Cleopatra has been making waves. More than 2,000 years after her death, the face that sunk the Roman Republic is once again causing a diplomatic ruckus.
Last month, the Egyptian antiquities ministry launched a remarkable attack on Netflix over the streamer’s new series Queen Cleopatra. Their contention wasn’t that the Jada Pinkett Smith-produced documentary was a bit naff – it most certainly is – but that it was a “falsification of Egyptian history and a blatant historical misconception”.
Netflix’s crime? Casting a black actress, British soap star Adele James, as the notorious queen. So with all the forbearance of Italians confronted with a plate of seafood linguine showered in parmesan, Egyptian MPs promptly called for Netflix to be banned entirely. The casting, they argued, was “an attack on family values”. The story of Cleopatra, of course, is otherwise flush with cosy household homilies.
Yet not three years ago, internet opinion-havers were up in arms for precisely the opposite reason. That was when it was announced Israeli actress Gal Gadot would be playing Cleopatra in an as-yet-unreleased film helmed by Patty Jenkins, who directed Gadot in Wonder Woman. Gadot’s take promised to “bring the story of Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, to the big screen in a way she’s never been seen before... To tell her story for the first time through women's eyes.”
Despite this laudable intention, some outraged commentators accused the film’s backers of white-washing one of the most famous women in history. The very criticism Netflix’s film purported to address.
So what did Cleopatra look like? Awkwardly for both Netflix and the Egyptian government, no one really knows. What we think we know of Cleopatra is largely a fantasy of a succession of male writers – Plutarch, Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw – constructed over millennia. The evidence we do have about her appearance is flimsy, at best.
“The actual facts that we have about Cleopatra, the contemporary evidence, is pretty sparse,” says Toby Wilkinson, Professor of Egyptology and Deputy Vice Chancellor at the University of Lincoln.
“Most of what we have is other peoples’ views of her which were hugely coloured by their particular political stance and then the whole web of myths that grew up around her, which are of course more powerful in a sense than the few historical facts that we’ve got.”
No contemporary accounts of Cleopatra survive and none of those from which our traditional conceptions of her are drawn are considered particularly objective. Cleopatra as we remember her today – an Egyptian queen, an astonishing beauty, a great seducer of men, a tragic figure who took her own life with a snake – proves to be more fiction than history.
After all, she wasn’t even really an Egyptian. The Ptolemies, ruling dynasty of which she was a member, styled themselves as Egyptian on public monuments, hence the persistent surviving image of Cleopatra in Egyptian dress (and the famous Elizabeth Taylor look). But they were in fact foreign invaders who strictly maintained the ethnic integrity of their own line - up to and including frequent incestuous marriages. According to her most recent biographer, Stacy Schiff, ethnically Cleopatra was “approximately as Egyptian as Elizabeth Taylor”.
The Ptolemies were actually from Macedonia, a powerful state on the fringes of what we now call Ancient Greece. Alexander the Great, who invaded Egypt and overthrew its Persian rulers in 332 BC, was born there. In the power struggle following Alexander’s death, one of his most powerful generals, Ptolemy, seized Alexandria and declared himself Pharaoh. His descendants ruled there for the next three centuries – Cleopatra was the last of the line.
“There wasn’t really a concept of being Greek at that point. The Ptolemies would have identified themselves very strongly with their Macedonian homeland,” says Wilkinson.
We have very little idea what Macedonians looked like. “They probably wouldn’t have looked much like the modern Greeks,” says Wilkinson. In other words, neither Gal Gadot or Adele James are “accurate” casting for Cleopatra – because no one has a clue what “accurate” looks like. Given this context, talk of “white washing” – or its opposite – is meaningless.
A bigger problem for casting directors is Gadot and James’s beauty. For centuries, Cleopatra’s reputation as an astonishing beauty has been maintained but its provenance is dodgy at best. The legend seems to have originated with the Roman historian Cassius Dio, who declared her “a woman of surpassing beauty.” But Dio was born nearly two hundred years after Cleopatra’s death and his account of her appearance seems to have been motivated more by political considerations than anything relating to her actual appearance.