Cleopatra's Education and Rise to Power

Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Today we're launching the latest of our Sunday series, and over the next four weeks we'll be exploring one of the ancient world's most famous figures, Cleopatra. My guest to guide us through the life and times of this remarkable ruler is Islam Issa, who's Professor of Public Humanities at Birmingham City University, and the author of books including Alex andria, The City That Changed the World. In today's first episode, we chart the world into which Cleopatra was born, its sprawling geography, its family tensions, and the figures and forces that were to have an enormous impact on her life to come . I'd like to start on a personal note if I can. When did you first encounter her as a cultural figure? Do you remember? That's like asking somebody what their first memory is, I think. Certainly as a child, being raised by Alexandrian parents and coming from a long line of Alexandrians, which is the city where Cleopatra was born and raised and from which her family ruled for several centuri es. So I do remember my parents talking to me about Cleopatra as a child and having a kind of fondness for her, that she was a hero of sorts, and I'd say another memory early on would be on the half a pound, fifty piasta coin in Egypt. So that's the kind of pocket money that you can buy sweets with and stuff. So she's on that coin, the only woman who was on a coin at the time. So those would probably be my earliest memories. Nothing much to do with the Romans or Shakespeare. But that I mean that those are quite formative memories, so you do have a longstanding relationship with her as a figure. Yeah, I would absolutely love to meet her somehow. Well perhaps we can get back to that idea later on in the podcast. To kick us off then, we should rewind back to the the time and when she was alive and the place. Can we do some scene setting? I'd like to do this in two major ways, I suppose, dynastic and geographical. Can we start with the first of those? We're gonna talk a lot over the next four episodes about the Ptolemaic Kingdom and, historian Joyce Tilsley has described this dynasty as being like the worst sort of soap opera on television. What do we need to know about the wider lineage into which Cleopatra was born? First of all, I don't think it's the worst soap opera, I think it's the best soap opera. I guess the link to Alexander the Great is important, that Ptolemy I, whose great great grandfather of Cleopatra, was one of the boyhood friends and later generals of Alexander, who went on every foreign expedition with Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC. Alexander founds Alexandria, which will become the Ptolemaic capital. And once Alexander dies, Ptolemy takes that nice slice of the cake which is which is Egypt. So there's that link from Macedon, where Alexander's from, and the Hellenistic link, and the fact that they then go to Egypt. We might also say that they have lots of Ptolemies. So we start with Ptolemy I, Ptolemy II, Ptolemy III. Ptolemy means sort of warlike. There's lots of Cleopatras, the Cleopatra we're going tal tok about is Cleopatra the Seventh. Cleopatra means beloved of her father. And then we have lots of Berennices as well. That's the third name that we get a lot of, which is a name related to victory. On the whole, this is going to be a story about a dynasty that has enigmatic ancestry, sibling rivalry, completely dysfunctional, incest at certain stages So that's the kind of background that we're talking about. It's certainly a lively story, and we'll cover some of these episodes as we go. Is there anything else we need to understand before we start about the relationship between this and dynasty the world around it. Well as I said, Ptolemy I , when Alexander dies, takes Egypt, he hijacks the body of Alexander the Great, takes it to Alexandria, creates the mausoleum for him there. So they're prioritizing Egypt. I think that's one thing we can say. Yes, they expand, they have a little bit of the Levant to the Cyprus, but Egypt is very much their priority. They're also relatively neutral in terms of foreign affairs. So that's one way in which they can sort of prioritize Egypt as well. They have several interesting policies, let's say, that they do. And obviously we' well'll come onto some ideas like the library and and and and that kind of thing shortly, but I think one of the important things for me is the the kind of unification process they they go through. So essentially they ensure that there's a single currency throughout their dynasty. They also have lots of emphasis on amalgamating the Greeks and Egyptians, getting them to live together. So they create a god called Serap is, who's a Greco Egyptian god, who's a very successful god, and also the fact that they have a very conscious mercantile economy. It's probably the first one in history that's that conscious. So they do things like maximizing export s, minimizing imports, increasing tariffs. That's the kind of relationship that they have with the world. It's quite trade-oriented. One of the things I'm always struck by when we're talking about this period and this place is the fact in many ways these are people with whom we can identify. They've got relatable emotions and reactions and behaviours. And then in other cases, the way in which they lived is so different from how we live today that it can sometimes be difficult to get our head around. I suppose one of the things that we will get into as we talk is the idea of brother-sister marriage. Can you talk us through this and why it was seen as an important thing in that society? Yeah, it's it's a complicated relationship, let's say the brother-sister relationship, but it does become one of the defining aspects of the Ptolemaic dynasty. Now it starts quite early on. Ptolemy I is founder of the dynasty. Now Ptolemy II then takes rule. His sister, Arsine , is married to one of Alexander's generals at fifteen, Lysimachus. Now Lysimachus dies in battle