Cleopatra's Legacy: Celebrity, Allure, Skin Color | Middle East And North Africa

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ALLURE AND MYSTERY OF CLEOPATRA

Cleopatra by
John William Waterhouse
Cleopatra (69-30 B.C.) is one of the most famous women of all a time. A Greek Queen of Egypt, she played a major role in the extension of the Roman Empire and was a lover of Julius Caesar, the wife of Marc Antony and a victim of Augustus Caesar, the creator of the Roman Empire. Coin portraits and a bust reportedly made in her lifetime show her with a prominent nose and a large forehead. There were reports she had rotten teeth. But despite these flaws she is one of the world’s most famous seductresses. [Source: Chip Brown, National Geographic, July 2011; Stacy Schiff, Smithsonian magazine, December 2010; Judith Thurman, The New Yorker, May 7, 2001 and November 15, 2010; Barbara Holland, Smithsonian, February 1997]

Cleopatra has been obscured in what biographer Michael Grant called the "fog of fiction and vituperation which has surrounded her personality from her own lifetime onwards." Chip Brown wrote in National Geographic, “Despite her reputed powers of seduction, there is no reliable depiction of her face. What images do exist are based on unflattering silhouettes on coins. There is an unrevealing 20-foot-tall relief on a temple at Dendera, and museums display a few marble busts, most of which may not even be of Cleopatra. [Source: Chip Brown, National Geographic, July 2011]

Ancient historians praised her allure, not her looks. Certainly she possessed the ability to roil passions in two powerful Roman men: Julius Caesar, with whom she had one son; and Mark Antony, who would be her lover for more than a decade and the father of three more children. But her beauty, said Greek historian Plutarch, was not "the sort that would astound those who saw her; interaction with her was captivating, and her appearance, along with her persuasiveness in discussion and her character that accompanied every interchange, was stimulating. Pleasure also came with the tone of her voice, and her tongue was like a many-stringed instrument."

Stacy Schiff wrote in her book Cleopatra: A Biography, “She nonetheless survives as a wanton temptress, not the first time a genuinely powerful woman has been transmuted into a shamelessly seductive one. She elicited scorn and envy in equal and equally distorting measure; her story is constructed as much of male fear as of fantasy. Her power was immediately misrepresented because — for one man's historical purposes — she needed to have reduced another to abject slavery. Ultimately everyone from Michelangelo to Brecht got a crack at her. The Renaissance was obsessed with her, the Romantics even more so. [Source: Stacy Schiff, Smithsonian magazine, December 2010, Adapted from Cleopatra: A Biography, by Stacy Schiff.]

Brown wrote: “The wealth of attention paid to Cleopatra by artists seems inversely proportional to the poverty of material generated about her by archaeologists. Alexandria and its environs attracted less attention than the more ancient sites along the Nile, such as the Pyramids at Giza or the monuments at Luxor. And no wonder: Earthquakes, tidal waves, rising seas, subsiding ground, civil conflicts, and the unsentimental recycling of building stones have destroyed the ancient quarter where for three centuries Cleopatra and her ancestors lived. Most of the glory that was ancient Alexandria now lies about 20 feet underwater...In the last hundred years about the only new addition to the archaeological record is what scholars believe is a fragment of Cleopatra's handwriting: a scrap of papyrus granting a tax exemption to a Roman citizen in Egypt in 33 B.C.

Cleopatra, the Shakespearian Celebrity

"Fierce, voluptuous, passionate, tender, wicked, terrible, and full of poisonous and rapturous enchantment" is what Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about Cleopatra in 1858. Shakespeare made her into a romantic heroine described her as a magnificent creature with a burning soul and deep love for Antony”...”Other women cloy / The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry / Where most she satisfies,” Shakespeare wrote....”George Bernard Shaw saw her as purring sex kitten. Closer to her own time, Propetius called her a "harlot queen of incest." Historians often mark her death as the end of both ancient Egypt and ancient Greece and the beginning of the Roman Empire.

Louisa Thomas wrote in Newsweek, “Cleopatra has always been a player in other people’s dramas if in different roles: she can be a coquette or a feminist, a martyr or a villain, a goddess or a fallen woman, even blonde or black. Horace called her the “fatale monstrum” — the fatal minster, Chaucer made her virtuous...In her own day, legions of Egyptians thought she was a reincarnation of the goddess Isis, while her nemesis, the Roman Octavian (Augustus), called her a whore. It is that description — Cleopatra as a vamp, a seductress whose machinations led to the downfall of Julius Caesar and Marc Antony — that dilates the countless depictions in art, literature, theater, film and not least, history books.”

