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- [00:00]
Charlotte Higgins
Now's the time for drinking deep. And now's the time to beat the earth with unfettered feet. The time to set out the God's sacred couches, my friends, and prepare a holy feast. It would have been wrong before today to broach the vintage wines from out the ancient bins while a maddened queen was still plotting the capitals and the Empire's ruin.
- [00:27]
Mary Beard
That is how soon after the event, the Roman poet Horace began his celebration of the defeat of the crazy Queen Cleopatra and her death in 30 B.C. celebrating at the same time the start of the reign of Octavian, who'd soon renamed himself as the Emperor Augustus.
- [00:47]
Charlotte Higgins
Her end was a mythic event in Roman history. The hyped, probably overhyped Battle of Axiom, where Octavian claimed victory over Mark Anthony and Cleopatra entered the Roman national consciousness. Her suicide after Mark Antony had taken his own life was remembered ever after, not only as Rome's glorious victory, but as tragic, brave and an act of considerable ingenuity.
- [01:16]
Mary Beard
It does take some doing to engineer death by snakebite, if the story is true, that is.
- [01:24]
Charlotte Higgins
In this third part of our Cleopatra miniseries, we're going to be casting, I hope, a cool eye on her defeat, her death and her afterlife in the Roman imagination.
- [01:37]
Mary Beard
What happened in Cleopatra's last days? And why did they remain so vivid in the Roman imagination? Why was she so politically useful to the new regime of the Emperor Augustus? What kind of Roman PR campaign about the Queen was Horace contributing to? This is Instant Classics, the podcast that uncovers the ancient stories still shaping the world today. And I'm Mary Beard.
- [02:05]
Charlotte Higgins
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 Life After Death. And just as a content warning, this does include people taking their lives.
- [02:36]
Anita Anand
To some, he is the revolutionary hero who restored China to its rightful place on the global stage.
- [02:42]
William Durampal
To others, he's a brutal despot accused of presiding over more civilian deaths than either Stalin or Hitler.
- [02:49]
Anita Anand
Mao Zedong has one of the most recognizable faces in the world. Yet he started life in a muddy provincial village.
- [02:56]
William Durampal
A rebel son who hated his father, survived a 6,000 mile walk across China and rose to become a figure of
- [03:03]
Anita Anand
titanic proportions from Empire the Goal Hanger World History Show. I'm Anita Anand.
- [03:09]
William Durampal
And I'm William Durampal.
- [03:11]
Anita Anand
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.
- [03:20]
William Durampal
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.
- [03:41]
Anita Anand
Subscribe to Empire Wherever you get your podcasts to listen now, we left the
- [03:47]
Charlotte Higgins
story Last time in 32 BCE, Octavian, Julius Caesar's heir and Mark Anthony, Julius Caesar's one time right hand man,
- [04:03]
Mary Beard
had
- [04:04]
Charlotte Higgins
been in an alliance which had just about held together for a dozen years and then it finally collapsed. Octavian produced the will of Mark Antony which made it look like he was basically abandoning Rome to set up a kind of eastern monarchy in Alexandria.
- [04:26]
Mary Beard
Right, yeah. And there's been a huge amount of modern discussion about that will, whether it was authentic or whether it was a convenient forgery. But it actually doesn't matter hugely which because whichever it was, it did the trick. It made it look as if Antony was setting up a kind of rival to Rome with Cleopatra in Alexandria. And war is very soon declared, interestingly on Cleopatra, partly to make it look as if this was not a civil war being declared. Cleopatra is foreign. The war is declared against a foreign queen. Not against Anthony though, obviously, you know, Anthony's absolutely crucial in this. And they do everything kind of slightly old fashionedly properly in this declaration of war. There's a very, very old Roman ceremony for declaring war on the enemy where a load of priests called fetal priests go. This is back in early Rome. They go to the boundary of the enemy territory and they throw their spears in. And that is the process of kind of saying this is where war is starting, the throwing of the spears. Now, as Rome's empire get bigger, they can't easily go to the borderline of Roman territory and throw the spears in. It would have taken them weeks to get there. So what they do is they typical Roman kind of cleverness here, they designate a small bit of territory. In Rome itself, a small piece of land is designated enemy territory. And these old priests go and they throw their spears into that.
- [06:16]
Charlotte Higgins
It's like chucking them into the, I don't know, the Egyptian embassy or something as a symbolic.
