Cleopatra (10 page)

Soon after Cleopatra’s death her victorious rival Octavian ordered that all images of Cleopatra be destroyed. As Cleopatra was, at the time, perceived as public enemy number one, his Roman subjects were happy to comply: it is, in any case, unlikely that there were many Roman Cleopatras to be destroyed. But in Egypt, where Cleopatra’s images were cult images connected with the worship of the goddess Isis and with Cleopatra’s own personal cult, this order caused great offence. Plutarch tells us that some of her Egyptian statues were saved by the priest Archibios, who, acting either as Cleopatra’s friend or as a representative of the native priesthood, offered Octavian an irresistible 2,000 talents to preserve them. Her two-dimensional images carved high on the temple walls were difficult to destroy and so remained untouched, but the majority of her statues were indeed lost.

Those images that do survive may be divided into two very different groups which can, if considered out of context, give Cleopatra the
semblance of a severely split personality. There are images composed in the classical or Hellenistic style (but not necessarily by non-Egyptian artists) which show Cleopatra dressed as an elite Hellenistic woman, and images composed in the Egyptian style which present her as a traditional Egyptian queen bearing the time-honoured regalia designed to express political and religious power. When viewed side by side, the two styles convey a strikingly mixed message. To modern, western eyes the Hellenistic Cleopatra looks relaxed and natural, while the Egyptian Cleopatra seems stiff and artificial; there is therefore a great temptation to interpret the Hellenistic Cleopatras as true-to-life representations. This is wishful thinking. Classical portraiture was intended to convey an idealised, recognisable, often heroic representation of its subject rather than a warts-and-all snapshot. In the case of the Ptolemies, artists often included attributes intended to hint at the subject’s divinity, so that it can be difficult to distinguish a fragmentary queen from a fragmentary goddess. Hellenistic images of Cleopatra might therefore be expected to look alike because they are the official image of Cleopatra; it does not necessarily follow that they look particularly like the flesh-and-blood queen. It is highly unlikely that Cleopatra sat for each and every formal portrait, so we must assume that the majority of her images were carved from artists’ models and sketches. The standard practice of creating statue heads and bodies separately, maybe even in different workshops (the head of marble finished, perhaps, with plaster, then painted; the body of stone, wood or metal), makes accuracy of the composite whole even less certain, and accounts for the disproportionate number of recovered Ptolemaic heads.

For over 2,000 years non-experts have habitually identified any and every classical-style statue of a woman holding a snake, or standing next to a snake, or wearing a snake bracelet, as ‘Cleopatra’. This has gone hand in hand with a predictable tendency for enterprising masons to reach for their chisels and add snakes to classical statues, instantly
turning bland Aphrodites into exciting and far more valuable Cleopatras. It is only in the past century that art historians have been able to discard the fake and, or so they hope, identify genuine contemporary or near-contemporary Hellenistic Cleopatra statuary on the grounds of date and style. The identification of genuine Cleopatras is, of course, a matter of personal conviction as well as scientific proof, and a room full of expert art historians would undoubtedly produce different opinions on different pieces. Today just one Hellenistic head is more or less universally accepted as an authentic Cleopatra, with a further three heads being championed by various experts.
¹⁷

The one undisputed Cleopatra was recovered from the Villa of the Quintilii, on the Via Appia, Rome, in the late eighteenth century. Today it is housed in the Vatican Museum. Originally the head was displayed on the body of a statue of a priestess of the Roman goddess Ceres recovered from the same villa; it was not until 1933 that art historian Ludwig Curtius recognised that the head and body were not a true pair. The head has a broken nose (an over-delicate late eighteenth-century ‘restoration’ has recently been removed). It was designed to be inserted into a now-lost body, and a rough patch on one cheek and a curious stone knob on the head suggest that it was originally part of a larger statue group. Cleopatra appears as a mature woman whose hair is dressed in the ‘melon coiffure’ (sectioned and braided hair drawn back into a low bun; the name reflects the supposed resemblance to a melon segmented lengthways) worn by many upper-class Hellenistic women. Royal women topped this hairstyle with a broad diadem whose ribbons tied beneath or underneath the bun. Cleopatra has large heavy-lidded eyes, a small mouth, badly made ears, a long face, a broad forehead and a curled fringe. This fringe of kiss curls, often described as snail curls, is a defining characteristic of Cleopatra’s Hellenistic portraits and appears in a more exaggerated form on her coins.

All of Cleopatra’s coin portraits are in the Hellenistic style. These
are generally taken to be her most lifelike portraits, purely because they are the least obviously flattering. Almost sixty silver and bronze coin types have been identified, issued in Egypt, Cyprus, the cities of Syrio-Palestine, and perhaps in parts of Italy and Greece. The coins may be divided into two broad types.
¹⁸
The vast majority, minted in Egypt and Cyprus throughout her reign, show Cleopatra as a typical Ptolemaic queen, although a bronze coin minted in Cyprus that shows her nursing her infant son Caesarion, apparently represents Cleopatra as the mother goddess Isis. The reverse of these coins show Egyptian symbols. Her Romanised coins, minted late in her reign outside Egypt, show Cleopatra with Mark Antony. Here the queen appears in a slightly diminished light, not as an independent ruler, but as a client-queen of Rome and, perhaps, as part of a married couple.

Silver tetradrachm of Cleopatra VII from Askalon, dating to 50–49 when Cleopatra was feuding with her brother Ptolemy XIII.

