Cleopatra

Queen of Egypt, lover of at least two Roman emperors and sworn enemy of a third, Cleopatra's reign was marked by intrigue, seduction, and civil wars.  Sophie covers it all and teases an unexpected contemporary leader who can't quite compete with Cleo (but who could?)

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2599997/episodes/18768959

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Cleopatra and the intelligence, they forgot to mention a podcast by Sophie Manners. Hello and welcome back. I'm Sophie Manners, Professor of European History at Queen's College, Cambridge, author of biographies of people who have been consistently misrepresented by subsequent centuries, and who would, I suspect, find the misrepresentation both predictable and infuriating, wearer of a scarf that a visiting American academic described this morning as very Elizabeth Taylor, to which I responded, thank you, and then spent the walk back to my office working out exactly how to explain in a podcast why that particular compliment is the precise problem we are here to address. We need to talk about Cleopatra and I mean that with the specific emphasis on the word talk, because what has mostly happened to Cleopatra over the past two thousand years is not talking but performing a continuous, relentless, spectacular performance of a particular idea of her, an idea that has almost nothing to do with who she actually was and everything to do with what subsequent centuries found it useful or entertaining or politically convenient to believe about her. She has been painted, sculpted, filmed, novelised, operaticised, I believe that is a word, and if it isn't it should be, and depicted in essentially every visual medium available to human creativity since her death in thirty BCE, and in virtually every single one of these depictions, the same qualities are emphasized beauty, seduction, the dangerous power of a woman who used her body as her primary political instrument. What is almost never emphasized, that she was a politician of extraordinary capability, a military strategist of real sophistication, an economist who stabilized a kingdom in fiscal crisis, a linguist who spoke nine languages, nine including Egyptian, which no Ptolemaic ruler before her had bothered to learn, which tells you something both about her and about her predecessors, and a philosopher queen who read widely, debated seriously, and governed a complex and fractious state for twenty one years before Rome finally overwhelmed it. She was not primarily a seductress, she was primarily a ruler, and the relentless reduction of a ruler of this quality to her romantic relationships with two Roman generals is one of the more comprehensive acts of historical distortion in the Western tradition, and it has been going on for so long and with such visual splendour that even people who know better find it difficult to entirely dislodge the image of Elizabeth Taylor in the black wig and the gold eyeliner. I say this I want to be clear, as someone who considers Elizabeth Taylor's Cleopatra one of the great Hollywood productions, and who has watched it on at least two occasions with genuine enjoyment. Both things can be true. The film is magnificent. The film is also from a historical standpoint roughly as accurate as a portrait of John Harrison that showed him communicating with dead sailors through a crystal ball. Right. Let us begin where she began, which requires us to understand where she came from, because where she came from is not where most people think. Cleopatra, the seventh Philippata. The Philippata means father loving, an epithet she chose, and the choice tells you something about the political landscape she was navigating, was born in sixty nine BCE in Alexandria, Egypt. She was the daughter of Ptolemy XII Orlets, King of Egypt, and of a mother whose identity is not definitively established in the historical record, which is itself instructive about how thoroughly women were erased from official documentation, even when their sons and daughters went on to rule the world. She was not Egyptian. This is the first thing to establish, clearly, because it matters, and because it is frequently elided in popular accounts. She was Macedonian Greek. The Ptolemaic dynasty, of which she was the seventh generation, had been founded by Ptolemy the First Soter, one of Alexander the Great's generals, who took Egypt as his portion of the divided empire following Alexander's death in 323 BCE. The Ptolemies ruled Egypt for nearly three centuries, and for almost the entirety of that time, they ruled it as a Greek-speaking court sitting atop an Egyptian-speaking country, maintaining their Macedonian identity, marrying within the family with a dedication to genetic concentration that produced across the generations a range of outcomes, from brilliant to catastrophic, and largely declining to engage with the Egyptian language and culture they governed. Cleopatra was the exception. She learned Egyptian. She presented herself to her Egyptian subjects as the embodiment of the goddess Isis, divine, maternal, the protector of the kingdom, and was received as such by a population that had never, in living memory, been spoken to by their ruler in their own language. The