- [06:21]
Mary Beard
Yes, no, that's absolutely right. I think in this case, when we're told that this was a ritual that was used, you can see that he's really bigging this up. I don't know how often this old ritual was resurrected, but in this case it's really bigging it up and saying this is a proper Roman Campaign against a foreigner and a foreign queen.
- [06:49]
Charlotte Higgins
Yeah, legitimising the war. A move that we have seen a few times in subsequent history using different means of.
- [06:58]
Mary Beard
That is true. What happens is this quickly develops into a kind of a head on clash. And there's a crucial naval battle at a place called Actium, which is on the coast of northwest Greece. It's now just a bit south of Corfu. You've got Mark Antony and Cleopatra are there leading their fleet and it is hugely written up actually this. You've got Mark Antony and Cleopatra against Octavian. It's all very in once Octavian Augustus has won. It's terribly kind of Dunkirk spirit. You know, people talk about having served at the battle of Actium. It's a kind of mythic moment. And what Octavian Augustus does to commemorate that moment in which he actually finally defeats Mark Antony and Cleopatra is that he erects at Actium on the coastline at Actium he erects an absolutely massive victory monument which has been known. It was started to be discovered in the early 19th century. It's recently been re excavated and what's been been discovered in the last campaign of excavations is actually some of the sculptural decoration from this victory monument and part of that displayed the triumphal procession of Octavian celebrating his victory over Cleopatra. And it's absolutely fantastic. It's a bit fragmentary but it's fantastic Roman sculpture which if you happen to be near the Prevezza Museum in North Greece, it's well worth going and having a look because there's a lot of Augustan cash went in to commemorating the place of Actium as the place where Antony and Cleopatra were finally kicked out.
- [09:10]
Charlotte Higgins
Yeah. It's really hard to overstate, in fact what Actium becomes as a symbolic moment. It is the kind of moment from which the whole sort of Augustan rain is seen to spring. But I think we have reason to believe that this sort of Dunkirk like moment was a little bit, maybe a bit more of a damp squib in reality, Mary. I mean I seem to remember a lot of. There were a lot of desertions and changing of sides and confusion and you know, not quite the heroic victory. But Augustus would like us to believe.
- [09:48]
Mary Beard
Yeah, no, I mean when you read both ancient and modern accounts it's very easy to get the impression that this was a grand capital G, a grand battle in which the two sides came together and Octavian was gloriously successful. Now the truth is, yeah, as you say, it was won, it was won by desertion and disloyalty Mark Anthony had got some battle plans for how to deal with the fleet of Augustus, fleet of Octavian in this conflict. But those battle plans were leaked to the other side. So they knew exactly Octavian's side knew exactly what Mark Antony and Cleopatra intended to do. And although some of the ancient accounts are a bit contradictory here, it looks like even before the real fighting started, Cleopatra decided to go back to Alexandria with her war chest of cash. Right. And that she was quickly followed by Mark Antony. There wasn't much real fighting actually done before Antony and Cleopatra actually deserted. And there are kind of both rather sad stories, actually, about the journey back to Alexandria by Anthony and Cleopatra, because Anthony gets picked up by Cleopatra's ship. They're on two separate ships to start with. But then Cleopatra kind of takes Anthony onto hers. And according to Plutarch, and again, how absolutely accurate this is, that what Anthony does is he just sits at the front of the ship and doesn't talk to anybody, doesn't talk to her. It's a turning point in Anthony's career, apart from the turning point that was meeting Cleopatra here at the end. Writers in antiquity paint him as increasingly silent, increasingly morose, and actually increasingly useless.
- [12:01]
Charlotte Higgins
He knows the game is up, Mary.
- [12:03]
Mary Beard
He knows the game is up. I mean, moderns have rather. Modern writers have rather imaginatively kind of diagnosed him with depression. But I think it's more that he knows the game is up, actually. And what happens, and we'll come back to this, is, you see, in that final year or so, less than a year, you see that Cleopatra is. Is certainly presented as being much, much more in the driving seat than Anthony now, still, not everything is completely finished for them. I mean, to start with, even after Octavian Augustus has had this kind of walkover actium, there were attempts to negotiate deals between the two sides, but there was no real doubt that Octavian at that point had won and he sails to Egypt. He follows Antony and Cleopatra to Egypt after the battle, where there is a bit of a skirmish or two. When he arrives in Egypt, there is some military resistance, but most of the forces desert. Most of Antony and Cleopatra's forces desert to Octavian. He's now in control, and he's in control of Egypt, not just of the Roman world. And what follows then in Pluto and in other writers is a long, detailed, intricate, mutual suicide narrative. And that Antony and Cleopatra are staying in different places in the city of Alexandria. Antony takes his own life first. He's received a note from Cleopatra saying that she has killed herself or will have killed herself. By the time he gets the letter, people have suspected that Cleopatra might have been trying to nudge him into taking his own life. At that point, he asks his slave, who's horribly appropriately called Eros, passion love. He asks his slave Eros to kill him rather than actually kill himself. But Eros doesn't do that and Eros kills himself instead.
