The seven Cleopatras who shaped the ancient world

But she was not a lone wolf at all. There was a whole family of women behind her who formed the template for what she was able to become. Without the other six Cleopatras, it would have been impossible for Cleopatra the seventh to do what she did. So although her life and ambitions are remarkable, they are nonetheless better observed in the context of the dynasty that produced her.

Without the other six Cleopatras, it would have been impossible for Cleopatra the seventh to do what she did

You write in your book that the history of the Cleopatras begins not in Egypt, but further to the east. What was the empire into which the first of the Cleopatras was born, and what do we need to know about the geopolitical situation at the time of her birth?

By the second century BC, the Hellenistic period had already been going for about 150 years. It was a world forged following the death of Alexander the Great, and his empire being split up between rival generals. Cleopatra I was born into the house of Seleucus, which owned essentially all of what’s now Syria, Palestine, Israel and swathes of Mesopotamia as well. The first Cleopatra was the daughter of a man named Antiochus III, who even in his lifetime was known as ‘the Great’. He was a formidable man who extended his empire as far as he could – as far as the border with Egypt, which at the time was a superpower ruled by the Ptolemies. They were the descendants of Ptolemy, another of Alexander’s generals, and the Ptolemies and the Seleucids had been locking horns for roughly a century by this point, with land-grabs going on constantly across the border.

The two sides were particularly squabbling over one piece of land: a part of what we now think of as the Beqaa valley in Lebanon. The marriage of the princess Cleopatra to Egyptian pharaoh Ptolemy V was Antiochus III’s way of offering an olive branch to the Egyptians, but it was also a way for him to get influence within the Egyptian court. So there was a double deal going on.

Cleopatra I headed to Alexandria in 193 BC at the age of roughly 17. What was the Egypt that she encountered like?

Even though she had been brought up in the very fine city of Antioch, I think she would have been in awe of Alexandria. It was the Greek centre of this world; basically, a colonialist power had imprinted itself on traditional Egypt. The north of Egypt – Alexandria and the Nile Delta – had a very Hellenised population. In fact, the Ptolemies offered free land and tax rebates to attract Greek-speaking settlers to the area. But as you went further down into Egypt you arrived at the heart of the Egyptian population – Egypt for the Egyptians.

The fact that Alexandria had never completely aligned to Egypt had created a strange disconnect between the world of Alexandria and its ruling family and the rest of Egypt. Indeed, there had been revolts against the Ptolemies by the local Egyptian population – but by the time Cleopatra I arrived, a synergy had developed between the Greek settlers and Egypt’s local populations. This was very much fostered by the royal house itself: the first Ptolemies were keen to be seen both as Greek Hellenistic rulers and traditional pharaohs, and to do that they courted the traditional priests of Egypt and looked after the traditional cults of the Egyptian gods. So they had this double-faced, Janus approach to rulership – which, by and large, was working for them.

The idea of looking in two directions is also interesting with regard to Cleopatra’s loyalties. How much was that an issue?

Dynastic marriages are interesting. What role should a princess play when she goes into a marital home? There was always an element of the Egyptian court that questioned Cleopatra’s loyalty to the Egyptian crown, and spread rumours that Egypt would go to ruin because of Cleopatra making sure that her father had a strong influence.

But that’s not what happened. Cleopatra I was remarkably loyal to her husband and to the Egyptian populace. The way she made a mark on the Egyptian court was by carefully fostering a good relationship with the Egyptian courtiers. She had a lesson to learn in that regard, because the queen she succeeded had been killed in a court coup. And so, knowing that it was very easy for the Egyptian court to get rid of a queen, she decided to play the long game.

What do we need to know about the family history of Ptolemy V, the man Cleopatra I married?

It was probably the most dysfunctional family in antiquity – which is saying something. Ptolemy V was a pretty ineffectual pharaoh, who was very happy to sit back and let his ministers do his work for him and be managed by his courtiers. What’s also notable about the Ptolemies more generally is that they had settled on the custom of pharaohs marrying their sisters. This was not just dynastic incest by name but by physical union: Ptolemy V, for instance, was the son of a brother-sister marriage.

We can explain this theologically. The goddess Isis had a child with her brother Osiris – who essentially represented the living pharaoh. In the Greek world, Zeus married and slept with his sister Hera.

So incestuous blood heightened the Ptolemies’ claim as god kings.

