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Not Egyptian and no great beauty: what Cleopatra actually looked like

Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra in Joseph L Mankiewicz's 1963 film - Getty
Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra in Joseph L Mankiewicz's 1963 film - Getty

Cleopatra has been making waves. More than 2,000 years after her death, the face that sunk the Roman Republic is once again causing a diplomatic ruckus.

Last month, the Egyptian antiquities ministry launched a remarkable attack on Netflix over the streamer’s new series Queen Cleopatra. Their contention wasn’t that the Jada Pinkett Smith-produced documentary was a bit naff – it most certainly is – but that it was a “falsification of Egyptian history and a blatant historical misconception”.

Netflix’s crime? Casting a black actress, British soap star Adele James, as the notorious queen. So with all the forbearance of Italians confronted with a plate of seafood linguine showered in parmesan, Egyptian MPs promptly called for Netflix to be banned entirely. The casting, they argued, was “an attack on family values”. The story of Cleopatra, of course, is otherwise flush with cosy household homilies.

Yet not three years ago, internet opinion-havers were up in arms for precisely the opposite reason. That was when it was announced Israeli actress Gal Gadot would be playing Cleopatra in an as-yet-unreleased film helmed by Patty Jenkins, who directed Gadot in Wonder Woman. Gadot’s take promised to “bring the story of Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, to the big screen in a way she’s never been seen before... To tell her story for the first time through women's eyes.”

Despite this laudable intention, some outraged commentators accused the film’s backers of white-washing one of the most famous women in history. The very criticism Netflix’s film purported to address.

So what did Cleopatra look like? Awkwardly for both Netflix and the Egyptian government, no one really knows. What we think we know of Cleopatra is largely a fantasy of a succession of male writers – Plutarch, Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw – constructed over millennia. The evidence we do have about her appearance is flimsy, at best.

“The actual facts that we have about Cleopatra, the contemporary evidence, is pretty sparse,” says Toby Wilkinson, Professor of Egyptology and Deputy Vice Chancellor at the University of Lincoln.

“Most of what we have is other peoples’ views of her which were hugely coloured by their particular political stance and then the whole web of myths that grew up around her, which are of course more powerful in a sense than the few historical facts that we’ve got.”

No contemporary accounts of Cleopatra survive and none of those from which our traditional conceptions of her are drawn are considered particularly objective. Cleopatra as we remember her today – an Egyptian queen, an astonishing beauty, a great seducer of men, a tragic figure who took her own life with a snake – proves to be more fiction than history.

'As Egyptian as Elizabeth Taylor': Taylor in 1963's Cleopatra - Bert Stern/Conde Nast
'As Egyptian as Elizabeth Taylor': Taylor in 1963's Cleopatra - Bert Stern/Conde Nast

After all, she wasn’t even really an Egyptian. The Ptolemies, ruling dynasty of which she was a member, styled themselves as Egyptian on public monuments, hence the persistent surviving image of Cleopatra in Egyptian dress (and the famous Elizabeth Taylor look). But they were in fact foreign invaders who strictly maintained the ethnic integrity of their own line - up to and including frequent incestuous marriages. According to her most recent biographer, Stacy Schiff, ethnically Cleopatra was “approximately as Egyptian as Elizabeth Taylor”.

The Ptolemies were actually from Macedonia, a powerful state on the fringes of what we now call Ancient Greece. Alexander the Great, who invaded Egypt and overthrew its Persian rulers in 332 BC, was born there. In the power struggle following Alexander’s death, one of his most powerful generals, Ptolemy, seized Alexandria and declared himself Pharaoh. His descendants ruled there for the next three centuries – Cleopatra was the last of the line.

“There wasn’t really a concept of being Greek at that point. The Ptolemies would have identified themselves very strongly with their Macedonian homeland,” says Wilkinson.

We have very little idea what Macedonians looked like. “They probably wouldn’t have looked much like the modern Greeks,” says Wilkinson. In other words, neither Gal Gadot or Adele James are “accurate” casting for Cleopatra – because no one has a clue what “accurate” looks like. Given this context, talk of “white washing” – or its opposite – is meaningless.

