Cleopatra 1: Last Egyptian Pharaoh

Summary

Instant Classics: Cleopatra—Last Egyptian Pharaoh
Host: Vespucci | Guests: Mary Beard & Charlotte Higgins
Date: April 30, 2026

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Episode Overview

This inaugural episode of a five-part series focuses on Cleopatra VII—the enigmatic queen whose life has inspired myth, legend, scholarship, and fierce modern debate. Mary Beard, world-renowned classicist, and Guardian chief culture writer Charlotte Higgins, unravel the history and the myth, exploring Cleopatra’s role as last Pharaoh of independent Egypt, her legendary persona, her Macedonian-Greek roots, and the controversies surrounding her ethnicity and legacy.

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Key Themes & Discussion Points

1. The Myth and Extravagance of Cleopatra

• Introduction with the Pearl Dissolving Anecdote

  • Charlotte shares the vivid story recorded by Pliny the Elder, where Cleopatra dissolves a pearl in vinegar and drinks it before Mark Antony as proof of her immense wealth and extravagance.
    • “She drank it.” — Charlotte Higgins [00:21]

• Fact vs. Fiction

  • Mary and Charlotte set the tone: Cleopatra’s history is a blend of fact and myth, constructed by centuries of storytelling and reinforced by art, literature, and film.
    • “Her myth in some ways is her history. You know, she's inseparable.” — Mary Beard [05:38]

• Cultural Representations

  • Cleopatra as seductress, tragic heroine, freedom fighter, and even the butt of jokes in modern comedy (e.g., “Carry On Cleo”).
  • She is memorialized not just by historians but by Shakespeare, painters, and Hollywood.

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2. Cleopatra’s Lineage and the Ptolemaic Dynasty

• Cleopatra’s Background and Succession

  • Born circa 69 BCE to the Macedonian Greek Ptolemaic dynasty, which supplanted the traditional Egyptian pharaohs after Alexander the Great’s conquest.
    • “She comes to the throne in 51 BCE when her dad dies, a guy called Ptolemy the flute player... her little brother... is also her husband.” — Mary Beard [07:20]

• Dynastic Marriages & Family Intrigue

  • The Ptolemies’ notorious practice of brother-sister marriages was both a dynastic strategy and a source of modern fascination and discomfort.
  • Succession was often violent; few siblings died of natural causes.

• Violent and Declining Dynasty

  • By Cleopatra’s time, the dynasty was rife with conflict and intrigue, intertwined with broader Mediterranean politics.

• Greek-Egyptian Hybridity

  • Rulers were culturally Greek but draped themselves in Egyptian royal tradition and imagery to legitimize their power.
    • “They’re both Greeks and Egyptian pharaohs, at least symbolically, in this sort of intriguing way.” — Charlotte Higgins [15:04]

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3. Alexandria: Cultural Capital and Cleopatra’s World

• The Prestige of Alexandria

  • Alexandria, founded by Alexander the Great, was a cosmopolitan hub—home to the legendary Library and great poets like Callimachus and Apollonius of Rhodes.
  • In contrast to Rome’s modest cityscape, Alexandria was rich, glamorous, and culturally vital.
    • “...if you were to go from Rome to Alexandria in the age of Cleopatra, it would have been like... going from Philadelphia to Versailles.” — paraphrased from Stacy Schiff via Mary Beard [31:15]

• Cleopatra as Administrator, Not Just Icon

  • Though surrounded by myths of luxury, Cleopatra likely dedicated much of her reign to governance and administration (evidenced by a surviving document in her possible handwriting on tax concessions).
    • “Cleopatra is probably spending most or a lot of her time, more of her time, on doing the admin of this vast country rather than on dissolving pearls.” — Mary Beard [34:24]

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4. Power, Empire, and Rome’s Shadow

• Rome as Overlord

  • By Cleopatra’s rule, Rome was the superpower shaping Egypt’s fate, often determining succession.
    • “Effectively, Egypt is in Rome’s control.” — Mary Beard [23:30]

• Humiliation and Power Plays

  • Mary recounts Ptolemy “the flute player’s” humiliating reception by the Roman official Cato, symbolizing Egypt’s dependent status.
    • “He remains seated on what must have been a lavatory... a sort of message of humiliation.” — Mary Beard [26:00]

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5. The Question of Cleopatra’s Ethnicity

