that I've always not really I've always assumed that it sort of symbolically happened, but it didn't really happen or else they just wouldn't they wouldn't produce healthy children. So, what's your take? I mean, if you're asking me did Cleopatra really sleep with Ptolemy the XIII, her brother, I have to say I haven't the foggiest clue. We have we actually have no idea. Um some of the children of the dynasty are reputed to be the children of um brother-sister parents. We don't know whether that's true or not. It's also pretty clear that the marriage symbolic, literal, sexual or not, is not the only way that children are being born in this dynasty. I mean, one thing's probable, we don't know, is that Cleopatra herself was the son of, you know, what was politely called a concubine of her father, not of her father's sister to whom he was married. So, This is a relief. You know, this is probably it's probably a relief. Who's sleeping with who in the ancient world is is, you know, even more difficult to discover than in the modern world, you know, so um my take on it, my first take on it is we can we can hypothesize about the real relations quotes real relations that underlie this, but essentially, this is a dynastic tactic. And it's found in other dynasties both ancient and modern across the world. You know, it's you know, doesn't take you much to see that you can squeeze out rivals if you keep it in the family, and many many dynasties have done that. There's there's one um complicating factor. And it complicates it and doesn't provide an answer is that when one ancient historian a couple of decades ago decided to look at the marriage patterns of ordinary people in Egypt and in Ptolemaic Egypt in particular and to see what they were doing, he found that there was a surprising amount of brother-sister marriage lower down the social strata. Now, again, why we don't know. Was it about property? What was the consequence? It's for me, it's just slightly complicated or quite a lot complicated. Um the old view that oh look, this is the this is dynastic politics. It happens only at the very top of Ptolemaic society, and it's done for absolutely political reasons. There's there is a hint that brother-sister marriage is more prevalent than you, Charlotte, would like to think. But where we go with that fact, I don't know. I don't know. Well, I do I think it's certainly interesting just to hold that sense that it's rather confronting in mind that people did things differently in other places and at at other times. Okay, so >> >> it's totally taboo for us, obviously less taboo for them. Yeah. If if we park incest for a minute, we'll come back to it, I think. Um what is clear is that this dynasty, the Ptolemaic, has a really grand start. You know, Ptolemy the first, you know, the the the right-hand man of Alexander, he got lots of cash from Alexander's conquests. He's uh he is really setting up something big in Alexandria. By the time we've gone on a couple of hundred years, this dynasty is a bit uh on the down, right? It's not going up. And it's always, and this is part of the part of what we're talking about in brother-sister marriage, the dynasty has always had its internecine violent streaks, right? And and rivalries within it. Um by the time you get to Cleopatra's day in the 1st century BCE, um it's even more violent and conflicted than it was before. I mean, I think that you know, one one side of that is that um you know, Cleopatra's got four brothers and sisters. None of them None of them die a natural death, right? This is, you know, it's very it's dangerous to be born into the Ptolemaic dynasty. Um I mean, there's the brother The brother to whom she's first married, uh interestingly, well, died while he was being pursued in a boat by Julius Caesar, and he falls overboard, um but he's wearing gold golden armor, and he can't swim, right? So, you know, that's So, he sinks. That's Don't try this at home, kids. It's really dangerous. Don't put on your golden armor. Not if you're being chased by Julius Caesar. Um in a boat in a boat. And so, this dynastic tensions, there are encroachments from partly from further east, where people are kind of coming in seeing a dynasty a bit down on its luck, and kind of taking some of the traditional lands of the Ptolemies. But more important than anything, um the really big new power on the block, which is completely now or beginning to completely now overshadow the Ptolemaic dynasty, is the power of Rome. By this stage, certainly by the you know, the middle of the 1st century, a bit before, effectively, Egypt is in Rome's control. You know, it is So, so, so, Rome is a sort of superpower by this point, essentially controlling controlling the Mediterranean, essentially. And so, it's it's it's Egypt is not yet within the Roman Empire, but it's certainly because that's going to happen as part of our story here in our next five episodes, but it's really under the influence of this enormous growing military and political behemoth that's on its doorstep. Yeah. And you know, when we say that it's kind of, you know, it's under the control of Rome, what that you know, what actually means is that although it might be independent nominally, um it's quite often Rome or individual Roman politicians who are deciding who which of these Ptolemies is going to be the next king or queen. Uh and and how. And when we find Cleopatra in