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So Cleopatra, taking only Apollodorus with her, got into a little boat and landed at the palace when it was already getting dark. And as it was impossible to escape notice otherwise, she stretched herself out full length inside a sleeping bag while Apollodorus tied the sleeping bag up with a cord and carried it indoors to where Julius Caesar was. It was by this device of Cleopatra's, it's said that Caesar was first captivated.
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Now, that was how, at least according to the biographer Plutarch, Cleopatra first introduced herself to Julius Caesar while he was staying in Alexandria. Not as most modern paintings and movies have it, popping out from a rolled up carpet, but hidden in a sleeping bag or possibly a laundry bag.
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It was the start of one of the two big Roman adventures in Cleopatra's life.
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It was after this, thanks to Caesar, that she was re established on the throne of Egypt after she'd quarreled with her brother. But there was much more to it than this. Together, Caesar and Cleopatra enjoyed together one of the most significant Nile cruises in the whole of history. And she went on to have Julius
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Caesar's son, or at least she always insisted that he was the father.
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And the second adventure is even more famous several years later, after the death of Julius Caesar. And this is the Antony and Cleopatra episode, immortalized of course by William Shakespeare, by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, and hilariously satirized by Sid James and the Carry on team in its non comedy version.
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Version. It's a story of high passion, decadence and dissolving pearls with a tragic end. Both Mark Anthony and Cleopatra take their own lives in 30 BCE after their unsuccessful bid to make Anthony Julius Caesar's successor. And they're defeated in battle by Octavian, who later became the first Roman emperor, Augustus.
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So this week we're looking at these very different episodes in Cleopatra's life, asking how they come down to us and what very different impressions of her they give us.
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This is instant Classics, the podcast uncovering the ancient stories still shaping the world today. I'm Mary Beard.
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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 episode, Cleopatra meets the Romans.
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To some, he is the revolutionary hero who restored China to its rightful place on the global stage.
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To others, he's a brutal despot accused of presiding over more civilian deaths than either Stalin or Hitler.
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Mao Zedong has one of the most recognizable faces in the world, yet he started life in a muddy provincial village.
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A rebel son who hated his father survived a 6,000 mile walk across China and rose to become a figure of
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titanic proportions from Empire the Goal Hanger World History Show. I'm Anita Anand.
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And I'm William Durampal.
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In this six part series, we're joined by world renowned expert Rana Mitter to explore the life of the father of Communist China, Mao Zedong.
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We'll track his rise from a bookstore owner to a guerrilla commander. And we'll witness his ruthless elimination to secure total power. And we'll descend into the dark experiment of the Cultural Revolution, a time when ancient temples were burnt, children denounced their parents, and a nation worshipped a mango as a sacred relic.
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Subscribe to Empire wherever you get your podcasts to listen now.
- [04:12]
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So both these stories of Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony take us right into the centre of the power struggles and the civil wars that are tearing Rome right apart in the first century bce. The first is set during the rise to power and then the assassination of Julius Caesar. The second during the conflicts that happen after caesar's assassination in 44 BCE that then culminates in Augustus becoming the first emperor to take up the throne of the Roman Empire. But Mary, tell us, what on earth was Julius Caesar doing in the first place in Egypt that meant that he was introduced to Cleopatra wrapped up in a sleeping bag or a laundry bag?
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I'm going to cut a really, really complicated story very short. We're in 48 BCE and at this point, Julius Caesar on his way to becoming dictator of Rome. Julius Caesar, who's then aged 52, is battling it out with his one time Roman ally, but now enemy and rival, Pompey, because they're both actually trying to establish themselves effectively as the sole ruler of Rome by fortier. Julius Caesar has fairly decisively beaten, actually beaten Pompey in battle. And Pompey after the battle has scarpered to Egypt, followed by Julius Caesar. Meanwhile in Egypt, there's another civil war going on because Cleopatra, she's aged about 21 at this point and her younger brother and co ruler, Ptolemy XIII, not
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to be confused with Ptolemy XIV, her
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other brother or the 12th, her dad, right, They've been husband and wife and co ruler since 51, but they thought they've fallen out or their advisors or the different factions have fallen out. And it looks first of all as if Cleopatra pushes brother out, but then she gets pushed out by him or his faction, leaving him then as the sole ruler. Now I'm being slightly tentative here because it's that kind of complicated politics that we have to put together from very fragmentary evidence And a lot of the evidence comes from ancient Egyptian papyrus documents that have been found. And a lot of weight is put on whether, for example, in any particular document, whether Cleopatra's name comes before Ptolemy's or Ptolemy's before Cleopatra. You know, it's all. You know, it's. We don't have a straightforward, simple account of the squabbles of Cleopatra and her brother, but that's what looks like what's happened. But then. Then what you get is you get those two stories of Julius Caesar and the Egyptian quarrels kind of converging, because Ptolemy's people, even if not Ptolemy himself, he's a teenager, think that they will manage to ingratiate themselves with Julius Caesar if they kill Pompey, right? Which they do as soon as Pompey, who's scarping to Egypt since he gets off the boat, they decapitate him. They cut his head off.
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Nice.
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And they do what you do, they send it to Caesar. This turns out to be a bit of a miscalculation. Caesar is not impressed. And the story is that he's so revolted, he bursts into tears. Now, you know, I've always thought they might be a bit crocodile tears, because I suspect Caesar is quite relieved secretly to have Pompey out of the way. But nevertheless, that's not the official version. It looks to Caesar. This is how the story goes. It looks to Caesar as if the easiest thing to do at this point is to exert a bit of traditional Roman power. So what he does. I can't remember what he does with the head, actually, but he establishes himself in the royal palace and he tells the quarreling factions in Egypt, you know, the Ptolemy faction and the Cleopatra faction, he, quote, bangs their heads together. I shouldn't say that, to get back to the kind of joint rule that their father had planned for them.
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B
So is this where this rather unconventional business of the laundry bag and. Or sleeping bag. I'm very confused about this laundry bag, sleeping bag confusion that we know it's not a carpet, right?
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A
It's not a carpet. The Greek word is slightly ambiguous and is compatible with either a laundry bag or. Or a sleeping bag. It is not compatible with a carpet. Cleopatra's problem is that she's actually on the outcrowd. Caesar has, you know, occupied, effectively, the royal palace in Alexandria. He's not inviting her in. He's not saying, oh, you know, let's come and have some negotiations. Cleopatra, she reckons, rightly, I think, that if she wants to stand up for herself and her side, the Best way to do that is to come face to face with Caesar and to try to talk him onto her side. So she's got to get into the palace. That's the laundry bag trick. Out she emerges and it kind of appears to work, you know, so that Caesar's quite impressed. Not only one suspects by the 21 year old that this is the story by the 21 year old emerging from the bag, but also the trick, you know, this is ingenious. So it looks as if basically he sticks with his idea that they should go back to the old joint rule that dad Ptolemy the flute player had planned. But really by this point Caesar's on Cleopatra's side and very soon
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there's actually
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armed conflict breaks out in which Ptolemy XIII dies. I mean, that's the golden army story.
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He falls off the throne. Don't wear golden armor when you're in a boat if you can't swim, or even if you can swim.
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So what Caesar does then is appears to. And all this is a bit in inverted commas because we're piecing this together. He appears to establish Cleopatra's right to the throne even when Ptolemy XIII has drowned in his golden armor. But he makes her joint ruler with her even younger brother, Ptolemy XIV, before Caesar goes back to Rome, perhaps in April 47. And to all appearances, Cleopatra rules with Ptolemy XIV as her new husband also until Ptolemy XIV's death in 44.
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B
So in some ways, if you leave aside the carpets, or the not carpets, the laundry bags, the sleeping bags, the golden armor, the marrying your brother, it's quite a normal story in Roman terms, in the sense that the Romans have come in and rather bossily decided to sort out this fraying political situation in a sort of vassal country or a subordinate country on their borders. But there is a kind of curveball in this, isn't there? That makes it not the ordinary story of the Romans sorting out the troubles of their less important neighbours.
