What Did Cleopatra Really Look Like?

There are a lot of misconceptions about Kleopatra VII Philopator of Egypt, the ancient queen most commonly known in English as simply “Cleopatra.” For instance, as I discuss in this article from March 2019, she actually lived closer to the present day than to the time of the construction of the pyramids of Giza. Meanwhile, as I discuss in this article from August 2019, the popular story about Cleopatra committing suicide by allowing an Egyptian asp to bite her on the breast is probably apocryphal and it is more likely that she actually committed suicide by drinking poison or by cutting herself and applying poison to the wound.

Perhaps the greatest misconception of all about Cleopatra, though, is what she looked like. Modern people have a very clear image of what Cleopatra looked like: a beautiful, pale, small-nosed woman like Elizabeth Taylor dressed in a revealing outfit with thick makeup, straight, black hair, bangs, and braids with gold ornaments going down to her shoulders. Unfortunately for fans of classic films, this image is inaccurate in almost every single way.

We actually have pretty good idea of what the historical Cleopatra looked like and it’s nothing at all like the image most people have in mind. For one thing, she didn’t have bangs. She did have a large, hooked nose, a prominent chin, and curly hair that she normally wore in a bun at the back of her head. There’s even a possibility that she may have been a redhead.

The modern image of Cleopatra

The modern image of Cleopatra in popular culture has been fundamentally shaped by the portrayal of Cleopatra by the British-American actress Elizabeth Taylor in the 1963 historical drama film Cleopatra, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, based on the book The Life and Times of Cleopatra by Carlo Maria Franzero.

One immediate problem with the film is that it gives very little impression of just how much time actually passed over the course of Cleopatra’s reign. Elizabeth Taylor was thirty-one at the time of the film’s release. At the time when Cleopatra first met Julius Caesar in 47 BC, though, she was only about twenty-two years old (about a decade younger than Taylor) and, by the time of her death in August of 30 BC, she was nearly forty (about a decade older than Taylor). She surely must have aged considerably over the course of that time, but yet films rarely show this.

Elizabeth Taylor’s portrayal of Cleopatra was, in turn, influenced by the portrayal of Cleopatra in the 1934 black-and-white epic film Cleopatra, which was directed by Cecil B. DeMille and starred the American actress Claudette Colbert as Cleopatra. It was Cecil B. DeMille’s film the generated the idea of Cleopatra having bangs; in that film, Claudette Colbert portrayed Cleopatra with bangs because, at the time, bangs were part of Colbert’s signature image. In other words, it all had to do with the actress’s image, not with how the historical Cleopatra really looked.

ABOVE: Image of Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra in the 1963 film Cleopatra

ABOVE: Color publicity photo of Claudette Colbert as Cleopatra from the 1934 film Cleopatra, directed by Cecil B. DeMille

A note on Cleopatra’s nationality

Before we even talk about Cleopatra’s surviving portraits or how she is described in extant written sources, we need to talk about her ancestry, which is, unfortunately, a subject of what seems like perpetual public controversy. Most people assume that, because Cleopatra ruled Egypt, she must have been a native Egyptian. Consequently, it is often assumed that Cleopatra must have looked “Egyptian” (whatever that means). In reality, Cleopatra probably thought of herself primarily as Greek and it is unclear whether she even had a single Egyptian ancestor.

We know very little about where the ancestors of most specific individuals who lived in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt came from. For instance, as I discuss in this article I wrote in October of last year, we have no idea whether Hypatia of Alexandria’s ancestors were mostly Greek or mostly Egyptian; all we know is that Hypatia herself lived in Alexandria, a city in northern Egypt that was founded by Greeks.

Cleopatra is one of the few exceptions to this trend. Because Cleopatra was a member of the well-documented and long-lasting Ptolemaic Dynasty, we have a pretty good impression of where most of her ancestors came from, going back centuries before she was even born. The fact is, nearly all of Cleopatra’s known ancestors were Makedonian Greeks whose ancestral homeland was the kingdom of Makedonia, which was located in what is now northern Greece.

ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing the territorial extent of the ancient kingdom of Makedonia (labelled here as “Macedonia”) in the year 431 BC on the eve of the Peloponnesian War. Nearly all of Cleopatra’s known ancestors either came from Makedonia or were descended from people who came from Makedonia.

