Cleopatra, Imperialism and Orientalism: Untamed Oriental Woman, Courageous Ruler or Elegiac Mistress?

Abstract

This paper explores literary images of Cleopatra VII, the queen of ancient Egypt, who was an ally of Antony in his struggle against Octavian. Octavian defeated Antony and Cleopatra at Actium in 31 BCE, and conquered Alexandria in the next year. In his political invective Octavian propagated Antony as the effeminate husband of an Oriental Cleopatra living in extraordinary luxury and excess, who presented an imminent danger to the Roman Empire and the West in general. The paper investigates the transformation of Cleopatra’s image in various literary genres in antiquity and their reception in Renaissance painting and in modern film. It considers Edward Saïd’s Orientalism in relation to Aeschylus’ Persae, and discusses how Octavian’s political invective against Antony shaped the image of Cleopatra. Augustan poets reflected on Octavian’s image of the Egyptian queen and depicted Cleopatra in accordance with the tropes of their genre. Horace depicts Cleopatra’s husband Antony in the manner of an invective as her slave and eunuch in the Epode 9. In the first part of his Ode 1.37, Horace depicts Cleopatra as a monstrous and mad queen, but in the second part he stresses that she faced her defeat with dignity as a good ruler. Roman elegists present Cleopatra according to the tropes of love elegy as an elegiac mistress and Antony as her slave. Vergil in the Aeneid depicts the clash between Cleopatra’s East and West, represented by Augustus, although the poet’s framing of the episode underlines its fictive character and emphasizes the fluidity of the stereotypical allegations of foreignness and femininity. Later receptions expand on Cleopatra’s Oriental character, which was instrumentalized by the emerging European Imperialism and Orientalism of 19th century. Stereotypical and orientalising images of Cleopatra were appropriated in painting and film to reproduce power relations, as well as to incite consumption of goods related to the image of the Egyptian queen.