Cleopatra, Caesar and Antony and What They’d Look Like Today
Did Hollywood whitewash Cleopatra? A Pulitzer Winning historian says no.
Most of what we know about Cleopatra is wrong…
She was a queen at 18, the richest woman in the world, lover of Julius Caesar, and Marc Antony, the most famous woman of the Greco-Roman era — and yet almost everything we know about her is wrong. How sad is that?
She was not a promiscuous seductress. She had sex with two men and bore children to both. She didn’t kill herself by the bite of an asp hidden in a basket of figs. That’s a dramatization. She poisoned herself to avoid being taken prisoner of war and paraded through the streets in chains.
She was the queen of Egypt, but she wasn’t Egyptian — she was Greek.
The Library of Congress says based on the number of books about her, Cleopatra is the seventh most famous woman in the world — yet, most people don’t even know what she looks like.
We think we do. But we’re thinking of the Hollywood version. A beautiful woman like Elizabeth Taylor, in sexy clothing, with straight black hair and plenty of eyeliner. That image is inaccurate in almost every way and we can mostly blame Hollywood.