dealing with Rome and dealing with the power of Rome, um and we wonder what um yeah, you know, what the ground rules for that are, well, in part, we're in a dynasty who al- already is a bit of a puppet of Rome. You know, and we know about modern world superpowers, and you know, they say who they want to be ruling a particular country. Yeah, I've I've heard of this. I've I think I've vaguely heard of um people wanting to do a bit of regime change. Yes, you have. Uh and that that is what's, you know, going on. And uh and so, the there's clearly this sense that, you know, the Ptolemaic dynasty is still kind of parading itself as um uh as the as an independent dynasty, but they're not really. And there are There are wonderful stories actually through throughout this period of um uh the odd ways in which the the Ptolemies um interact with Rome, and the humiliation to which they uh are put. And this is my favorite one, I think, is is about um Cleopatra's dad, uh Ptolemy the flute player. Um and he'd been, again, in one of these bits of um basically civil war in Egypt. Um He'd been temporarily thrown out of the country. And he decides he's going to go to Rome to um get their support, and he starts off going to one Roman official called Cato, who's in the area, to get his assistance. He's very He's He's very puzzled when uh he's taken in to see Cato, um because um Cato doesn't get up, as you'd normally would expect him to do to, you know, greet greet greet the sort of temporarily removed king of Egypt, um but he remains Cato remains seated on what must have been a lavatory, because the biographer Plutarch, uh telling the biography of Cato, um uh tells us is that he had been taking what must have been a course of laxatives. Cato had been taking laxatives. Plutarch only says medicine, but it's clearly laxatives. And presumably, he had therefore deeply unpredictable diarrhea. So, he's sitting on the lav when Ptolemy is brought in. And uh he just says to Ptolemy that, you know, why don't you just go back home and make it up with your people, and etc. It'll be fine. Now, you can't help but think that there's there's a a sort of message of humiliation here for the Ptolemies that Cato is saying, you know, you are so unimportant to me, really, that I will deal with you, you know, while I'm sitting on the lavatory. That's next level from giving someone a dressing down in the Oval Office, isn't it? I mean, it's like saying the president will see you now. Oh, by the way, he's on his golden lav, right? And uh and you know, and you know that you and one way of reading that incident, and it's only one, um you you can say it's it's a bit of a joke on Cato, but one way of reading the incident is to say, look, um this is, you know, showing this is a demonstration to Ptolemy of uh how unimportant he is. But can we turn it around the other way? Because because Alexandria was also also was actually super important in its way, wasn't it? I mean, it was an incredible, you know, centuries-old city that was um cosmopolitan, um sophisticated, a seat of absolutely extraordinary learning. I mean, that's the one That's the sort of, in a sense, the most famous thing about Alexandria. It's uh you know, things like the Library of Alexandria, huge center of learning. They've got copies of uh of all the most significant uh Greek literature that they can get their hands on. There was extraordinary poets who were associated with incredibly influential poets like Callimachus and Apollonius of Rhodes, um who wrote the Argonautica, who was actually a librarian of the of the Library of Alexandria. And so, you know, it was prestigious, it was glamorous, um it was it wasn't powerful politically in the in the sense that Rome was, but it had this allure, right? I mean, you're absolutely right, because, you know, I've been talking about the Ptolemaic dynasty in Alexandria as if it was a kind of rogue state with people bumping each other off and marrying their sisters, and um and, you know, being, as it were, effectively controlled by Rome. And that's partly true, but the other side of Alexandria is its cultural capital. You know, this was a really glamorous place. Now, Rome is interested in Egypt partly because it's rich, too. There are There's clearly quite a lot of financial transactions, both money being lent both ways between Rome and Egypt. There's a There's, you know, this is not a um a rogue state which is, you know, simply kind of um doing the modern equivalent of shooting each other and being a nuisance. There's a huge background to its um to its allure, and it is in a really, really rich part of the world. And it's actually hugely more impressive, and this is the thing that's quite hard to kind of get your head around. It's hugely more impressive than the city of Rome itself. So, Rome has got the the military power at this point, mm far more than Egypt. But if you were to go to Rome, you know, it's There's none of these marble buildings yet. It's a higgledy-piggledy, slightly kind of smelly, disorganized city with very poor infrastructure, and not much glamour. Alexandria, however, starting from Ptolemy the first, has been plowing money into um building itself to power. And there's, There's a biography of Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff. And she has a I think a really apt comparison because she says if you were to go from Rome to Alexandria in the age of