- [14:38]
Charlotte Higgins
Oh dear.
- [14:39]
Mary Beard
I mean, it's horrible. And then in a really, really ghastly form of wounding, Mark Anthony stabs himself in the stomach. And he doesn't die straight away. He's mortally wounded, but he doesn't die. He is then taken to Cleopatra, who had not killed herself despite the note. And he is hoisted up to the upper floor of where she was. She's in an upper floor of some building. He, in this terribly wounded state, is hoisted up into her company and then he dies. This is told by Plutarch in the biography of Mark Antony in an extraordinarily nasty and very detailed way. And I think it's probably right that a lot of modern readers of this have clearly suspected that Plutarch has an eyewitness account that he's basing himself on. The account of how the body is hoisted up, et cetera, is horribly vivid.
- [15:59]
Charlotte Higgins
Dear, oh dear. That is really a terribly grim story. And what was Octavian's response when he heard about his former ally and then bitter enemy having taken his life to start with?
- [16:13]
Mary Beard
He has a little cry now. I mean, it's very interesting that we think of our image of this kind of absolutely kind of stoical, buttoned up Romans, you know, they're always crying. Julius Caesar cries when he sees the head of Pompey. Octavia has a little cry when he hears what's happened to Anthony. But all the same, he determines that he's going to get Cleopatra and he's going to get Cleopatra alive. Because what he wants to do, you know, these triumphal processions being such big news, he wants to parade Cleopatra as a captive in his triumphal procession of at Rome.
- [16:59]
Charlotte Higgins
It's just what you do, what you do with your defeated, the defeated monarchs of enemy territories. It's the supreme kind of statement of power.
- [17:10]
Mary Beard
He's still actually outside the city of Alexandria at this point. And he sends, he's in Egypt but not in the capital. He sends various of his men, subordinates to talk to her, to try to kind of keep her alive really. As soon as he actually gets to the city, he goes and visits Cleopatra. This is all told in Plutarch's account. And she, at first, according to Plutarch, tries to blame Mark Antony for everything, right? Octavian says, sorry, that doesn't wash. You know, you can't just put the blame on Anthony. And when she sees he's not kind of accepting her story, she basically begs for mercy as soon as she gets. As she does. Shortly, she gets a tip off that what Octavian is really wanting to do is to send her to Rome to be part of his triumph and to be humiliated. Rather than face that humiliation of being paraded through the streets of Rome as. As Octavian's victim, she resolves to kill herself. And what she does is she goes to the tomb monument, which is obviously quite large, where Anthony's ashes were, because by now he's been cremated. She says goodbye to them. And then it looks like it's in the same spot. She kills herself with the bite of some snakes. The modern English translation is usually asp, Cleopatra and the asp. But we don't know what sort of snakes they are, really, that she'd had smuggled in, possibly in a bowl of figs. And her two faithful slaves also take the snakes and die by snakebite.
- [19:10]
Charlotte Higgins
I have to say, the snakes and the figs, it's all a bit sexual for me. I mean, is it literally true, the sort of phallic image and the figs, the sort of vulva like figs?
- [19:24]
Mary Beard
I think other people have thought, like you, Charlotte, that there is a kind of literary sexual resonance in all this, that, you know, the only way. This is the only. Only appropriate way for the great femme fatale to die is by the phallic snake. How do we know? I mean. Well, what the story is clear about is that it's the parade in the triumphal procession that she thinks of as the sticking point. And that certainly comes out in the Horace poem we quoted at the beginning of this episode. And we'll be coming back to it, the idea of the triumph as being something which is the most offensive to Cleopatra. And according to Livy, in a quote we have from the Roman historian Livy, what she cries out when she realizes what's going to happen is she repeatedly says, I will not be triumphed over. In Latin, non triumphabor. So the whole Roman story is about how that is what she's not going to do. And of course, when she does kill herself, what Octavian has to do, he can't any longer have her in the triumph. And so what he does is he makes a wax model of her. He makes a model, probably of wax.
