The mystery of Cleopatra

Woman, queen, foreigner, Cleopatra had many faults. She also made the mistake of choosing her lovers in Rome, first Caesar, then Mark Antony. Fortunately, the one who threatened both the Republic and Roman virtus [1] was defeated at the battle of Actium in 31 BC, by the great Octavian, future Augustus. As history is written by the victors, the emperor entrusted the writers and poets of his time — Virgil, Horace, Flavius Josephus, Propertius... — with the task of disseminating through the ages the image of a “mad queen” and a “fatal monster [2]”, the memory of a manipulative woman, consumed by ambition, thirsty for riches, who was the cause of the last Roman civil war, the portrait of an Egyptian with oriental customs steeped in lust who threatened the moral rigour of Rome; enough already. Portraying her as a prostitute and a nymphomaniac at the same time discredited Caesarion, the fruit of her love with Caesar, whereas Octavian was only Julius’ adopted son.

Then Cleopatra fell into oblivion until the Renaissance. The translation of ancient texts then brought back to memory this woman of power, opulence and voluptuousness. Dante cast “Cleopatra the lustful” into hell, among the wanton and the criminal. Shakespeare drew, for his play, on Plutarch’s Life of Antony, which recounted how the queen inflamed Antony’s passions and “finally extinguished and stifled whatever remnants he still had of honest and virtuous feelings”. Artists also seized on the character: they depicted a beautiful woman, of course, sensual, naturally, striving to describe her breasts rather than her nose, and her death more often than her life (ill. 1 and 2). On canvas or in marble, Cleopatra constantly swoons, half naked, bitten by a snake striking her breast rather than her arm as history tells, so that…