Cleopatra, it would have been like if you're in the 18th century going from one of the American towns, Philadelphia, small wooden town, going to Versailles, right? You know, that that it's it's it's big news. And so, whatever the the the tensions, it's Cleopatra's home base in Alexandria is really big news. It's big news culturally and it's big news because of bigness. It's the second biggest city in the Roman world. It's got more than half a million population probably. And and it's got the prestige of having been founded by Alexander the Great. You know, so it's got a lot going for it. And there are wonderful stories about you know, how how that prestige of Alexander remains being very alluring to Romans. I mean, Romans like to see themselves as in the footsteps of Alexander the Great. Um, and they sort of do pilgrimages to see that body which Ptolemy the first had rather cleverly snatched to to be the kind of the logo of his his new capital. And when a bit a little bit later after just after the death of Cleopatra around the same time, Octavian, the future emperor Augustus, is in town. He goes to see he goes to visit the body and he gets so close that it says it must have been in some way mummified. Um, he knocks Alexander's nose off cuz he's touching the very body of Alexander. Amazing if true. It sounds like one of those slightly apocryphal stories. Yes. I really wanted to be true. Yeah, it's a good story. So, this city is pulling in all sorts of different ways and it's not you know, it's not just you know, a battleground between warring Ptolemies. It's got a whole load of stuff that people, Romans in particular, absolutely gripped by. And you know, it's it's into that context where we think of the kind of glamorous context of Cleopatra, it's into that context that we have to put her back, right? And to think about how how she operated. You know, the trouble is there are great periods of her life. As I said, there's no biography of Cleopatra. Ancient biographies, plenty of modern ones. Um, there's there's periods of her life throughout her childhood, for example, but even several years later, you know, stretches of time when we have no idea what she's doing. And you have to pick up kind of intriguing references like one reference which says that she wrote she wrote books on cosmetics and apparently on dandruff, right? So, books on dandruff by by Cleopatra. Now, if it is the same Cleopatra, and that of course is always difficult. That's pushed people to say, "Oh, she's quite a literateur, really." You know, she's um, beauty expert. Beauty expert. I mean, I tend to think of her, you know, not not being a beauty expert. And You know, actually if she is queen of this place, it's a bit like Roman emperors that you get all these stories of luxury, etc., etc. But Cleopatra is probably spending most or a lot of her time, more of her time on doing the admin of this vast country um, rather than than on dissolving pearls, right? You know, dissolving pearls is very much a sideline. And she's probably got a huge um, set of helpers to do this, but she is um she's an administrator as well as a decadent queen. And there's there's a wonderful little symbol of that. There is one papyrus in which people think we have the actual handwriting of Cleopatra. Now, it's it's not 100% certain. It's not 100% certain, but it's a long document and at the end what people think is the queen has written in her own hand, "Let this be the case." What's that document about? It's a document about tax concessions. So, possibly she was spending more time on doing really important administration, really dull stuff like tax, than either bathing in asses' milk or writing books about makeup. I mean, it would be sort of amazing and wonderful if the rumors about her or the the kind of references to her writing books about hair care and makeup were true. But do we think perhaps it's a little bit more likely that she was mostly doing the boring stuff? >> Well, I think so. >> important admin stuff which, you know, you've got to do if you're ruler of a major country in the Mediterranean basin. What we'll be able to do when we get a bit further into our story, we'll uh, we'll be able to think about maybe some of these stories of luxury are being driven by something, you know, by by a desire to cast her in a particular way rather than by the day-to-day life of a hard-working Egyptian queen. Now, you know, I think I know that I'm influenced >> the chances, Mary? I know that I'm influenced by my view of Roman emperors here and I think, you know, you know, they spent, you know, more time also doing tax concessions than having sex in the swimming pool. But you know, we you've got to remember that when you're telling the stories of royalty then or now, it's you you tend to get drawn to wild imaginings, not to documents about corn supply and tax concessions. We will be coming back to this um, in the next episode, but we're going to have to look at another big question in the second part of this episode. Hello, lovely listeners. If you're not yet part of our Instant Classics book club, well, now is the perfect time to join because we are making our way through one of the most exciting works of literature ever. That's Homer's Odyssey. We would love you to join our book club which we absolutely adore. So, please do join now. To give you all the access to our previous episodes and loads of other