As a member of the Ptolemaic Dynasty, Cleopatra was directly descended from Ptolemaios I Soter, one of Alexander the Great’s generals and a member of the Diadochoi, the group of generals who divided up Alexander’s empire amongst themselves. The Ptolemies were one of the most notoriously inbred dynasties in the ancient world and it was customary for men in the royal family, especially kings, to marry their own sisters and cousins.

The Ptolemies rarely ever married outsiders and, when they did, they usually only married members of other Greek royal families. In fact, Cleopatra’s only known ancestor with any non-Greek ancestry was her three times great-grandmother Kleopatra I of Syria, whose father Antiochos III was descended from Apama, the Sogdian wife of the Greek king Seleukos I Nikator, and whose mother Laonike III was of mixed Greek and Persian ancestry.

As a result of all the rampant inbreeding, Cleopatra’s family tree looks a lot more like a ladder than a “tree.” Cleopatra herself married two of her own brothers in succession: Ptolemaios XIII Theos Philopator and Ptolemaios XIV. Both of these marriages ended badly.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a bust of Ptolemaios I Soter, one of Alexander the Great’s generals, the founder of the Ptolemaic Dynasty, and a distant ancestor of Cleopatra, on display in the Louvre

In addition to being of Greek ancestry, the Ptolemies were also culturally Greek. Greek was the only language that most of the Ptolemies ever learned to speak and, while they portrayed themselves as pharaohs to their Egyptian subjects, they portrayed themselves to the world—and almost certainly thought of themselves—as thoroughly Greek monarchs.

They minted Greek-style coins, sponsored Greek intellectuals, gave their offspring Greek names, commissioned portraits of themselves using Greek iconography, and traced their legitimacy to their connection with Alexander the Great.

In fact, Cleopatra herself was the only member of her family who ever even learned to speak the Egyptian language and, even with her, surviving documents from her court reveal that she conducted nearly all official business in Greek. She almost certainly would have thought of herself primarily as a Greek queen.

ABOVE: Egyptian court document dated to February 33 BC in the Greek language, bearing the Greek word γινέσθωι (“make it happen”) at the bottom in Cleopatra’s own handwriting

Cleopatra’s parents

Cleopatra’s father was Ptolemaios XII Auletes, but we don’t know for certain who her mother was. Ptolemaios XII is known to have had several wives, all of whom are reported to have been from noble families. His primary wife was Kleopatra V Tryphaina and she is the only one of his wives whose name is recorded.

The Greek writer Strabon of Amaseia (lived c. 64 BC – c. 24 AD) writes in his Geographika 17.1.11 that, of all Ptolemaios XII’s daughters, only the eldest (i.e., Cleopatra’s sister Berenike) was legitimate. This statement, however, has caused considerable controversy, since Strabon is the only ancient writer who ever even implies that Cleopatra was illegitimate.

Furthermore, if Cleopatra’s illegitimacy were really a well-established fact, then it is absolutely baffling why the Romans did not use it in their propaganda against her, since it would have been a perfect way of delegitimizing her. If it were really well-established that Cleopatra was not the legitimate daughter of Ptolemaios XII and his legal wife, we would expect to see this claim reiterated and emphasized in virtually every extant Roman source. Instead, what we see is the exact opposite: total silence.

There are two possible resolutions to this conundrum. One is that Strabon may have simply guessed that Ptolemaios XII’s daughters other than Berenike were illegitimate without any reliable evidence. The other possibility that, when Strabon says that Ptolemaios XII’s daughters other than Berenike were “illegitimate,” what he really means is that they were children of Ptolemaios XII by his minor wives, rather than children of his primary wife.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Greek-style portrait head of Cleopatra’s father Ptolemaios XII Auletes

Was Cleopatra’s mother Egyptian?

In January 2019, after a story came out that Angelina Jolie and Lady Gaga were competing for the lead role in an upcoming Cleopatra biopic, a whole flurry of articles came out expressing outrage that Cleopatra wasn’t being portrayed by a black woman.

Most of these articles acknowledged that Cleopatra was of Greek ancestry, but claimed that new evidence had demonstrated that Cleopatra’s mother might have actually been African. An article by Nadra Nittle published in Vox on 14 January 2019 titled “Almost all of the actresses who’ve played Cleopatra have been white. But was she?” presents one form of this argument:

“Historians have long described Cleopatra as ethnically Greek, but during the past decade, that assumption has increasingly been called into question. In 2009, a team of archaeologists found the remains of a woman they believed to be Princess Arsinoe, Cleopatra’s sister. The researchers believe Arsinoe’s remains, found in Ephesus, Turkey, indicate that her mother (also likely Cleopatra’s) was African.”

