General Notes

Name Prefix:<NPFX> Queen
Note: Cleopatra VII THEA PHILOPATOR

(Greek: Goddess Loving Her Father) (b. 69 BC--d. Aug. 30, 30 BC,Alexandria), Egyptian queen famous in history and drama, loverof Julius Caesar and later the wife of Mark Antony. She becamequeen on her father's death (51 BC), ruling successively withher two brothers Ptolemy XIII (51-47) and Ptolemy XIV (47-44)and her son Ptolemy XV Caesar (44-30). After the Roman armies ofOctavian (the future emperor Augustus) defeated their combinedforces, Antony and Cleopatra committed suicide, and Egypt fellunder Roman domination. Her ambition no less than her charmactively influenced Roman politics at a crucial period, and shecame to represent, as did no other woman of antiquity, theprototype of the romantic femme fatale.

The second daughter of King Ptolemy XII, Cleopatra was destinedto become the last sovereign of the Macedonian dynasty thatruled Egypt between the death of Alexander the Great in 323 andits annexation by Rome in 31. The line had been founded byAlexander's marshal Ptolemy. Cleopatra was of Macedonian descentand had no Egyptian blood, although she alone of her house tookthe trouble to learn Egyptian, and for political reasonsregarded herself as the daughter of Re, the sun god. Coinportraits of her show a countenance alive rather than beautiful,with a sensitive mouth, firm chin, liquid eyes, broad forehead,and prominent nose. Her voice, says the Greek biographerPlutarch, "was like an instrument of many strings." He adds that"Plato admits four sorts of flattery, but she had a thousand."When Ptolemy XII died in 51, the throne passed to his15-year-old son, Ptolemy XIII, and that king's sister-bride,Cleopatra. They soon fell out, and civil war ensued. Ptolemy XIIhad been expelled from Egypt in 58 and had been restored threeyears later only by means of Roman arms. Rome now felt that ithad a right to interfere in the affairs of this independent,exceedingly rich kingdom, over which it had in fact exercised asort of protectorate since 168. No one realized more clearlythan Cleopatra that Rome was now the arbiter and that to carryout her ambition she must remain on good terms with Rome and itsrulers. Thus when Caesar, the victor in the civil war, arrivedin Egypt in October 48, in pursuit of Pompey (who, a fugitivefrom his defeat at Pharsalus in Thessaly, had been murdered ashe landed four days before), Cleopatra set out to captivate him.She succeeded. Each was determined to use the other. Caesarsought money--he claimed he was owed it for the expenses of herfather's restoration. Cleopatra's target was power: she wasdetermined to restore the glories of the first Ptolemies and torecover as much as possible of their dominions, which hadincluded southern Syria and Palestine. She realized that Caesarwas the strong man, the dictator, of Rome, and it was thereforeon him that she relied. In the ensuing civil war in Egypt Caesarwas hard-pressed by the anti-Cleopatra party, led by herbrother, Ptolemy XIII, but Caesar eventually defeated them andreestablished the joint rule of brother and sister-wife. Caesar,having won his victory on March 27, 47, left Egypt after afortnight's amorous respite. Whether Caesar was in fact thefather of Cleopatra's son whom she called Caesarion cannot nowbe known.

It took Caesar two years to extinguish the last flames ofPompeian opposition. As soon as he returned to Rome, in 46, hecelebrated a four-day triumph--the ceremonial in honour of ageneral after his victory over a foreign enemy--in whichArsinoe, Cleopatra's younger and hostile sister, was paraded.Munda, in 45, was the coup de grace. Cleopatra was now in Rome,and a golden statue of her had been placed by Caesar's orders inthe temple of Venus Genetrix, the ancestress of the Julianfamily to which Caesar belonged. Cleopatra herself was installedby Caesar in a villa that he owned beyond the Tiber. She wasaccompanied by her husband-brother and was still in Rome whenCaesar was murdered in 44. She