Now Playing
Exiled at Nineteen: Cleopatra's First Fall and Fight Back
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Cleopatra's early reign was a ruthless palace coup that stripped her of the Egyptian throne before she turned twenty — and she refused to accept it. This chapter follows her rise, her expulsion by Ptolemy XIII's handlers, and the calculated gamble that brought Julius Caesar into her story.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
How does an eighteen-year-old girl hold a throne? That's not a rhetorical question.
When Ptolemy XII died in fifty-one BCE, his will named two of his children as joint rulers. Cleopatra, at eighteen, and her younger brother Ptolemy XIII, who was around ten years old.
Around forty-nine BCE, the faction controlling Ptolemy XIII moved against her. The exact circumstances aren't entirely clear.
Caesar's arrival in Egypt in forty-eight BCE was itself the product of Rome's own turmoil. He had just defeated his great rival Pompey at the Battle of Pharsalus in Greece.
It would be easy to reduce this to romance. And later Roman accounts did exactly that, painting Cleopatra as a seductress who ensnared Caesar through beauty and charm.
Returning to power didn't mean ruling alone. Ptolemaic dynastic tradition required a co-ruler, specifically a male co-ruler, even if that co-ruler held no real authority.
The Roman world after Caesar's death split between competing factions. Eventually, it settled into a division between Octavian in the west and Mark Antony in the east.
Chapter summary auto-generated from the verified script. Listen to the full episode for the complete content.