- [12:48]
A
That is true, because by the time Julius Caesar gets on his boat to go back to Rome, Cleopatra is heavily pregnant with Julius Caesar's child. So she insists, and so it is not universally but generally believed. Caesar leaves about April, the child is born in June and Cleopatra calls him Kaisarion or Caesarion. Right. You know, just in case you should ever forget whose child he was, she gives him the name Caesarion. Little Caesar is what it means. Cute, but don't forget who daddy is. And now this, of course, you know, this is not just a story of a wanted or unwanted pregnancy. This is a big potential Political game changer if it's true, because Caesarion is actually Caesar's only biological child. And what's going to be happening a few years down the road is that these big Romans are going to be fighting it out to be recognized as the successor of Julius Caesar. Now there being a biological successor there, a son of Caesar called Caesarion, that is going to be big news and it's going to give potentially it will give Cleopatra a big card. And it is interesting, I think that from that point on she does start to spend quite a lot of time in Rome. She certainly goes there in 46 with little Ptolemy XIV, her husband and co ruler. And she stays in one of Julius Caesar's spare properties, right. She's sort of a semi official visitor and she's actually in Rome. Whether she stayed the whole time in between. She's actually in Rome when Caesar's assassinated in 44 BCE. Although she perhaps wisely departs pretty sharpish after the death. We can again, it's hard to trace her movements. But you know the great orator and also letter writer whose letters still survive, Marcus Tullius Cicero, he mentions for example, Cleopatra being there and says how he can't stand the queen. He really can't stand the queen. But it does raise quite a lot of interesting questions we're not going to have time to explore. But if both King and queen, Cleopatra and Ptolemy, the whatever number he is, are in Rome for certainly months on end, maybe not years, maybe the takes about three weeks to get from Rome to Alexandria. There is a big question about who's running Egypt. And we have to imagine there's quite a big and effective administration that doesn't need either Cleopatra or Ptolemy there. It's also kind of interesting to know who. It's interesting to know where Caesarion is, right.
- [16:05]
B
Whether she was bringing him to Rome to kind of in a sense reveal him and show him and make something of him as Caesar's heir or whether he was safely back in Egypt because it might have been quite dangerous for him to be in Rome openly.
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We will be catching up with Caesarion and his fate next time. But I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say it was pretty risky being once Caesar's dead, it's pretty risky being the only biological child of Julius Caesar.
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B
No shit, as they say. But Mary, one thing we haven't talked about is the cruise because we mentioned this Nile cruise in the introduction. And somehow in the middle of civil war, pregnancy running the country, Caesar supposedly keeping an Eye out on what was happening to his power base in Rome. Julius Caesar and Cleopatra sort of snuck in a Nile cruise, right, which apparently was something not invented by Agatha Christie. What is the significance of this holiday they took down the Nile if it was a holiday?
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A
Well, you know, yes and no. I mean, I confess I'm going to be pushing the evidence just a little bit here, but not too far. And I'm going to be going back to what I was taught 50 years ago as a student. I remember the lectures vividly. I remember our lecturers saying, so what were Cleopatra and Caesar doing on the Nile? Right. I'll tell you next week, ladies and gentlemen. Right, okay. The point was that we were told was that this wasn't just a romantic getaway. Might have been, in part, but that wasn't the sole purpose. Nor was it a kind of very intimate, private occasion. According to one historian, Appian, writing in the second century CE, there were famous 400 boats on this Nile cruise. This was not just, you know, one or two boats going down for this romantic, romantic tourist attraction, but we were also told that it had huge consequences for the whole of the Western world. And this, I think, is quite a nice story. The question you have to ask first is what was Julius Caesar's most lasting legacy to the world?
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B
If that is a quiz question, Mary, I'm a swat, so I know the answer, okay? It's the Julian calendar.
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A
Yes, it is. Not kind of ideas of autocracy. It's not, you know, trying to drain the marshes outside Rome. It's not all the other things. Not conquering Gaul, for heaven's sake. Right? If Julius Caesar. Thank you, Charlotte. Thank you, swat. Julius Caesar's most lasting legacy to us has been our calendar, right? The Julian calendar. Now, what that means is it was he who actually imposed on Rome the months, basically the months that we still have with their 30 and 31 days and also the leap year. Right? Now, this got tinkered with later, but only tinkered with because the basic framework of all this was brought about by Caesar's great calendar. The question then is, though, where did he get the idea from? Right? Now it's absolutely clear that he learned about how to get the calendar in order, how to make an efficient calendar. It's pretty clear, as ancient writers say, so that he got the idea when he was in Egypt. We talked last time about the cultural and scientific literary atmosphere in Alexandria. It's not all writing poetry. Some of it is hard science. And it really looks like. And this is what ancient writers believed that it was these Egyptian scientists that explained to Caesar how to do it. But you say, so when did he have the time, Right? You know, he's in the middle of the civil war. When's he going to be concentrating on astronomy, for heaven's sake? So what we were told as students, Right, okay, this is partly tongue in cheek, was that it was on that holiday cruise when he took the instruction in how to reform the calendar, perhaps, you know, perhaps One of the 400 boats was a kind of, you know, a nerdish party of scientists ready to tell Caesar what to do. So it stuck with me that that absolutely fundamental legacy of Caesar to the west goes back to certainly a stay in Alexandria and likely as not to what he learned on his cruise.
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B
Now that you've summoned up this slightly speculative idea of it being the cruise, I cannot now banish an image of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra lying on the deck of their beautifully apportioned boat, staring at the stars while the very learned Cleopatra explains to Julius Caesar how he might reform the chaotic Roman calendar. But I've probably taken it a step. Have I taken it a step too far, Mary, even for you.
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A
It's pillow talk astronomy, isn't it? Pillow talk astronomy.
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B
It's a good scene for my movie.
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A
But I think at this point, we have to leave Caesar behind. We have to work onto the next Roman adventure of Cleopatra, a few years later with Mark Antony.
- [22:24]
B
Foreign. I'll be honest, shopping for clothes is not my favorite thing. I just want to look good without overthinking it. Stitch fix makes it easy. You take a quick style quiz, your size, your vibe, your budget, and a real human stylist sends a box with clothes that actually fit your life. Try it on at home. Keep what works, send back the rest. Shipping's free. No subscription request required. Get $20 off@stitchfix.com podcast.
- [22:57]
A
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.
- [23:16]
B
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.
- [23:36]
A
All details are on our website, instantclassicspod.com
- [23:43]
B
so, Mary, tell me about how the next Roman adventure for Cleopatra starts, because this is obviously not an immediate thing, right? She's had her Julius Caesar episode and then time elapses and a lot of stuff happens in between before she then encounters Mark Anthony.
- [24:06]
A
Right. The relationship with Mark Anthony is quite differently evidenced from that with Caesar. I mean, we've been saying that to quite a large extent, you have to kind of piece together the dates, you have to piece together who's in control. Now actually with the relationship with Mark Antony, we do have a narrative account now. It's lasting for on and off for 11 years between about 41 and 30 B.C. and there are three children of this relationship and in the end they die a very few days apart. They take their own lives. But so there's much, much more detail. Partly because Plutarch, the 2nd century biographer, wrote a biography of Mark Antony, not of Cleopatra. But the biography of Mark Antony did focus quite heavily on his relationship with Cleopatra. A good chunk pages and pages of Plutarch's biography are about not Anthony, but Anthony and Cleopatra. So we can be a little bit more confident. I mean, it's not a contemporary source, it's more than 100 years later, but there is a narrative story. It's also underneath. I'm afraid it is just as complicated because we're now in the next phase of the Roman civil wars. They are the background to the relationship between the two. And we are after the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 and Marcus Antony and at first joins forces with Octavian, who is Caesar's great nephew and has been adopted by Caesar in Caesar's will. And together what they do is they. They send packing, defeating militarily Caesar's killers. They, they defeat the assassins of Caesar in 42 BC. However, the relationship between Octavian and Mark Antony is always pretty fragile, pretty on off. It's a sort of power sharing agreement after the death of Caesar and the defeat of the assassins, a power sharing agreement which sees Octavian largely operating in the west of the Roman Empire and Anthony largely in the east. But that power sharing eventually breaks down completely and in 3130 BCE they come directly to a head and they end up in 31 fighting it out in a naval battle to decide who is going to be the sole ruler of the whole of the Roman world. And Octavian wins. Cleopatra and Mark Antony were fighting together against Octavian. They were defeated together. After the defeat, they, they scarpet back to Egypt and fairly soon they take their own lives.
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B
So just take us back a bit of a step, Mary, to how the relationship between them starts. And I'm just also very struck and conscious of the fact that the sort of sexual and the political are completely intertwined, or apparently intertwined, at least as far as our Roman sources tell us. So it feels like we're telling her story through her sexual relationships with these two incredibly powerful Romans. But at the same time, that's kind of what we've got to go on. And high politics is completely involved as well as sexual politics.
- [28:13]
A
You can't take Cleopatra out of these relationships however much you want to. I mean, as far as Mark Anthony's concerned, Cleopatra and Anthony had met way back in Egypt earlier, but it's 41 BCE is the kind of crucial date, because Mark Antony, based in the eastern city of Tarsus, which is in modern Turkey, in his part of the Roman Empire, he invites or summons Cleopatra to visit him. Now, what it seems like is that he had believed that Cleopatra had been bankrolling Caesar's assassins who had just been defeated by Anthony and Octavian. Not necessarily true. And what he was wanting to do is to divert Cleopatra's cash his way for the military plans, escapades, campaigns out east that he had in mind. Now, you know, going back to what you've just said, you know, this is. This is an interesting case of where it's quite hard to pin down what the politics, what the practicality is, what the passion is in all this. And some modern historians have said, look, Cleopatra was never very important. What she was, she was a treasure chest. And whatever the passion, whatever the romance, she was being used by these Romans to come up with the cash to bankroll their careers. Now, at this point, you get into layers and layers of both ancient and modern sexism, and I think it's impossible to sort out. There is a kind of a wonderful story of Cleopatra's first encounter with Mark Hanfer's main encounter in 41. And it's a story in some ways that really does match, although it's kind of. It's got a different plot, but it matches the encounter with Julius Caesar. Because what apparently happens is that Cleopatra, when she gets the invitation, the summons, the orders from Mark Antony, first she plays hard to get. Go. She's not going to go. She's not going to fall in with this. Then she gets into a boat and she does decide to go to Tarsus, and she sails in this barge or whatever, she sails upriver, she's dressed as Venus, she's being fanned by her attendants, slaves who are dressed as Cupids. And there's a fantastic smell. Perfumes are being sprinkled everywhere, incense is being burnt. And it gets to be quite funny because. Because in the Plutarchian story, Mark Antony is waiting for Cleopatra in the Tarsus Marketplace and the crowds are around him. When the crowds discover that Cleopatra has showed up in this fantastic barge, they all desert him to go and take a look at Cleopatra. And they leave Mark Antony on his own in the marketplace, looking a bit of an idiot. So he tries to recoup things by inviting her to dinner. And she says, no, you come to me. I think you should come to me.
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B
Ooh, power move. Brilliant. Power move.
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A
Brilliant. Power move. Barge, light dinner. You know, fantastic lighting event. Plutarch records how amazing the lighting was. And he also records that the next night he did have her back. You know, there was a reciprocal invitation, but it wasn't half as good as Cleopatra's dinner party. So come back and essentially, in the standard narrative, and, you know, I'm sure it has been much embellished, before you could know it, they've both gone off to Alexandria together, where they spend the winter.
- [32:34]
B
Okay, so Mark Anthony is absolutely captivated by this, right? And thus one of the great love affairs, supposedly, of history begins and the. And the decade passes, basically, doesn't he? I mean, let's not forget that Mark Anthony is married. So he's married, first of all to his wife, Fulvia. And then after she disappears off the scene, Octavia, who is Octavian's sister, that's the future Augustus sister. And he's pursuing various military campaigns in the east, and he's got this sort of fabulous love nest with Cleopatra in Alexandria, and they've. They have a new family, so there's a lot. You know, he's a busy. He's a very busy man.
