posted on May, 17 2009 @ 04:43 PM
Sorry there has been a delay guys I have been busy with work, here is some of the stuff I wanted to add:
Cleopatra Ptolemy was the descendant of a line of Greeks stretching back to Ptolemy, the general of Alexander the Great. She was the last of this
line and the last Pharaoh of Egypt. After her, Rome would rule Egypt.
Cleopatra was an Egyptian queen famous in history and drama, lover of Julius Caesar and later the wife of Mark Antony. She became queen on the death
of her father, Ptolemy XII, in 51 BC, ruling successively with her two brothers Ptolemy XIII (51-47) and Ptolemy XIV (47-44) and her son Ptolemy XV
Caesar (44-30). After the Roman armies of Octavian (the future emperor Augustus) defeated their combined forces, Antony and Cleopatra committed
suicide, and Egypt fell under Roman domination. Her ambition no less than her charm actively influenced Roman politics at a crucial period, and she
came to represent, as did no other woman of antiquity, the prototype of the romantic femme fatale.
The second daughter of King Ptolemy XII, Cleopatra was destined to become the last sovereign of the Macedonian dynasty that ruled Egypt between the
death of Alexander the Great in 323 and its annexation by Rome in 31. Alexander’s marshal Ptolemy had founded the line. Cleopatra was of Macedonian
descent and had no Egyptian blood, although she alone of her house took the trouble to learn Egyptian, and for political reasons regarded herself as
the daughter of Re, the sun god. Coin portraits of her show a countenance alive rather than beautiful, with a sensitive mouth, firm chin, liquid eyes,
broad forehead, and prominent nose. Her voice, says the Greek biographer Plutarch, "was like an instrument of many strings." He adds, "Plato admits
four sorts of flattery, but she had a thousand." When Ptolemy XII died in 51, the throne passed to his 15-year-old son, Ptolemy XIII, and that
king's sister-bride, Cleopatra. They soon had a falling out, and civil war ensued. Ptolemy XII had been expelled from Egypt in 58 and had been
restored three years later only by means of Roman arms. Rome now felt that it had a right to interfere in the affairs of this independent, exceedingly
rich kingdom, over which it had in fact exercised a sort of protectorate since 168. No one realized more clearly than Cleopatra that Rome was now the
arbiter and that to carry out her ambition she must remain on good terms with Rome and its rulers. Thus when Caesar, the victor in the civil war,
arrived in Egypt in October 48, in pursuit of Pompey (who, a fugitive from his defeat at Phrasal in Thessaly, had been murdered as he landed four days
before), Cleopatra set out to captivate him. She succeeded. Each was determined to use the other. Caesar sought money--he claimed he was owed it for
the expenses of her father's restoration. Cleopatra's target was power: she was determined to restore the glories of the first Ptolemy’s and to
recover as much as possible of their dominions, which had included southern Syria and Palestine. She realized that Caesar was the strong man, the
dictator, of Rome, and it was therefore on him that she relied. In the ensuing civil war in Egypt Caesar was hard-pressed by the anti-Cleopatra party,
led by her brother, Ptolemy XIII, but Caesar eventually defeated them and reestablished the joint rule of brother and sister-wife. Caesar, having won
his victory on March 27, 47, left Egypt after a fortnight's amorous respite. Whether Caesar was in fact the father of Cleopatra's son whom she
called Caesarian cannot now be known.
It took Caesar two years to extinguish the last flames of Pompeian opposition. As soon as he returned to Rome, in 46, he celebrated a four-day
triumph--the ceremonial in honor of a general after his victory over a foreign enemy--in which Arsinoe, Cleopatra's younger and hostile sister, was
paraded. Munda, in 45, was the coup de grace. Cleopatra was now in Rome, and a golden statue of her had been placed by Caesar's orders in the temple
of Venus Genetrix, the ancestress of the Julian family to which Caesar belonged. Cleopatra herself was installed by Caesar in a villa that he owned
beyond the Tiber. She was accompanied by her husband-brother and was still in Rome when Caesar was murdered in 44. She behaved with a discretion that
she was later to discard, and her presence seems to have occasioned little comment; officially she was negotiating a treaty of alliance. Cicero, the
politician and writer, mentions her in none of his contemporary letters, though his later references to her show that he regarded her, as most Romans
did, with rancor.
Caesar's assassination put an end to Cleopatra's first campaign for power, and she retired to Egypt to await the outcome of the next round in the
Roman political struggle. When, at the Battle of Philippi in 42, Caesar's assassins were routed, Mark Antony became the heir-apparent of Caesar's
authority--or so it seemed, for his great-nephew and personal heir, Octavian, was but a sickly boy. When Antony, bent on pursuing the eternal mirage
of Roman rulers, an invasion of Persia, sent for Cleopatra, she was delighted. Here was a second chance of achieving her aim. She had known Antony
when he had been in Egypt as a young staff officer and she had been 14. She was now 28 or 29 and completely confident of her powers. She set out for
Tarsus in Asia Minor, loaded with gifts, having delayed her departure to heighten Antony's expectation. She entered the city by sailing up the Cydnus
River in the famous barge that Shakespeare immortalized in Antony and Cleopatra. Antony was captivated, and Cleopatra subtly exploited his raffish and
unstable character. Forgetting his wife, Fulvia, who in Italy was doing her best to maintain her husband's interests against the growing menace of
young Octavian, Antony put off his Persian campaign and returned as Cleopatra's slave to Alexandria, where he treated her not as a "protected"
sovereign but as an independent monarch. "Her design of attacking Rome by means of Romans," as one historian put it, "was one of such stupendous
audacity that we must suppose that she saw no other way." Her first effort had been frustrated by Caesar's death; she felt now that she could win
all by using the far more pliant and apparently equally powerful Antony. In Alexandria Cleopatra did all she could to pander to his weaknesses. They
formed a society of "inimitable livers," whose members in fact lived a life of debauchery and foll