political intelligence of this is difficult to overstate. In a kingdom where the majority population had been governed by a foreign dynasty for three centuries, the ruler's willingness to speak their language and adopt their religious iconography was not merely a gesture. It was a fundamental repositioning of the entire basis of her legitimacy. She also spoke Parthian, Hebrew, Ethiopian, Aramaic, Median, and Latin, in addition to Greek and Egyptian. She was, according to the ancient sources, a woman of such conversational range and intellectual engagement, that people who met her came away remembering not her face but her voice, her mind, the quality of her attention. Plutarch, writing a century and a half after her death, but drawing on sources that were closer to contemporary, wrote that her beauty was not in itself incomparable, but that the power of her presence, the persuasiveness of her speech, and the character that accompanied every interaction made her company uniquely compelling. He described it in terms that we would now recognise as a combination of charisma, intellectual engagement, and the particular quality of attention that makes the person you are talking to feel like the most interesting person in the room. She was, in short, primarily a mind, and it is primarily as a mind that we are going to discuss her. Her father, Ptolemy XII, was not a king of distinction. He was a king of survival, which required in the Egypt of the first century BCE, a particular set of skills that were less impressive in their way than his daughter's, but not trivial. Rome was the overwhelming power of the Mediterranean world. Egypt was rich, extraordinarily rich, the breadbasket of the ancient world, its grain feeding much of Rome's population, its trade routes controlling the flow of luxury goods from the east, and Rome's relationship to Egypt was the relationship of someone who has decided they want your house, and is currently deciding how they prefer to acquire it. Ptolemy XII survived by essentially buying Roman protection, which required paying enormous sums to Roman politicians, which required squeezing those sums from his own population, which made him spectacularly unpopular, and led in fifty-eight BCE to his expulsion from Egypt by his own subjects, who installed his daughter Berenice on the throne instead. He went to Rome and lobbied for military support to reclaim his kingdom. He got it after paying more enormous sums, and returned to Egypt in fifty-five BCE with Roman forces, reclaimed the throne, and had Berenice executed, which was the Ptolemaic approach to sibling rivalry, and which nobody who knew the family found especially surprising. Cleopatra was fourteen when her father was expelled, she was eighteen when he returned. She had watched in the most formative years of her political education exactly how the game of great power politics worked, the vulnerability of Egypt, the importance of Roman patronage, the cost of that patronage, and the consequences of misjudging it. She filed all of this away with the efficiency of someone who understood at eighteen, that her survival depended on not repeating her father's mistakes, and on understanding Rome better than Rome understood her. Ptolemy XII died in fifty-one BCE. Cleopatra was eighteen. She inherited the throne jointly with her younger brother, Ptolemy XIII, who was ten years old and whom she was required by Ptolemaic tradition, to marry Yes. Her brother. Yes, she was required to marry him. Yes, this is the aspect of Ptolemaic dynastic practice that requires the historian to set aside several standard assumptions about family arrangements and focus on the political mechanics, which is exactly what Cleopatra was doing. The marriage was nominal, the power was hers, she governed, she issued decrees in her own name. She presented herself on official documents as the senior ruler. She was eighteen years old and she was running one of the most valuable and complex states in the ancient world. The first three years of her reign were difficult. There was drought, there was famine, there were grain supply problems that required careful management to prevent civil unrest. She managed them. There were political factions at court aligned with her brother and with the guardians who controlled him, older men who had no interest in being governed by an eighteen year old woman when a ten year old boy was technically available as an alternative, and those factions worked systematically to undermine her position. By forty eight B CE, she had been driven from Alexandria. Her brother's regents had consolidated their hold on the court, and she was in exile in Syria, raising an army. This is the moment at which Julius Caesar arrives in Egypt, and I want to handle this carefully because Caesar's arrival has been so thoroughly romanticized in every medium and every century that the political reality of what Cleopatra was doing tends to disappear entirely into the fog of sexual legend. Caesar arrived in Alexandria in forty eight BCE, pursuing his enemy Pompey, whom he expected to find there and who had, inconveniently, already been murdered by Ptolemy the thirteenth's advisers, who had calculated incorrectly, as it turned out, that presenting Caesar with Pompey's