Free The Murder of Cleopatra by Pat Brown Page A

as young as Cleopatra—age twenty-one when she met him—was bound to look pretty ripe and pleasing to the eye. By the time she met Mark Antony, Plutarch points out, Cleopatra would certainly have been mature enough to know how to work her wiles and make herself extremely attractive to her prey. So, likely not a true beauty, but not unattractive either, and with youth, intelligence, charm, and money, there is no doubt that Cleopatra was quite an alluring woman of her time.
    It is worth mentioning that of the statues of Cleopatra made after her death and found in the museums of Rome and Berlin, not one of them shows her as an “African” queen; they all show her to be Mediterranean and looking quite similar to the other men and women sculpted from the same period. She may well have had somewhat of an olive-skinned complexion, but then so would many Macedonians. This could hardly be construed as evidence that she was the child of a mixed-race couple. And if she were, wouldn’t Octavian, who was her biggest detractor and enemy and who put out many an insult concerning the queen in an attempt to degrade her in the eyes of the Romans, jump on the opportunity to claim she was less than white and ridicule her as the offspring of the lowly peasant class, the “natives” of Egypt, the illegitimate child of a slave woman? In this profiler’s opinion, absolutely.
    Most of these statues do not show Cleopatra to be a great beauty, but range from depicting her as tolerably decent-looking to lovely-enough. It wasn’t until later in history when artists whitened her skin to resemble marble, exposed her breasts, draped her in diaphanous finery, and positioned her in sensual poses that Cleopatra became the foxy lady we envisage today. In none of these early renderings is she ever shown as being of Nubian descent. These portrayals of Cleopatra as black have cropped up only in the most recent decades and, like that of the black Jesus, serve more as a philosophical and cultural icon than a historic one.
    The only real clue to what Cleopatra looked like, tangible evidence as opposed to mere rumor or stories passed down over the years,would come from the coins she issued during her years as pharaoh. There is nothing in the profile of her face on the money that would suggest she was a woman of color; in fact, she has a hooked nose, which is more common to Mediterranean people than those of sub-Sahara Africa. The Ptolemy line appeared to be endowed with a long, hooking nose, but it is hard to say whether the coinage represented Cleopatra’s exact facial features. After all, coins were a method of advertising the person in power, and the profile of the queen was intended to show omnipotence, not necessarily her true appearance or her beauty. It is interesting to note that none of the coinage bearing Cleopatra’s name and likeness show her as an Egyptian pharaoh/goddess/Isis, as she is represented on the walls of the temple in Dendera, but always as a Greek with a Macedonian-Greek appearance and a Greek hairstyle. Clearly, these diametrically opposed portrayals of Cleopatra serve as propaganda to their respective audiences, and neither is overly concerned with a literal representation of her appearance.
    Some argue that had Cleopatra not been a beauty, Julius Caesar and Mark Antony would not have been so taken with her and history might have turned out differently. I disagree. Cleopatra, the great city of Alexandria, and the Ptolemaic treasury were a package deal, and if Cleopatra weren’t quite as charismatic or tolerable to look upon, both men might still have attached themselves to her due to the other benefits that came along with her person. That Cleopatra was actually attractive enough, witty, and beguiling certainly made things a bit easier for her and, perhaps, her influence on the men was improved due to these advantages. The more arrows one has in one’s quiver, the more one has to work with,