perks like being able to join our online community and getting early booking access to our live events. All details are on our website instant classics pod.com. So, Mary, one big question that a lot of people have and you know, it's been a question for a long time going right back to the 19th century and it's certainly I think more people are asking it now than than probably at any other time is is which says more perhaps a lot about our own moments that we're that we're in now is what was Cleopatra's ethnicity? You know, like what was her skin color which I guess those are two different things. Um, you know, in short a lot of people ask, "Was Cleopatra black?" How do we tackle, like bearing in mind that we've got two middle-aged white women, that's you and me, Mary. We may not be exactly the top people to be or that the most ideal people to be discussing this question. But anyway, we've got to I think tackle this in a way. You know, what what what what are we talking about here? I mean, I suppose the point that I would always want to make, Mary, um when as a prelude to even answering this question is that um, if you read Greek and Roman literature of any kind, poetry, history, prose, anything, you don't get the answer to this question ever in any context, really. In other words, the Greeks and the Romans do not tell you about the skin color of the people they're writing about. It is not a category in which they are in any way interested, right? And even and I think it's really important and interesting to to bear this in mind that um it's so present in our contemporary culture and it seems so obvious and so automatic to define people by ethnicity and skin color, but the Greeks and the Romans never tell us if people are black or white. It's not a category. In other words, it's a broadly speaking, it's a modern set of categories in in which the Greeks and the Romans were not interested and it's it's very instructive to remember how those categories are invented categories for historical reasons in our own era. Which isn't to say, like obviously we do want to ask them. There are all sorts of reasons why we do want to ask those questions of Cleopatra now, but it's just we're not not to find the answers. Like no Greek or Roman writer is going to say, "And by the way, Cleopatra was black." That just wouldn't have meant anything to them. By and large, you're right. You do get very occasional references to skin color. There's an extraordinary um episode in one of the uh Greek novels written in the Roman Empire um where a woman has a black child because at the moment of conception, she was looking at a picture of a black person. Um but already the sheer difference of that is already in a sense proved you right that this is these are not defining identity categories. And so, we're looking for something understandably um which the ancients aren't much bothered by. That goes uh across all these disputed cases. I mean, you know, Septimius Severus is a a Roman emperor who comes from the coast of Africa. Uh and people have debated his ethnicity. Uh and the issue is it's not we people don't ancients don't talk about it. That kind of therefore leaves leaves modern scholars to both you know, try to work it out, but also of course inevitably invest their own um their own assumptions, their own prejudices um in answering the question. And you know, I think that tradition the traditional answer amongst classicists is not the only answer, but the mainstream answer has been to say, "Look, Cleopatra was a Macedonian Greek. She wasn't Egyptian. And she certainly wasn't sub-Saharan Africa and African at all. That uh there might have been people would say, "Well, a bit of Persian, a bit of Syrian in her blood from some you know early bits of intermarriage within the dynasty um but more or less she's 100% European." That might be true. But what we have to remember is that if we imagine that Cleopatra was not the child of her father's wife, but of of that say a concubine, it could mean and it might well mean that her mother was Egyptian. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean doesn't very likely mean that her mother was black African, though that also was not impossible. All right? Uh so, you know, she is an absolute classic case of what you're talking about that um we don't know her skin color, we don't know her mum's skin color, and we can see different possibilities that it is straightforward Macedonian Greek, it is um Macedonian Greek and Egyptian, or even possibly um black African. Um And it is actually inter in in terms of any kind of certainty, it's very hard, though there are some there are some hints. Very hard to go further than that. It's so interesting, isn't it? Because it it having said that these categories don't matter in a sense or they don't matter particularly to the the Greeks and the Romans, of course they do matter in the modern world because what you've just described is I think you're you're suggesting now that we need to hold all these possibilities lightly. We need to hold these possible if we're if we're interested in this question, we need to hold these possibilities uh and we'll never going to know for sure. But of course in the modern world, which is a racist world effectively, as soon as you start representing as soon as you start representing Cleopatra on the stage or in art or on the screen, then then you have to