A bigger problem for casting directors is Gadot and James’s beauty. For centuries, Cleopatra’s reputation as an astonishing beauty has been maintained but its provenance is dodgy at best. The legend seems to have originated with the Roman historian Cassius Dio, who declared her “a woman of surpassing beauty.” But Dio was born nearly two hundred years after Cleopatra’s death and his account of her appearance seems to have been motivated more by political considerations than anything relating to her actual appearance.

Queen in waiting: Gal Gadot in Wonder Woman: 1984 - Clay Enos
Queen in waiting: Gal Gadot in Wonder Woman: 1984 - Clay Enos

Cleopatra inherited a dynasty well on the way to calamity. The Roman Empire had turned its sights towards the fantastically wealthy corner of Africa on its doorstep and her father  Ptolemy XII had been forced to effectively mortgage Egypt for the pay-offs necessary to keep the Romans at bay. When Cleopatra took the throne, at the age of 21, the imperative to fend off the Romans had only increased.

“What does a woman ruler in that position do? What cards does she have left to play?” poses Wilkinson, in explaining the tactics behind Cleopatra’s famous love affairs with two different Roman rulers: first Julius Caesar, then Mark Anthony. (Curiously, because she had children with both men, this extraordinary fact is one of the few pieces of Cleopatra’s personal history whose truth we can be sure of.)

It was Cleopatra’s relationship with Mark Anthony that made early historical accounts of her life so susceptible to political motivation. Cleopatra sided with Anthony in the civil war between the three Triumvirs who ruled the empire after Caesar, which resulted in both their deaths, Rome’s defeat of Egypt and Octavius Caesar’s accession to emperor in 27 BC.

The Roman historians who wrote the first accounts of Cleopatra were therefore writing from the other side of history.

“It served their purposes either to belittle or to exoticise Egypt in order to bolster the Roman claim and Roman triumph in having conquered Egypt,” says Wilkinson. “You never get an unbiased account of Cleopatra.”

Not so flattering: a coin apparently depicting Cleopatra - Owen Humphreys
Not so flattering: a coin apparently depicting Cleopatra - Owen Humphreys

For instance, it suited Dio to portray her as a great beauty because it fitted into his broader construction of Anthony as enslaved to a seductive sexual temptress. The image simultaneously emasculated Anthony and cast him as a traitor, in thrall to Egypt, not Rome. Hence Dio’s account of Cleopatra as scheming and sexually voracious.

But the closer to anyone who actually saw Cleopatra we get, the flimsier the idea that she was a great beauty seems to look.

“All we’ve got to go on are some statues which are inevitably idealising and coinage, which is probably more accurate, which shows her with a very pronounced aquiline nose and a pointed chin. She does not look what we would consider to be beautiful in 21st century aesthetics,” says Wilkinson, diplomatically.

The closest to contemporary written account of Cleopatra’s appearance that we have comes from the Roman historian Plutarch, who has this to say: “Her beauty, as we are told, was in itself not altogether incomparable, nor such as to strike those who saw her.”

Accurate? Who knows: Adele James as Cleopatra in Netflix's Queen Cleopatra - Netflix
Accurate? Who knows: Adele James as Cleopatra in Netflix's Queen Cleopatra - Netflix

“She was considered powerful and of course that brings its own attraction,” says Wilkinson.

“Why did Julius Caesar sail up the Nile with Cleopatra? Not necessarily because she was beautiful in a conventional sense but because she held the keys to Egypt. That was what made her alluring.”

He continues: “The idea that you can do a film of Cleopatra that is somehow ‘accurate’... I mean, whose accuracy? Whose version of the truth are you following?” says Wilkinson.

It’s a question both Netflix and the Egyptian government would do well to ponder. For centuries, Cleopatra has been tussled over by competing powers, her image moulded to suit the agendas of the times. In a sense, then, Netflix’s series is just the latest in a long line of mythmakers to burnish the myth of Cleopatra – at the expense of the real-life ruler.

Could the real Cleopatra please stand up? Poor woman, even she doesn’t know who she is anymore.


Queen Cleopatra is on Netflix now