Cleopatra VII: The Last Pharaoh of Egypt
Cleopatra VII Philopator (69-30 BCE) was the last pharaoh of the Ptolemaic dynasty and the last active ruler of independent ancient Egypt before its annexation by Rome in 30 BCE. Born in Alexandria and dead at thirty-nine, she was a brilliant linguist (she was the first Ptolemy to learn Egyptian), a clever diplomat, and a master of personal politics, who tried to save her kingdom from absorption by the rising power of Rome. Her story, intertwined with those of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, ended in one of the most famous suicides in history on 12 August 30 BCE. After her death, Egypt became a Roman province, ending the era of the pharaohs forever.
A Princess of the Ptolemies
Cleopatra was a descendant of Ptolemy I Soter, one of the generals of Alexander the Great, who became king of Egypt after Alexander’s death in 323 BCE. The Ptolemaic dynasty that he founded ruled Egypt for nearly three centuries (305-30 BCE), governing a complex society of Greek immigrants, native Egyptians, and other peoples of the eastern Mediterranean. Although they adopted many Egyptian customs, including the title of pharaoh and the worship of the god Amun, the Ptolemies, as documented in the surviving papyri and on the Rosetta Stone (196 BCE), remained culturally Greek and rarely bothered to learn the Egyptian language.
Cleopatra was different. By her own account she could speak at least nine languages, and she was the first of her dynasty to learn Egyptian, an unusual choice in a Greek-speaking court, as the contemporary biographer Plutarch (Life of Antony 27) records. She presented herself, uniquely among the Ptolemies, as a true Egyptian pharaoh. For the broader historical setting, see our guide to the Late Period of ancient Egypt and Persian and Greek influence.
Family, Siblings, and the Early Reign
Cleopatra’s family life was turbulent. Her father, Ptolemy XII Auletes, died in 51 BCE, leaving the throne to the eighteen-year-old Cleopatra and her ten-year-old brother, Ptolemy XIII. By Egyptian custom the siblings were married, and the two were supposed to rule jointly. The resulting 21-year reign of Cleopatra (51-30 BCE) is one of the best-attested of any Ptolemaic ruler.
The partnership quickly broke down. A power struggle developed between Cleopatra and her brother, backed by court officials who disliked her. By 48 BCE, civil war had broken out in Egypt, and Cleopatra had been expelled from Alexandria. She was gathering an army in Syria to retake her throne when, in the summer of 48 BCE, Julius Caesar arrived in Egypt, pursuing his rival Pompey the Great. For the story of her political alliances, see Cleopatra’s alliances with Rome.
Cleopatra and Caesar
Cleopatra’s famous arrival in Caesar’s quarters, smuggled into the royal palace in a linen sack, is one of the great stories of the ancient world. Whether legend or fact, it worked: Caesar agreed to support her claim to the throne. Within months, Ptolemy XIII was dead, defeated in the war that followed Caesar’s intervention, and Cleopatra was restored to the throne as joint ruler with her younger brother, Ptolemy XIV.
In 47 BCE, Cleopatra gave birth to a son she named Ptolemy XV Caesar, popularly known as Caesarion. Many ancient sources, including the Roman historian Plutarch, believed that Caesar was the child’s father. Caesar did not officially acknowledge the boy, but he did support Cleopatra in other ways, allowing her to call her brother-husband “Caesarion”, little Caesar.
When Caesar was assassinated in 44 BCE, Cleopatra was in Rome. She returned to Egypt, where Ptolemy XIV soon died, possibly murdered on her orders, and Caesarion was proclaimed co-ruler. The full story is in Cleopatra’s alliances with Rome.
Cleopatra and Mark Antony
In 41 BCE, Cleopatra was summoned to meet the Roman general Mark Antony at Tarsus in modern Turkey. The meeting, brilliantly staged, was the beginning of both a political and a romantic partnership. Antony, one of the most powerful men in Rome, needed Egypt’s wealth to support his wars in the east. Cleopatra needed Roman protection against her enemies. Their alliance produced three children and several joint political ventures.
Between 36 and 30 BCE, Antony and Cleopatra presented themselves as a kind of eastern royal couple, modeled on Dionysus and Aphrodite, ruling from a joint capital in Alexandria. This alarmed the Romans, who saw Antony as a traitor. In 32 BCE, the Roman Senate declared war on Cleopatra, and, by extension, on Antony. The next year, on 2 September 31 BCE, the two sides met at the Battle of Actium, off the west coast of Greece.
Actium was a disaster for Cleopatra and Antony. Their combined fleet was outmaneuvered and partly destroyed by the Roman admiral Marcus Agrippa, and Cleopatra, leading sixty ships, broke off and fled to Egypt. Antony followed her. The two abandoned their forces and prepared for the end. For the climactic events, see the death of Cleopatra.
Death and the End of the Ptolemies
In the summer of 30 BCE, the Roman general Octavian, the future emperor Augustus, invaded Egypt. Antony’s forces were defeated on land, and he committed suicide, mistakenly believing Cleopatra was already dead. Cleopatra, captured and unable to flee, took her own life a few days later, most probably on 12 August 30 BCE, a date the classical scholar Rolf Krauss (Die 3. Zwischenzeit, 2006) and the broader tradition of ancient chronography (Plutarch, Life of Antony 86) treat as the most likely.
The most famous ancient account, that of Plutarch, says she died from the bite of an asp, a sacred Egyptian snake. Modern scholars have suggested other possibilities, including poison hidden in a hairpin or a self-inflicted wound. Her death ended the line of the Ptolemies and began the long Roman period in Egypt. For the full story, see the death of Cleopatra and the end of the Ptolemies.
Caesarion, her son by Caesar, was murdered on Octavian’s orders a few days later. The Ptolemaic line was over. Egypt became a Roman province, governed from Alexandria by a prefect appointed by the emperor. The age of the pharaohs had ended, more than three thousand years after it had begun.
Legacy
Cleopatra has been reimagined countless times, as a seductress, a queen, a scholar, a nationalist, a tragic heroine. In her own lifetime, Roman propaganda painted her as a dangerous foreign witch. In the centuries since, she has been the subject of paintings by Caravaggio, John William Waterhouse, and John Singer Sargent, of operas by Handel and Berlioz, and of films from the silent era to Elizabeth Taylor’s 1963 epic. Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra remains one of the most performed plays in the English language.
Beneath the myth, she was a serious ruler who kept an independent Egypt alive for twenty-two years in the face of overwhelming Roman power, a fact that has led Aidan Dodson (Monarchs of the Nile, 1995, p. 247) to call her “the most able of the Ptolemies.” She was also a pharaoh in the full sense: she built temples, she was depicted in the traditional pharaonic style, and she was worshipped as a divine ruler after her death. Cleopatra’s self-presentation as Isis incarnate was, in the reading I find most persuasive, a deliberate theological move that linked her to the longest tradition of Egyptian queenship.
If you visit the temple of Dendera today, the small figure of Cleopatra and Caesarion carved on the back of the great hypostyle hall is one of the last dated portraits in genuine pharaonic style, made within a generation of Roman annexation. It is also a reminder, if you want one, that the woman the Romans called regina reginarum did not, in her own eyes, see herself as the last gasp of a Greek court in Alexandria. She saw herself as pharaoh.