“‘That Arsinoe had an African mother is a real sensation which leads to a new insight on Cleopatra’s family and the relationship of the sisters Cleopatra and Arsinoe,’ Hilke Thuer of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, who made the discovery, said at the time.”

An article by Biba King published in The Independent on 15 January 2019 titled “Cleopatra should be played by a black actor—and not just because it might be more historically accurate” presents essentially the same argument:

“Others want the iconic role be played by a black actor, citing revelations that Cleopatra’s mother was actually African (a theory that emerged after a skeleton, thought to belong to Cleopatra’s sister Princess Arsinoe, was found in Ephesus, Turkey).”

Unfortunately, as exciting as it would be to learn that Cleopatra’s mother was a native Egyptian, both of these passages are deeply inaccurate.

First of all, the skeleton that they are talking about here wasn’t discovered in 2009. The octagonal tomb at Ephesos containing the skeleton was first discovered in 1904, but it was initially mistaken for a victory monument. The skeleton itself was discovered in 1926. It was in the 1990s that the Austrian scholar Hilke Thür first speculated that the tomb and the skeleton that was found in it might belong to Arsinoë IV.

What happened in 2009, then? Well, that is the year that the BBC produced a documentary promoting Thür’s hypothesis, titled Cleopatra: Portrait of a Killer. Apparently, the author of the Vox article saw the year that the documentary was produced and incorrectly assumed that the skeleton had just been discovered that year.

Leaving that matter aside, the evidence to support the identification of the tomb at Ephesos as that of Cleopatra’s sister Arsinoë IV is actually incredibly shaky and many classicists, including the eminent scholar Mary Beard, have rejected this identification as implausible.

The octagonal tomb at Ephesos doesn’t have any kind of name or inscription on it to identify it as belonging to anyone in particular, meaning Hilke Thür’s identification of the tomb as Arsinoë IV’s is based almost entirely on circumstantial evidence. Here are some of the main pieces of evidence on which Thür has based her argument:

• The tomb was shaped like an octagon, which Thür claims matches the second tier of the lighthouse of Alexandria.
• The tomb bore papyrus-bundle columns.
• The skeleton was radiocarbon-dated to between c. 200 and c. 20 BC.
• The skeleton belonged to a girl, who was relatively young when she died.
• The girl’s remains showed no signs of her having borne heavy loads, which suggests that she was of relatively high status.
• The girl was clearly beheaded, indicating that she had been executed.

This evidence isn’t really compelling. It doesn’t make much sense to associate the octagonal shape of the tomb with the Lighthouse of Alexandria, since lots of buildings in the ancient world were presumably octagonal, and the papyrus-bundle columns don’t necessarily mean anything. Meanwhile, Arsinoë IV was probably not the only young woman of relatively high status who was executed in Ephesos between c. 200 and c. 20 BC.

There is also at least one piece of evidence that seems to seriously undermine the identification of the girl from the octagonal tomb as Arsinoë IV and that is the girl’s age. Arsinoë IV was most likely born sometime between 68 and 63 BC and she was executed under the orders of Marcus Antonius in 41 BC, meaning she would have most likely been somewhere between twenty-two and twenty-seven years old at the time of her death. The girl whose skeleton was found in the tomb at Ephesos, on the other hand, is estimated to have been between fifteen and eighteen years old at the time of her death.

In other words, the girl who was buried in the octagonal tomb at Ephesos seems to have been somewhere between twelve and four years younger at the time of her death than we would expect Arsinoë IV to have been. This doesn’t definitively prove that the skeleton from Ephesos is not that of Arsinoë IV, since these kinds of estimates are naturally very imprecise, but it does cast serious doubt on the identification of the skeleton as Arsinoë IV’s.

In any case, even if the skeleton from Ephesos is Arsinoë IV’s, Thür’s evidence to support her argument that the girl from the tomb was of mixed Greek and African ancestry is highly dubious at best. Her team was not able to conduct an accurate analysis of the DNA from the skeleton because the bones had been handled too many times since they were first uncovered in 1926 and the DNA was too corrupted to work with.

