Cleopatra what kind of woman was she

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Preview this item Preview this item. Cleopatra : what kind of a woman was she anyway?. Rating: not yet rated 0 with reviews - Be the first. Subjects Cleopatra, -- Queen of Egypt, -- B. Cleopatra, -- Queen of Egypt, -- B. More like this Similar Items. Allow this favorite library to be seen by others Keep this favorite library private.

Save Cancel. A famous example of her flair for the dramatic came in 48 B. Caesar was dazzled by the sight of the young queen in her royal garb, and the two soon became allies and lovers. Cleopatra later employed a similar bit of theater in her 41 B. When summoned to meet the Roman Triumvir in Tarsus, she is said to have arrived on a golden barge adorned with purple sails and rowed by oars made of silver. Cleopatra had been made up to look like the goddess Aphrodite, and she sat beneath a gilded canopy while attendants dressed as cupids fanned her and burned sweet-smelling incense.

Antony—who considered himself the embodiment of the Greek god Dionysus—was instantly enchanted. Cleopatra joined Julius Caesar in Rome beginning in 46 B. Cleopatra was forced to flee Rome after Caesar was stabbed to death in the Roman senate in 44 B. Cleopatra first began her legendary love affair with the Roman general Mark Antony in 41 B.

According to ancient sources, they spent the winter of B. Cleopatra eventually married Mark Antony and had three children with him, but their relationship also spawned a massive scandal in Rome. Rather than ask whether Cleopatra was beautiful , a question that cannot be answered in any event, one should ask whether she was desirable.

The plaster cast of the Vatican Cleopatra left , which was taken in the Staatliche Antikensammlungen Berlin , shows the queen to good effect and may have been sculpted when she was in Rome. Here, one can appreciate how young Cleopatra was, only about twenty-one when she first met Caesar in 48 BC. He was more than thirty years her senior and to stay in Egypt until the next year, when she gave birth to Caesarion "little Caesar".

That year too, her brother drowned in the Nile during the Alexandrian War and Cleopatra became sole ruler. She then duly married her other younger brother Ptolemy XIV but he died at her instigation in 44 BC, just months after Caesar himself had been assassinated.

Caesarian then became nominal ruler as Ptolemy XV, the last of that royal lineage, until his own death in 30 BC, just days after that of his mother. The original bust right is relegated to a corner of the Museo Gregoriano Profano, which is closed to the public because there is not the staff to supervise it.

After repeated visits, a sympathetic guard did allow supervised access for this photograph to be taken. Its placement against a back wall in front of a window does not present the queen to advantage, as can be seen from the weathered left cheek. A better perspective is provided by Walker and Higgs in the smaller picture above from the British Museum exhibition catalog which, curiously, has been reversed in printing. We stand up peerless. Cleopatra was the only Ptolemaic queen to mint coins with her own name and effigy in which she alone is portrayed , and the die cutters in Alexandria presumably were aware of her appearance.

The coin on the left was struck early in Cleopatra's reign after 51 BC , when she was, as Dio phrased it, "in the prime of her youth. This Alexandrian type is represented by a bronze eighty-drachma. It was an innovation that allowed the royal mint to assign an official denomination to a coin not otherwise related to its intrinsic value. A decade later, after Cleopatra had married Antony, the Syrian-Roman type presents a quite different profile of the queen, displaying the same hawk nose and sharp chin as her consort on the obverse, who looks equally grotesque.

This Roman style is illustrated by the silver tetradrachm above from Antioch and by denarii issued by Antony. The British Museum catalog of its exhibition Cleopatra of Egypt: From History to Myth does not have either the Berlin or Vatican bust on its cover but that of a woman thought to have modeled herself after the queen, perhaps a member of her entourage. More telling, there is no royal diadem. It was the first bust to be identified as Cleopatra based on numismatic evidence, which may account for it gracing the cover of the catalog.

Or the curators simply may have thought that it presented a more pleasing and complete portrait. In preparing the exhibit, a small black basalt statue on loan from the Hermitage Museum also was identified as depicting Cleopatra VII. He also considered Hypatia to have been devoted to "magic, astrolabes and instruments of music" and beguiling people with her satanic wiles, LXXXIV.