head would be taken as a helpful gesture rather than an affront. Caesar was furious. He was also, as the representative of Rome, effectively the most powerful person in the Mediterranean world, and his presence in Alexandria was not a courtesy visit. It was a demonstration of Roman interest in Egyptian affairs that could not be ignored. Cleopatra understood this with a clarity that her brother's advisers apparently lacked. She needed Caesar's support to reclaim her throne. Caesar needed stability in Egypt, which meant a reliable ruler who understood Roman interests. She had herself smuggled into the royal palace. The famous story of the carpet, or more accurately, a linen sack, which is slightly less glamorous but more plausible, passed her brother's guards and presented herself to Caesar not as a suppliant, but as a ruler making a political case. What happened next is the subject of two thousand years of elaboration, but the political core of it is straightforward. Caesar supported Cleopatra's restoration to the throne. She provided Rome with the Egyptian grain supply and financial resources that Caesar's position required, and they became, in the process, lovers. The sequence matters. The political calculation preceded the personal relationship. She was not seducing him to get power. She was pursuing power through every available means, of which personal relationship with the most powerful man in the Mediterranean was one, and she deployed that means with the pragmatism of someone who understood that squeamishness about method was a luxury that her situation did not permit. She bore Caesar a son, Caesarean, little Caesar, in forty seven BCE. She visited Rome in forty six BCE, where Caesar installed her in his own villa on the Geniculum Hill, and where her presence and Caesarian's existence caused a political scandal of considerable proportions, since Caesar was married to someone else, and the Roman public's relationship to the idea of their general fathering a child with an eastern queen was complicated to say the very least. She was there when Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March 44 BCE. She returned to Egypt. Caesarean was recognized as her co-ruler. The political crisis that followed Caesar's assassination consumed Roman politics for the next fifteen years and produced, as its eventual resolution, the triumvirate of Octavian, Mark Antony, and Lepidus, and then the final conflict between Octavian and Antony, that ended the Roman Republic and established the Empire. Cleopatra's position throughout this period required continuous, sophisticated navigation of a power struggle she could not control but could not afford to ignore, because the outcome would determine whether Egypt survived as an independent kingdom or became a Roman province. Mark Antony summoned her to Tarsus in 41 BCE to explain her conduct during the Civil War, specifically whether she had supported his enemies. Her response to this summons is one of the great set pieces of ancient theatre. She did not go to Antony as a suppliant. She arrived on a gilded barge with purple sails and silver oars, dressed as Aphrodite, accompanied by boys dressed as Cupids and women dressed as sea nymphs, in a production so spectacular that the entire population of Tarsus, including the people who had been waiting to hear Antony speak, abandoned his platform and ran to the waterfront to watch her arrive. Antony was left sitting alone at his tribunal while the crowd had gone elsewhere. This was not vanity. This was politics conducted as performance. The deliberate demonstration to Antony and to every observer that Cleopatra VII of Egypt was not someone you summoned. She was someone you received. The staging cost money and planning and an acute understanding of exactly how Roman men of Antony's type responded to the theatrical. She had done her research, she knew her audience. She arrived not in the manner of someone answering a summons, but in the manner of a goddess granting an audience. They became allies, and then lovers, and eventually something approaching partners in a shared political project. The donations of Alexandria in 34 BCE, in which Antony redistributed Roman Eastern territories to Cleopatra and their children in a ceremony of oriental splendour that Roman opinion found catastrophically objectionable, was either an act of genuine political vision or a catastrophic political miscalculation, depending on whether you were Cleopatra or Octavian. It gave Octavian exactly the propaganda he needed, the Roman general who had gone native, who had abandoned Roman values for an Eastern queen, who was giving away Roman territory to foreign children. And Octavian was a propagandist of extraordinary skill who used it without mercy. The war between Octavian and Antony came to its decisive moment at the Battle of Actium in thirty one BCE. The battle itself was a naval engagement off the western coast of Greece, and its outcome, Antony and Cleopatra's fleet withdrawing, ultimately retreating to Egypt, has been debated by military historians ever since. Was it a defeat? A strategic withdrawal? Was Cleopatra's fleet's departure a betrayal of Antony or a prearranged extraction of their most valuable assets? The sources, which are