Thür’s team’s assessment that the girl was of partial African ancestry was based solely on measurements of the skull that were made before the skull went missing during World War II. It is widely accepted among modern scholars, though, that skull measurements are not a reliable way of determining race. Furthermore, because the skull is missing, we don’t even know if the measurements that were taken of it are accurate.

Finally, although we do know that Cleopatra VII and Arsinoë IV were both daughters of Ptolemaios XII Auletes, we don’t know if they had the same mother. As I have already mentioned above, Cleopatra VII’s mother was most likely Cleopatra V Tryphaina, who was either the sister or cousin of Cleopatra’s father Ptolemaios XII Auletes. Arsinoë IV’s mother, however, is unknown.

In other words, even if the skeleton from the octagonal tomb at Ephesos really was Arsinoë IV’s and it did prove that Arsinoë IV’s mother was Egyptian, that still wouldn’t prove that Cleopatra VII’s mother was Egyptian. This whole argument, then, is basically just a series of unfounded assumptions on top of unfounded assumptions.

ABOVE: Photograph from this article of the partially reconstructed octagonal tomb at Ephesos that some have speculated might be the tomb of Cleopatra’s sister Arsinoë IV

A different argument for Cleopatra’s mother being a native Egyptian

Clearly, the whole octagonal tomb argument falls flat, but a more plausible argument for Cleopatra’s mother as Egyptian has been put forward by the scholar Duane W. Roller in his book Cleopatra: A Biography, published by Oxford University Press in 2010. Roller argues that Cleopatra’s mother may have been a secondary wife of Ptolemaios XII and that she may have been a descendant of a member of the Ptolemaic royal family named Berenike and her husband Psenptais, who was an Egyptian high priest of the god Ptah.

In support of this argument, Roller notes that Psenptais II and Berenike’s son Petubastis III officiated Ptolemaios XII’s coronation and that Petubastis III’s funerary stele unusually mentions Ptolemaios XII’s wives, which makes the most sense if one of those wives was related to him. He also notes the fact that Cleopatra VII’s daughter Cleopatra Selene commemorated Psenptais II and Petubastis III’s family when she was living in Mauretanian Caesarea. He argues that this makes the most sense if Cleopatra VII’s mother (i.e., Cleopatra Selene’s maternal grandmother) was a member of this family.

Obviously, this is all circumstantial evidence, but, with all the evidence put together, he makes a fairly compelling case. I am therefore willing to believe that Cleopatra’s mother may have indeed been part Egyptian.

What Cleopatra VII really looked like

Let’s move on from the topic of Cleopatra’s ancestry to talk about her appearance. Because Cleopatra was one of the most powerful people of her time and the ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt for twenty-one years, we have no shortage of ancient depictions of her, so we have a pretty good impression of what she really looked like—or at least how her official portrait artists portrayed her.

Here are some photographs from different angles of the so-called “Berlin Cleopatra,” a realistic marble portrait head of Cleopatra currently held in the Altes Museum in Berlin, Germany. It dates from her own lifetime and is probably the closest any of us will ever come to seeing what Cleopatra herself looked like:

Here is another marble portrait head of Cleopatra that is currently held in the Vatican Museums. The nose on this one has, unfortunately, been broken off, but, as I discuss in this article I wrote in July 2019, this is very common for classical marble sculptures, since the nose is a rather thin piece of marble that sticks out past the rest of the face and it therefore has a tendency to be the first part to break off if the statue is knocked over or if something is knocked into it. We must imagine this head as having originally possessed a nose similar to the Berlin portrait shown above:

Here is a full marble statue of Cleopatra from the Vatican Museums. Like the two portrait heads shown above, it is also contemporary to her reign:

Many scholars think that the marble sculptures of Cleopatra are heavily idealized and that Cleopatra’s portraits on her coins are less idealized. Her coin portraits, however, are of inferior artistic quality and, to me at least, look rather cartoonish. They are also somewhat less consistent in how they portray her.

In any case, here is a portrait of Cleopatra from one of her own coins minted in Egypt during her reign:

Here is another silver coin minted by Cleopatra, depicting herself on the obverse and Marcus Antonius on the reverse:

Here is another coin, also depicting Cleopatra on the obverse and Marcus Antonius on the reverse:

Judging from Cleopatra’s portraits, it seems that she had a rather large nose that was at least slightly hooked. In coin portraits, the degree to which her nose is hooked is emphasized, but, in sculptural portraits, it tends to be toned down. Similarly, in coin portraits, Cleopatra seems to have a rather large, projecting chin, but this prominent feature is noticeably toned down in her sculptural portraits.

Even though most people today imagine Cleopatra with bangs because of how she was portrayed in twentieth-century films, in ancient portraits, she is consistently shown without bangs. Likewise, even though most people imagine Cleopatra with straight hair, judging from her surviving portraits, it seems her hair was actually curly, not straight at all. In realistic-looking portraits, she is usually shown with a so-called “melon” hairstyle, with her hair pulled back into a bun at the occipital.

Over her signature “melon” hairstyle, Cleopatra is usually portrayed wearing a kind of ornamental cloth headband known as a “diadem.” The diadem was an indispensable symbol of royal authority in the Hellenistic world and most other Hellenistic rulers were portrayed wearing them. Although it may be an imperfect comparison, it is helpful to think of the diadem as basically the ancient Greek equivalent of a crown.

ABOVE: Bronze bust from the Villa of the Papyri in Pompeii depicting a Ptolemaic ruler, most likely Cleopatra’s ancestor Ptolemaios II Philadelphos, wearing a diadem

Cleopatra’s size

There are some details about Cleopatra’s physical appearance that ancient artistic representations of Cleopatra don’t tell us, but that we can gather from ancient written sources. The Greek biographer Ploutarchos of Chaironeia (lived c. 46 – c. 120 AD) states in his Life of Julius Caesar 49.1 that, in 47 BC, when she was about twenty-two years old, Cleopatra met with Julius Caesar for the first time by hiding inside a στρωματόδεσμον (strōmatódesmon), a kind of large sack probably about the size of a duffle bag that was used for storing bedclothes. This bag tied up with Cleopatra inside and presented to Caesar. When Caesar untied the bag, Cleopatra arose from it.

The idea of Cleopatra being presented to Caesar rolled up inside a carpet is a modern misconception resulting from a mistranslation of the Greek word στρωματόδεσμον in Ploutarchos’s account. It is unclear whether even Ploutarchos’s original story is true, since it may be a legend. Ploutarchos was, after all, writing well over a century after Cleopatra’s death.

In any case, the mere fact that people in ancient times thought that the young Cleopatra was able to fit inside a large sack for tying up bedclothes is a strong indication that she had a reputation for being an extremely tiny person. The fact that she had this reputation is an indication that she was probably rather small.

ABOVE: Cleopatra and Caesar, painted in 1866 by the French Academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, is one of the most iconic representations of Cleopatra being presented to Caesar in a carpet. The idea of her rolled up inside a carpet actually comes from a mistranslation, since the actual Greek word used by Ploutarchos is στρωματόδεσμον, which refers to a kind of large sack for tying up bedclothes.

Cleopatra’s skin tone and hair color

None of the ancient artistic depictions of Cleopatra tell us what color her skin was or what color her hair was. Although, as I talk about in this article I originally published in February 2017, classical sculptures were originally painted to look lifelike, the original pigments on the Berlin Cleopatra and other sculptures of her have all flaked away and, as far as I am aware, no one has done examinations of them to determine what the original colors were.

Here, however, is a painting from one of the houses in the Roman city of Herculaneum, which was destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. This painting dates to the first century AD and has been identified by some scholars as a posthumous portrait of Cleopatra.

We know this is definitely a portrait of a Hellenistic queen, since the woman in the painting is wearing a diadem. Because the portrait is surrounded by Egyptian motifs, we can be reasonably sure that the woman shown is specifically an Egyptian queen. Details such as the “melon” hairstyle and the rather large, somewhat hooked nose have led many scholars to think that this woman is supposed to be Cleopatra:

If this painting does indeed depict Cleopatra and it is an accurate representation of her, that would mean Cleopatra was pale-skinned with frizzy red hair. Of course, we cannot be completely certain that this painting really depicts Cleopatra. Even though the woman in the painting closely resembles known portraits of Cleopatra and she is shown surrounded by Egyptian motifs, the painting is still not labelled and there is no way to tell for sure if it is really Cleopatra or another Hellenistic Egyptian queen with the same hairstyle.

Many have complained about Cleopatra being portrayed by white actresses, since many have argued that this is whitewashing. If this painting from Herculaneum is indeed a reasonably accurate near-contemporary portrait of Cleopatra, though, this would mean that Hollywood may actually be correct in portraying Cleopatra as white. Indeed, Hollywood’s real mistake may actually be in giving Cleopatra dark hair.

Cleopatra and makeup

We usually imagine Cleopatra wearing extremely heavy makeup. This idea is one that can be traced all the way back to antiquity. The Roman poet Marcus Annaeus Lucanus (lived 39 – 65 AD), better known simply as “Lucan,” attempts to portray Cleopatra in his epic poem the Pharsalia Book 10, lines 136-146, as a dangerously seductive eastern woman, bedecked in makeup and pearls and wearing a see-through dress. He draws on imagery that the Romans commonly associated with prostitutes to emphasize Cleopatra’s supposed sexual licentiousness. Lucan writes, as translated by H. T. Riley:

“There do kings recline, and Caesar a still higher power; and having immoderately painted up her fatal beauty [formam… nocentem], neither content with a sceptre her own, nor with her brother her husband, covered with the spoils of the Red Sea, upon her neck and hair Cleopatra wears treasures, and pants beneath her ornaments. Her white breasts shine through the Sidonian fabric, which, wrought in close texture by the sley of the Seres [i.e. the Chinese], the needle of the workman of the Nile has separated, and has loosened the warp by stretching out the web. Here do they place circles, cut from the snow-white teeth hi the forests of Atlas, such as not even when Juba was captured, came before the eyes of Caesar.”

Lucan’s description squares pretty well with how most people today imagine Cleopatra, but it is actually hard to say whether the image he presents us with is accurate. For one thing, Lucan was born in 39 AD, nearly three quarters of a century after Cleopatra’s death. He began writing the Pharsalia in around 61 AD, nearly a full century after Cleopatra’s death. Lucan himself certainly never saw Cleopatra in person, nor is it likely that he could he have personally met with anyone who had seen her in person.

Furthermore, Lucan was a Roman imperial propagandist who knew that Cleopatra had been the enemy of Augustus, the first Roman emperor, and therefore wanted to portray Cleopatra in the absolute worst possible light. Since the Romans viewed heavy makeup as immoral and associated it with prostitution, Lucan describes Cleopatra as wearing heavy makeup specifically to make her sound like a prostitute with no modesty or sense of decency.

I imagine that Cleopatra probably wore makeup at least sometimes, but how heavy it would have been is hard to say. I am personally inclined to think that she probably didn’t wear nearly as heavy makeup as we usually imagine her wearing. It is true that the ancient Egyptians often lined their eyes with kohl and it is possible that Cleopatra may have done this under some circumstances as well. Nonetheless, we must remember that, culturally, Cleopatra was Greek, not Egyptian. Among the ancient Greeks, as with the Romans, heavy makeup generally seems to have been frowned up and even associated with prostitution.

Indeed, even wearing makeup at all was sometimes seen in the Greek world as deceitful. The ancient Athenian writer Xenophon (lived c. 431 – 354 BC) in chapter ten of his dialogue Oikonomikos portrays an old man named Ischomachos who catches his much younger wife secretly painting her face with white lead to make herself appear pale and her cheeks with alkanet dye to make them appear rosy. He berates her, telling her that, by wearing makeup, she is deceiving him and hiding her true appearance from him. He says to her, as rendered in this translation:

“Then please assume, my dear, that I do not prefer white paint and dye of alkanet to your real colour; but just as the gods have made horses to delight in horses, cattle in cattle, sheep in sheep, so human beings find the human body undisguised most delightful. Tricks like these may serve to gull outsiders, but people who live together are bound to be found out, if they try to deceive one another. For they are found out while they are dressing in the morning; they perspire and are lost; a tear convicts them; the bath reveals them as they are!”

This is, of course, an extreme opinion, but it does reflect an extreme form of what seems to have been a prevailing attitude among the ancient Greeks that the “natural look” was best.

Modern reconstructions of Cleopatra’s appearance

Many people have tried to reconstruct Cleopatra’s appearance based on ancient depictions of her. For instance, here is one modern attempt to reconstruct what Cleopatra might have looked like, based on the many surviving ancient portraits of her:

How accurate is this reconstruction? It’s hard to say. Most difficult to assess is the accuracy of Cleopatra’s skin color, since this depends to a large extent on how much faith you want to put in the accuracy of that pale, redheaded portrait from Herculaneum. In this reconstruction, as you can tell, they clearly decided to go with giving her olive skin, which is not an unreasonable supposition.