about twenty years later, and then her half brother kills her sons, so she decides to she was in Macedon and decides to seek refuge with her full brother Ptolemy II. So she goes back to Alexandria twenty years later at 35. And it's at that stage that she seems to tell Ptolemy II that his wife is plotting against him and seems to convince him that they should be married. So that's to kind of cement their power during a time of upheaval regionally . I've got a few sort of thoughts on that. Number one is if they wanted to sleep with each other, I don't think they would have announced that. So obviously there's a reason to announce it. Number two, if he wanted to make her queen, he didn't need to get married to her. So obviously there's a reason for that. And I my sense is that it's to ensure that she's higher in the hierarchy than his first wife, because it's also a polygamous relationship. So those are a couple of the the the things we we should probably bear in mind. Also, they don't procreate. It's not until Ptolemy IV that that happens and we get Ptolemy the Fift. And something that's really important to remember is it's not normal, even for the people of the time , but that it's not normal for humans. It's actually normal for gods, both Greek and Egyptian, because we have Zeus and Hero, we have Osiris and Isis. So in a way, they're showing their power and they're also showing that they have divine qualities by doing it. So it was a tool to represent their powerfulness by relating themselves to the gods. Absolutely, yeah. Yeah. Cementing their power and both literally, because they're in charge, and symbolically through the link with the divine. Having established this wider context, can you tell us about Cleopatra's parents? Who were they? Can you introduce us to them? Yes, so her father is another Ptolemy. Surprise, surprise. It's Ptolemy the Twelfth, he was known as Ptolemy Aulites, which means the flute player, Sabina who played the flute, who was also known as Ptolemy the Illegitimate, let's say, for reasons that we'll probably come on to. So he marries Trophania , who becomes Cleopatra V . We don't know much about Cleopatra V , so she could be his sister, she could be his half-sister, she could be his cousin. She's only mentioned on a few papyri, and actually that scarcity of of references suggests that she might not have had royal lineage necessarily. I mean th there's a possibility that Cleopatra's mother Something that I wanted to ask you, and we can come back to this as well, is this question of how we know about these people and what they did. What are the main sources that we can draw on with any degree of confidence to understand these these sort of facts and these people. With the Ptolemies it's a lot of the stella, you know, Estella inscriptions, whether in temples, slabs that have been found, the most famous of which is the Rosetta Stone. We mentioned the first Ptolemy born of a sibling marriage, Ptolemy V. Well, the Rosetta Stone is about Ptolemy V being the king. So those will be the main sources, and unfortunately, a lot of sources have been lost because the Library of Alexandria would have also had histories that have been destroyed. Having met her parents, let's meet her siblings. Who among these brothers and sisters do we need to know about Well we know that Ptolemy XII and Cleopatra V Veronike the Fourth. So we certainly know that Veronique was her sister, maybe her half sister. And then we also have Ptolemy the Second also has four children whose mothers are unconfirmed, let's say. So very original names here: Ptolemy the Thirteenth and Ptolemy the Fourteenth. So two boys and two girls, Arsineway and Cleopatra, the one we're talking about. They all come up in the story in one way or another. So we all keep their names in our minds and we'll come back to those as the story unfolds. Having talked about the sort of the family context of this story, we should talk about the physical location. Your fantastic book on Alexandria has the subtitle The City That Changed the World. Can you tell us about this place and give us a sense of it as a city and its importance? So founded in the fourth century BC, it's on the Mediterranean. So it's an intersection between three continents, Africa, Asia, and Europe. It's got the link with the Hellenistic world through Alexander and Ptolemy, and it's got a link with Egypt. Egypt is an old civilization. When Alexandria is founded, so the time of Alexander the Great and Ptolemy I , it's actually , let's say, halfway between the building of the pyramids and our present day. Wow. And just to put that into context, because we're talking about Cleopatra, Cleopatra is closer in time to the invention of the iPhone than she is So that's how old and established Egypt is. So Alexandria, by the time of Cleopatra, has gone through some really fantastic phases as a city. It's become a trade hub for the region, one of the busiest ports in the region. It's that link between different cultures because a lot of people arrive by sea to Alexandria and one of the founding principles of it was the different people could come together to live in relative tolerance in order to make it an economic hub. And so we see people coming from the Levant, lots of Jews coming from the Holy Land, people coming from the south from Nubia, Greeks, Romans, and so on, even evidence of Indians coming into Alexandria in its first years. And then the other aspect of Alexandria that's important is the library and research centre. So Ptolemy I and Ptolemy II, Cleopatra's ancestors, bet on this idea that knowledge equals power. That if they could gather all of the world's knowledge and look after it and then in their research centre next door create knowledge and disseminate knowledge, then they could wield soft power. And to a large extent that's worked. Because Alexandria was a place where great inventions were made, huge advances in scholarship, scholars from all around the region would come and reside there and study there. So in many ways it was ahead