The critic Harold Bloom called Cleopatra the “world’s first celebrity.” Based on the number of books written about her (329 in 1999 in the Library of Congress collection), Cleopatra is the world's seventh most famous woman. Cleopatra was immortalized in plays by George Bernard Shaw and Shakespeare and played by Vivien Leigh and Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood films.

Cleopatra, the Modern World, Pop Culture and Hollywood Films

Caesar and Cleopatra in a film
Chip Brown wrote in National Geographic, “Where, oh where is Cleopatra? She's everywhere, of course — her name immortalized by slot machines, board games, dry cleaners, exotic dancers, and even a Mediterranean pollution-monitoring project. She is orbiting the sun as the asteroid 216 Kleopatra. Her "bath rituals and decadent lifestyle" are credited with inspiring a perfume. Today the woman who ruled as the last pharaoh of Egypt and who is alleged to have tested toxic potions on prisoners is instead poisoning her subjects as the most popular brand of cigarettes in the Middle East....If history is a stage, no actress was ever so versatile: royal daughter, royal mother, royal sister from a family that makes the Sopranos look like the Waltons. When not serving as a Rorschach test of male fixations, Cleopatra is an inexhaustible muse. To a recent best-selling biography add — from 1540 to 1905 — five ballets, 45 operas, and 77 plays. She starred in at least seven films. [Source:Chip Brown, National Geographic, July 2011]

William Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw have written plays about Cleopatra. Famous artists painted her. On film, Cleopatra has been played by Theda Bara, Sarah Bernhardt, Claudette Colbert, Sophia Loren and Elizabeth Taylor. The 1963 film with Taylor and Richar Burton is sometimes regarded as the greatest bomb of all time. It cost $44 million. Taylor changed costume 65 times in Cleopatra. The costumes alone cost $135,000. Angelina Jolie is slated to play Cleopatra in a forthcoming 3-D bio-pic, possibly to be directed by James Cameron. Produced by Scott Rudin, the film is based on Stacy Schiff’s biography. A rock musical starring Catherine Zeta-Jones and directed by Steven Soderbergh is also in the works.

Cleopatra’s Legacy

Stacy Schiff wrote in her book Cleopatra: A Biography, “Inevitably affairs of state have fallen away, leaving us with affairs of the heart. We will remember that Cleopatra slept with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony long after we remember what she accomplished in doing so: that she sustained a vast, rich, densely populated empire in its troubled twilight. A commanding woman versed in politics, diplomacy and governance, fluent in nine languages, silver-tongued and charismatic, she has dissolved into a joint creation of the Roman propagandists and the Hollywood directors. She endures for having seduced two of the greatest men of her time, while her crime was in fact to have entered into the same partnerships that every man in power enjoyed. That she did so in reverse and in her own name made her deviant, socially disruptive, an unnatural woman. She is left to put a vintage label on something we have always known existed: potent female sexuality. [Source: Stacy Schiff, Smithsonian magazine, December 2010, Adapted from Cleopatra: A Biography, by Stacy Schiff.]

It has forever been preferable to attribute a woman's success to her beauty rather than to her brains, to reduce her to the sum of her sex life. Against a powerful enchantress there is no contest. Against a woman who ensnares a man in the coils of her serpentine intelligence — in her ropes of pearls — there should, at least, be some kind of antidote. Cleopatra would unsettle more as sage than as seductress; it is less threatening to believe her fatally attractive than fatally intelligent. As one of Caesar's murderers noted, "How much more attention people pay to their fears than to their memories!"

A center of intellectual jousting and philosophical marathons, Alexandria remained a vital center of the Mediterranean for a few centuries after Cleopatra's death. Then it began to dematerialize. With it went Egypt's unusual legal autonomy for women; the days of suing your father-in-law for the return of your dowry when your husband ran off with another woman were over. After a fifth-century A.D. earthquake, Cleopatra's palace slid into the Mediterranean. Alexandria's magnificent lighthouse, library and museum are all gone. The city has sunk some 20 feet. Ptolemaic culture evaporated as well; much of what Cleopatra knew would be neglected for 1,500 years. Even the Nile has changed course. A very different kind of woman, the Virgin Mary, would subsume Isis as entirely as Elizabeth Taylor has subsumed Cleopatra. Our fascination with the last queen of Egypt has only increased as a result; she is all the more mythic for her disappearance. The holes in the story keep us coming back for more.