All the coins reveal the same woman in profile: a woman whose prominent nose and pronounced chin do not suggest, to modern western eyes, a great beauty. These features tend to become
more pronounced with age, so that Cleopatra appears ‘softer’ or more conventionally attractive in the earliest coins issued in Alexandria when she was nineteen years old, while the later coins, shared with Mark Antony, show a more defined, slightly hooked aquiline nose, a strong chin and mouth and enough fat folds (politely known as Venus rings) on the neck to allow some observers to suggest that she suffered from a goitre. This older Cleopatra looks like a slightly feminised version of Mark Antony, and both resemble Auletes. Comparing statues and coins, we can see that Cleopatra inherited more than her nose from her father. Both share deep-set eyes and a firm, slightly bulbous chin; both, in fact, bear a passing and presumably deliberate resemblance to Ptolemy I. The strong nose can be traced back to Ptolemy VIII, suggesting that Cleopatra may have deliberately chosen to emphasise the one trait that unequivocally identified her as a genuine Ptolemy.

Cleopatra’s coins reflect, to a greater or lesser extent, the skills and traditions of their makers. Allowing for this, it seems entirely understandable that Cleopatra might not have wanted to appear soft and feminine on the tokens that represented her sovereignty both within Egypt and in the wider Mediterranean world. Both Cleopatra Thea (queen of Syria, and great-great-aunt to our Cleopatra) and Cleopatra III (great-grandmother to Cleopatra VII) issued coins that gave them strong, almost masculine faces and, in the absence of an accepted Hellenistic iconography representative of politically powerful femininity, Cleopatra VII might have chosen to follow their example. This tendency to an increasingly masculine appearance is obvious in the statuary of Cleopatras I–III; as the queens grow more powerful their images become less feminine, climaxing in a basalt Egyptian-style statue of Cleopatra III now housed in Vienna Museum which gives the elderly queen the appearance of an old man in an incongruously frivolous curly wig.

Modern observers have not been slow to comment on Cleopatra’s perceived lack of beauty and, in particular, on her nose, which has
been the subject of learned discussion and many jokes, culminating in Lord Berners’s 1941 novel
The Romance of the Nose
.
¹⁹
The kindest comment is perhaps that she was ‘a
belle laide
with a rather large mouth and, on some specimens, a long hooked nose which she had inherited from her father’.
²⁰
The unspoken question hovers – how did Cleopatra manage to captivate two of Rome’s greatest men if it was not by her looks? Beauty is, of course, in the eye of the beholder, and standards of beauty vary from time to time, culture to culture and person to person. Most would in any case agree that beauty, pure and stark, is far removed from sexual allure. There is general agreement that another of Egypt’s queens, the 18th Dynasty Nefertiti, possessed a beauty that appeals to every age, race and gender, but although many have marvelled before Nefertiti’s world-famous Berlin bust, few have found her in any way sexy.
²¹
The real question here is not whether we find Cleopatra beautiful, but whether Caesar found her attractive enough to sleep with. And the answer is that clearly he did. Plutarch, who of course never met her, tells us that Cleopatra’s charm lay in her demeanour, and in particular in her voice:

Dio, writing a century after Plutarch, begs to differ. His Cleopatra is beautiful, and all too well aware of the effects of her beauty. The whole private meeting has therefore been planned so that she might seduce the susceptible Caesar:

Presumably the fact that Cleopatra was queen of Egypt, the last of an ancient and semi-divine line, precociously intelligent, politically powerful and extraordinarily rich, simply added to her charms.

If the Hellenistic Cleopatra is a woman of doubtful physical appeal, the Egyptian Cleopatra has all the beauty and serenity of a goddess. This is exactly what we would expect. Like their Greek and Roman contemporaries, Egypt’s official artists never set out to create true-to-life portraits. Nor did they manufacture ‘art for art’s sake’. Invariably, they created symbolic or idealised representations of an individual at a particular stage of his or her life, usually for a specific religious purpose. In this respect, royal art may be considered as the ultimate extension of the hieroglyphic writing system, where every word is a picture and every picture can be read as a word. A statue or a two-dimensional image can be read, just as a papyrus scroll can be read.

A quick glance through any illustrated book of Egyptian art will reveal ranks of near-identical kings smiting foreigners, near-identical scribes sitting with a papyrus roll across their lap, and near-identical sons and daughters standing naked with fingers in their mouths beside their much larger parents. This tradition continued for over 3,000 years, so that the 1st Dynasty King Den, who wields a mace to smite an enemy on an ivory label in c. 3000 appears scarcely different from Auletes smiting an enemy on the pylon of the Edfu temple of Horus in 57. As the office of the king continued unchanging from reign to reign, irrespective of the office holder, this similarity was a good and desirable thing; a reinforcement of the cyclical continuity of Egyptian life. And, in case anyone really wanted to know which king was being shown, the artists invariably added a name.
²⁴
The Egyptian-style art of the Ptolemies was essentially propaganda, designed to allow the Ptolemies to appeal to their Egyptian people and their Egyptian gods by reflecting and fuelling their political and religious beliefs.
²⁵
With pose, material, scale and placement all predetermined, it seems impossible that these images can tell us anything of Cleopatra’s appearance. They do, however, tell us quite a lot about her perceived role. Egypt had a long tradition of highlighting powerful women using a combination of religious and political symbols, and Cleopatra exploited this tradition to the full. The two-dimensional Cleopatra standing larger than life at each end of the rear wall of the Hathor temple at Dendera is an uncompromisingly traditional Egyptian queen. The bewigged, crowned, beautiful and eternally young Cleopatra can barely be differentiated from the queens who lived thousands of years before her, and she can barely be differentiated from the goddesses Isis and Hathor. The confusion is deliberate and convincing.