of its time and I imagine it was like stepping into the future for many people as they arrived and were welcomed by the Ferris Lighthouse, which was one of the ancient wonders of the world . Did the existence of this center of learning contribute to the atmosphere of the city? Do we get a sense of what that would have been like? I think it was something like a university town, what we might think of these days, like an Oxford or a Bologna, because there's evidence that the library was overstocked, had hundreds of thousands of scrolls, estimates go seven hundred thousand, maybe more, and so they had lots of little daughter libraries sort of pop around the city. There was also an obsession with with scrolls, with books at the time. So the Ptolemies would search ships, for example, who docked into the port, not for contraband, but for books, and if the a book was found it would be taken to the library and copied, and in all likelihood the copy would be going back to the owner. They wrote to foreign rulers to try to get books as well. They even at a certain stage embargoed the export of papyrus so that rival libraries can't keep up. Wow. So there is a sense that that kind of knowledge was very important in the city. I'd say as time went on, some people might have liked it less fr from the general population, because these scholars lived rent free, tax free, with rising prices and rising taxes, that's not necessarily a good thing for the for the for the public. So there must have been some periods where the general public was wary of quite the amount of investment that was going into this state endeavor, which is the library and research center. This is really interesting and it's really good to get such a detailed context to the world in which Cleopatra would emerge. What do we know So she would have been raised in the royal quarter. The royal quarter we know included the library and research centre, interestingly. One of the earlier Ptolemies, for example, had built a private zoo there. So we assume she had pets. They had their own royal port as well, and and they had these what we now call barges, but that image of a barge is probably quite romanticiedz. I think these were like the super yachts of the time. So she would have grown up around that. Alexandria had some really amazing inventors, like Keron of Alexandria and others, who invented dancing puppets, that kind of thing. So she would have had really nice toys, I assume. Pastimes, I'm guessing she would have liked dancing. As a princess, she would have had a private tutor, and there was for a long period the head librarian. It's a kind of ministerial role, and he kind of doubled as the tutor for the prince and princess as well. And one important thing about her early life is that cle opatra, beloved of her father, that's the name. I think her father took her under his wing, and we get a sense of that because her father actually goes to Rome to seek some support from there, financial support , military support, that kind of thing. And when he goes, he takes Cleopatra with him. And Cleopatra's about eleven at that time, and she stays in Rome till she's about fourteen. So she has that experience as well. And it's really interesting to think about the interconnectedness of the world at that time that she was able to go and spend several years living somewhere else. It's also really striking that we can sort of work out quite a lot about her life from quite an early age. Yeah, I think some of it is patching together aspects of the city of Alexandria. I think one of the important ways of understanding Cleopatra 's early life is understanding the culture of the Ptolemies and the culture of the city, and that's probably how we can patch things together. But we do know, for example, that uh her father was hosted by Pompey in Rome, so that's one one detail that we can we can be confident about. Can you tell us a bit about Pompey? Who was who is he? So he was one of Caesar's men. There's a certain stage where he he and Caesar have a a a slightly more difficult relationship. He's obviously a person who has huge ambitions in Rome and he's integral to to the rise of Rome as well. I mean Cleopatra we know that she's around those kind of powerful people We've talked a bit there about the Great Library. Is it true that Cleopatra was the only member of the Ptolemies to learn to communicate in the language that the Egyptian people used. And can you tell us a bit more about her education? So as we said, with the exception of those three years, she's in Alexandria, so the tutor she would have had is Philostratos. He would have taught her things like literature, oratory skills, classics. There's one particular stone slab that suggests she may have dressed as a male at certain times of her childhood, so that she can learn specific subjects, which probably like philosophy, rhetoric, maybe, that kind of thing. Her language learning is a fascinating aspect of her. You know, Plutarch writes that she speaks about a dozen languages, which is amazing. He says she doesn't need an interpreter for those for those languages. In terms of those languages, I think it's important to think about Alexandrian Greek, Koini Greek. So Alexand ria develops its own kind of dialect of Greek, which actually it's thought as someone like Jesus would have spoken. And so that would be the main language. So Cleopatra doesn't only speak Egyptian, which I'll come on to. She also speaks the original sort of Macedonian language of her forefathers, which I think is fascinating. So that was a Hellenistic language that was abandoned, so to speak, by some of her parents and grandparents, because they preferred Alexandrian Greek. So I think she has this kind of nostalgia and knowledge of the greatness of the Ptolemaic dynasty in its early days by learning to speak that Hellenistic language. As for Egyptian, absolutely, it's it's it says so much about her that she learnt Egyptian because that was seen as a more commoner style language. From what we know, she probably is the