Natalie Haynes and guests discuss Cleopatra's intelligence, charisma, and political acumen. They explore her relationships with powerful men, her luxurious lifestyle, and the challenges she faced as a female ruler. The podcast highlights Cleopatra's mesmerizing personality and her enduring legacy in history and popular culture.
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Ptolemaic Dynasty Complexity
The Ptolemaic dynasty had confusing naming with nearly everyone named Ptolemy or variants like Cleopatra or Berenike.
This created a "snake pit" of family rivalries and frequent lethal power struggles.
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Roman Bias Against Cleopatra
Roman authors often avoided naming Cleopatra directly, showing gendered bias emphasizing her femininity.
They dehumanized her power as a woman who defied Roman expectations of female humility.
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Cleopatra's Ruthless Early Reign
Cleopatra's early reign was marked by brutal family power struggles, including executing her sister Berenike.
Roman political involvement helped her father regain power but heightened danger around succession.
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Natalie Haynes returns with a new series of sparkling stories from the ancient world which shed light on the world today.
Cleopatra was a brilliant politician, a ruthless leader and a massive brain-box, who spoke nine languages. The Queen of Egypt had charisma to burn, but she probably didn't look like Elizabeth Taylor. Her intelligence and magnetism were more than enough to attract the attentions of the world's most powerful men, and to keep her in power - in a notoriously lethal dynasty - for over twenty years.
Guests Jane Draycott and Llewelyn Morgan join Natalie to make sense of the Ptolemaic family naming system, to discover what it took to stay at the top for so long in dangerous times, and to find out just how besotted Mark Antony was with the Egyptian Queen. Cleopatra knew exactly how to make an impression: she entertained the war-weary Antony on a gold-covered luxury barge, fragrant with burning spices, decked out with fairy lights. She made him rub her feet at a banquet for losing a bet and he famously wandered out of an important lecture because Cleopatra was passing and he preferred to talk to her.
'Rock star mythologist’ and reformed stand-up Natalie Haynes is obsessed with the ancient world. Here she explores key stories from ancient Rome and Greece that still have resonance today. They might be biographical, topographical, mythological or epic, but they are always hilarious, magical and tragic, mystifying and revelatory. And they tell us more about ourselves now than seems possible of stories from a couple of thousand years ago.
Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics