Cleopatra’s Loves

Before I move on to discuss the famous loves of my life I’d like to get one thing straight. History is renowned for its inconsistencies and failures to report the actual truth of things, as time and word of mouth can change what actually happened for a far more romantic version of events. One such supposed fact that’s been distorted by the lens of aging is my beauty. Legend has it that I was the most beautiful queen of my day, when in truth I was no better looking that the average lady in the street. My family were well known for their intermarriage due to their social class and the difficulties finding someone of appropriate status to marry and such behavior is not recognised for producing good looking offspring. I’d argue that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac and if also helps if you’re clever too and I had power and brains in spades. It was this that made me such a memorable and complex queen, helping me use my womanly wiles to manipulate the course of history to my will.

I never did like the Romans too much. They’re always painted these days as a noble, progressive culture when in truth they were much more like crazy, overblown cowboys who’d all let their egos run away with their common sense, hooked up on gold and war. My country had been invaded by these runaway lunatics and I had to do something to stop them completely taking over, so employing the old saying “keep your friend close and your enemies closer” I decided to seduce their leader, Julius Caesar. I’ve always been one for a show, so I had myself rolled up into a carpet to be presented to the Roman leader and jumped out when the carpet was shown to him later that day. We quickly fell in love and were married, allowing me to claim the Egyptian throne and keep Rome at bay from taking my country for a little while longer. It was a strange sort of affair as Caesar was 52 at the time and I was only 21, so we didn’t have too much in common. These were the days before Viagra and he was always so stressed after running his empire in the day time that all we ever had in the evening was a few bottles of wine and then at the weekend he was always off to the games with his mates. Still it was a bit of a shock when the old man got murdered, especially seeing as it put all my good work to waste.

People like to think of my marriage to Marc Antony as one of the great marriages of history when in truth it would be more like the Queen of England marrying Donald Trump. Never one to miss a trick, I decided that he would be a good pick for my husband when he became one of the two men to rule Rome following the death of my last. I waited for my moment and when he summoned me to Tarsus I appeared before him on a boat, dressed as a vision of Aphrodite, playing on Marc Antony’s own sense of immortality, as had he become emperor then he would have also become a god. We fell in love and married a year later and I had two children by him and we lived a fairly normal life apart from when I got him to murder my sister. In the end however my luck turned bad once more as my husband simply couldn’t keep good relations with his friends in Rome, upsetting a chap called Octavian, a faux pas that would eventually lead to our deaths.