• Origins of the Modern Controversy

  • The question “Was Cleopatra Black?” is largely a modern preoccupation; ancient sources do not describe people in terms of skin color, and these categories held little meaning in the ancient Mediterranean.
    • “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…” — Charlotte Higgins [39:12]

• Evidence and Uncertainties

  • Classicists believe Cleopatra’s ancestry was overwhelmingly Macedonian Greek, but questions remain about her mother—possibly Egyptian, possibly not.
    • “If you were to push me to say, okay, so what is Cleopatra's ethnicity? I think I'd cross my fingers and come down on the side of she's half Macedonian and half Egyptian. Personally, I think there isn't any realistic chance that she is, in our terms, black, but you could not rule that out.” — Mary Beard [51:44]

• Visual Evidence and Its Limits

  • Surviving images (coins, reliefs) are highly stylized or coded for political purposes rather than accuracy.
    • “There’s always a gap between the official image that you’ve got of Cleopatra and her real appearance. And of course, if you’re wanting to think about skin color, well, I’m afraid a silver coin doesn’t reveal the colour of skin.” — Mary Beard [49:25]

• Contemporary Relevance

  • Modern debates over Cleopatra’s portrayals reflect current racial politics and a desire to recognize the diversity of the ancient world.
    • “As soon as you start representing Cleopatra on the stage or in art or on the screen, then you have to pick. And the fact that she's been represented in the modern world so often as effectively European does tell you about the prejudices and racism of the contemporary world.” — Charlotte Higgins [44:26]

• Africa in the Ancient Imagination

  • Discussion expands to what it meant to be “African” in the Roman Empire—moving beyond skin color toward cultural difference and diversity.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• “Who’s sleeping with who in the ancient world is, you know, even more difficult to discover than in the modern world...” — Mary Beard [17:49]
• “It’s dangerous to be born into the Ptolemaic dynasty.” — Mary Beard [21:53]
• “Don’t put on your golden armor… if you’re being chased by Julius Caesar in a boat.” — Mary Beard & Charlotte Higgins [22:44]
• “If you were to go from Rome to Alexandria in the age of Cleopatra, it would have been like… going from Philadelphia to Versailles.” — paraphrased, Mary Beard [31:15]
• “The history of Greece and Rome is not a purely European history.” — Charlotte Higgins [57:30]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:00–02:12 — Introduction, myths, and media around Cleopatra
• 04:58–07:16 — The futility of separating myth from reality & setting Cleopatra's Egyptian context
• 09:02–11:18 — Cleopatra’s lineage, sibling marriages, dynastic intrigue
• 11:54–16:03 — The Ptolemies’ Macedonian roots and Egyptian tradition
• 21:53–23:38 — Dangers, violence, and dynastic decline
• 23:38–29:10 — Rome’s involvement and Alexandria’s cosmopolitan prestige
• 34:24–36:28 — Cleopatra as a hands-on ruler, not just a symbol of excess
• 38:28–41:00 — Cleopatra’s ethnicity: Ancient ambivalence, modern obsession
• 46:29–49:44 — The unreliable evidence of visual representations
• 50:00–53:07 — Clues about Cleopatra’s background and the academic ‘gloves off’ debate
• 53:09–57:32 — Rethinking ‘African’ identity in antiquity and the legacy of classical study

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Concluding Thoughts

Charlotte and Mary underline that while the mythic Cleopatra is inseparable from the historical queen, much about her remains fundamentally unknowable, especially her ethnicity and personal identity. The modern desire to claim or represent Cleopatra according to contemporary categories says more about us than about her. The hosts emphasize the rich multicultural tapestry of the ancient Mediterranean and look forward to exploring the queen’s relationships with Caesar and Antony in future episodes.

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Transcript

[Charlotte Higgins]

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.

[Mary Beard]

That is how one ancient writer, Pliny the Elder, who, 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 Anthony.

[Charlotte Higgins]

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 first century BCE.

[Mary Beard]

The seductive lover of Julius Caesar, it was said, as well as of Mark Anthony, 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.

[Charlotte Higgins]

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 cliches like bathing in asses milk, which is so wonderful for the skin and

[Mary Beard]

she's never been forgotten. William Shakespeare wonderfully recreated her as a tragic van fatal. 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 love depicting that pearl trick and she's occasionally been elevated as an anti colonial freedom fighter or Egyptian nationalist.

[Charlotte Higgins]

In our first five part series, and surely Cleopatra deserves five parts. We're looking at her history and her myth from the first 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?