- [21:01]
Charlotte Higgins
It's not the same, is it? I mean, I have to say, good old. I mean, in a way it is. There is something. I mean, it's a horrific story, but there is something. She does manage to steal that moment from Augustus. And there is something incredibly magnificent about that, in my view. I know that I'm romanticizing. I know that I'm treating it as if it's a literary story rather than a story of real people. I think it's really hard not to do that. But there is something amazing about having the strength of will to avoid that humiliation.
- [21:40]
Mary Beard
The loose end that we've still got loose, however, is Caesarion.
- [21:45]
Charlotte Higgins
Oh, yes.
- [21:45]
Mary Beard
The son of Julius Caesar's son.
- [21:48]
Charlotte Higgins
Yes. Potentially the heir to the whole of Rome. Now, why. Why are we not talking. Talking about Caesarion, the first emperor of Rome?
- [21:56]
Mary Beard
He's a teenager. He's 17 by this point, you know, what we have to say is whether or not he really was Caesar's son. He was certainly believed to be the son of Julius Caesar. And in that will, forgery or not, Anthony had recognized him as the son of Julius Caesar. So at this point, Octavian is sort of in charge. He has won. But he is only the adopted son and the great nephew of Julius Caesar. And so Caesarion is bound to be seen as a rival. Now, there are in ancient writing, various stories of what was planned for him in different ways. One story is that Cleopatra decided that she would try to send him to India to escape.
- [22:49]
Charlotte Higgins
Right, right.
- [22:50]
Mary Beard
You know, which is. Which is very interesting in terms of the idea of India being, although very, very remote and a safe place for Caesarion to go on. On the Roman horizon. The Greco Roman horizon.
- [23:03]
Charlotte Higgins
Yes. And it's the limits of where Alexander the Great, the. The ultimate sort of founder of Alexandria had got to. So there's a certain kind of poetic justice to being sent to the. This sort of point at the edge of the map, so to speak.
- [23:18]
Mary Beard
Oh, exactly. However, there's no prizes for guessing what actually happened. That kind of. In modern terms, he was eliminated. We don't know how, but I think force and violence were used. And it is said that Octavian had been given some wise advice by. By one of his advisors, which was to the effect of too many Caesars is not a good thing. So that is where Caesarion's story, I'm afraid, ends.
- [23:57]
Charlotte Higgins
We've already hinted that there are quite a few questions lurking in this extraordinary story. And I think after the break, I would. I'm really looking forward to discussing, just getting a little bit deeper into some of these cruxes. Speculations, Questions.
- [24:20]
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- [25:18]
Mary Beard
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.
- [25:35]
Charlotte Higgins
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.
- [25:55]
Mary Beard
All details are on our website, instantclassicspod.com
- [26:02]
Charlotte Higgins
so, Mel, it's no surprise, is it, that all of this has been intense, let's say intensely scrutinized. Is it really practicable to be killed by poisonous snake?
- [26:12]
Mary Beard
No, you, you were raising this before Charlotte that, you know, this all looks a bit literary. Is the suicide by the snake snake real? Now, we are not the first generation to have had some suspicions about this. In fact, ancient writers themselves, some did at least have their doubts about this story of the suicide or they had clever ideas about how on earth it could have been possible. Right.
- [26:42]
Charlotte Higgins
They get the snakes to bite exactly on cue.
- [26:45]
Mary Beard
That's right. Know, you know, Plutarch thinks that it was, that it was actually brought in, in a jug and that what Cleopatra did was get a golden spindle. It had to be golden, didn't it? Because it's Cleopatra, a golden spindle and kind of poked it to get it cross. Right. And then it bit. I mean, you know, I mean Plato's, you know, scraping the bottom of the barrel here, I'm afraid. And I think other. Other modern writers, not so much ancient, but they've actually, you know, looked rather carefully at the lethal power of an asp and suggested that you would not die by, you know, this was not a way of. Of dying. And so to some extent, I think possibly we do go back to, you know, your sort of version that you were hinting at that, you know, you've got this devastatingly temptress, like Egyptian queen, and you then invent a suicide narrative for her which exactly fits, you know, with the fleshy figs of the woman and the snake, you know.