- [33:18]
A
He's a very, very busy man. But don't let's start feeling sorry for him, you know, saying.
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B
I'm definitely not feeling sorry for him.
- [33:26]
A
How did he fit it all in? You know, and, you know, he's. I mean, the real issue here is probably Octavia, because she's Octavian's sister, while he's spending part of his time in his Alexandrian love nest, right?
- [33:42]
B
And supposedly unbelievably luxurious and excessive and extravagant.
- [33:50]
A
Plutarch kind of thinks that Mark Antony had shown worrying signs of excess before, but it was Cleopatra that tipped him over the edge, you know, that it was the relationship with Cleopatra. I mean, it is a. You know, it is a classic blame the woman thing here.
- [34:06]
B
Absolutely. It's always the woman. Yeah. Arch that eyebrow.
- [34:11]
A
But. But that is. That's Plutarch's line. And it's followed by very many writers, both ancient and modern. And there are these extravagant stories of. Of both their political and their. And their private lifestyle. I mean. I mean, he. And I'm putting this in voted commas. He gives away several Roman territories to Cleopatra and to the children. He distributes lavish honours to them in what looks like in Roman terms. And again, I'm putting this in inverted commas, a very orientalizing Eastern monarchical kind of way. Right. It looks as if you've got Eastern kingship underlying the story of this relationship, are dangerous in Roman points of view for two ways. First of all, kingship, because Romans avowed whatever, the sole rulership of Julius Caesar and eventually Augustus and the rest, they're not kings. In Roman terms. It looks like Antony's behaving a bit like a monarch. And it's the kind of. The absolutely stereotypical suspicion of the East. And at one point he appears when he's had a little victory, a little military victory in Armenia, in the east. Not all of Anthony's campaigns are going very well, it has to be said, perhaps because his mind isn't entirely on the job. He seems to celebrate what looks like a victory parade, a Roman triumph, actually, in Alexandria itself, you might say. So what, you know, victory celebration, you know, Alexandria, Rome, whatever in. It's the fact that it looks like this very specific Roman triumphal celebration that's at stake for Rome, because the triumph is. Is a celebration, you know, it is parading the victor, it is parading the victorious soldiers and the loot and whatever. But it's. It's absolutely tied to Rome. It's tied to the layout, the topography, the geography of Rome. And it looks as if Antony's trying to sort of hoik that and do it out east.
- [36:40]
B
So it looks like if you do it somewhere else, it looks like you're claiming that somewhere else as a sort of power center, as a symbolic arrival to Rome at the centre of the empire.
- [36:50]
A
Arrival to Rome, that is probably as offensive, if not more offensive, than the stories of private luxury that circulate around them. I mean, we saw last time the dissolving pearl trick. That's one very good example. My favorite story comes from the palace kitchens, the palace of Cleopatra, which she's sharing with Mark Antony. And it comes from Plutarch. And there's a kind of indirect eyewitness account here, because Plutarch has a grandfather who'd had a friend, and he recounts all this in his biography. He had a friend who'd Actually visited the palace kitchens. And when this friend goes in, he sees eight wild boars roasting on spits. And he says to his mate, the head cook, gosh, you must be expecting a lot of people to dinner. Eight wild boars. And the cook says, no, no, it's, you know, it's just 12 people or a small dinner or something like this. But we don't know exactly when they're going to want to sit down to eat. So we've got each one of these boars was put on at a slightly different moment on the spit, so that whenever they decide to eat, there's bound to be one boar just ready to eat. Now, this is kind of monarchical extravagance. Absolutely typically rendered, I think Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra picks up this, the story of the wild boars. But the parallel I like is with our own dear king when he was still Prince Charles, because there is a story, much denied, I have to say, by Buckingham palace, that the cooks in Prince Charles's residence cook nine boiled eggs in the morning, put on at different moments, so that when Prince Charles sat down to dinner, one of them would have been done just how he likes it.