[Mary Beard]

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.

[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 week, Cleopatra, the last Egyptian pharaoh.

[Mary Beard]

To some, he is the revolutionary hero who restored China to its rightful place on the global stage.

[Charlotte Higgins]

To others, he's a brutal despot accused

[Mary Beard]

of presiding over more civilian deaths than either Stalin or Hitler. Mao Zedong has one of the most recognizable faces in the world. Yet he started life in a muddy provincial village. A rebel son who hated his father

[Charlotte Higgins]

survived a 6,000 mile walk across China and rose to become a figure of titanic proportions.

[Mary Beard]

From Empire, the Goal Hanger World History Show. I'm Anita Anand. And I'm William DuranPaul. In this six part series, we're joined by world renowned expert Rana Mitta, joining to explore the life of the father of communist China, Mao Zedong. 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

[Charlotte Higgins]

of the Cultural Revolution, a time when

[Mary Beard]

ancient temples were burnt, children denounced their

[Charlotte Higgins]

parents, and a nation worshipped a mango

[Mary Beard]

as a sacred relic. Subscribe to Empire wherever you get your podcasts to listen. 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 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 a bit more complicated than that.

[Charlotte Higgins]

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 queen who fell in love with several important Roman aristocrats. And in a way, you know, why would, why would we want to.

[Mary Beard]

Yeah, I mean, I think for me that her myth in some ways is her history. You know, she's inseparable. But, but I think we can, we can go further all the same without, without 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 in the traditional accounts, traditional popular accounts. And, and we can think about what, we can put her back into her context. I think that's what's really important. And if you put her back into her context, that you make a kind of different sense of what her life is all about. And that's why we're actually Starting our five parter with thinking about her in the Egyptian context, where to some extent she belongs. She's Queen of Egypt, right. And we need to ask a bit about what it meant to be queen of Egypt in the first century bce. You know, what kind of job was it? Where did she come from? I mean, how did she, how did she end up in that position? I mean, I suppose what we need to do is we need to start with the bare bones of her career. I mean her cv, it might look a bit dry, but I think we need to sort of get the starting point and the end point sort of laid out before we, before we dig a bit deeper.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Right, let's get rid of the asses milk and the poisonous snakes.

[Mary Beard]

Well, we'll be coming back to the poisonous snakes and the sex and the asses milk. But okay, so she's probably born and I'm going to have to warn everybody. There's an awful lot that should have a probably in front of this. We don't have know a biography, an ancient biography of Cleopatra. We're putting all this together 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. And we'll come back to them. And they had taken the place of the traditional Egyptian pharaohs. So 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 when her dad dies, a guy called Ptolemy the flute player. And she. That was not a compliment, you know, it was meant to suggest that, you know, his mind perhaps wasn't always on the job. Dad died and in 51 she comes to the throne, ruling jointly with her little brother, who is Ptolemy xiii. He's known. And that little brother is also her husband.

[Charlotte Higgins]

That doesn't go especially well, does it, Mary?

[Mary Beard]

The marriage isn't a huge success. The joint rule isn't a huge success. Pretty soon they're fighting each other and into that fight comes Julius Caesar. And we'll come back to what he's doing in Egypt in a later episode. 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 xiv, to whom she's also married until his death, suspiciously in 44 BC. And then she rules jointly with her son, her young son by Julius Caesar. It said to whom she's not married, let's be clear, in a new royal partnership, we've nearly got her to the end because in the aftermath of caesar's assassination in 44 BC, Cleopatra from Egypt backs the supporters of Caesar, not the people who'd 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 Anthony and Cleopatra are, are defeated in a naval battle in 31 BCE. Octavian is victorious and Mark Antony and Cleopatra both take their own lives.

[Charlotte Higgins]

But she got a lot, she managed to get a lot in to quite a short life frankly, didn't she? I mean it was eventful.

[Mary Beard]

The problem of telling it is just as, you know, it's just, you know, too much is happening in Cleopatra's cv, even though there's huge gaps that even 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.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Yeah, Mary, it's easy to see that there are a ton of questions suggested by that very kind of bare bones outline. And I guess the first question would be, you know, who is this family, this dynasty of the Ptolemies who are ruling Egypt at the time? This is the family of which Cleopatra is the heir. Who are they? Where do they come from? Because this all goes back to in fact Alexander the Great, right, who died in 323bce. So this is going back several hundred years.