- [27:56]
Charlotte Higgins
Yes. And I have to say, similarly, Mark Antony being at least attempting to be killed by Eros is a little bit too. It's a bit too heavy in its symbolism for me, you know, and Anthony
- [28:08]
Mary Beard
was killed by Eros is, you know, Anthony was killed by passion. And, you know, the idea that in the end Eros doesn't kill Anthony but kills himself is also another level of the symbolism of this story, which in many, many bits I suspect is not literally true. I mean, I think even all this absolute Roman focus on the triumph that what really Cleopatra could not stand was the idea of humiliation. Now, like you, I think there is something, you know, there's something very brave about this that, you know, there is some things that she will not go through and she will. She will take her own life rather than face what Octavian wants to do with her. Now, it's worth mentioning that it was a bit of a cliche that brave foreign monarchs killed themselves rather than go through with a triumph. A little bit earlier, King Mithridates from what is now Turkey, also killed himself rather than go through with a triumphal procession in Rome. Now, the fact that it's a cliche doesn't mean it's not true.
- [29:41]
Charlotte Higgins
No. Because it could be a kind of habit of. I mean, albeit a very sad and difficult habit of mind. It could be a habit of mind that. That is in fact what you do. And presumably, Mary, you do have to fit it into a sense into the Roman habit of mind that is that. That, you know, prominent politicians in Rome do take their own lives from time to time when they're. When they're on their uppers. That is, you know, it's certainly totally alien to the idea that any defeated. I mean, it's. It's so alien to our modern sensibilities. But it does happen in ancient Rome, doesn't it? It's a virtuous way out.
- [30:24]
Mary Beard
Yes. And so I mean, the jury has to be out about really what happened in Cleopatra's last hours. There are some radically different theories that modern writers have come up with. Not ancient. I mean, one is to say that the whole story of the suicide is a confection. And at the very least, Octavian engineered Cleopatra's death. It was, you know, was it more murder than suicide? Why would he want to do that? Because despite. The answer would be, despite all this kind of. This buildup of how he wanted her in his triumph, Cleopatra was very hot property. You know, she was too hot to handle. There's, you know, she's the mother of Julius Caesar's only biological child. In. Even in a triumph, you might think that she was better there as a model, not in real life.
- [31:30]
Charlotte Higgins
Yeah, yeah, you can totally see that. Because there are also stories of prisoners of war, prominent prisoners of war being paraded through triumphs and then having kind of rhetorical moments where they. Where they turn out to be rather magnificent. I mean, this is going a bit later in history, a few generations on, but there's the British captive King Caratarchus, who's paraded through Rome, and then Tacitus writes about the incredibly eloquent speech he made. And maybe you don't want. You don't want the living Cleopatra kind of being magnificent and beautiful and making. And being clever and making.
- [32:04]
Mary Beard
No, that's right. I mean, and, you know, even going back into the earlier period, there are occasions, even if they don't make big speeches, where the victims in the triumph often glamorously clad, but awfully piteous and crying, they steal the show, Right. It's not. And I suppose, look in kind of terms of real politique, if I'd been advising Octavian, I'd say, don't have her in the triumph. Make a nice model. So she killed herself, but eliminate. Her caesarion has been eliminated. Eliminate. Now, sorry, I'm sounding terrible.
- [32:44]
Charlotte Higgins
Interesting, Interesting insight into your, you know, your. Your own sort of inner thoughts here, Mary. Yeah, I mean, had you been Augustus, you would have. You would have seen her off, I'm
- [32:57]
Mary Beard
afraid, you know, putting myself in the museum, this is not, you know, I, of course, would have, you know, tended her carefully and looked after her and given her a pension. But, but putting yourself in the mind of the Roman advisor of Octavian, Octavian's own mindset, you know, you could say, look, you'd say, look, you know, she's going to be. She's going to be a bundle of trouble, right? She's going to steal the show, she's going to be a bundle of trouble, you know, get rid of her, I'm afraid, horrible as it sounds. And no, I am not advocating the elimination of one's enemies. Absolutely not. Though we're seeing an awful lot of it now. I think we can never get to the bottom of this. You can tell the story speculatively in, you know, any number of different ways. Any number of different ways.