first Ptolemy to to learn Egyptian. So it says that she wanted to rule as an Egyptian queen, not just as a Hellenistic queen. I I think she wanted to win the respect of the population and of the Egyptian priesthood, which was very influential as well. So that choice does tell us a great deal about her personality, you think? I I think so. Both both learning the Macedonian and the Egyptian tells us about her, that she understands the the greatness of Ptolemaic dynasty, that she wants to be an Egyptian queen. And we get that sense with other stuff as well. We think she wore both Greek and Egyptian attire, for example, so she's she's going for that universal kind of queen figure. Do you think there's anything else we need to understand about the way gender was constructed at this point in time to help us make sense of her power, either at this point in the story Yeah, and it's kind of related to to her family. I think the fact we know more about her father than her mother is telling. That immediately suggests a sort of patriarchal setup . The fact that her sister usurps her father suggests that actually women can rule and women held a lot of power within the Ptolemaic dynasty. So a bit on both sides there. And is there anything else that you think we need to understand about young Cleopatra to make sense of what's going to happen next? I think it's related to her family. It's those similar two points. The first is about her mother, that on a human level, we're unsure who her mother is, whether she even was raised by her mother or with her mother. So Cleopatra V disappears from records suddenly and she disappears in sixty-nine BC, which is the same year that Cleopatra is born. So did she die in childbirth? Did she get exiled or or assassinated? Is it not her mother? So there's a human element there. The other important context would be about her father. We said he takes her to Rome, he takes her under his wing and so on. But what we have to remember is when he takes her to Rome with him in fifty seven BC , her sister usurps him, and that's an important development. So her father is usurped by Berenice, so she witnesses that. She witnesses that when she goes away, her sister usurps the throne from her father. And I think that's an immediate kind of red red flag, isn't it? It's an alarm bell for me about what she's witnessing when she's just turned teenager. And we get a sense even from this point that this is a family built on really shifting sands that at any point things could change course or things could happen that you're not completely control of. Absolutely, with the added complexity of the Romans as well. The father's not the best financial planner, let's say. The treasury's struggling, and there's there's all sorts of power grabbing happening in the family, and he ends up seeking the support of Rome through loans and it's interesting because he also bribes the Romans to help him. So he's loaning money from the Romans and then using it to bribe Romans, which is not a good tactic. And so when he goes to Rome, they obviously already have some grip over Egypt through that. So I think that that's that's probably one of the key developments. And and and the fact that in order to go back to Egypt, he uses a Roman army to help him go back to Egy pt. So we're already starting to establish some of the currents and some of the characters who are gonna go on to be important. There's one figure who makes his first appearance at this point in the story, and that's Mark Antony. Can you introduce us to him and tell us when him and Cleopatra first met? So when her father is in Rome, he tries to get the Romans to invade Alexandria for him, so that he can go back , take Egypt back from his daughter. And they do so in in fifty-five BC. And the Roman cavalry that enters Alexandria is led by a commoner called Mark Antony. And as the leader of that cavalry, I think Cleopatra may have met him at that time. He was still in his late twenties at the time. She would have been a teenager. He's in his late twenti es. But essentially he's a person who's gone up the ranks. He's he's a self-made military man. So we're drawing to a close with this first episode. There's players on the board, things are starting to take shape. There's one more key moment we should talk about, which was in 52 BC, when Cleopatra was still in her teens, her father made a decision, made an announcement that was to shape what was going to come ne xt. Can you just talk us through what happened? So they go back to Alexandria in 55 BC. Her father takes control again, thanks to the help of the Romans, and he executes his daughter, her sister. About three years later then, his health is deteriorating, and he announces that Cleopatra is co reg ent. Co regent means she's ruling with him, and it's a bold move because the co regent was often a spo use. On this occasion he obviously trusts her, and so she becomes co ruler, so to speak, with her father. At that stage she's only seventeen, and about a year later, Ptolemy the twelfth dies and Cleopatra is at the hell. And in the next episode, we're going to be talking about her rise to power and some of the challenges she faced and what happened next. But for now, Islam, thanks so much for being here . Thank you for listening to the first episode in our four-part series on Cleopatra's Life and World. In the next episode, we'll be charting how Cleopatra rose to power, so do join me for that. And if you've enjoyed this episode and want to go beyond the podcast, you can visit the History Extra app, where I've created a list of wider content that explores the life and afterlife of this fascinating figure. You can find a link to that in the episode description. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Because behind every headline is a bottom line. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. And when you see the money side, you understand what others miss. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com . 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