Cleopatra’s Identity Politics

Few women have come into their looks as late as did Cleopatra VII, the first-century B.C. queen of Egypt. In accounts of the ancients she is no stunner. Only several hundred years after her death did she finally qualify as striking. Another thousand years needed to elapse before anyone decided—it was Boccaccio, writing in 1361—that Cleopatra was “famous for nothing but her beauty.” With mixed results, and with Elizabeth Taylor unapologetically blocking the way, we have been laboring to fix a face to her ever since.

That effort has generated plenty of controversy, but none so loud as the uproar that greeted the casting of Adele James as the star of the Netflix series “Queen Cleopatra,” which premiered in May. James is very much a great beauty. She is also Black. Cleopatra, countered Egypt’s Antiquities Ministry, was white, with “Hellenistic characteristics,” an assertion that her Greek Macedonian ancestry and coin portraits would seem to confirm. Cleopatra was also a queen in Africa, with a mother of unknown origin, which seemed sufficient grounds to portray her as a Black woman at a time when empowering Black role models are especially welcome.

It was not the only time this year that Egypt found itself reminding the world that, though located in Africa, it sees itself as an Arab or Muslim country, part of the Middle East or North Africa. When a museum in the Netherlands mounted a summer exhibit titled “Egypt in Hip Hop, Jazz, Soul and Funk,” connecting Queen Nefertiti with the music of Tina Turner and Beyoncé, Egyptian authorities responded by banning Dutch archaeologists from an excavation site in the country they had worked since 1975.

The Egyptian government is angry enough about what it considers historical misappropriation to have threatened to produce its own TV series featuring a white Cleopatra. An Egyptian lawyer has filed a lawsuit in the country against Netflix for $2 billion, given what he sees as a criminal assault on Egypt’s “civilizational and cultural heritage.”

Lost in the furious debate about whether Cleopatra was a fair-skinned Macedonian or a dark-skinned African is the extent to which she manipulated her own image, and why. Legitimacy was rarely far from her mind. She too kept an eye out for powerful antecedents. Identity politics played a role in the first century B.C. as well, though it took different forms.

The Egypt that Cleopatra inherited at 18 was a land of immense political importance and unrivaled wealth. For several hundred years, Alexandria, its capital, had stood at the center of the Mediterranean world. The largest Jewish population outside of Judaea made its home in Alexandria. Buddhist monks walked its streets. Indian imports decorated its homes. Until the rise of Rome, it was the city to which you traveled for a master craftsman, a book, a tutor, a fine rug or an animal trainer. You hoped that your doctor had trained there. Like 11th-century Constantinople or 19th-century Paris, the Hellenistic city owed its frantic, inventive energy and its kaleidoscopic color to that cultural scrimmage.

That cosmopolitanism left the city out of sync with the country to which it belonged. Cleopatra’s Egypt was primarily a land of two ethnicities, with two distinct cultures. A Greek aristocracy, based for the most part in Alexandria, comprised little more than a tenth of the population but monopolized government offices and the military posts. They ran the economy while the native Egyptians worked the land; the all-important Egyptian harvest depended on one class while its profits accrued to another.

The Greeks made no secret of their condescension, the Egyptians of their resentment. Tensions erupted in the Alexandrian streets, where petty crime was known as “mugging, Egyptian style.” When a woman accidentally emptied her chamber pot on a passerby and then spat in his face, ethnic differences generally played a role, as they did when a bath attendant poured a jug of scalding water on a customer, burning his stomach and thigh. (The spitter and bath attendant were both Egyptian.)

To complicate matters, a contract written in Greek was subject to Greek law, one written in Egyptian to Egyptian law. Even the marriage code was different. The Greeks paid lower taxes and met with more lenient penalties. An Egyptian who attempted to leave Alexandria without a pass sacrificed a third of his property. The Greek who attempted to leave only paid a fine.

We have some sense of how Cleopatra dealt with the dual audiences. It was her job to protect the laboring class from her legion of Greek officials, few of whom seem to have resisted the temptation to steal pigs, seize dovecotes and inflate tax bills. She regularly intervened for her people, who looked upon her, in both her earthly and divine roles, as their benevolent guardian. Plutarch insisted as much on Cleopatra’s political dexterity as on her unexceptional looks. She spoke, he tells us, nine languages, including every dialect of flattery. She was also the first and only Ptolemaic ruler to bother to learn the language of the people over whom she ruled.

As a woman and a foreigner, she reigned over one of the first multicultural societies, broadcasting to different constituencies over different frequencies. At times she appeared before her people as the goddess Isis, a guise she assumed more vigorously than had any of her predecessors. It connected her to the native Egyptian cult. It helped that, like Cleopatra, Isis was a single mother; the identification allowed Cleopatra to smuggle her son by Julius Caesar into the narrative. She participated as well in traditional festivals in ancient Pharaonic dress. If not actually a woman of “infinite variety,” as Shakespeare had it, Cleopatra came close, sorting through the iconographical costume trunk, tailoring and recycling where necessary, indulging in what might register today as appropriation but in the golden melting pot of Alexandria qualified as cultural syncretism.

The ancient world arguably knew her best from her portrait on coins. Here was Cleopatra as she hoped her millions of subjects would see her. All jutting chin and sharp cheekbones, she projects authority. Pearls hang from her neck and ears. She has woven more through her hair. In a break with tradition, she and Mark Antony, the Roman general, appear on opposite sides of coins issued during the last years of her reign, just before they were defeated by the future Roman emperor Augustus. Even allowing for inexpert engraving, the two silhouettes look remarkably alike, which may have been the point.

Cleopatra returns to mass circulation this summer on the new Egyptian 20-pound note, currency she shares this time around with Cairo’s great mosque of Muhammad Ali. She looks like neither Elizabeth Taylor nor Adele James; to many she may seem indistinguishable from any earlier Ptolemaic ruler of either gender. A Greek Macedonian woman who has assumed the trappings of an Egyptian pharaoh, she vanishes into symbolism. She appears to be smiling faintly, as if she has some inkling of the trouble she still causes.

Stacy Schiff, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, is the author of “Cleopatra: A Life,” among other books.