Cleopatra’s Skin

At a recent scifi and fantasy writers’ critique group I was in, one of my fellow authors used Cleopatra as a character. If you’re a writer, I highly encourage you to do this; Cleopatra was an incredibly fascinating person. In this story, Cleopatra was mentioned to be dark-skinned. Based on my work on my dissertation, I argued that Cleopatra was Macedonian, from a family (the Ptolemies) that was not only exclusive but floridly incestuous. (“If your family tree doesn’t fork, you might be a [Ptolemy].”–Jeff Foxworthy) Therefore her skin color would be that of a Greek, which, in that time and place, was described in ancient documents as “honey-colored.”

Another of my fellow writers said that her understanding was that while Cleopatra’s Macedonian paternity is certain, her mother is actually unknown. This was something I hadn’t heard before. She checked Wikipedia, and found exactly such an assertion, with citations to five sources. Now, Wikipedia is a great place to begin your research; we obviously didn’t have the time or reason to dig further then, but I was fascinated, and this entry is the fruit of my following up on that lead. I was able to get a hold of all five of the Wikipedia sources, all legitimate, well-researched books varying along the continuum from college textbooks to technical graduate tomes.

Let me be clear now before we dig in: I would love to discover that Cleopatra was of both European and African genetic ancestry. It would add new layers of complexity to a person who is already bursting at the seams with fascinating detail. But as an ex-historian, I can only get on board if it seems to be either genuinely unknowable (in which case everyone is free to make up their own minds), or more plausible than the alternative. As you’ll see, I think it is not impossible, but much less likely than that she was a member of a family of elite Macedonians. (Not that there’s anything wrong with being Macedonian; it’s just that in Cleopatra’s case it’s the default setting.)

One of the five sources cited for the statement, “While Cleopatra’s paternal line can be traced, the identity of her mother is uncertain” (Grant 1972) opens by saying that Cleopatra’s mother is unknown, but concludes that she was the Macedonian Cleopatra V Tryphaina, contradicting the assertion it is supposed to support. This is why you can’t stop with Wikipedia! Two more authorities (Jones 2006 and Dodson & Hilton 2004) believe the weight of the evidence is with our Cleopatra being the child of her father and his sister Cleopatra Tryphaina (ick ick ick), but leave open a small window of uncertainty. This because of the fact that no ancient source names our Cleopatra’s mother.

That leaves Burstein 2004 and Roller 2010, who both build a circumstantial case for Cleopatra’s mother being Egyptian. (They get this argument from Werner Huss, “Der Herkunft des Cleopatra Philopator,” Aegyptus 70 (1990): 191-203, cited by each of them.) The first piece of the puzzle is that there is one ancient source that says that Cleopatra was illegitimate: the geographer Strabo.

[Ptolemy Auletes], however, was banished by the Alexandrians; and since he had three daughters, of whom one, the eldest, was legitimate, they proclaimed her queen;​ but his two sons,​ who were infants, were completely excluded from service at the time. (Strabo, Geography, 17.1.11)

The daughter proclaimed queen in Strabo’s account would be Cleopatra’s elder sister, also named Cleopatra. (O what a tangled web we weave!) Strabo, then, would be subtly saying that our Cleopatra was not born of an official wife. The problem with this is that Strabo is writing a few years after Octavian (later Augustus Caesar) had defeated Cleopatra and Antony and driven them to their suicides. He grew up as a citizen of the Roman Empire and surveyed their new empire for them. Getting your information on Cleopatra from Strabo would be a little like consulting InfoWars for the latest on Biden. Case in point: he ends his account of the Ptolemies by saying that the Roman invasion finally put an end to Egypt’s “being ruled with drunken violence.” Not exactly impartial.

A second problem is that no Roman source written during Cleopatra’s life, all of which are full of the most vicious character assassination, so much as mentions the possibility that Cleopatra was not legitimate. Back in Strabo’s favor, he actually was in Egypt when he wrote and may have had access to records those earlier enemies never knew about. One possibility is that Ptolemy had a second, Egyptian wife whom the Alexandrians considered legitimate, but whom Strabo dismissed. Roller finds evidence of one member of the Ptolemy family marrying an Egyptian, but the only connection to the Ptolemies is the bride’s name, Berenike–a popular name for wives of the Ptolemies, but by no means exclusive to the royal family.  

