The victors celebrated with a leisurely Nile cruise, a visit to the pyramids, and some whistle-stopping in the heartland. In the ensuing war against Caesar and Cleopatra, which the world’s greatest general nearly lost (until reinforcements arrived, he was severely short-handed), Ptolemy drowned. Caesar’s Praetorians dragged him back inside, but his handlers rallied their forces. The next morning, her brother, learning that he had been outplayed, dashed into the streets and nearly persuaded a mob to rise against the usurpers. However she finagled her nocturnal job interview, she seems to have aced it. She stole back into Alexandria under cover of darkness and smuggled herself into Caesar’s quarters in her own palace (though probably not rolled up in a carpet). To win his confidence, Cleopatra needed to act boldly. Caesar had a strategic interest in Egypt’s wealth and stability, but no personal investment in which of two quarrelsome siblings sat on the throne. Cleopatra went into exile, and late in 48 B.C., while she was abroad, rallying her partisans and raising an army, Julius Caesar arrived in Alexandria, flush with victory over Pompey in Rome’s Civil War. The boy-king was not yet old enough for conjugal relations, but his counsellors conspired to seize sole power on his behalf. In 51 B.C., when Cleopatra was eighteen, she inherited the crown jointly with a younger brother, Ptolemy XIII, and, in accordance with dynastic custom, they were married. Pompey the Great propped up his regime, and on his return Auletes got rid of Berenike and her second husband-she had already killed her first. Her older sister, Berenike IV, had seized the throne while their father, Ptolemy XII, nicknamed Auletes (“the flute-player”-an allusion to licentious tastes), was away in Rome, mortgaging his kingdom for military aid. Legions of others have conjured her from a void.Ĭleopatra VII, a living deity to her subjects, was the second of five or six children in a murderous royal family that ruled the richest country in the Middle East. “We just started making things up,” a spokesman explained at a recent news conference-“Homer, Aristotle, Socrates, Hippocrates, the lever and fulcrum, rhetoric, ethics, all the different kinds of columns, everything.” (Euclidean geometry, for example, is actually the work of a grad student named Kevin.) The group did not claim credit for the biography of Cleopatra-a product of Greek civilization, like all the Ptolemaic pharaohs-although perhaps it should have. Photograph from Contrasto / ReduxĪccording to The Onion, a group of “leading historians” has announced that the culture of ancient Greece was “entirely fabricated” between 19 by a team of scholars working “nonstop” to forge the relevant evidence. Claudette Colbert as Cleopatra, who has smoldered fairly consistently onscreen, although no one knows what she really looked like.
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