- [39:08]
B
So kind of extraordinary story about the boors. So to me, it's either, incredibly, we know where it comes from because Plutarch tells us, and therefore very likely to be true, or, you know, pace, King Charles and his eggs. It's the sort of story you tell about very rich royal people. I like it anyway.
- [39:32]
A
Yeah. And what's really interesting is that we're still doing it, you know, and if there's an origin to this story, it is in Plutarch. Grandfather having the friend who talked to the cook and seemed, you know. So that image of royal excess really does go back this far. However.
- [39:53]
B
However, I mean, this is all very lovely with eating roast boar and dissolving your pearls and your wine, but it's not gonna go. It's not gonna end well, is it, Mary?
- [40:05]
A
No. And by 32 BCE, and they've had a good innings, actually. The fragile relationship between. Not between Mark Antony and Cleopatra, but between Mark Antony and Octavian had really kind of ruptured beyond repair. Octavian has a great PR coup, which is the sort of symbolic start of the final breakdown. Octavian claims that he's got hold of Antony's will, which he had deposited in the temple of Vesta in Rome. And we've seen in earlier episodes that temples were often used as kind of safekeeping places for documents and treasure in the Roman world. Now as Octavian reports it, he sort of publishes it. Mark Antony's will had said that Caesarion was Julius Caesar's legitimate son. Now, that has huge implications for Octavian. He'd made his children by Cleopatra, not by his legitimate Roman wives, his heirs. And he had instructed his body, when he died, to be buried in Alexandria next to Cleopatra. Now, the import of that, coming after these stories of how he was exporting Rome to Alexandria, the import of that is that Mark Anthony has now gone Egyptian. He's gone to the dark side. And it was the leverage which became really the perfect excuse for Octavian's people, Romans in Rome, to declare war. Now, actually, they declare war on Cleopatra, but effectively that means on Mark Anthony too.
- [42:16]
B
It's so interesting the way you've told this story, Mary, because it's is such a great reminder that it's really hard to winnow out this story and to kind of separate these strands, the one from the other. You know, is it a story that's of overwhelming passion or political calculation? Can you separate those two strands? You know, who is calling the shots here? Is it Anthony? Is it Cleopatra? You know, who's the sort of skilled politician? You know, what does everybody want? Does Anthony really just want all that Egyptian cash? What is Cleopatra's agenda? And of course, we have to bear in mind that Barth, some of the papyrus documents that you've described that contain, you know, good evidence that this is all being told really through a Roman point of view, that is that doesn't much care for Cleopatra. But I suppose one thing that you cannot deny Mary, right, is that there is. Cleopatra is powerful. The Romans thought she was powerful. She is a mover in whatever element her power truly lies. Political, monarchical, sexual, intellectual. She's definitely a female figure who is a force to be hugely reckoned with.
- [43:46]
A
And that's one of the problems for Rome, because we haven't yet got to the period in Roman history when there was the possibility of imagining, even if behind the throne, a powerful empress, emperor's wife, the Roman Republic, and we're at the very, very end of the Roman Republic on the cusp to one man rule. The point about women is that they had no political power, they had no power. And so Cleopatra doesn't fit very easily, you know, And I think when Marcus Tullius Cicero says he hates the queen, you know, there's that sense of the queen being the wrong location, whatever kind of power we're talking about. But there is the kind of final episode in Cleopatra's life and in a sense we know where the story ends but I think we'll come to this next time. There are more unexpected twists than you might imagine. There's a very nasty twist we'll discover for Little Caesarion but we're also going to see how useful the dead Cleopatra became to the regime of what was Octavian who was fast becoming the new emperor Augustus. And I think it's what happens next that helps us understand a bit better why it's so difficult to see through the anecdotes that we get told of Cleopatra. We can start to see that they're being told for a purpose but one that we can't ever eradicate to see beneath it. So there's some there are some funny twists coming or not so funny twists coming. Next turn.
- [45:48]
B
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 instant classics and podmail.com or on our social media at Instant Classics Pod.
- [46:05]
A
Bye bye.