Cleopatra Biography of the book

In all matters, a reasonable is useful for the income of 1 [1]. Once having lost power, she gained her, then almost lost her again, then gathered an empire, and in the end she lost everything. In childhood, the goddess, in his youth, is the queen, then - a superstar, she became an object of conversation and worship, gossip and legends during her life. At the peak of power, she was the mistress of almost the entire eastern Mediterranean.

At one fleeting moment in her hands was the fate of the entire Western world. She gave birth to a child from a married man and three more - from another, and died at thirty -nine years old, referring to the last generation before the birth of Christ. The catastrophe reinforces the reputation, and Cleopatra's final was sudden and thunder. Since then, she has forever seized our minds.

Many said and continue to speak on her behalf, among them - the greatest playwrights and poets. We have been investing our own words in her mouth for two thousand years. I must say, Cleopatra had an extremely rich afterlife life: her name was named after asteroid, video game, brand cigarettes, slot machine and stripper club, it and the stamp, the “synonymous” Elizabeth Taylor.

Shakespeare convinced us of her endless variability, because he knew nothing about herself. The name is known to everyone, but the image is very vague. Yes, Cleopatra is one of the most noticeable figures in history, but at the same time we are weakly imagining how it really looked. Portraits on the coins, minted during the life of the queen and, apparently, herself approved, is the only evidence that you can believe.

In addition, we remember her not at all for what we should. Only a gifted and far -sighted ruler is able to create his own fleet, suppress the uprising, maintain a currency course, and feed the hungry. An outstanding Roman commander trusted her with a grip in military affairs. She stood apart even at a time when there were many women rulers: this is the only queen of the ancient world, who ruled independently and played a noticeable role in relations with the West.

She was incomparably richer than anyone else in the Mediterranean, and more influential than any other woman of his era [2]-which in due time reminded one too hot king, who decided to kill the lord of Egypt 2. Cleopatra came from the kind of hereditary murderers and diligently supported the family tradition, but behaved surprisingly decently, given where and when she lived.

Nevertheless, she is still perceived only as an extravagant seducer: this is not the first and not the last case in history, when a truly powerful woman is at a shameless harlot. Cleopatra’s life - like any person who writes poems about - was full of troubles and disappointments. She grew up in unheard of luxury and inherited the kingdom in a state of decline.

Ten generations of her ancestors selflessly played the pharaohs. In fact, the Ptolemys were Macedonian Greeks, so Cleopatra is about the same Egyptian as Elizabeth Taylor. At eighteen, she got a country with a difficult past and shaky future. Between her and Nefertiti is a thousand three hundred years. The pyramids that the queen almost certainly showed Julia Caesar, then graffiti were already covered.

The Sphinx was last restored a thousand years ago. The glory of the once great empire of the Ptolemes faded. Cleopatra was growing up at the time when the shadow of Rome hung over the world, which spread to the Egyptian borders. She was eleven when Caesar reminded his military leaders: one who does not fight, does not rich and does not conquer other peoples - not a Roman. One eastern monarch, which began his own epic struggle with Rome, spoke about the future problems of Cleopatra: the Romans are similar to the wolves.

They hate the great kings. They plunder their property. They want to capture everything and “either destroy everything, or the mouth” 3 [3]. This is a very transparent hint of the last rich country remaining in the East, which was part of the sphere of Roman interests. Egypt was able to be flexible - thanks to which for the most part he was able to preserve his autonomy - however, he was already tightly tied with Rome.

Father Cleopatra was worth a lot of money to receive the official status of “Friend and Ally of the Roman people”. His daughter soon realized that it was not enough to be a friend of the people and the Senate: it is necessary to make friends with the most powerful Roman. And try, find this in the late republic, torn by civil wars. Cleopatra’s whole life passed against their background.

The conceited Roman military leaders fought in an endless match of ambitions, the outcome of which is twice - and both times extremely unexpectedly - decided on Egyptian land. After each such cataclysm, the Mediterranean countries shuddered in an attempt to adjust their loyalty to one or another policy and redirect the streams of gratitude. Cleopatra's father put everything on the Pompey of the Great, brilliant Roman commander, who seemed to be the inexhaustible favor of Fortune.Pompey became the patron saint of the family, and also entered the war with Julius Caesar - just when, on the other side of the Mediterranean Sea, she went to Cleopatra's throne.

In the summer of 48, Caesar defeated Pompey in Central Greece. Pompey escaped to Egypt, where he was joyfully met and immediately, without putting it in a long box, was beheaded. Cleopatra was twenty -one years old. She had no choice but to start flirting with the new Lord of the Roman world. This Egyptian woman was very different from the rest of the vassal rulers, the names of which - and not by chance - have not reached this day.