[Mary Beard]

That's right, 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 had already been sidelined. He's conquered swathes 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 parsley out to what would become different dynasties. And Ptolemy comes from Macedonia, northern Greece, he's right hand man of Alexander and he gets the Egypt bit of Alexander's conquests. And what Alexander had done is, I mean, not only as it were, thrown out the Persians, but he'd also started to build a new capital of Egypt in the city of Alexandria, where Alexandria is now. And Ptolemy is going to make that his capital. So there's a kind of a total 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 and to take it back to Alexandria, the city that Alexander had started to found, and to bury it there. So, you know, his. 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 there's always going to be a tension here. The pharaohs have sort of gone, but there is still a huge amount of power and symbolism and architecture, et cetera, resting on old pharaonic Egypt. And there is a tension between that and the new Greek, Macedonian, Greek dynasty that the Ptolemies are. So it's a diverse country and it's got fissures between the different strands.

[Charlotte Higgins]

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 pharaohs. So they're both Greeks and Egyptian pharaohs, at least symbolically, in this sort of intriguing way. And they also behave a bit like pharaohs in the sense that there is this tradition of brothers and sisters marrying each other, which is a confusing and strange habit. And they. They are also confusing, Mary, because they're all called the same names, right? They're all called Ptolemy, Cleopatra, Berenice. Berenice, if you want to pronounce it in a Greek way, and Arsinoe, sort

[Mary Beard]

of bewildering a family. You know, 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 VI or Cleopatra vii, because technically, oh, Cleopatra, Cleopatra is Cleopatra vii. But I think it's not the best place to start. There are things that strike us as very odd, and I think that we've already seen with Cleopatra the idea of when she has a joint ruler as part of this dynastic succession. In two cases, they're her younger brother and she marries them or she is married off to them, you know, not even in their teens, probably. It's always been a puzzle quite how to understand that.

[Charlotte Higgins]

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, 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 the downs and hoarding all the power into the dynasty. The downside, Mary, is very obviously genetic, because 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 close family marriages. So my question that I want to ask you, and 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. What's your take?

[Mary Beard]

If you're asking me did Cleopatra really sleep with Ptolemy xiii, her brother, I have to say I haven't the foggiest clue. We actually have no idea. Some of the children of the dynasty are reputed to be the children of 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's always 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 my take on it, my first take on it is we can have, 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, it 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 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? For me, it's just slightly complicated or quite a lot complicated. The old view that, oh, look, this is dynastic politics. It happens only at the very top of Ptolemaic society. And it's done for absolutely political reasons. 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.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Well, 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 other times.

[Mary Beard]

Okay.

[Charlotte Higgins]

So it's totally taboo for us. Obviously less taboo for them.

[Mary Beard]

Yeah. If, if we park incest for a minute, we'll come back to it. I think what is clear is that this dynasty, the Ptolemy, has a really grand start. You know, Ptolemy the first, you know, the. The right hand man of Alexander. He'd got lots of cash from Alexander's conquests. 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 on the down. It's not going up. And it's always. And this is part of the, you know, part of what we're talking about in brother and sister marriage. The dynasty has always had its internecine violent streaks.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Right.

[Mary Beard]

And rivalries within it. By the time you get to Cleopatra's day in the first century bce, it's even more violent and conflicted than it was before. I mean, I think that one side of that is that Cleopatra's got four brothers and sisters. None of them, none of them die a natural death. This is, you know, it's very. It's dangerous to be born into the Ptolemaic dynasty. The brother, the brother to whom she's first married interestingly, died while he was being pursued in a boat by Julius Caesar. And he falls overboard, but he's wearing golden armor and he can't swim. Right. So, you know, that's.

[Charlotte Higgins]

So he sinks. Don't try this at home, kids. It's really dangerous. Don't put on your golden armor.

[Mary Beard]

Golden armor. Not if you're being chased by Julius Caesar.

[Charlotte Higgins]

In a boat.

[Mary Beard]

In a boat. And so there's 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, 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 first century, a bit before, effectively, Egypt is in Rome's control. You know, it is.

[Charlotte Higgins]

So Rome is this sort of superpower by this point, essentially controlling. Controlling the Mediterranean, essentially. And so 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.