The creators of this reconstruction have noticeably omitted the cloth diadem that Cleopatra is nearly always shown wearing. Meanwhile, the outfit Cleopatra is shown wearing in this reconstruction, with its extremely low neckline and bare shoulders, is almost certainly not the kind of outfit the historical Cleopatra would have worn out in public, since Greek women—yes, even queens—were expected to dress modestly. (There are surviving nude statues of Cleopatra, but these are statues portraying her as a goddess, not accurate representations of how she really dressed.)

Cleopatra with cornrows?

Some modern attempts at reconstructing Cleopatra’s appearance are even more flawed than the one I have shown above. For instance, you may have seen this image floating around the internet, purporting to be an “accurate” representation of Cleopatra:

Now the face in this image is probably mostly accurate, but whoever made this image has completely butchered Cleopatra’s signature hairstyle. For some reason, they left out her cloth diadem and decided to anachronistically portray her with cornrows.

Cornrows were definitely not a common hairstyle in the ancient Mediterranean world and there are no extant representations of Cleopatra that unambiguously depict her with this very modern hairstyle. I think that whoever created this image willfully misinterpreted the hairstyle Cleopatra is often portrayed with on her coins and portraits in effort to make Cleopatra look more like a contemporary black American woman.

If you actually look closely at the ancient depictions of Cleopatra that I have shown earlier in this article, especially the Berlin Cleopatra, you can see the ripples of her curls, especially towards the front of her hair. This suggest to me that her hair isn’t actually supposed to be braided at all; it’s just curly and the lines we often see along the back of her head are just the artists’ somewhat simplistic way of showing that her hair is pulled back:

It’s actually extremely simple to recreate the hairstyle that Cleopatra is normally portrayed with in her portraits. Indeed, I imagine that it probably took Cleopatra’s slaves only about three minutes to do her hair in the morning. Here is a video that explains exactly how to recreate Cleopatra’s hairstyle, with a visual demonstration of how it’s done:

I think that perhaps the reason why no one ever seems to portray Cleopatra with the actual hairstyle that she is portrayed with in all her coins and Greek portraits is because her actual hair style is so simple that it just doesn’t seem glamorous enough for a queen. It’s basically just the ancient Greek equivalent of a ponytail. Thus, people feel the desperate need to portray Cleopatra with a more elaborate hairdo.

Was Cleopatra beautiful?

It is often claimed that Cleopatra wasn’t beautiful, but that she made herself seductive through her intelligence and her wit. There’s no doubt that Cleopatra was extremely intelligent. She reportedly spoke nine different languages, probably at least three of them with native or near-native fluency. She managed to win over unlikely allies and maintain her rule over Egypt for over two decades during one of the most turbulent and chaotic periods in Egyptian history. No matter what you think of her, she was a very intelligent woman.

There’s also little doubt that Cleopatra had a reputation for her wit. Ploutarchos of Chaironeia records in his Life of Marcus Antonius 29.3–4 that Cleopatra and Marcus Antonius once went fishing together. Marcus Antonius found that he wasn’t catching any fish and he didn’t want to look bad in front of Cleopatra, so he ordered some of his men to take fish that had already caught, dive under the water, and put the fish on his hook.

Cleopatra, however, caught on to what he was doing. She pretended to be impressed and, the next day, she invited large numbers of people to come watch Marcus Antonius go fishing. Then, when Marcus Antonius put down his line, she ordered one of her own attendants to put a pickled fish from the Black Sea on his hook. Marcus Antonius pulled up his line, thinking one of his own divers had put a fish on his line. When he pulled up the pickled fish, everyone laughed.

People are probably correct, then, when they say that Cleopatra was smart and funny. On the other hand, though, I’m not sure I agree with the claim that Cleopatra wasn’t beautiful. She may not align with our modern American conception of what counts as “beautiful,” but ancient writers thought she was very beautiful. The ancient historian Kassios Dion (lived c. 155 – c. 235 AD), who was a Roman Senator of Greek origin, describes Cleopatra’s appearance in his Roman History 42.34.4–6. Here is how he describes her, as translated by Ernest Cary:

“For she was a woman of surpassing beauty, and at that time, when she was in the prime of her youth, she was most striking; she also possessed a most charming voice and a knowledge of how to make herself agreeable to every one. Being brilliant to look upon and to listen to, with the power to subjugate every one, even a love-sated man already past his prime, she thought that it would be in keeping with her rôle to meet Caesar, and she reposed in her beauty all her claims to the throne. She asked therefore for admission to his presence, and on obtaining permission adorned and beautified herself so as to appear before him in the most majestic and at the same time pity-inspiring guise. When she had perfected her schemes she entered the city (for she had been living outside of it), and by night without Ptolemy’s knowledge went into the palace.”