But then the dynasty encountered a problem: Ptolemy V didn’t have any sisters. This is why Cleopatra I had been brought into Egypt – as a kind of pragmatic decision. What’s interesting, though, is that after she’d been on the throne for about a decade, Cleopatra I was honoured with the title ‘beloved sister of the king’. So they harked back to the idea of incest as much as they could, stretching what ‘sister’ meant to allow it to happen.

By approximately 176 BC, both Cleopatra I and Ptolemy V were dead. What happened next?

Cleopatra I had given birth to three children, and the eldest son was set to go on to the throne, but he was still too young to rule at the time his father died. Cleopatra I had been made regent, which was the first time that had happened – and the fact that the court didn’t make any fuss shows they obviously regarded her as a very capable woman. We don’t think there were any suspicious circumstances surrounding her death, at the age of about 45, and she was succeeded by her eldest son, Ptolemy VI, who married his full-blood sister Cleopatra II.

But there was also a royal spare who wasn’t willing to take a back seat. His name was Ptolemy VIII, but he was known in antiquity as Psychon – which means something like ‘fatty’. I’ve called him Potbel- ly, because it describes him so well. He’s one of the most egregious characters in the whole of ancient history – a tyrant to his fingertips. He was placed on the throne alongside his brother and sister for a while, meaning that for a few years there was a very strange, and not particularly comfortable, tripartite monarchy. Certainly, there was no love lost between Cleopatra II and Potbelly.

It’s important to be able to walk into a world in which incest was acceptable and mortals were seen as living gods, but to still see them as real people capable of loving and hurting each other

You write that the Cleopatras have not fared well in scholarship because, perhaps, they are “simply too melodramatic”. A vivid example of such melodrama is what’s said to have occurred on Cleopatra II’s 55th birthday. What happened?

It’s a dreadful scenario – a Grand Guignol spectacle. Cleopatra II and Potbelly had married after the death of her first husband,
and they’d had a son, Memphites. He and his father had quarrelled, and it looked like the situation was irreconcilable, so he’d been taken out of Egypt.

At the time of Cleopatra II’s birthday, Potbelly had been with his son in Cyprus. Back in Alexandria, the queen had received lots of presents, including a large box. Cleopatra opened it – to discover Memphites’ dismembered corpse inside. That was the kind of man Potbelly was: if marking his authority meant slaughtering his own flesh and blood, so be it.

You might ask: why did Potbelly do that to his son and heir? The answer is: he had another two sons and another ready-made family, because the other upsetting thing about this scenario is that Potbelly had also married his niece, Cleopatra II’s youngest daughter, Cleop- atra III. The fact he was married to mother and daughter at the same time did not, as this story attests, make for a happy home.

This story highlights a strange aspect of this history: it features human characters with whom it’s possible to empathise, but
a society with norms and values markedly different from our own. How do we go about making sense of that?

That’s a really perceptive reading. It’s important to be able to walk into a world in which incest was acceptable and mortals were seen as living gods and goddesses, but to still see them as real people capable of loving and hurting each other. That’s why nicknames such as Potbelly are vital: it makes them human. Otherwise, they’re just lists of names and dates that mean nothing.

Those nicknames also reveal a lot about their characters and the ways they were viewed. Cleopatra III, for instance, was given a vicious nickname – a slang word for female genitalia – which tells us a lot about how she was seen. I wanted to depict all of the Cleopatras as flesh and blood as far as possible, because it’s only by doing so that we can make sense of the macabre, outrageous incidents they experienced.

You write that Cleopatra III alone makes for a fascinating psychological case study. What was her story?

She was probably the most formidable of all the Cleopatras, with a sense of narcissism and self-promotion that puts even Liz Taylor’s Cleopatra in the shade. She amassed more religious and royal titles for herself than any other Egyptian queen. I think we can look to her background to explain this: her brothers had all been killed and she had no obvious person to marry, so got into the bed of her uncle Potbelly. This has sometimes been presented as a kind of Lolita scenario – of him grooming her – but I don’t think that’s what happened. She was far too knowing, and probably gave Potbelly children willingly.

Yet I think the situation does account for some of her self-aggrandisement later in life. She dominated her sons, Ptolemy IX and X, taking precedence over them in religious rituals and court ceremonials. I’m sure this harked back to when she was young, when she could have been cast out of the dynasty with no role to play of any kind – she was making sure that would never happen. That is, I suppose, why she seems to have had no warmth about her at all. Even though Ptolemy IX had fallen in love with his sister-wife, Cleopatra IV, for instance, she forced them to divorce because it didn’t suit her politically.