[Mary Beard]

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 that actually means is that although it might be independent nominally, 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 and how. And when we find Cleopatra in dealing with Rome and dealing with the power of Rome, and we wonder what, you know, what the ground rules for that are. Well, in part, we're in a dynasty who already is a bit of a puppet of Rome, and we know about modern world superpowers and they say who they want to be ruling particular country.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Yeah, I've heard of this. I think I've vaguely heard of people wanting to do a bit of regime change.

[Mary Beard]

Yes, you have, and that is what, you know, going on. And. And so there's clearly this sense that, you know, the Ptolemaic dynasty is still kind of parading itself as. As the. As an independent dynasty, but they're not really. And there are. There are wonderful stories actually, through. Through. Throughout this period of the odd ways in which the. The Ptolemies interact with Rome and the humiliation to which they are put. And this, my favorite one, I think, is. Is about Cleopatra's dad, Ptolemy, the flute player. And he'd been, again, in one of these bits of basically civil war in Egypt. He'd been temporarily thrown out of the country, and he decides he's going to go to Rome to 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 puzzled when he's taken in to see Cato because Cato doesn't get up as you normally would expect him to do, to read the sort of temporally removed king of Egypt, but he remains. Cato remains seated on what must have been a lavatory because the biographer Plutarch telling the biography of Cato tells us is that he had been taking what must have been a course of laxatives. Cato had been taking laxatives. Plato only says medicine but is clearly laxatives. And presumably he had therefore deeply unpredictable diarrhea. So he's sitting on the laugh when Ptolemy is brought in and 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 all be fine. Now you can't help but think that there's 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.

[Charlotte Higgins]

It's next level from giving someone a dressing down in the Oval Office, isn't it?

[Mary Beard]

I mean it's like saying the President will see you now. Oh, by the way, he's on his golden laugh, right? And you know, and you know that one way of reading that incident, and it's only one, you can say it's a bit of a joke on Cato, but one way of reading the incident is to say, look, this is, yeah, showing this is a demonstration to Ptolemy of how unimportant he is.

[Charlotte Higgins]

But can we turn it around the other way? Because Alexandria was also super important in its way, wasn't it? I mean it was an incredible centuries old city that was cosmopolitan, 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, things like the Library of Alexandria, huge centre of learning, they've got copies of all the most significant Greek literature that they can get their hands on. There are extraordinary poets who were associated with incredibly influential poets like Callimachus and Apollonius of Rhodes, he 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, it was, it wasn't powerful politically in the, in the sense that Rome was, but it had this allure, right?

[Mary Beard]

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, 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, money being lent both ways between Rome and Egypt. You know, this is not a. A rogue state which is, you know, simply kind of doing the modern equivalent of shooting each other and being a nuisance. There's a huge background to its. 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 military power at this point, far more than Egypt. But if you were to go to Rome, you know, 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 ploughing money into building itself to power. And there's a biography of Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff. And she has, 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? It's big news. And so whatever 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 it's got the prestige of having been founded by Alexander the Great. So it's got a lot going for it. And there are wonderful stories about, you know, 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, and they sort of do pilgrimages to see that body, which Ptolemy, I had rather cleverly snitched to be the kind of the logo of his new capital. And when a little bit later, 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 that he knocks Alexander's nose off because he's touching the very body of Alexander.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Amazing, if true. Sounds like one of Those slightly apocryphal stories.

[Mary Beard]

Yes, I really want it to be true.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Yeah, it's a good story.

[Mary Beard]

So this city is pulling in all sorts of different ways and it's not, you know, it's not just 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 into that context, when 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. There's periods of her life throughout her childhood, for example, but even several years later, you know, stretches a 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 books on cosmetics and apparently on dandruff. Right. So there's a books on dandruff by. By Cleopatra. Now, if it is the same Cleopatra. And that of course, is always difficult, you know, that's pushed people to say, oh, she's quite a litterateur, really. You know, she's beauty experts. 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 rather than on dissolving pearls. Right. You know, dissolving pearls is very much a sideline and she's probably got a huge set of helpers to do this, but she's an administrator as well as a decadent queen. And 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 long document 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.

[Charlotte Higgins]

So possibly she was spending more time on doing really important administration of really dull stuff like tax than either bathing in Nasser's milk or writing books about makeup. I mean, it would be sort of amazing and wonderful if the rumours about her or 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?

[Mary Beard]

Well, I think so.

[Charlotte Higgins]

The boring important admin stuff which you know, you've got to do if you're ruler of a major country in the Mediterranean base.

