Ms-Represented: Cleopatra

Welcome to MsMojo. You know her name, but do you know her real story? Today we're exploring how one of the most famous women of all time has been Misrepresented.

She was the bodacious beauty who brought the ancient world to its knees. A scintillating seductress. A siren who lured mighty men to their doom, brought empires to the edge of destruction, and toppled dynasties with her hedonistic hubris. That’s the Cleopatra the world knows, the image that has made her an icon. There might be no royal woman in all of history more famous. What more could a Queen ask for? Well, in life, Cleopatra was not exactly the sort of lady to let other people write her story.

A royal birth is hardly an inauspicious start in life, but no one could have predicted Cleopatra’s eventual fame or infamy. She was a member of the House of Ptolemy, a dynasty of Egyptian rulers descended from the Macedonian Greek general of the same name. It was the longest dynasty in Egypt’s history, but the family was more notable for their similarities to Game of Thrones characters [There will be an SB here]. Yeah, that’s not the only reason [There will be an SB here]. There we go. Her mother is not confirmed, but was likely either the cousin or sister of her father, Ptolemy XII Auletes, a Pharoah more interested in playing his flute than in ruling his kingdom. Inbreeding was not uncommon in the ancient world, but it always proved to be a bad idea in the end. The legacy of family feuds and mental instability had weakened the Ptolemaic rulers over time, and continued during Auletes’s reign. But amid the chaos, Cleopatra quietly made use of the advantages her environment offered her.


The port city of Alexandria, capital of Ptolemaic Egypt, was not only a major trade center, but the greatest center of Hellenistic learning in the world. With its vaunted Musaeum, and the Library of Alexandria, Cleopatra grew up not only surrounded by the brightest minds of the era, but with access to the widest array of information available at the time. She was privately tutored by the philosopher Philostratus in her youth, and proved to be especially gifted with languages. Aside from her native Greek, she would be the only Ptolemaic ruler to actually speak, read, and write Egyptian. She had a similar fluency in Latin, and also spoke and understood numerous other languages, including Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic, just to name a few. The full extent of her education is undocumented, but it’s safe to say you don’t become a polyglot to that extent if you’re a disinterested pupil, or incurious about the world around you. Those tendencies would serve her well in the years to come.

For years, Rome had happily exploited the resource-rich and geographically advantageous Kingdom of Egypt. Financial loans and other favors served to keep Egyptian rulers in line with Roman interests, and Auletes was no exception. The Pharaoh’s debts passed a financial burden on to his people, making him extremely unpopular. When he was ousted by his eldest daughter Berenice, he was forced to flee. Cleopatra was by his side when he arrived in Italy.

Again, there isn’t much to go on regarding Cleopatra’s life at this point. No one was paying much attention to the 11-year-old daughter of a crownless King. But once again Cleopatra would find herself in position to get a rarified education. While her father lobbied politicians and financiers, the young princess would have had a front row seat to the workings of the most powerful political machine in the Classical world. And she took notes.

With Pompey’s help, Auletes returned to Egypt for a short, dysfunctional second reign before passing away. His will left the crown to be jointly shared between Cleopatra, who was then around 18, and the older of her two little brothers, who was no more than 10. Civil war ensued when he attempted to force her out, aligning with their sister Arsinoe against her. Let’s just say it didn’t go how either of them hoped. In case you’re keeping track, this means that 3 out of Cleopatra’s 4 known siblings had been part of an interfamily power grab. Small wonder that her last surviving brother only shared a brief co-regency with her before he died under mysterious circumstances.

Cleopatra’s ruthless streak is frequently included in her portrayals, and not incorrectly, either. Surviving the snakepit of the Ptolemaic royal family to emerge as sole ruler of Egypt? Nobody could do that without a willingness to get their hands dirty. While depictions of Cleopatra as just one more poisonous serpent abound, less commonly explored is what happened when she rolled up her sleeves and got down to the business of ruling.


Her reign was one noted for its relative stability. In fact, hers was the first royal tenure in fifty years with no rural revolts against the monarchy. Unlike her father, Cleopatra was an involved ruler, apparently deeply invested in her subjects. While balancing Egypt's delicate diplomatic relationships, she successfully kept her realm independent of Rome when it had been on the brink of annexation only a handful of years prior. But some out there are already thinking we’ve skipped a major character in the story. What’s a powerful woman if she can’t be reduced to her personal life, right?

Alright, we can’t exactly boil this down to personal life alone. The personal is often political, after all, and that’s doubly true if you’re a political player. For as capable, and astute as she was, Cleopatra needed allies to accomplish bigger goals, and that was especially true when she was at her lowest. This is where practically all screen adaptations of Cleopatra’s story begin.


While embroiled in the civil war against her siblings, she took it upon herself to approach Julius Caesar, the Roman general and political heavyweight. Famously she snuck into his quarters rolled up in a rug, only to emerge and charm him to her side. Despite modern perceptions of her as the ultimate smokeshow, Cleopatra was probably not a great beauty. But she was reputed to be witty and charismatic, with a keen tactical mind. Caesar was quickly persuaded to back her. Not only did he use his resources to help restore her throne, but the pair began a physical relationship, which produced a son.

Was it love? We’ll never know. It was, however, a good strategic move. With a man like Caesar on her side, Cleopatra could rely on an amount of protection. And as the mother of his son, she was guaranteed a degree of influence over him that she would have been hard pressed to gain in regular diplomatic dealings. The trouble was, it’s impossible to foresee every circumstance. The strategic advantages of her relationship with Caesar were all swept away when he was assassinated in the Roman senate.


The principles behind her alliance with Caesar being sound, Cleopatra attempted to replicate the situation with another prominent Roman general. Marc Antony was powerful and popular. Over the course of their roughly ten year relationship, he gave her three children, and lent his military might to her political acumen. With his help, Cleopatra moved to expand her territory and was able to work from a place of greater security. Unfortunately, Antony was too confident in his own position, or maybe just not as good a politician as he thought. His efforts on Cleopatra’s behalf handed ammunition to his rival, and brother-in-law, Caesar’s nephew, Octavian.

After publicly accusing Antony of enriching a foreign queen at the expense of the Roman Republic, Octavian led a naval campaign against the pair, which culminated in a decisive defeat at the Battle of Actium. Antony and Cleopatra returned to Egypt in defeat. They resisted a while longer, but Cleopatra at least saw the writing on the wall. She was making plans to protect Caesarion’s position as her heir when Antony’s forces made their final surrender. Antony took his own life upon hearing the news. Cleopatra lived long enough to meet Octavian when he occupied her palace. She was defeated, but she was adamant that she would not be a trophy. Rather than be paraded through Rome in humiliation, Cleopatra allegedly allowed an asp to bite her, bringing an end to a dramatic, and consequential 39 years on Earth.

The rug. The lovers. The snake. That’s what her life was boiled down to in collective memory. Not the education, not the fight for the throne. Not the successful reign, or the deft political maneuvering. Everyone knows her name, yet few know anything about her.

The saying goes that well behaved women rarely make history. True as it may be, though, the frustrating fact is that unusual, unruly, and ungovernable women are often buried by the male dominated societies that outlive them. For better, and often for worse, history is written by the winners. Cleopatra’s foe Octavian would go down in history as Caesar Augustus, the first Emperor of Rome. He painted the Egyptian Queen as the evil foreign temptress, luring men into a web of ambition and lust. By his account, she was ambitious and arrogant, but ultimately not clever enough to wield power effectively. Contemporary historians and poets ran with this spin. Then, in the first century CE, the Greek scholar Plutarch would use these sources for his written account of Cleopatra’s life, and the image was cemented in Western canon. It would be centuries before anyone would start to seriously question this version of the narrative.

Even in the diminished state Augustus and Plutarch left her in, it would be hard to argue we aren’t still obsessed with her. Cleopatra has dominated both high art and pop culture for over 2,000 years. It’s almost as if we collectively sense there’s more to her. So it’s baffling that film and television only want to reproduce the same tired edit. She is always framed in relation to Caesar and Antony. The only difference is whether she is a silly girl swept away by love, or a vamp who merged ambition with passion, and burned her whole world down as a result. But we are often meant to understand Cleopatra as too spoiled and emotional to go the distance as a ruler.


More sympathetic renderings of her still lean into the cliches. Shakespeare wrote her as one of the most compelling women in his canon, but still made her love affair into the axis of her narrative. “Clone High”’s Cleo, is smart and a natural leader, but vain and manipulative. HBO’s “Rome” was willing to give us the cunning politician, but wiped out any good will by also making her a hedonistic, self-obsessed person with substance use disorder.

She must be pretty dangerous. It’s what her contemporaries tell us anyway. By working so hard to smear her name, they only show that this woman who ruled capably in her own right got under their skin and took up rent-free residence in their minds. The fact that we have yet to do her justice on screen says that there’s still something transgressive about her. So we’re supposed to remember her defeats, but not her triumphs. The ruin of her lovers, and not the prosperity of her country. Her defiant death, but not her extraordinary life. Because if we didn’t, we’d see that the woman at the root of the long shadow she casts is someone who totally deserves to live on in history. But the way she did in life: on her own terms, and not anyone else’s.


Which other famous figures have gotten the Cleopatra treatment in pop culture? Let us know who you feel has been royally Misrepresented in the comments.