A new exhibition on the life and afterlife of the ancient Egyptian queen Cleopatra, “The Mystery of Cleopatra,” opened at the Arab World Institute in Paris on 11 June and runs until 11 January next year.
While it would be too much to expect any single exhibition to present a solution to the “mystery” of Cleopatra, even one on this extensive scale, it does present material that might help visitors make up their minds about this last ancient Egyptian ruler who even though not of native origin fought hard to prevent the country she ruled from being swallowed up by the Roman Empire in the first century BCE.
Born in 69 at a time when Egypt, like the rest of the Eastern Mediterranean, was being hungrily eyed by Rome, Cleopatra ascended to the Egyptian throne in 51 as co-ruler with her younger brother Ptolemy XIII in an arrangement typical of the Ptolemaic Dynasty that had ruled the country since its conquest by Alexander the Great in 332. These were difficult years for the Dynasty owing to internal dissension and the growing power of Rome, and there may have been few observers at the time who expected the arrangement to last.
Cleopatra’s achievement in keeping her throne for as long as she did might be seen as the first mystery of her career, though the evidence suggests that there was little that was mysterious about her political manoeuvering and that she was simply if not more ruthless than perhaps just more quick-witted than her peers. There was little that Egypt’s Ptolemaic rulers would not do to keep their thrones, and Cleopatra probably owed more to her ability to turn situations to her advantage and outwit her rivals than to any novelty in the means she employed.
These could include civil war, and Cleopatra got rid of her brother in 47 by allying herself with the Roman general Julius Caesar, in Egypt following the defeat of his rival Pompey in Greece earlier in the same year. She used Caesar both to dispose of Ptolemy and to have herself installed alone on the Egyptian throne. So successful was this strategy, perhaps a mixture of hard-nosed realpolitik and, broadly speaking, womanly wiles, that she later tried the same thing on another visiting Roman general, Mark Antony, though this time with unhappy results.
Cleopatra was not in a position of strength in the late 50s and early 40s BCE, but she managed to turn the situation around by playing on what seem to have been the emotional vulnerabilities of Roman generals not ordinarily known to have a sentimental side. Her liaison with Caesar brought her security and a son by the leading Roman politician of the day. Her later liaison with Antony, after Caesar’s assassination seen as the new leading man, went wrong because she underestimated Caesar’s nephew Octavian, the future Emperor Augustus, who defeated them both at the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE.
When Cleopatra first met Caesar in 47, the latter was known less for his romantic affairs and more for the ruthlessness that had made him the conqueror of Gaul, most of present-day France, between 58 and 50 BCE. As a member of the so-called First Triumvirate with Pompey and Crassus, a cabal of powerful generals, Caesar had shown little or no restraint in pursuing his own ends, fundamentally weakening the Roman state as he did so and in due course eliminating his rivals in a series of civil wars.
When Cleopatra later met Caesar’s successor Antony, with Octavian a member of the Second Triumvirate of generals that divided up the Roman world, she somehow also managed to take advantage of the situation. Like in the earlier case of Caesar, she had children by Antony and persuaded him not only to use Roman power to guarantee her position on the Egyptian throne but also to make her the ruler of other territories.
Perhaps this ability to turn things to her advantage from a position of apparent weakness is part of the mystery of Cleopatra, using what must have been her considerable charms to persuade her Roman interlocutors to guarantee her political position and even to extend her realm. Another part of the mystery may have to do with motives. While Cleopatra, in this respect at least a true representative of the Ptolemaic Dynasty, was prepared to use unorthodox methods to secure her throne, there have always been questions about whether this exhausted them.
Cleopatra was 21 when she met Caesar in 47. He was 51. When she met Antony in 41, she was in her late twenties, and he was in his early forties. The two relationships, though clearly similar in some respects, were significantly different in others, notably because of the less pronounced gap in age.
The surviving sources from the period, all of them written by Roman authors and unsympathetic towards Cleopatra, are in little doubt that she manipulated Caesar, though she could hardly have contributed to his downfall. Antony, on the other hand, later airbrushed out of Roman history, is more strongly censured since on the Roman view he effectively threw away his position in Rome for his relationship with Cleopatra.
No one can ever know the truth about Cleopatra’s relationship with Antony. Was she using him to attain security for herself and her country, perhaps in a similar way to her earlier strategy with Caesar? Would she have abandoned Antony and directed her attention towards Octavian, if there had been any prospect of such a change of sides bringing her the security she wanted, even at the cost of so spectacular a betrayal?
Even supposing that Cleopatra’s was a case of divided loyalties, with her being willing to ditch not one but two Roman generals if they became liabilities to her Egyptian cause, could there have been a different outcome to the defeat at Actium, perhaps with Caesarion, Cleopatra’s son by Caesar, installed on the Egyptian throne?
Though of course this did not happen, could it have done, even after the debacle with Antony, if she had stepped aside?
