Of all the queens who have ever ruled, none has so completely escaped the boundaries of history to become legend as Cleopatra VII, the last sovereign ruler of ancient Egypt.
Her story has been told and retold for more than two millennia by Roman generals, Greek historians, Renaissance playwrights, Hollywood filmmakers, and now by a new generation captivated by her enduring enigma. She is remembered as the woman who nearly changed the course of the ancient world, and, in many respects, did so.
What is it that has kept Cleopatra alive in humanity’s imagination for so long? Was it her celebrated beauty, the irresistible allure that legend claims captivated the most powerful men of her age? Or was it something far more formidable: a brilliant political mind, mastery of multiple languages, and exceptional diplomatic skill that enabled a young queen, once exiled from her own throne, to charm the two most powerful men in Rome and build an empire of influence that her enemies feared more than any army?
I believe that it was the rarest of combinations — Cleopatra possessed an exceptional intellect matched by remarkable charisma, and she wielded both with the confidence of a ruler who understood power better than most of her contemporaries. Long after her kingdom disappeared and her empire fell, Cleopatra herself never truly vanished. She became immortal, not only in history, but in myth.
She is, in every sense, Egypt’s greatest gift to the world’s imagination. For more than 2,000 years, historians, poets, playwrights, and artists have wrestled with her legacy. Some fell under her spell, immortalising her in verse, sculpture, and painting. Others despised her and committed their prejudice to the historical record. She has been glorified and condemned, mythologised and diminished. But she has never, not once, been forgotten.
Before we can go through Cleopatra’s life, we must reckon honestly with the sources that describe it and acknowledge their profound limitations. The two figures who have done most to shape our image of her are the ancient Greek historian Plutarch and Shakespeare, and neither can be considered an impartial witness.
Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, as she appears in his play Antony and Cleopatra, is, in many ways, the finest literary portrait ever drawn of her: passionate, regal, fiercely Egyptian, and utterly commanding. He gave her the words that have echoed across four centuries, and, I believe, captured something closer to the truth of her character than the Roman sources ever did. For Shakespeare understood that she was not merely a seductress, but a queen, a patriot, and a woman of extraordinary will.
Plutarch is a different matter. Writing in the first and second centuries CE more than a century after Cleopatra’s death and drawing heavily on Roman sources hostile to her memory, he could not escape the influence of the propaganda Octavian, later the Roman Emperor Augustus, had carefully crafted to justify his war against her.
In Octavian’s narrative, Cleopatra was not a sovereign ruler defending her kingdom, but an Eastern temptress who had corrupted Rome’s greatest general Mark Antony and threatened the republic itself. Plutarch absorbed these prejudices, and they are reflected throughout his account. We must therefore read everything written about this remarkable queen with considerable caution. Much of what has come down to us is neither innocent nor impartial.
Cleopatra herself left no memoir, no personal account, and no document in her own hand that has survived. The woman who could speak nine languages, Egyptian, Greek, Latin, Ethiopian, Hebrew, Aramaic, and others, and who was the first ruler of the Ptolemaic Dynasty to learn the language of her own people, comes down to us almost entirely through the eyes of those who either feared her or desired her.
That fact alone should give us pause before accepting any single account of her life as definitive.
POWER: Cleopatra came to power as the joint ruler of Egypt alongside her younger brother, Ptolemy XIII, in accordance with the wishes of their father, Ptolemy XII.
He understood that Egyptian law and political tradition made it difficult for a woman to rule alone, and his will bound the siblings together in what was intended to be a shared monarchy. It was not. The arrangement quickly descended into open conflict, and Cleopatra was driven from the throne into exile as a queen without a kingdom and one forced to seek allies in the desert borderlands of Egypt.
It was at this moment of vulnerability that Cleopatra made the decision that would define her life. The Roman general Julius Caesar had arrived in Alexandria, the most powerful man in the world, pursuing his defeated rival, Pompey. Cleopatra immediately recognised that Caesar was the only man capable of restoring her to the throne, and she acted with the boldness that would come to define her political career.
The story of how she arranged to be smuggled into the palace wrapped in a carpet or a linen sack, according to different accounts, and presented before Caesar remains one of the great dramatic episodes of antiquity. Plutarch recounts it beautifully. I believe there is an essential truth to the story, even if some of the details have been embellished: that Cleopatra appeared before Caesar without warning or ceremony, and that the impression she made on him was both immediate and decisive.
Caesar intervened on Cleopatra’s behalf, resolved the conflict with Ptolemy XIII, and restored her to the throne. More than that, she became Caesar’s companion and bore him a son, Caesarion, or “Little Caesar”, whom she presented to the world as the heir to both Egypt and Rome.
The evidence of her intention is carved in stone. On the great façade of the Temple of Hathor at Dendera in Upper Egypt, Cleopatra is depicted beside her son in a monumental royal relief, affirming her legitimacy in the ancient Egyptian tradition. She appears before the gods, queenly and serene. It remains one of the most powerful images of female political authority that antiquity has left us.
Cleopatra later travelled with Caesar to Rome, where she lived for a time. But Rome did not welcome her. Many Romans regarded the Egyptian queen with open suspicion and hostility, an Eastern foreigner who had seduced their greatest general and, in their eyes, threatened the integrity of the Republic. When Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March in 44 BCE, Cleopatra returned to Egypt with Caesarion and began the next chapter of her extraordinary life.
In the power struggle that followed Caesar’s death, the Roman world was divided between Octavian in the West and Mark Antony in the East. Antony had heard much about the woman who had captivated Caesar and wanted to meet her. His initial motives may well have been political, even punitive. Cleopatra had not offered unqualified support during the civil wars that followed Caesar’s assassination, and Antony may have intended to call her to account. He summoned her to appear before him.
She came, but entirely on her own terms. Their meeting took place aboard a magnificent vessel off the coast of Tarsus, on the southern shore of Asia Minor. Plutarch’s description of the scene, the gilded stern, the purple sails, the silver oars, the perfumed breezes, and Cleopatra reclining beneath a canopy of cloth of gold, became one of the most celebrated passages in all of ancient literature.
Shakespeare borrowed it almost word for word. Whether every detail is accurate or not, the encounter was clearly staggering in its effect. Mark Antony, the hardened soldier and Roman triumvir, fell in love with the queen of Egypt.
Mark Antony abandoned Rome and came to live with Cleopatra in Alexandria. Together, they built a life, had children, and forged a relationship that was both a profound love affair and a formidable political alliance. But Antony was married to Octavia, the sister of Octavian himself, and what had taken place was seen in Rome as both a personal affront and a political provocation of the gravest kind.
The rupture was irreparable. From that moment, the great confrontation became inevitable in a conflict that would culminate in the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE and seal the fate of Egypt, the Ptolemaic Dynasty, and Cleopatra herself.
The accounts of Actium and its aftermath are among the most contested in ancient history. Did Cleopatra withdraw her fleet during the battle, leaving Mark Antony exposed? Did she send him a false message claiming that she had died, causing him to take his own life in despair? Was she guilty of betrayal, or was her withdrawal a calculated military and political manoeuvre intended to preserve the fleet for future resistance?
The ancient sources disagree. I am not certain that we will ever know the full truth of what passed between them in those final, desperate days.
ENDING: What we do know is this: Mark Antony died by his own hand after receiving word, whether true or false, that Cleopatra was dead.
Cleopatra herself then fell into the hands of Octavian, who had very specific plans for her. He intended to take her to Rome and display her in chains during his triumphal procession, the ultimate humiliation for a conquered monarch, paraded as a trophy before the Roman people.
That Cleopatra would not permit. The woman who had sat upon the throne of the Pharaohs, who had borne Caesar’s heir, and who had stood as an equal before the most powerful men of her age would not allow herself to be exhibited like a prize animal in another man’s victory parade.
And so, according to the most celebrated account, she chose death. The story of Cleopatra’s end, the Egyptian queen reclining in her chamber, an asp at her breast, the sacred cobra, symbol of Egyptian royal divinity, delivering its fatal bite, is one of the most enduring images of all antiquity.
I must be honest: I find the story compelling in its symbolism, but difficult to verify as historical fact. She may well have died by poison, but the details of the method remain genuinely uncertain. Yet the image of a queen who chose, above all else, the sovereignty of her own death, who refused to be defined by Octavian’s triumph, rings entirely true to everything we know of her character.
With her death in 30 BCE, Cleopatra VII passed from history into legend. But one question has persistently refused to be answered: where is she buried?
Some scholars believe her tomb was constructed near her palace in Alexandria and that it now lies beneath the waters of the eastern Mediterranean, submerged by the coastal subsidence that has claimed much of ancient Alexandria over the centuries. For a long time, this was where the inquiry largely rested, a beautiful, melancholy theory, picturing the last queen of Egypt lying undiscovered beneath the waves.
Then came Kathleen Martinez, a scholar and archaeologist from the Dominican Republic, with a different and more specific proposition: that Cleopatra was buried in the Temple of Taposiris Magna west of Alexandria inside the sacred precinct dedicated to the god Osiris.
I must confess that when Martinez first explained her theory to me, I was not immediately persuaded. In the long history of Egyptian and Ptolemaic burial practices, there is no firm precedent for a Pharaoh or monarch being interred within a functioning temple in this way. Moreover, Octavian, who took control of Egypt after Actium and was not a man given to sentimental gestures towards his defeated enemies, would hardly have been eager to allow his vanquished rivals to rest in a place of such honour.
And yet, I came to see that the search itself had a value beyond the purely archaeological. At the time Martinez put forward her theory, Egypt was struggling to recover from the devastating impact that terrorism had inflicted on its tourism industry. Announcing a search for Cleopatra’s tomb, one of the most famous figures in human history, had the potential to draw the world’s attention back to Egypt’s antiquities at a critical moment.
Excavations at Taposiris Magna duly began under the supervision of the Ministry of Antiquities. The world followed the search with growing interest, and the site did not disappoint. Coins bearing Cleopatra’s name, statuary, remarkable architectural remains, and buried artefacts have all confirmed that Taposiris Magna was a place of genuine religious significance during the Ptolemaic period and that it has not yet yielded all its secrets.
The hold that Cleopatra exercises over the human imagination has only deepened with time. Literature, theatre, painting, and cinema have all played their part in sustaining and transforming her image. Shakespeare gave her immortal verse. The French painter Gérôme gave her a visual world. And Hollywood gave her the actress Elizabeth Taylor.
I remember vividly the day the late and brilliant Egyptian writer Kamal Al-Mallakh invited me, then a young inspector of antiquities at the Pyramids, to meet Elizabeth Taylor during her visit to Giza. She had already played Cleopatra in the legendary 1963 film opposite Richard Burton in a production so extravagant and so charged with real-life drama, for Taylor and Burton famously fell in love during the shoot, that it became part of the legend of Cleopatra itself.
When I saw Taylor standing before the Pyramids, I felt for a moment as though the boundary between history and cinema had dissolved entirely. The film had succeeded in doing something remarkable: it had given the world a living face for Cleopatra, one so vivid and so persuasive that it became, for an entire generation, inseparable from the historical woman.
And still the story continues. Today, we hear of a new film in the making, with Angelina Jolie set to portray the queen for a new generation. The announcement alone generated global attention, proof, if any were needed, that Cleopatra’s power to fascinate has not diminished by a single degree across 2,000 years.
Each new portrait of her, whether in marble, on canvas, on stage, or on screen, adds another layer to the legend without exhausting it.
What is it that makes her so inexhaustible? I think it is this: Cleopatra was not simply a beautiful woman who attracted powerful men. She was a ruler of genuine brilliance who navigated one of the most treacherous political landscapes in the history of the ancient world, a small kingdom caught between the hammer of Rome and the memories of a great empire.
She fought with every weapon available to her: diplomacy, intelligence, alliance, charm, and courage. She succeeded for longer than most of her contemporaries thought possible. And when the end came, she met it on her own terms. That is the kind of story that does not fade.
Cleopatra: the enchantress of hearts. The queen who turned history into legend. The woman who never really died.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 9 July, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.
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