Although she has been dead since 30 B.C., Cleopatra VII, the last of the Ptolemaic rulers, still wields considerable power. The magic of her name is drawing crowds to the British Museum's exhibition "Cleopatra of Egypt: From History to Myth," which runs until Aug. 26 and includes some new finds and interpretations. The museum has attracted loans of Cleopatra-related sculptures, coins, paintings, ceramics, jewelry and other artifacts from some 30 museums, libraries and private collections, stretching from Russia to Algeria to Canada.
On public view for the first time is an 80-cm granite head—believed to represent Ptolemy XV Caesar (Caesarion), Cleopatra's son by Julius Caesar—found in the harbor at Alexandria, Cleopatra's capital, by French archaeologists in 1997. Side by side are three smaller marble heads from the city—of the Greek god Serapis and two Ptolemaic rulers—that probably have not been displayed together for two millennia.
"Cleopatra's name is more evocative than any image of her," says Peter Higgs of the museum's department of Greek and Roman antiquities and co-curator of the exhibition. In what Higgs calls a "biographical study"—and one with which not all classical scholars may entirely concur—Cleopatra is presented in a range of guises that have contributed to the legend that she began building during her lifetime. "We know that not everyone is going to agree with us," says Higgs. "We're not saying we're right about everything. This is our interpretation."
On contemporary coins, Cleopatra appears masculine and powerful. Slim and serene in sculptures, she is sometimes portrayed as the goddess Isis, the divine, royal mother whose cult she followed. Erotic Roman caricatures depict her as a harlot. She is a sensual and tragic figure in Renaissance paintings and objets d'art. Her modern face comes straight from Hollywood, embodied most famously in 1963 by Elizabeth Taylor—whose off-screen affair with her own Mark Antony, co-star Richard Burton, recalled the 14th century writer Giovanni Boccaccio's description of Cleopatra as a woman "who became an object of gossip for the whole world."
The star of the museum's exhibition, though, is a 104-cm black basalt statue on loan from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. One of the best-preserved representations of a Ptolemaic queen, it has been identified as Cleopatra VII. The figure is holding a double cornucopia and wearing a headdress decorated with three cobras—symbols associated only with her.
Two later images cast light on how Cleopatra's reputation was sullied in Rome after Octavian (later to become the emperor Augustus) defeated Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium in 31 B.C. A marble relief, part of a frieze replete with symbols of Egypt and the Mediterranean, depicts a couple engaging in sexual intercourse aboard a boat. And a terracotta oil lamp shows a female figure, amid a Nile-like landscape, squatting on a phallus atop a crocodile. To the poet Lucan, she was a "wanton daughter" of Macedonian kings.
"Everything we know about Cleopatra comes from later Roman writers," including Plutarch, says Higgs, "and it's nearly all negative." That "prudish and snobbish" Romans would see Egypt's queen as a barbarian and a seductress is unsurprising, he adds, given that "she had taken away from them both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony." Still, says Higgs, even Cleopatra's critics acknowledged that she had some admirable qualities. Apart from her beauty, she is said to have been a humorous and charming conversationalist. Intelligent and savvy, she was a skilled diplomat who spoke several languages—and was clearly loved by Caesar and Antony, the fathers of her four children.
Like her Ptolemaic predecessors in the three centuries following Alexander the Great's ouster of the Persian administration in Egypt in 332 B.C., Cleopatra had to appeal to both Greeks and Egyptians—to be seen as both Greek monarch and Egyptian pharaoh. She also needed to present herself as a formidable figure amid the violence and chaos that characterized the Mediterranean region at the time. Indeed, before Cleopatra even ascended the Ptolemaic throne, she needed to have been ruthless, given the familial bloodbaths that long characterized her incestuous line.
Following Octavian's conquest of Egypt, Antony's suicide—by falling on his sword—and then Cleopatra's—perhaps with the help of the asp of legend, if not a cobra—the new emperor ordered that all statues of Cleopatra be destroyed. Most of the surviving images depict a figure with a voluptuous body and a strong face, masculine in its features, emphasizing power. Representations from old coins, particularly rare Greek ones, have helped to identify Cleopatra in marble and limestone sculptures. So, too, did the tiniest item on display—a 1.3-cm blue glass intaglio bearing Cleopatra's profile in a more naturalistic Greek style.
Cleopatra Selene—Cleopatra's daughter by Mark Antony and the twin of her second son, Alexander Helios—is identified as the subject of a rare marble portrait statue found in Cherchel, Algeria. On loan from that city's Archaeological Museum, the statue has never been outside Algeria before. Cherchel was the capital of the ancient kingdom of Mauretania, restored by Augustus to Cleopatra Selene's husband, Juba II. Another marble rendering of Cleopatra Selene, found near Juba's palace at Cherchel, shows her as a more mature woman, with a heavier face and "snail-shell" curls around her forehead.
Alexander Helios is believed to be represented, in a bronze statuette, as the Prince of Armenia. According to Plutarch's writings, Mark Antony gave his sons by Cleopatra the title of kings, bestowing Armenia, Media and the Parthian Empire on Alexander and Phoenicia, Syria and Cilicia on his younger brother Ptolemy Philadelphus. After the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra, their three children were made to live out their lives in obscurity. Half-brother Caesarion was not so fortunate. He was executed by Octavian.
Images of Cleopatra's great loves and political allies, Caesar and Antony, are included in the exhibition, but perhaps more interesting than any sculpted head is a joke in stone dating from 34 B.C. Inscribed in Greek on a basalt statue base found at Alexandria is a reference to "Antony, the Great, lover without peer." The text, says Higgs, contains a pun relating to the "Association of Inimitable Livers," which Plu- tarch wrote was a group established by the high-living Antony and Cleopatra in cosmopolitan Alexandria. Antony the inimitable liver became Antony the inimitable lover, both in the brothels of Alexandria and in Cleopatra's bed.
Her inimitable living and dramatic demise made Egypt's exotic queen an icon—to many, the first female superstar. For several hundred years from the time of Caesar, Cleopatra and all things Egyptian intrigued even those Romans who demonized her, influencing style, customs and culture. By the early Renaissance in Europe, with its revival of interest in classical traditions, Cleopatra again became a subject of art, literature and fashion. Her luxurious banquet for Antony, his death, her grief at his tomb and her own death all are represented in paintings and sketches in the exhibition, as well as on a variety of decorative objects, including watches, fans and vases. The Renaissance portrayal of the tough and tragic seductress—as derived from the early Romans—has trickled down to the 20th century and beyond.
Cleopatra found her way onto the silver screen even before cinema had sound. In 1917, Theda Bara starred—in harem girl get-up—in a silent-film version of Cleopatra. Seventeen years later, Claudette Colbert had the title role, and Hollywood waged an all-out publicity campaign to encourage female moviegoers to adopt the "Cleopatra look." Many copied Colbert's dark bangs after hearing her declaim, following the seduction of Antony: "I've seen a god come to life. I'm no longer a queen. I'm a woman."
A woman she was, and one for all time. With so much, yet so little, known about this queen without a face, this figure of history and myth, Cleopatra lives on in the "infinite variety" cited by Shakespeare. And like so many intrigued observers through the ages, visitors to the exhibition can draw their own picture of her.