[Mary Beard]

What we'll be able to do when we get a bit further into her story, we'll, we'll be able to think about maybe some of these stories of luxury being driven by something, you know, 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 by 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 when you're telling the stories of royalty, then or now, it's you, you tend to get drawn to ew wild imaginings, not to documents about corn supply and tax concessions. But we will be coming back to this 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.

[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.

[Mary Beard]

All details are on our website, instantclassicspod.com

[Charlotte Higgins]

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, which says more perhaps a lot about our own moments that we're in now is what was Cleopatra's ethnicity like? What was her skin colour? Which I guess those are two different things. In short, a lot of people ask was Cleopatra black? How do we tackle 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 the Most ideal people to be discussing this question. But anyway, we've got to, I think, tackle it in a way. You know, what are we talking about here? I mean, I suppose the point that I would always want to make, Mary, as a prelude to even answering this question, is that if you read Greek and Roman literature of any kind, poetry, history, prosecution, 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 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, broadly speaking, it's a modern set of categories in which the Greeks and the Romans were not interested. And 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 going 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.

[Mary Beard]

By and large, you're right. You do get very occasional references to skin colors. An extraordinary episode in one of the Greek novels written in the Roman Empire, where a woman has a black child because at the moment of conception she was looking at a picture of a black person. But already, the sheer difference of that has already in a sense proved you right that these are not defining identity categories. And so we're looking for something, understandably, which the ancients aren't much bothered by, that goes across all these disputed cases. I mean, you know, Septimius Severus is a Roman emperor who comes from the coast of Africa, and people have debated his ethnicity. And the issue is, it's not. People don't. Ancients don't talk about it. That kind of therefore leaves modern scholars to both, you know, try to work it out, but also, of course, inevitably invest their own assumptions, their own prejudices in answering the question. And, you know, I think that tradition, the traditional answer amongst classicists, 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 African at all. That 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, but more or less she's 100% European. That might be true. 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, let's say, a concubine, it could mean. And it might well mean that her mother was Egyptian. Now, that doesn't necessarily. Doesn't very likely mean that her mother was black African, though that also was not impossible.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Right?

[Mary Beard]

So, you know, she is an absolute classic case of what you're talking about, that 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 Macedonian Greek and Egyptian, or even possibly black African. And it is actually in terms of any kind of certainty. It's very hard, though there are some hints. It's very hard to go further than that.

[Charlotte Higgins]

It's so interesting, isn't it? Because having said that, these categories don't matter in a sense, or they don't matter particularly to 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 suggesting, Mary, that we need to hold all these possibilities. Lightly. We need to hold these possibilities if we're interested in this question, we need to hold these possibilities and we're 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 you have to pick. And the fact that she's been represented in the modern world so often as effectively European does tell you about the prejudices and racism of the contemporary world. So it kind of. It's a very confusing picture because it both matters and it doesn't matter.

[Mary Beard]

No, exactly. And you know, you're looking out always. I mean, the ancient historian is constantly looking out for things that might give us a steer on this. Right. And the obvious thing to look at are the surviving images of Cleopatra, the surviving ancient images. Now these have got. These are really intriguing in all kinds of ways, but they don't much help with what she actually looked like. That's the problem. I mean, you can tell that from the very earliest dated Egyptian representation of her is in an inscribed plaque, a relief sculpture in which she. And the text written onto this sculpture makes it absolutely clear that 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. But it's.

[Charlotte Higgins]

And it's a kind of very stylized Egyptian looking profile. It's sort of a 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.

[Mary Beard]

Yes, it's non naturalistic and it's. But it's definitely a bloke. Right, Right.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Okay.

[Mary Beard]

That is coded male. Yeah, coded male would be a polite way of putting it. It's far from tria. You can make some guesses about why she's represented as a man. I mean, partly that coded male phrase is perhaps a giveaway that 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. Other people, I think I'd probably be more with this explanation in this case is that this is at the very beginning of her reign and they've been doing a picture, an inscribed relief picture of the ruling member of the dynasty, which was dad, you know, Ptolemy, the flute player. And they were doing him like a male pharaoh, like you kind of would. You're putting Macedonian power into a pharaonic guise. And they make him a bloke because he is a bloke at this moment. Just as they got it all finished pretty well, he goes and dies. And Cleopatra, 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 can't be bothered to do another one.

