Tag: cleopatra vii

cleopatrasdaughter:

historical figures → cleopatra vii  

“Among the most famous women to have lived, Cleopatra VII ruled for twenty-two years. She lost a kingdom once, regained it, nearly lost it again, amassed an empire, lost it all. A goddess as a child, a queen at eighteen, a celebrity soon thereafter, she was an object of speculation and veneration, gossip and legend, even in her own time. Like all lives that lend themselves to poetry, Cleopatra’s was one of dislocations and disappointments. She grew up amid unsurpassed luxury, to inherit a kingdom in decline. The Ptolemies were in fact Macedonian Greek, which makes Cleopatra approximately as Egyptian as Elizabeth Taylor.  Thirteen hundred year separate Cleopatra from Nefertiti. The pyramids already sported graffiti. The Sphinx had undergone a major restoration, a thousand years earlier. And the glory of the once great Ptolemaic Empire had dimmed. Cleopatra’s was an era of outsize, intriguing personalities. At its end the greatest actors fo the age exist abruptly. A world comes crashing down after them.”                                Insp.

bolleyns:

My Favorite Ladies of History ➵ Cleopatra VII Philopator (the final ruler of the Ptolmetic empire of Egypt before it fell under Roman rule) 69 – 30 BC

“Among the most famous women to have lived, Cleopatra VII ruled Egypt for twenty-two years. She lost a kingdom once, regained it, nearly lost it again, amassed an empire, lost it all. A goddess as a child, a queen at eighteen, a celebrity soon thereafter, she was an object of speculation and veneration, gossip and legend, even in her own time. At the height of her power she controlled virtually the entire eastern Mediterranean coast, the last great kingdom of any Egyptian ruler. For a fleeting moment she held the fate of the Western world in her hands.” – Cleopatra : A Life by Stacy Schiff

optimvsprinceps:

luthienmuse:

in-the-violet-hour:

destroymales:

terpsikeraunos:

queenotrera:

History wants so badly for Cleopatra to be beautiful. Like they can’t conceive of Rome being intimidated by anything less

because being a linguist, fleet commander, and powerful ruler doesn’t matter, only her looks

Her Arab contemporaries raved about her being very interested and knowledgeable in the sciences.

She completely reformed the system in Alexandria, and Egypt at large; making it much more of a functional powerhouse. 

She did what 300 years of her ancestors couldn’t: Managed to get the support of both the Greek AND Egyptian subjects she ruled.

There is a sculpture that has been identified as her, through comparisons to coins minted under her rule, that proves beyond a doubt that she wasn’t particularly beautiful.

It isn’t that people just happen to believe it by mistake. Rome was fucking terrified of her and painted her as a vapid, scheming, beautiful, sex obsessed queen to discredit her to their people. She was a threat, and that was how they handled it. The unfortunate thing is that that is the most surviving record of her. A smear campaign against one of the smartest, most powerful women in human history. 

This is a woman who became her father’s co-ruler at nearly 14 years old in order to train for her actual ascension to the throne, who was forced to marry her own siblings in order to keep her power, and it’s widely believed that she poisoned them so she could rule alone. She’s a Pharaoh who led Egypt into a new era of wealth, who went fearlessly into war to protect her rule and Egypt’s independence from the Roman empire, a woman who took her own life rather than face being raped and tortured by her conquerors, knowing full well that she was leaving her surviving children in their uncertain mercy. Cleopatra is one of the most interesting, morally ambiguous, complexing historical figures we have and the media has turned her into a tantalizing sex object for the male gaze.

Even after Cleopatra died her influence on those around her lived on: her daughter, Cleopatra Selene, was the only child of Cleopatra’s to live to adulthood, and she became queen of Mauretania along with her husband Juba and it’s believed they married for love, which was extremely rare for that time period, especially among nobles/the upper class. Not only did she grow up in the house of her mother’s worst enemy and technical murderer, but she still went on to become a queen who possessed an equal amount of political power as her husband, even having her face minted on coins on the opposite side of his likeness, showing they were equal rulers.

Cleopatra and her influence on history, and her daughter’s legacy, have both been brushed aside in favour of the sexy Cleopatra visage. It’s bullshit. Egyptian mythology is interesting and vivid, and full of powerful women and it’s bullshit that we take some of the most powerful women in Africa’s history and try to turn them into fashion icons or sluts who only ruled through toying with men. 

I LIVE FOR PEOPLE TO KNOW THIS, people still refuse to believe that a woman can/could have achieved anything without beauty or fucking magical powers  

It wasn’t really “Rome was terrified of her because she was a woman and also was competent.” The image of Cleopatra as a seductress was created specifically by the Augustan propaganda machine to justify Octavian’s profoundly illegal civil war against Mark Antony and Sextus Pompey. 

It was forbidden to make civil war under Roman law, so when Octavian and Agrippa raised an army and killed a bunch of Roman people, he had to sell a really good lie to justify it. He found that in Cleopatra, who Mark Antony had a very strong relationship with. Antony had promised a bunch of stuff to her upon his death (including his own burial in Egypt and iirc land), which Octavian told Roman citizens was essentially him selling Rome out to a super sexy foreign queen, and allowed him to fight a war against Antony by considering him an Egyptian, and thus “foreign” enemy. In the Res Gestae, when Octavian/Augustus writes “In my nineteenth year, on my own initiative and at my own expense, I raised an army with which I set free the state, which was oppressed by the domination of a faction”, that’s what he means.

tl;dr: the image of Cleopatra as a dangerous and beautiful seductress comes directly from propaganda in a specific political and historical moment and not a generalized Roman fear of female competency.

tagging @jenesaispourquoi in case she has anything to say on this topic