Uproar Over Portrayal of Cleopatra as Black in a Netflix Miniseries

In 2023, critics and officials in Egypt reacted angrily to streaming platform Netflix's decision to cast half black British actress Adele James in the lead role of its production "Queen Cleopatra" — saying the ruler had lighter skin. "Was Cleopatra black? First of all, I have nothing against black people at all, but I am stating the facts — look at the Macedonian queens, none of them were black", said archaeologist Zahi Hawass, a former antiquities minister who released a documentary about Cleopatra around the same time as the miniseries. [Source: AFP, May 11, 2023]

AFP reported: In April 2023, Egypt's antiquities ministry weighed in on the debate, insisting the historical Cleopatra had "white skin and Hellenistic characteristics". Netflix promoted its documentary-drama "Queen Cleopatra", produced by Jada Pinkett Smith, as featuring "reenactments and expert interviews". Following the release of a trailer for the Netflix production, an online petition accusing the streaming service of rewriting history had garnered more than 40,000 signatures by late April.

In a country where some were already calling for Netflix to be banned for content deemed offensive to Egypt or "its family values", legislator Saboura al-Sayyed last month repeated her call for parliament to block the platform. Commentators in Egypt often decry campaigns among mostly African-American groups claiming the black origins of pharaonic civilization.In 2009, a BBC documentary claimed that Cleopatra had African blood, an assertion that passed without incident.

Dicey Claim That Cleopatra’s Sister Was Partly African

Owen Jarus wrote in Live Science: In 2009, the BBC aired a documentary called "Cleopatra: Portrait of a Killer" in which the documentary-makers talked to researchers examining skeletal remains found in 1926 in a tomb at Ephesus in modern-day Turkey. The researchers believed that the bones belong to Arsinoë IV, a sister of Cleopatra who was killed on the orders of Mark Antony in 41 B.C. Ancient records indicate that Cleopatra encouraged the killing, fearing that Arsinoë would try to take her throne. [Source:Owen Jarus, Live Science, August 9, 2023]

Though the skull was lost during World War Two, the team reconstructed and analyzed the skull using old photographs and drawings and claimed they identified cranial features that suggest Arsinoë IV's mother was of African descent. The distance from the forehead to the back of the skull is long in relation to the overall height of the cranium and that is something which you see quite frequently in certain populations, one of which is ancient Egyptians and another would be Black African groups," which could suggest that Arsinoë IV had mixed ancestry, Caroline Wilkinson, an anthropology professor at the University of Liverpool, said in the documentary.

If one assumes that Arsinoë IV was Cleopatra's full sister, this would suggest the queen may have been of partly African descent, the researchers noted. However, a literature search did not reveal any published research in a scientific journal detailing these reconstructions. The researchers who made the suggestions did not return requests for comment at time of publication. And a 2021 study in the Journal of Forensic Scientists found that when forensic anthropologists tried to estimate ancestry for 251 skulls from people in the U.S. of "mixed" ancestry, they were wrong 80 percent of the time.

The scholars that Live Science talked to were either unaware of the claims or cautious about these findings. Duane Roller, a professor emeritus of classics at Ohio State University, said that Cleopatra and Arsinoë may not have had the same mother. The ancient writer Strabo (63 B.C. to A.D. 24), who lived in Alexandria, wrote that Ptolemy XII, the father of Cleopatra, had children through multiple mothers. As such "we have no idea who the mother of Cleopatra and Arsinoë was, or even if they were the same person," Roller told Live Science.

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Greece sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Hellenistic World sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; BBC Ancient Greeks bbc.co.uk/history/ ; Canadian Museum of History historymuseum.ca ; Perseus Project - Tufts University; perseus.tufts.edu ; MIT, Online Library of Liberty, oll.libertyfund.org ; Gutenberg.org gutenberg.org Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Live Science, Discover magazine, Times of London, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, Encyclopædia Britannica, "The Discoverers" [∞] and "The Creators" [μ]" by Daniel Boorstin. "Greek and Roman Life" by Ian Jenkins from the British Museum.Time, Newsweek, Wikipedia, Reuters, Associated Press, The Guardian, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, “World Religions” edited by Geoffrey Parrinder (Facts on File Publications, New York); “History of Warfare” by John Keegan (Vintage Books); “History of Art” by H.W. Janson Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.), Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.

Last updated July 2024