predominantly Roman and predominantly hostile to Cleopatra, say betrayal. The military logic of the situation suggests the picture is more complicated. What is not complicated is what followed. Octavian's forces invaded Egypt in thirty BCE. Antony, receiving false reports that Cleopatra had already died, fell on his sword. He did not die immediately, as these things are never as clean as they sound. He died in Cleopatra's arms, which is the kind of detail that tends to overwhelm the political analysis in subsequent retellings, and which was certainly deeply personal, but which Cleopatra then had to set aside and think very clearly about what happened next. What happened next was negotiation. She met with Octavian. She was not passive, she was not, as the Romantic tradition almost universally depicts her, a woman destroyed by grief, waiting for a picturesque end. She was a ruler assessing her options in the most constrained circumstances of her life, trying to determine whether her kingdom and her children could survive the new dispensation, and under what terms. Octavian needed her alive, at least temporarily, to walk in chains through his triumph in Rome. The captive foreign queen was the essential centrepiece of a Roman triumphal procession. She knew this. She was determining whether life under those terms was Preferable to the alternative. She died on August 12th, 30 BCE in Alexandria. She was thirty-nine years old. The ancient sources are unanimous that she died by her own hand, and the asp, or asps, or a hairpin containing poison, or a self-administered poison hidden in a comb, is the detail that has generated more artistic depictions than any other fact in her biography. The exact method is historically uncertain. The intention is not. She chose the terms of her own death with the same deliberateness that she had chosen the terms of her political life. She would not walk in chains through Octavian's triumph, she would not be displayed to Rome as a trophy. She was a queen, she would die as one. With her death the Ptolemaic dynasty ended. Egypt became a Roman province. Cazarion was executed on Octavian's orders. He was a potential rival, being the son of Julius Caesar, and Octavian did not tolerate potential rivals. Cleopatra's children by Antony were taken to Rome and raised by Antony's Roman wife, Octavia, which is one of those historical details that contains more human complexity than almost any fictional plot could manage. The propaganda machine of Octavian, who became Augustus, who became the founder of the Roman Empire, worked immediately and comprehensively to establish the narrative of Cleopatra, that Western civilization has largely accepted ever since. The Eastern Temptress, who seduced Roman generals and nearly destroyed the Republic. It was a narrative that served Augustus's political purposes perfectly, explaining the civil war as the consequence of individual moral failure, rather than structural political crisis, and casting himself as the defender of Roman virtue against oriental decadence. It was also as political narratives deployed for political purposes tend to be substantially false. She was not primarily a temptress, she was primarily a ruler of a kingdom under existential pressure from a superpower, who used every available instrument of power military, economic, diplomatic, personal, theatrical, with a sophistication that her enemies consistently underestimated, and that her admirers consistently reduced to its most photogenic component. The personal relationships with Caesar and Antony were real and were not purely cynical, but they were also instruments of state policy, and the woman who deployed them was a politician first and a lover second, however, comprehensively the tradition has reversed those priorities. Now, the T's picture a woman who inherited power in a context of acute external threat and internal instability, someone who came to the position young, who was underestimated by virtually everyone around her, and who spent the early years of her tenure establishing, by sheer force of demonstrated competence, that the underestimation was an error, someone who understood with exceptional clarity that the symbolic dimensions of power, how you appear, what you wear, how you arrive, what the staging communicates before a word is spoken were not decorative but essential. Someone for whom performance and politics were not separable, because in her world they never had been. Picture someone who was operating in an environment dominated by men who held most of the formal power and who navigated that environment not by pretending the imbalance did not exist, but by understanding it so thoroughly that she could use it. Someone who knew what powerful men expected, and who either exceeded those expectations or redirected them, depending on which was more useful in the specific moment. Picture someone who was multilingual, intellectually serious, and culturally fluent across multiple traditions, someone who could operate with equal comfort in different registers, different vocabularies, different frameworks of meaning, because her situation required it, and her intelligence permitted it. Someone who had been trained from childhood to understand that the room you are in, the audience you are addressing, and the language literal and metaphorical you are speaking require constant conscious calibration. Picture someone who formed a significant political and personal alliance with the most powerful man in the most powerful institution in her world. An alliance that was simultaneously genuine and strategic, and whose genuine quality did not diminish its strategic nature in the slightest. Someone for whom the personal and the political were not separate categories, but aspects of a single, continuous negotiation. Picture someone who was reduced by the media and the popular imagination of her era, primarily to her appearance and her romantic relationships, someone whose intellectual gifts, administrative capabilities, and political achievements were consistently subordinated in public discussion to questions about how she looked and who she was sleeping with, in a manner that would never have been applied to a man of equivalent capability and achievement. Someone who watched this reduction happen and was unable to prevent it, because the machinery of image making was in the hands of people who found the reduction useful. Picture someone whose legacy the thing actually attributed to them in the popular imagination is almost entirely constructed from the outside by people with their own agendas, and bears only partial resemblance to the actual substance of what they did and what they were. Who is this person? It is Jacinda Arden. I see some of you nodding. I see others preparing objections. Both groups, as usual, are welcome at this table. Let me make the case. Jacinda Arden was born on july twenty sixth, nineteen eighty, in Hamilton, New Zealand. Her father was a police officer. Her family was Mormond, a faith she left in her twenties over the question of LGBTQ inclusion, which tells you something about both her values and her relationship to institutional authority. She was, from early on, the kind of person who evaluated institutions by whether they met her standards rather than adjusting her standards to meet the institution. She studied communication at the University of Waikato. She worked in the Cabinet Office in Wellington, then in the Cabinet Office in London, under Tony Blair's government, where she was apparently an efficient and capable junior official whom almost no one at the time would have identified as a future head of government, which is the political equivalent of the girl from Leewoden, or the carpenter from Yorkshire, and which I find across these episodes a recurring pattern that probably tells us something important about how extraordinary people tend to enter the world. She became a member of Parliament in 2008 at twenty eight. She became leader of the Labour Party in August 2017, seven weeks before the general election, when the previous leader resigned, and the party was facing what most observers considered an unwinnable campaign. She was thirty seven. She had been Labour leader for exactly seven weeks when the election was held. She did not win a majority. She formed a coalition government with New Zealand first and the Greens, but she came close enough to form a government which almost no one had thought possible when she took the leadership. And she did it with a quality of energy and communication that New Zealand politics had not recently encountered. She became Prime Minister of New Zealand in october twenty seventeen. She was thirty-seven years old. She was the world's youngest female head of government. She was, six months later, the second elected head of government in history to give birth while in office, the first being Benazir Bhutto, which is a company of two that reflects a set of institutional arrangements rather than any scarcity of capable women. She brought her infant daughter, Neve, to the United Nations General Assembly, where the baby was photographed in a UN security pass lanyard, in an image that circulated globally with such speed that it became, briefly, one of the most shared political photographs of the year. She did not plan this image as a piece of political theatre. It was simply what happened when you were a head of government and a mother simultaneously, and saw no reason to pretend otherwise. The Christchurch Mosque shootings of march fifteenth, twenty nineteen, in which fifty-one people were killed by a white supremacist terrorist were the defining crisis of her prime ministership. Her response, immediate, unequivocal, personal, and politically effective, drew global attention and admiration that transcended normal political affiliation. She refused to name the attacker publicly, denying him the notoriety he sought. She wore hijab when meeting with the Muslim community. She pushed through gun control legislation banning military style semi automatic weapons within weeks of the attack, with a parliamentary majority that reflected genuine cross party consensus. She said in a phrase that was both entirely instinctive and entirely calculated in its effects they are us. She managed the COVID nineteen pandemic in 2020 with a combination of early decisive action, clear communication, and personal accessibility. Her Facebook Live broadcasts from home, in casual clothes, became a form of political communication that many of her counterparts attempted to emulate, and few managed to replicate, because the quality she was communicating was not a style, but a substance, and substance is harder to imitate than style. New Zealand's early pandemic outcomes were, by comparative international metrics, among the best in the developed world. She resigned in January 2023 at forty-two, citing exhaustion. I no longer have enough in the tank, she said, in a press conference that was widely described as unprecedented in its honesty, and that I found watching it both admirable and rather interesting in what it revealed about the gap between the public expectation of political leaders and the private reality of what the role requires. She left office with high approval ratings and went to Harvard as a fellow. Now the parallels with Cleopatra first inherited and assumed power under conditions of external pressure and internal instability, managed from a position of youth, and with the constant background noise of people who were not entirely sure a young woman should have it. Cleopatra was eighteen when she took the throne with her brother's regents, already working to undermine her. Arden took the Labour leadership seven weeks before an election she was expected to lose with a party that had been in opposition for nine years, and with a caucus that had just removed her predecessor, in circumstances that suggested the party was not entirely united. Both women walked into difficult rooms and persuaded them. Second, the multilingual, multicultural political intelligence. Cleopatra's nine languages were instruments of political connection. She spoke Egyptian to be Egyptian, Parthian to be Parthian, Greek to be Ptolemaic, Latin to deal with Romans. Arden's cultural fluency was of a different kind, but a recognizable one. She could move between the registers of formal parliamentary debate, casual social media, Maori ceremonial welcome, international diplomatic exchange, and intimate personal communication with the bereaved, and she moved between all of them without visible seam. Both women understood that authority is partly a matter of speaking the right language to the right audience at the right moment. Third, the staging of arrival and presence. Cleopatra's barge at Tarsus was a piece of political theatre, so precisely calibrated to its audience, that it achieved its objective before she had said a word. Arden's communication style, the Facebook lives, the direct address, the willingness to be seen in circumstances that conventional political image management would have avoided, was equally calibrated, equally deliberate, and equally effective. Both women understood that the visual and symbolic dimensions of power are not secondary to the substantive dimensions, but prior to them. You must be received before you can be heard. Fourth, the personal political entanglement. Cleopatra's relationships with Caesar and Antony were simultaneously genuine and strategic, and their genuine quality did not reduce their strategic dimension. Arden's relationship with Clark Gayford, her partner and the father of Neve, who managed domestic arrangements while she governed, who was photographed holding Neve at the UN while Arden addressed the General Assembly, was a personal reality and a political statement simultaneously. The image of the father holding the baby while the mother governed was not staged, but it was understood, and its understood quality was part of its meaning. Fifth, the reduction to image. Cleopatra was reduced by Roman propaganda, and then by Western cultural tradition, primarily to her romantic relationships and her physical appearance. Arden was reduced by a certain strain of political commentary across the spectrum to her empathy, as though empathy were a style rather than a method, a decoration rather than a tool, a feminine quality that was interesting but ultimately secondary to the serious business of governing. In both cases the reduction served a purpose. It allowed people who found the substance of what these women were doing politically or institutionally challenging to discuss them in terms that avoided engaging with the substance. It is easier to argue about whether Cleopatra was beautiful than to engage with her economic management of Ptolemaic Egypt. It is easier to discuss whether Arden was too emotional than to engage with the political effectiveness of her pandemic response. Sixth The Exit Cleopatra chose the terms of her death rather than submit to the degradation Octavian had planned for her. Arden chose the terms of her departure from power, resigning on her own timeline for her own stated reasons, in her own words, rather than waiting to be removed or diminished, or exhausted to the point of error. Both women, when the conditions no longer permitted them to operate at the level they had set for themselves, declined to simply endure. This is, depending on your perspective, either a quality of self-knowledge or a quality of pride, and I suspect it is both, in roughly equal measure, in both cases. Where do the parallels strain? Cleopatra governed for twenty-one years in conditions of genuine existential threat, managing the independence of an ancient kingdom against the most powerful military machine in the