Life and afterlife: The exhibition opens with an overview of the political situation in Egypt at Cleopatra’s accession illustrated with objects from the time.
Unfairly traduced as the corruptor of Roman generals in the ancient sources, Cleopatra was a “shrewd diplomat” and “competent head of state,” the texts in this part of the exhibition say, adding that “she rallied Egyptian and Greek priests to her cause [of securing Egypt’s independence], supporting temple construction and granting financial privileges. She issued a series of decrees protecting the peasants and punishing corrupt officials.”
The exhibition does not contain copies of these decrees or say much about temple construction, though it does point out that one of the most important contemporary representations of Cleopatra is at the Temple of Hathor at Dendera in Upper Egypt where she is shown in a wall relief with Caesarion. There are also some portrait busts in the exhibition that may or may not be of Cleopatra but not the famous bust said to be of her in the Altes Museum in Berlin.
This first part of the exhibition is perhaps most valuable for showing on what slender foundations any true estimate of Cleopatra must unfortunately be built. The main sources are all by Roman authors, and their focus, xenophobic and misogynistic, is uniformly hostile, not only originating what the exhibition calls the “black legend” of Cleopatra but also showing no interest in the real nature of her rule.
It is Cleopatra’s relationship with Rome that counts, and this becomes if anything only more apparent in the exhibition’s second part, which is on Cleopatra’s afterlife in mostly Western culture. While this includes many representations of Cleopatra by Western artists from the early modern period onwards, with there being a kind of rash of them in the late 19th century when Cleopatra’s reputation as a decadent femme fatale overlapped with European orientalist painting, it is striking how these reproduce the same restricted repertoire.
Cleopatra is shown applying an asp or asps to her breast in her famous bid to commit suicide following defeat at the hands of Octavian, a story told by the 1st-century CE Greek historian Plutarch in his Life of Antony. She is shown looking down from her palace in Alexandria as the body of Antony is hauled up to her, also a story told by Plutarch, and she is shown having herself delivered to Caesar wrapped in a carpet, a story told by Plutarch in his Life of Caesar.
A section looks at Cleopatra’s representation in Western films, and again the episodes chosen are almost inevitably those first told by Plutarch, since they are those that best convey what he identified as the main components of Cleopatra’s character – her magnificence and vulnerability, her calculation and coquettishness despite what may have been outbursts of sincerity, her volatility, and what may well have been her nobility, imagination, and generosity, originally contrasted with Roman oafishness and narrowness, seen in the stupidity of Antony and the coldness of Octavian.
There are clips of the Italian actress Sophia Loren as Cleopatra in a forgettable 1953 film Due notti con Cleopatra (Two Nights with Cleopatra), as well as of the English actress Elizabeth Taylor in the 1963 film Cleopatra, at the time the most expensive film ever made and probably still one of the most boring. Looking at this material, it is hard not to feel that Cleopatra has not been well served by film directors, certainly when compared with the portrait of her supplied by Shakespeare in his play Antony and Cleopatra, a reworking of Plutarch.
Among the most interesting parts of this section is the account of the rediscovery of Cleopatra in the West in the early modern period, made possible by the translation of the sources. Plutarch’s works were rediscovered by European scholars in the late 15th century and translated into French and English at the end of the 16th, just in time for Shakespeare to use them for his plays. Along with some hints found in other ancient writings, it was this version of Cleopatra that shaped the views of all subsequent Western artists and writers.
Something rather different happened in the Islamic world, where the memory of Cleopatra was not lost in the same way as it was in Europe and where one finds intriguing references to the ancient Egyptian queen in writings from as early as the 9th century onwards, all of which present her in very different terms.
The 10th-century Abbasid bibliographer Ibn al-Nadim mentions Cleopatra in his Kitab al-Fihrist, for example, a listing of the contents of the Baghdad libraries of his time. The 9th-century Egyptian historian Ibn Abdel-Ḥakam similarly mentions Cleopatra in his Futuh misr wa’l-maghrib wa’l-andalus, an account of the Arab conquest of Egypt and North Africa, and the 9th-century Baghdad historian al-Masudi refers to her in his wide-ranging history the Muruj al-Dhahab (Meadows of Gold). There is also the strange case of the 12th-century writer Murtada Ibn al-Khafif’s “Egyptian History,” which today survives only in a French translation and features a character identified as Cleopatra.
While these Arab accounts contain inaccuracies, the exhibition says – Ibn al-Nadim apparently says Cleopatra wrote a book on alchemy, and Abdel-Hakam says she built the Alexandria Lighthouse – it describes them as being far more respectful of Cleopatra’s character, ignoring her liaisons with Antony and Caesar and presenting her as an enlightened and careful ruler.
Le mystère Cléopâtre, Institut du Monde arabe, Paris, until 11 January 2026.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 14 August, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
Short link: