Cleopatra

The Only One Who Learned Egyptian

Cleopatra VII was Macedonian Greek, the last of a dynasty that had ruled Egypt for nearly three hundred years without, as far as we know, a single one of them bothering to learn Egyptian. She learned it, along with several other languages, and she had herself depicted as an Egyptian goddess to Egyptians and as a Greek queen to Greeks. She was a working administrator of the richest country in the Mediterranean at a moment when Rome could have simply taken it, and she kept it independent for twenty-two years by attaching herself, in turn, to Julius Caesar and then, after his assassination, Mark Antony, the two most powerful men in the Roman world. That is usually told as seduction. It was foreign policy conducted with the only instruments a woman running a client kingdom actually had.

Understood the Triumph Waiting for Her

Antony lost at Actium in 31 BC and killed himself. She negotiated with Octavian, Caesar's own adopted heir, for a while, understood that she was being kept alive to be walked through Rome in a triumph, and died in a locked room of her mausoleum on 12 August 30 BC, aged thirty-nine, dressed in full royal regalia. Tradition says an asp bit her; the Greek biographer Plutarch records that story and then says plainly that nobody knows the truth — most historians now think poison. Octavian had Caesarion, her son by Caesar, killed. Three thousand years of Egyptian kingship ended in that room.