Even Lucan, the Roman poet I quoted earlier who absolutely hated Cleopatra’s guts, still described as her as possessing “formam nocentem” or “fatal beauty.” If Cleopatra wasn’t really beautiful, we would expect hostile authors like Lucan to make a big deal of this and lambast her for being ugly. Instead, they portray her beauty as dangerous. It’s really hard to make a case that Cleopatra wasn’t beautiful when even her worst enemies describe her as drop-dead gorgeous.

She may have had a rather large nose and frizzy hair, but who’s to say that means she wasn’t beautiful? I think that, when people insist that Cleopatra wasn’t beautiful, they are anachronistically imposing modern, western notions of beauty on a woman from over two thousand years ago.

ABOVE: Antony and Cleopatra, painted in 1884 by the English Academic painter Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema

Most (visually) accurate portrayal in a film or television show

In my opinion, the most visually accurate portrayal of Cleopatra in any modern film or television show that I have seen is probably the portrayal by the English actress Lyndsey Marshal in the HBO historical drama series Rome. Like the Cleopatra of history, the Cleopatra in the show has a rather large, hooked nose and a somewhat prominent chin. Also like the Cleopatra of history, she is very small, with Lyndsey Marshal standing at just five feet, half an inch tall. The show’s version of Mark Antony at one point refers to Cleopatra derisively as a “skinny little thing who talks too much.”

In season two, episode two “Son of Hades,” when Cleopatra goes to the city of Rome to meet with Mark Antony, she is even portrayed wearing her signature “melon” hairstyle and an outfit very much like the one she is shown wearing in the statue of her that I showed earlier:

You’ve really got to hand it to them, Lyndsey Marshal really does look like Cleopatra, especially in this shot. They’ve admittedly left out Cleopatra’s cloth diadem, which is probably a mistake, since the diadem symbolized Cleopatra’s position as queen and it is unlikely that she would have gone to Rome without wearing one.

Also, the neckline on her outfit in the show is much lower than the neckline she is portrayed with in her statue. This is probably not historically accurate, since, as I mentioned earlier, all women—even queens—in the ancient Greek world were always expected to dress modestly.

In this scene, the makers of the show have also given Cleopatra an ankh necklace. Cleopatra is not portrayed wearing a necklace like this in any extant representations, but it is conceivable that she might have worn one, since we do know that ankh amulets were a fairly common accessory in ancient Egypt. Several amulets of this kind were found in the tomb of Tutankhamun. Cleopatra was Greek, so she would have been less likely to wear this kind of amulet than a native Egyptian, but it is still conceivable that she would wear one.

I also think that Rome’s portrayal of Cleopatra’s personality is somewhat more accurate than many other portrayals. For instance, they did a fairly good job conveying that Cleopatra was actually extremely intelligent. Unfortunately, there are still some serious problems with how Cleopatra is portrayed in the show. For instance, in the show, she is portrayed sexually licentious and, at least one point, she is portrayed inviting random men to come have sex with her. We have no good evidence of her actually doing this. Nonetheless, I think they did a better job than a lot of other shows have done.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a blue ankh amulet from the Tomb of Tutankhamun. Ankh amulets really existed in ancient Egypt; we just don’t have a realistic portrait of Cleopatra wearing one.

Conclusion

The historical Cleopatra VII Philopator looked very different from how she is usually imagined:

• She definitely didn’t have bangs.
• She almost certainly had a rather large nose that was at least somewhat hooked.
• She probably had a rather prominent chin.
• She was probably very short and thin, at least when she was young.
• Her hair was curly, not straight, and she is usually portrayed with it tied back in bun at the back of her head and a cloth diadem worn over it.
• The traditional portrayal of Cleopatra as pale may be accurate, although it is difficult to assess the color of Cleopatra’s skin, since our sources for her skin color are rather limited.
• Depending on how much faith you want to place in that portrait from Herculaneum, her hair may have actually been frizzy and red.
• She probably didn’t wear extremely heavy makeup.
• She almost certainly didn’t wear extremely revealing outfits most of the time.