Cleopatra: From History to Myth
Susan Walker looks at our image of the great queen, as a major exhibition on her life opens at the British Museum.
Cleopatra ... ‘the most illustrious and wise of women’, an unexpected endorsement from John, Bishop of Nikiu in Upper Egypt in the 7th century AD. In similar vein, the Arab historian Al-Masúdí, writing three centuries later, describes Cleopatra as ‘the last of the wise ones of Greece.’ How have we come to see Cleopatra as the embodiment of unfettered passion and intrigue, even in death clasping the asp in ardent embrace?
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