Book Review: Cleopatra and Egypt

There has been a plethora of books on Cleopatra lately and Sally-Ann Ashton's Cleopatra and Egypt is neither the best nor the worst. It promises well, with a cover showing a still photograph of the silent film star Theda Bara as Cleopatra. The film itself which was produced in 1917 is lost, but some still photographs survive to show the popular conception of Cleopatra a century ago. The last chapter of Ashton's Cleopatra deals with the queen's legacy, but it is the weakest in the book and does not mention Theda Bara. Ashton's main theme is what we know about Cleopatra and how we know it and Ashton provides her readers with a very useful summary of the latest research and archaeological finds.

The first chapter is titled Cleopatra--Black and Beautiful. The question of her beauty raises two further issues: what was the color of her skin, and did her nose help to shape history, if, in fact, we know what its shape was. Blaise Pascal's quotation from his Pensées is often cited: he contended that, had Cleopatra's nose been shorter, the whole history of the world would have been changed. However, Cleopatra's representations do not exhibit a consistent nose. Some portraits show a hooked beak that she seems to have been inherited from her father Ptolemy XII Auletes. There is a good example of it on a coin in the Fitzwilliam Museum, which is illustrated in Ashton's book. Not all of Cleopatra's representations show it. Quite possibly, like the Bourbon nose, it signaled her family resemblance to the Ptolemaic royal line, and hence her legitimacy. And perhaps authority too: Queen Elizabeth I of England had an equally aquiline nose, though with less of a hook. Other portraits of Cleopatra straighten her nose, but none make it small. We cannot refute Pascal by arguing that Cleopatra's nose needed no shortening, but nonetheless his famous observation is bizarre: Cleopatra's nose was the least of all the causes for the shift in the progress of world history in the last half of the first century BCE.

The question of her skin color is more problematic. Cleopatra has as much right to be called an African as King George I of Greece, a prince of Denmark, had to be called Greek, but if we are to determine her origin by her DNA, then the Ptolemaic royal house to which Cleopatra belonged was Macedonian. But her father, Ptolemy Auletes, was the son of Ptolemy IX Lathyrus and an unknown concubine. The first edition of the Cambridge Ancient History, published before Cleopatra's ancestry became controversial, noted this detour in the royal stemma, and suggested in a footnote that, if the mistress of Ptolemy IX was not Greco-Macedonian, given what we know of his career, she may have been Syrian. But recently, G. Höbl, in his History of the Ptolemaic Empire1 has put forward a hypothesis that adds a new element to the discussion. He argues that Ptolemy XII Auletes had only one legitimate child, Cleopatra Berenice, and that his other four children, including Cleopatra VII, were born to an unknown mother who could have belonged to an Egyptian priestly family. Ashton mentions the hypothesis without endorsing it.