I don’t want it to sound as if I’m depicting this as ‘women’s interfering’. Cleopatra III saw the politics behind relationships first and feelings only afterwards. I wanted to cut her some slack, and show how she, and all the other Cleopatras, were brilliant politicians. Indeed, I think we judge Cleopatra III more harshly than Potbelly, for instance, simply because she was a woman – and it seems to me that that’s seen as the greatest crime of all the Cleopatras. They did everything men did, but are judged differently because they were women and are seen as having transgressed boundaries. Now is the time to put that reading aside. I’m aware that I’ve written a very feminist take on the Cleopatras, but it’s also an earnest take on their powers and prerogatives.

You think the Cleopatras genuinely did have power, then?

Yes – and they had it because the men of the family after Ptolemy V were incapable of rule. It was just generation after generation of losers, so the women stepped in and took charge. Had they not done so, I think Egypt would have disintegrated far earlier. It survived because of the wise rulership of successive Cleopatras.

The reigns of the final three Cleopatras fall within a section of your book called ‘Terminal Decline’. What happened?

The biggest factor was the emergence of Rome. For almost a century, it had been unwilling to enter Egyptian politics with both feet and had instead skirted around the edges. But by the middle of the first century BC, the Seleucids had fallen and Pompey had taken over their former territories – meaning that, for the first time, the Egyptians had Romans on their land borders. The Romans, of course, were one of history’s great warmongering civilisations, and I think the Ptolemies knew their time would be up if they didn’t play the game.

• Read more | Cleopatra's daughter: the tragic inheritance to triumphant reign of Cleopatra Selene

But the Cleopatras did play the game brilliantly in a way their husbands simply couldn’t match. There is no doubt whatsoever that sexual politics was a key part of that. Cleopatra VII’s successes were down to sexual politics as well as her brilliance as a ruler: her womanhood helped her alongside her intellect and her brilliance. Her ability to switch characters was key, too: Mark Anthony was a blustering man who liked booze and coarse entertainments, so she performed that kind of music hall turn for him, whereas Julius Caesar was drawn to her intellect. She used her gender to create a bubble of security for Egypt. The same had been true of her great-aunt, Cleopatra V, who is my favourite of the Cleopatras – she was the first queen regnant since the Pharaonic period, and really wasn’t afraid to take on these big male figures.

We should end where we began, then, with Cleopatra VII. How does knowing more about the lives of her predecessors help us recontextualise her story?

Cleopatra VII was a clever woman and she knew her history. When, towards the end of her life, Mark Antony doled out the east of the Roman empire to Cleopatra and her children, she named herself Cleopatra Thea Philopator – ‘the newest goddess’. That was clearly in homage to two former Cleopatras: her great-great-grandmother Cleopatra III, who had taken on the living role of Isis, and one of her aunts, Cleopatra Thea, who had dominated Seleucid history for decades. She was deliberately allying herself to her illustrious ances- tors, and because she couldn’t really look to the men of her family for any sort of influence, it had to be the women. I think we need to do the same: when we put Cleopatra VII into the context of the remarkable women who preceded her, we can begin to understand her motives, what she was up against, and what she was able to do.

Why do you think Cleopatra has so dominated our view of this history?

Cleopatra VII has never been lost in the imagination. She was her own, brilliant public-relations expert anyway, but from the moment of her carefully stage-managed death she entered into the popular consciousness. She has been claimed by every successive historical era and society as its own. She has stayed in our imaginations because she is elastic enough to be stretched into being whatever we want her to be: a femme fatale clad in gold lamé in a 1960s spectacle, or as a champion of Black Lives Matter. She is so flexible because she is, in many respects, untouchable: we’re dealing with legend, not reality.

I wanted to get back to the root of that reality, because it’s there that she’s most fascinating.

Finally, why do all of the Cleopatras matter?

They offer us a shining moment in the wider story of women’s history, and particularly that of antiquity in which women were often marginalised. We do our best to try to find female voices, but they’re hard to come across – and here, upfront and centre, we have the achievements of a remarkable, if unorthodox, group of women. And that in itself makes them worth studying.

Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones is professor in ancient history at the University of Cardiff. His previous books include Persians: The Age of the Great Kings (Wildfire, 2022)