- [34:03]
Charlotte Higgins
I mean, the crucial thing, in a way, Mary, isn't it, is that Cleopatra then becomes absolutely instrumentalised in the Augustan propaganda machine because this battle of Actium that we've described, which may have been a bit of a skirmish and not very impressive, becomes this sort of extraordinary pivot point where, from which the great era of peace, prosperity and civil, you know, the end of civil war dates from this moment. Everything that Augustus is about dates from this moment of defeat of these people. And Cleopatra, Cleopatra just. She becomes a kind of cog in that propaganda machine. And it's very hard to, Again, sort of super hard to sort of tease her out and see her for herself.
- [34:56]
Mary Beard
No. And, you know, one thing's for certain is that our picture of Cleopatra, whatever the literal truth is, but the picture of Cleopatra that we have inherited is a product of the new regime of Octavian. He becomes Augustus, the new regime's propaganda machine. And it is one of the absolute extreme version of histories written by the winners syndrome, that you've got a story of Cleopatra and a narrative that is constructed to be of service to the victorious figures, Augustus and his whole new deal, that in kind of launching his new regime, he and his advisors are actually launching it on the back of the defeat of Cleopatra. And that is really where the whole modern story of Cleopatra gets absolutely embedded, right? And we've already seen little bits of that and people have probably noticed that, that the conflict between Mark Antony with Cleopatra and Octavian is repeatedly and consistently presented as a conflict between proper Roman traditions and Oriental excess, right?
- [36:36]
Charlotte Higgins
And like Cleopatra is, Cleopatra is infecting, almost like a virus, these virtuous, upstanding Romans, politicians with her excess, her Oriental kind of luxury. There's this consistent thing about overindulgence, physical overindulgence, drinking too much wine, all the stuff about the acid milk and the. All of that. And this is the sort of malign influence that has turned their innocent little heads.
- [37:10]
Mary Beard
What we mustn't forget is that there were people in Rome at the beginning of Octavian Augustus's regime, you know, who were supporters of Antony, right? It wasn't that everybody was On Octavian side, Octavian needs a story and his story is that I represent proper Roman traditions against that orientalizing version of what Anthony was trying to do to Rome. I mean, hence all this stress on declaring war in the old fashioned way, the stress on the terms of the will, et cetera, et cetera. It's also very cleverly sufficiently letting Anthony off the hook because he is in the end the dupe of Cleopatra. You know, he might have had all kinds of ways of, you know, dangerously excessive ways, but it's when Cleopatra gets her hands on him that he becomes non Roman. Yes.
- [38:24]
Charlotte Higgins
And everything that then Augustus subsequently does in terms of his self presentation when he's trying to do two things at once, which is to become the sole ruler of Rome but also not associate himself with the fateful kings of Rome who were kicked out. So he has this very peculiar, sort of almost impossible thing to fulfil in terms of the way he gets people to think about him. But so cleverly he looks to Roman tradition and revives all these old fashioned Roman traditions. But I suppose when you put Cleopatra in the picture it's not just that they're old fashioned, which I often think of them as being, it's about tradition, it's about reviving these very arcane ritualistic things and making it seem very traditional. But it's also about being super, super, super Roman and eradicating every trace of this foreign influence. So she's, and poor old Cleopatra, you know, so she's everything all at once. She's a woman, which is terrible. She's, she's foreign, which is terrible. She is Eastern, which is terrible. With all this kind of ghastly excess and luxury. So all the things that Augustus then creates himself as are framed as repudiations of everything that Cleopatra is.
- [39:51]
Mary Beard
That's exactly right. And you've got this in the end tragic story in a sense of the decent Roman man Anthony undermined and influenced by a dangerous Eastern woman and queen. And that's really what Plutarch's narrative is telling us. And to some extent, I mean we started off with the poem of Horace celebrating Cleopatra's end and the victory of Octavian, written quite shortly after the battle of Actium. We don't know exactly when and to some extent you know, Horace is reflecting that, you know, when he talks about the maddened queen and he's really lurid actually in the original Latin about the kind of perverts in her train. So you can see and Horace's poem has often been read, you know, pretty simply as a jingoistic celebration, although in rather kind of more elegant verse than you might imagine, along the same lines as what Plutarch and all the others are talking about.
