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?
A special exhibition at the British Museum brings together for the first time a group of Egyptian-style statues that may be recognised as Cleopatra. They form the core of a substantial display of objects gathered from museums across Europe, North Africa and North America to survey Cleopatra’s place in history and the transformation of this remarkable individual from a seventeen-year-old princess to a living icon whose capacity to enthral has not dimmed in the two millennia that have passed since her death.
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