pick. And the fact that she's she's been represented in the modern world so often as ef- effectively European it it does tell you about the prejudices and racism of the contemporary world. So, it kind of it's a it's a very confusing picture because it both matters and it doesn't matter. >> >> No, exactly. And and you know, you're looking out always. I mean, the you know, the ancient historian is constantly looking out for things that might give us a steer on this, right? Um and the obvious thing to look at are the the surviving images of Cleopatra. It's the the surviving ancient images. Now, these have got the they're really intriguing in all kinds of ways, but but they they don't much help with what she actually looked like. That's the problem. I mean, you can tell that from the the very earliest dated Egyptian representation of her is an an inscribed plaque, a relief sculpture. In which she and the the text written onto this sculpture makes it absolutely clear that she's it is her. In which she is dressed up as a male pharaoh, right? Now, one thing's for certain, that's not how she looked, right? Um but it's And is it a kind of very stylized Egyptian-looking profile? It's a very traditional what we think of as straight down the line Egyptian. So, actually very physically undifferentiated. Not non-naturalistic is what I'm trying to say. Yes, it's non-naturalistic and and it's but it's definitely a bloke, right? Right, okay. >> >> That is coded male. Yeah, coded male would be a polite way of putting it. It's it's far from clear. You can make some guesses about why she's represented uh as a man. I mean, partly that coded male phrase is is um is perhaps a giveaway that you know, some people think that even though she's a woman, she's being represented intentionally here as a man because that's what power is. It's male, right? Other people, I think I'd probably be more with this this explanation in this case, is that this is at the very beginning of her reign. And they've been doing a a picture an inscribed relief picture of um the ruling member of the dynasty, which was dad, you know, Ptolemy the flute player. >> >> They And they were doing him like a male pharaoh like you kind of would. You're put- putting um uh Macedonian power into a pharaonic guise. Um and they make him a bloke because he is a bloke. Um this moment, just as they got it all finished pretty well, um he goes and dies. Um and Cleopatra, they the person in question is going to be Cleopatra they want to represent. So, what they do is they change the name. They say, "This is Cleopatra." But they leave the male pharaoh there because they you know, they can't be bothered to do another one. They haven't got the budget to change it. Or they haven't got the budget to change it or whatever, right? No, but it's for me it's just a great it it is a little a wonderful symbol of of the the difficulty of of even going to what claimed to be contemporary images of Queen Cleopatra and saying so that's what she looked like. You can do you can do the the same with coins. Um where uh there are many heads of Cleopatra um on coins. Uh and she's got a very pronounced hooked nose. Um and people uh you know, people have often said, "Oh, did she Cleopatra really look like that?" We simply do not know. Cuz it may not have been true portraiture, as it were, on those. You know, it's just you know, very like Roman emperors, right? You know, that you would be it would be a very dangerous to conclude that Roman emperors really look like the portrait statues that were apparently of them, right? Um the the same would go actually for portraits coin portraits in the modern world, really. Um so, there's always a gap between the official image that you've got of Cleopatra and her real appearance. And of course, if you if you're wanting to think about skin color, well, I'm afraid a silver coin doesn't reveal the color of skin. So, we're we're a bit stuck, but I just wonder if we if there are other things we can look at other than than visual representations that about herself or about you know, do we know whether she had an Egyptian mother? How far can we get with that? There's little hints. There are a few hints. Um I I think the strongest hint that she wasn't 100% Macedonian Greek, right? Which uh she's certainly 50%. Um are the reports that she's the only uh Ptolemaic ruler who actually spoke Egyptian. All right? Now, she's also supposed to be a very clever linguist, you know, cuz she's a clever girl. And um um but she spoke Egyptian. And there are signs that she was rather more interested in some of the traditional Egyptian religious ceremonies, et cetera, et cetera, um than other Ptolemies had been. Oh, and it's, you know, we're clutching at straws here, but if you wanted to say, um it it's not implausible that she had an Egyptian mother, you would point to the fact she speaks Egyptian, um and that she's clearly doing more of the traditional Egyptian stuff than all of the rest of the dynasty. Uh it's you know, it's it's a fragile hint. And you know, in the end, you know, if if you know, if you were to push me to say, "Okay, so um uh what is Cleopatra's ethnicity?" I think I'd um I'd cross my fingers and come down on the side of um she's half Macedonian and half Egyptian. I Personally, I think there isn't um any realistic chance that she is, in our terms, black, but uh you could not rule that out. And you know, for me, in some ways, I think the interesting thing i- is, you know, as you've started talking about this already, is uh why, when the answer to this question, everybody knows is uncertain, you know, if you if you sat people down and explained, "This is the evidence. We know we can't tell." What is the, you know, what's the energy that's going into this controversy? Because and I think that, you know, listeners will be kind of a bit amazed to discover quite how vitriolic uh and and edgy um academic papers there have been, you know, trying to trying to argue the case that Cleopatra was Egyptian, that she was black, that she was solely Greek. I mean, it's really gloves off stuff. Gosh, I didn't realize that. Well, that tells us much more about our own um time than Cleopatra's, I suspect. I think so. And I think that it's I mean, you you also hinted, I think, at the one of the answers that's driving this is the sense that an awful lot of the history of what we call the classical world has been written on the basis that somehow everybody was white European within it. Yeah, definitely. And and what what is driving this argument is, in a sense, this is you know, people are trying to put their hands up, make probably overstating the case, to say, "Stop. Let's just think a bit about um what what underlies our own Elizabeth Taylor-like image of Cleopatra." Mhm. And I think that it's the the determination over over centuries, really, of scholars of the ancient world, the determination not really to see the the potential ethnic diversity that make people want to fight about this sort of stuff. And and Africa is an extremely interesting place because Africa's a big continent. And when we talk about Cleopatra being black or any of these characters being black, we're we're kind of thinking that they've got ancestry in sub-Saharan Africa. And it's not impossible. >> >> But what what we're overlooking, I think, is that it's it's a question of what Africa means within this world. And I think it's you can't quite um just lump together everything that happens on, you know, the African north coast, the Mediterranean coast, um and sort of pretend it's not in a different place. And I think the most interesting work recently has not been to look at African culture in the Roman Empire a- as if what we're doing is trying to search out black Africans, but to say maybe that there are distinctive ways of of this culture thinking about itself differently, even if that, you know, isn't to be seen um in the color of their skins, which, you know, could be anything like modern Egyptians, white Greek, Berber, or whatever. And there's been a a recent book um by Catherine Conybeare about Augustine, St. Augustine, an early Christian, really important figure in the Roman Empire, who comes from a town in the in Mediterranean coast of Africa, which is Hippo. And she calls it um Augustine the African. Now, she doesn't mean by that that Augustine is not a sub-Saharan African. She's not claiming that. But she's trying to say maybe we ought to think of this culture in this North African region as not being black culture, but still being African in some way. And there are a real lot of, you know, famous um you know, ancient uh writers coming from Africa. Apuleius, for example, he wrote the amazing novel The Golden Ass. We've never thought really hard enough about um what Africanness might mean, what might be distinctive. And I think really that is where we should be thinking about, whether whether it's legitimate always just to fold in um the Mediterranean coast of Africa in the ancient world into Mediterranean culture uh and kind of ignore everything that's different. And so there's a good question underlying this, you know, what's African about ancient Africa? Um but it's hasn't been particularly helpfully answered by the the really sometimes vitriolic arguments that people have had about the skin color of Cleopatra and of others. It's a confusing picture, but I think I suppose what I I guess what I take away from what you've said, well, many things. I think partly is there's just I I think one has to be really, well, the a good way forward is to be very open-minded about the possibilities for what Cleopatra looked like. I also think, you know, it's instructive to remember that it didn't matter to to the to the to her contemporaries at all. Um and just to And also, I think this is just worth thinking about all the time, is that the history of Greece and Rome is not a purely European history. >> That's right. Yeah, that's right. Look east and look south, and you're going to find a much richer and and and a much more complete vision of what this world actually meant and where its roots disseminated into and what the influences it brought into itself were. That's the reason that, you know, we've entitled this first episode, you know, Cleopatra, the last Egyptian pharaoh, you know, to try to signal that, even if we can't we can't flesh it out very much. But I have to say, next time we're going to be going full on Roman with Cleopatra plus Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, which is uh significantly which is a significantly different story. Can't wait. See you then. As ever, we want to know your thoughts and comments, ideas, questions. And so, if you have them, please do send them to us at instantclassicspod@gmail.com or on our social media at @instantclassicspod. Bye.