world, and ultimately failed, though failed is a word I use with full awareness of what she was facing and how long she held it. Arden governed for five years, in a functioning democracy with institutional stability, and resigned voluntarily. The scales are different. The external threats are different. The consequences of failure were categorically different. Cleopatra's failure meant the end of her dynasty and her own death. Arden's departure meant a comfortable fellowship at Harvard. Cleopatra had no choice about whether to engage with power. Her survival required it. Arden chose public life from a family without political dynasty, and can unchoose it in ways that Cleopatra never could. The voluntariness of the modern democratic context is a genuine and significant difference. And Cleopatra, I want to be precise about this, governed a kingdom with enormous resources through instruments that included military force, economic control, and the absolute authority of a divine monarchy. Her political toolkit was, shall we say, more comprehensive than that available within the constraints of a New Zealand parliamentary democracy. The comparison is structural and thematic, not a claim of equivalent power or equivalent consequence. The verdict, Cleopatra. And I say this not merely because she is the historical subject. That would be too easy. And in any case I have genuinely wrestled with it because Arden is the most morally admirable figure I have paired with a historical subject in this series, and I want to say that clearly before I explain why she is still not the more compelling figure. Cleopatra is more compelling because the scale of what she was managing, and the conditions under which she was managing it, and the length of time she held a kingdom together against forces that would have overwhelmed almost anyone. All of that adds up to a kind of historical weight, that Arden's five years, for all their genuine achievement, do not yet match. Cleopatra is also more compelling because she is still, after two thousand and fifty years, almost entirely misunderstood. We are still, in 2024, fighting the propaganda of Octavian Augustus, still arguing against an image constructed by the enemies of a dead woman to justify a conquest they had already decided to make. There is something about that, the persistence of the distortion, the length of the injustice, the way she keeps escaping the tomb of the image and forcing historians to keep returning to the actual person. That I find genuinely extraordinary. She was not the woman on the barge, draped in gold, waiting to be seduced by Rome. She was the woman who designed the barge, chose the gold, calculated the effect on the audience, and used the entire spectacle as an instrument of state policy while managing a grain supply crisis, a dynastic succession challenge, and the long term structural problem of keeping Egypt independent of the most powerful empire in the world. She failed in the end, but she failed against Rome, which is not a failure that carries much shame. The Roman Empire absorbed everyone eventually. What is remarkable is not that she fell, but that she stood for twenty one years governing brilliantly against the full weight of Roman ambition and Roman propaganda while the world she had inherited dissolved around her. I grew up in Kingston upon Thames, a town that has, I think it is fair to say, produced very few philosopher queens, but the Thames runs from Kingston to the sea, and from the sea in the ancient world, you could get to Alexandria and to everything that Alexandria meant. The greatest library in the ancient world, the most cosmopolitan city on earth, at the centre of Hellenistic science, philosophy, and culture. And in that city, for twenty-one years, a woman governed with nine languages and an exceptional mind, and the particular courage of someone who understood that the alternative to governance was oblivion. She chose governance, she chose it every day for twenty one years, and when she could no longer choose governance on her own terms, she chose oblivion on hers. That is not a story about seduction. That is a story about power and intelligence and the stubbornness of someone who will not be told what she is, even by an empire, especially by an empire. Cleopatra VII Philippa, born Alexandria sixty nine BCE, died Alexandria thirty BCE, Pharaoh of Egypt, lover of Caesar and Antony, mother of Caesarion and of the children of Antony, speaker of nine languages, last ruler of the Ptolemaic dynasty, last independent ruler of Egypt for nearly two thousand years, the woman that Rome needed to turn into a seductress, because the alternative, acknowledging what she actually was, was considerably more threatening. Still being argued about, still being miscast, still underneath every Elizabeth Taylor, and every Ayasp and every golden barge, a politician of the first rank who deserved better from history, and is slowly two millennia too late a beginning to receive it. I'm Sophie Manners. Thank you for being here. Stacy Schiff's biography, simply titled Cleopatra, published in 2010, is the best modern account and is written with a clarity and a controlled fury at the historical distortion that I find deeply satisfying. Do read it. Good night.