The question then depends on Strabo’s sources, which would have been family records (assuming for the moment that he actually had such sources). How reliable would these have been? Going back to Grant, he finds evidence from papyri lost in the sands of Egypt for 2000 years. Most of these papyri are short official documents: contracts, receipts and the like (shades of Everything Everywhere All at Once again!). Almost all of these documents date themselves by saying who was king and queen at the time. One papyrus dates itself to a month and year of Cleopatra Tryphaina’s reign that would correspond to August of our year 69 BCE. Our Cleopatra was born in late 70 BCE or early 69 BCE–maybe as much as a year before Cleopatra Tryphaina exited the scene, probably by dying. Add in the time of our Cleopatra’s mother being pregnant, and the overlap could exceed a year and a half. This is not the kind of source Strabo would have consulted, since you would need to sift through piles and piles of them to figure out the full extent of Tryphaina’s reign. The existence of this undoctored evidence raises the strong possibility that, if Strabo did have written sources for his assertion of Cleopatra’s illegitimacy, they were probably falsified. Grant’s 2011 edition of his book, taking on board Werner Huss’s hypothesis, comes to the same conclusion as the 1972 edition: while Ptolemy Auletes certainly had a second legitimate wife after Tryphaina whose name and ancestry are unknown by whom he had three children, a girl and two boys, he would not have had two legitimate wives at one time. The overlap between Tryphaina and our Cleopatra strongly argues that they are mother and daughter.

Grant argues that the Ptolemies were monogamous, making a second simultaneous wife the mother of Cleopatra unlikely. He is generally right; Ptolemies mostly married one sister at a time. There is, however, a major exception: Ptolemy VIII Euergetes, a century earlier, reigned for more than 50 years, and had two legitimate wives: Cleopatra II (his sister) and Cleopatra III (his niece) (ick ick ick). So perhaps the idea of two wives for Auletes at once is not so immediately unlikely.

So where does that leave us? The balance of probabilities seems to me to weigh on the side of our Cleopatra being the daughter of Cleopatra V Tryphaina. The failure of Cleopatra’s many, many enemies (even Strabo) to argue that Cleopatra was genetically part African is also telling. They, of course, would have thought that was a bad thing, and wouldn’t have hesitated to use it in their propaganda. It’s almost surprising that they don’t anyway, with or without evidence!

A final piece of circumstantial evidence that Roller offers is that Cleopatra was the first Ptolemaic ruler to be able to speak Egyptian, and suggests this was the first language Cleopatra heard. This romanticizes ancient elite child rearing. As the daughter of an upper-crust family, Cleopatra would have been nursed by a servant, not her mother, who would have considered such labor beneath her. She also would not have been taught by her mother, but by a court tutor hired by her parents. Cleopatra herself chose as a tutor for her children the Jewish scholar Nicholas of Damascus; a similar cosmopolitan decision likely underlies Cleopatra’s command of eight languages, including Egyptian. On balance, the possibility that Cleopatra had genetically African ancestry is not foreclosed, but it must be considered less likely than the probability that she was entirely Macedonian.

But then, what does “entirely Macedonian” mean? All the ethnic groups in the Mediterranean intermarried to a high degree. There was at least one blonde in Cleopatra’s family tree (Ptolemy II Philadelphus), but also people with black or brown hair and complexions of “honey” or darker. There’s no absolute “purity” in any ancient ethnic group (that’s a thoroughly modern idea), and so much less so around the ancient Mediterranean. If Cleopatra had African ancestry, it was probably further back in her family tree than her own immediate ancestors’ inbred branch.

But what if you are a writer who wants to use Cleopatra as a character? Especially if, as is the case with my group, you are a writer of fantasy, science fiction and/or horror? If there’s already a little magic in the air, there is just enough uncertainty to write your own Cleopatra. The real Cleopatra was brilliant, and enthralling, and violent on a Godfather-type level. She was not a nice person. But that’s the historical Cleopatra. Who will your Cleopatra be?

Stuff I Read

Stanley M. Burstein. The Reign of Cleopatra. (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004).

Aidan Dodson & Dyan Hilton. The Complete Royal Families of Ancient Egypt. (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004).

Michael Grant. Cleopatra. (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972); (revised edition, London: Phoenix Press, 2011).

Prudence J. Jones. Cleopatra: A Sourcebook. (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006).

Duane W. Roller. Cleopatra: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).