[Charlotte Higgins]

They haven't got the budget to change

[Mary Beard]

it or they haven't got the budget to change it or whatever. Right. But for me it's just a great. It's his little. A wonderful symbol of the difficulty 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 the same with coins where there are many heads of Cleopatra on coins and she's got a very pronounced hooked nose. And people, you know, people have often said, oh, do you think Cleopatra really looked like that? We simply do not know because there

[Charlotte Higgins]

may not have been true portraiture, as it were. On those, you know, it is, you

[Mary Beard]

know, very like Roman emperors, Right. You know, that you would be. It would be very dangerous to conclude that Roman emperors really looked like the portrait statues that were apparently of them.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Right.

[Mary Beard]

The same would go actually for portraits, coin portraits in the modern world, really. 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're wanting to think about skin color, well, I'm afraid a silver coin doesn't reveal the colour

[Charlotte Higgins]

of skin, so we're a bit stuck. But I just wonder if there are other things we can look at other than visual representation, representations that. About herself or about, you know, do we know whether she had an Egyptian mother? How far can we get with that?

[Mary Beard]

There's little hints. There are a few hints. I think the strongest hint that she wasn't 100% Macedonian Greek, right? Which she's certainly 50%, are the reports that she's the only Ptolemaic ruler who actually spoke Egyptian. Now, she's also supposed to be a very clever linguist, you know, Cause she's a clever girl, 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, than other Ptolemies had been. And it's, you know, we're clutching at straws here. But if you wanted to say it's not implausible that she had an Egyptian mother, you would point to the fact she speaks Egyptian and that she's clearly doing more of the traditional Egyptian stuff than all of the rest of the dynasty. You know, it's a fragile hint. And in the end, if you were to push me to say, okay, so what is Cleopatra's ethnicity? I think I'd cross my fingers and come down on the side of she's half Macedonian and half Egyptian. Personally, I think there isn't any realistic chance that she is, in our terms, black, but you could not rule that out. And, you know, for me, in some ways, I think the interesting thing is, you know, as you've started talking about this already, is why, when the answer to this question, everybody knows is uncertain, you know, if you sat people down and saying, 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 I think that, you know, listeners will be kind of a bit amazed to discover quite how vitriolic and edgy academic papers there have been, you know, trying to. Trying to argue the Case that Cleopatra was Egyptian, that she was. That she was solely Greek. I mean, it's really gloves off stuff.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Gosh, I didn't realize that. Well, that tells us much more about our own time than Cleopatra's, I suspect.

[Mary Beard]

I think so. And I think that it's. I mean, 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.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Yeah, definitely.

[Mary Beard]

And what is driving this argument is in a sense, people are trying to put their hands up, probably overstating the case to say stop. Let's just think a bit about what underlies our own Elizabeth Taylor like, image of Cleopatra. And I think that it's the determination over centuries, really, of scholars of the ancient world, the determination, not really to see the potential ethnic diversity that make people want to fight about this sort of stuff. And Africa is an extremely interesting place because Africa is a big continent. And when we talk about Cleopatra being black or any of these characters being black, we're kind of thinking that they've got an ancestry in sub Saharan Africa. And it's not impossible. But what we're overlooking, I think, is that it's the question of what Africa means within this world. And I think it's. You can't quite just lump together everything that happens on the African north coast and Mediterranean coast 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 as if what we're doing is trying to search out black Africans. But to say maybe that there are distinctive ways of this culture thinking about itself differently, even if that isn't to be seen in the color of their skins, which could be anything like modern Egyptians, white Greek, Berber or whatever. And there's been a recent book by Catherine conabeer about Augustine, St. Augustine, early Christian, really important figure in the Roman Empire, who comes from a town in the Mediterranean coast of Africa which is Hippo, and she calls it 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, you know, ancient writers coming from Africa. Apuleius, for example, he wrote the amazing novel the Golden Ass. We've never thought really hard enough about 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 the Mediterranean coast of Africa and the ancient world into Mediterranean culture 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? But it hasn't been particularly helpfully answered by the really sometimes vitriolic arguments that people have had about the skin color of Cleopatra and of others.

[Charlotte Higgins]

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 think one has to be really, well, 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 her contemporaries at all. 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.

[Mary Beard]

That's right. Yeah, that's right.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Look east and look south and you're going to find a much richer 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.

[Mary Beard]

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 significantly, which is a significantly different story.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Can't wait.

[Mary Beard]

See you then.

[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@instant classicspodmail gmail.com or on our social media at Instant Classics Pod. Bye.