All subsequent years, she tried to direct the merciless Roman tsunami in the direction she needed, changed her patrons after the murder of Caesar and eventually twisted an affair with his protege, Mark Anthony. From the height of today, her rule looks just like a delay in the sentence: in fact, everything was over for her earlier than began. Although, of course, the young queen did not seem so.

After her death, Egypt turned into a Roman province, and again became an independent state only in the 20th century. Is it possible to say something good about a woman who slept with the two most influential men of the era? You can, of course, but only if you are not a Roman historian. Two formidable elements came together in Cleopatra: she was a woman and possessed power.

Smart women, as Euripids warned, hundreds of years before, are dangerous. The famous Roman historian with a sense of deep satisfaction calls one Jewish queen “just a nominal ruler” 4 [4], and after six pages accuses her of exorbitant ambitions and insatiable power 5. There were more disarming manifestations of power. In the marriage contract of the 1st century BC.

We do not know if Cleopatra Anthony or Caesar loved, but it is known for sure that she knew how to make each of them play her game, that is, from the point of view of the Romans, both “turned into slaves”. And it was the so -called game with a zero sum: female authoritarianism in any case left a man in losing.

The wife of the First Roman Emperor Augustus allegedly explained the secret of her influence on her husband: “... being himself in everything more chaste, doing with pleasure everything that pleased him, and not interfering in any of his deeds, especially preferred and does not notice the preferences of his passion” 6 [6]. We have no reason to take this formula for a clean coin.

However, Cleopatra was made from a completely different test. She could fishing, basking in the rays of the lazy Alexandrian sun, calmly remind the most famous Roman commander so that she would not relax and not forget about her duties. For the Romans, the Greeks embodied volunteers and neglect of the laws. A typical Roman did not see the difference between exotic and eroticism: Cleopatra was the flesh from the flesh of its dark, fertile earth and capricious, extravagant, striking the imagination of the river - a kind of personification of the otherworldly, mystical east.

Men lost their heads because of her, or at least changed plans. Such is it bred even in the biography of Mark Anthony, written by Plutarch. The historian of the XIX century calls her when meeting with Caesar of the “dissolved sixteen -year -old” [8], in fact, she was rather an extremely collected woman in twenty -one years. The scandalous reputation of the East was much older than Cleopatra, but this did not bother anyone: the queen was born in a sinful country of passions and excesses.

It is not surprising that Caesar became history, and Cleopatra became a legend. Roman chroniclers, who were very approximately oriented in their own ancient history, let even more fog. We all sometimes, like Mark Twain in the Vatican, clogged with tourists, prefer copies of the original. Also, the ancient classics created the works, simply backing old fairy tales.

It was they who put other people's vices on Cleopatra. History all the time needed to rewrite and give it more and more a gloss, not caring about accuracy. In ancient texts, villains always dress in especially vulgar purple, eat too many fried peacocks, wretch the bodies with rare expensive oils, dissolve pearls in acid. If you were a rebellious queen or a ruthless pirate, you will still judge you for the “vile luxury” 8 [9].

Evil and luxury were considered synonyms, the world shimmered with purple and gold. The story has tightly intertwined with the myth, people with the gods: this also does not simplify the situation to us. Cleopatra lived in a world where it was possible to easily bow to the remnants of Orpheusa Lira or see the shell of the eggs from which the daughter of Zeus hatched in Sparta.

History is not just written by descendants: it is also written for descendants. The authors of the most reliable of our sources have never seen Cleopatra. Plutarch was born seventy -six years after her death, he wrote at one time with the apostles Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Appian Alexandria worked after another century, Dion Cassius - after more than two.The story of Cleopatra differs from the history of other women in that the men who composed her - for various reasons - exaggerated her role, and did not try to push her away.

The connection with Mark Anthony was the most long in her life, but the connection with his enemy Octavian Augustus truly made her immortal. August defeated Anthony and Cleopatra and, in order to strengthen the radiance of his glory, introduced Rome, so to speak, with the “tabloid” version of the Egyptian Queen: insatiable, treacherous, bloodthirsty, power -loving.

He inflated the role of Cleopatra to incredible sizes, so that the same thing would become with his victory and to withdraw from the game his real enemy, former Shurin. And now to the work of the team of extremely tendentious historians add extremely fragmentary archival documents. Not a single papyrus from Alexandria has been preserved. Almost nothing remained on the surface of the earth from this ancient city.

It seems that the most that we have is a single word written by Cleopatra in 33 BC.