- [41:10]
Charlotte Higgins
But it is more complicated. I think the. I mean this is a great poem and I think it's not purely propaganda because if it was purely propaganda it would not. It would by definition not be a great poem. So it starts off like that, Mary, doesn't it, with this kind of great statement of triumph and celebration and sort of, as you say, sort of summoning up Cleopatra and her train as these sort of perverted, drunken, awful despots. But then the poem kind of goes for quite a long walk and the tone of it subtly changes as the poem goes on. And I think this is such a sort of. It's such a kind of interesting window on certain kinds of Roman thought that actually by the end of the poem, our sympathies, I think at least this reader myself, the sympathies have been encouraged to turn towards Cleopatra. She is described as like after this sort of exotic summing up of her as despotic and awful and also fleeing. But then it says that she's fleeing away from Italy as she's like a dove being pursued by a hawk or a hare being pursued by a hunter. We're already feeling a bit sorry for the hare, I think. And then it describes her taking her life. But increasingly as it does so, we get this sense that what she's doing is trying to die nobly and she's not dying like a coward. She doesn't show womanish fear. Now that's a sort of double thing. Maybe women should show womenly fear but actually there is something noble about not showing womanly fear. And you know, she is not. It ends the poem says non hummelis mulier. She is not a humble woman. Again, that's very double. You know, there's something noble and grand about Cleopatra in Horace's poem. It's possible to read it both ways.
- [43:23]
Mary Beard
Oh, I think that's right. And I think that as quite often with his real top rank poems, that Augustus is bankrolling himself. I think that they are wonderfully ambivalent. I mean, you could say the same for Virgil's Aeneid. They tell you that they give you the party line, she was a monstrous Egyptian queen, but they don't let you end there. They always are saying, putting a question mark over that, trying to see it the other way. And I think one of the things that is, is really useful when you're trying to think about the, you know, the paradoxical ambivalences that really underlie Cleopatra through getting to see through some of that kind of jingoistic stuff that you find in Plutarch or whatever. You know, always going to someone like Horace is a good way of opening up just a little bit of the, you know, you get the feeling that there have always been people. Although it doesn't much come into the mainstream literary tradition in the ancient world, it does very much in the modern world. There have always been people saying, oh, there is something admirable about Cleopatra, something admirable to kind of bring her to an end. I slightly jokingly mentioned last time that Julius Caesar's biggest achievement was reforming the Roman calendar. I think here it's worth remembering, and I just mentioned Virgil. I think it's worth remembering perhaps that Cleopatra's most lasting legacy is not quite necessarily what we suspect. But there's a case for saying that Cleopatra was immortalized actually as the Carthaginian queen Dido in Virgil's Aeneid, where you find very, very similar ambivalences. The story is very different. You know, Dido, the Queen of Carthage, has had an affair with Aeneas on his way back from Troy. Well, on his flight from Troy to found a new Rome in Italy, Dido, as it were in the Roman imagination, detains Aeneas. They've got a passionate affair. But in the end, Aeneas says duty is everything. Abandons Dido. And Dido takes her own life on
- [46:24]
Charlotte Higgins
the funeral, more practically with a sword.
- [46:26]
Mary Beard
Well, practically with a sword close to a funeral pyre. And you suddenly see that there are Cleopatra's somehow embedded in that. You know, she is a North African queen.
- [46:41]
Charlotte Higgins
Queen.
- [46:41]
Mary Beard
Yeah, she's a North African queen and she's, she is, she also takes her own life. Who is abandoning who. Passion and Eros is absolutely embedded. Now Virgil is not, you know, is not as kind of simple minded as just to make her a kind of a rewrite of Cleopatra. But you imagine Roman readers or Roman listeners hearing the story of Dido and Virgil's Aeneid when it was, you know, first performed or unwritten. It seems to me almost certain that one of the resonances that would be struck would be, you know, Dido and Cleopatra. And so, you know, the idea that somehow Cleopatra is bequeathed to us, not entirely through all the things we've been talking about, that's very important, but through another of the most famous queens in world history.
- [47:51]
Charlotte Higgins
Tragic Dido, she is an absolute scene stealer. There's no doubt about it. I mean, who do we love in that poem? Dido so in a sense she gets the last word for but it's such an interesting reading of the nid Mary I like it very much and I think, you know, next time we are going to look at more and more literary Cleopatras because Virgil and Horace are standing just at the very beginning of an absolutely vast tradition of literary clothes. Cleopatra's and next time the author Lucy Hughes Hallett is going to help us sift through a few of the most interesting ones.
- [48:38]
Mary Beard
But remember, it all started in Rome.
- [48:43]
Charlotte Higgins
As ever, we want to know your thoughts and comments, ideas, questions, and so if you have them, please do send them to us@instantclassicspodmail.com or on our social media nstantclassicspod. Bye.
- [49:07]
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