Was Cleopatra Really Hypersexual?

In popular culture, the Ptolemaic Egyptian queen Cleopatra VII Philopator is routinely portrayed as wildly hypersexual. If you’ve been on the internet lately, there’s a good chance you’ve heard a lot of crazy stories about how she supposedly threw wild sex orgies, had sex with over a hundred men in one night, had a vibrator that was powered by angry bees, and once offered to have sex with anyone who wanted it under the condition that they would be executed the next morning.

None of these stories have any kind of basis in the ancient sources, however. In fact, historically speaking, Cleopatra is only known for certain to have had sex with two men in her entire life: Julius Caesar and Marcus Antonius. The popular image of Cleopatra as an insatiable nymphomaniac is ultimately rooted in a vicious Roman propaganda campaign to discredit her, but modern authors, filmmakers, video game developers, and internet factoid-mongers have taken it to a whole new level.

The age-old Roman tradition of slander

As I discuss in this article I wrote in August 2020 about the Roman emperor Caligula, Roman historians had a habit of making up outrageous stories about rulers they didn’t like and they had a very specific model that they tended to follow. Time and time again, Roman historians consistently portray rulers they don’t like as extremely arrogant, feminine, financially wasteful, and sexually depraved.

Elite male Roman writers believed that women were supposed to be modest and chaste. Thus, when elite male Roman writers write about women they happen to dislike, they have a tendency to particularly emphasize the notion that these women were unusually sexually licentious. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder (lived c. 23 – 79 CE), for instance, tells the following story in his Natural History 10.83 about Messalina, the wife of the emperor Claudius, as translated by John Bostock and H. T. Riley:

“Messalina, the wife of Claudius Caesar, thinking this a palm quite worthy of an empress, selected, for the purpose of deciding the question, one of the most notorious of the women who followed the profession of a hired prostitute; and the empress outdid her, after continuous intercourse, night and day, at the twenty-fifth embrace.”

Make sure to remember this story, because it is going to be important in a moment.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman bust in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence believed by some to depict Messalina, the wife of the emperor Claudius

Roman writers and Cleopatra

Cleopatra was an enemy of Augustus, the first emperor of the Roman Empire. It should therefore come as no surprise that ancient Roman writers chose to portray Cleopatra as a sexually alluring and licentious. The Roman poet Sextus Propertius (lived c. 50 – after c. 15 BCE) refers to Cleopatra VII in his Elegies 3.11 as “incesti meretrix regina Canopi,” which means “the whore queen of debauched Kanopos.”

Kanopos was a city in the Nile River Delta that had a reputation among the Romans in the first and second centuries CE as a place of untrammeled debauchery and sexual perversion. By describing Cleopatra as a “whore queen” of Kanopos, Propertius is trying to portray both the queen herself and the kingdom she ruled as sexually depraved and therefore deserving of conquest by the Romans.

The later Roman poet Marcus Annaeus Lucanus (lived 39 – 65 CE)—better known in English as “Lucan”—gives a vivid description of Cleopatra’s supposed physical appearance in his epic poem, the Pharsalia, portraying her as a dangerously seductive eastern woman bedecked in pearls, heavy makeup, and a see-through dress. He employs imagery that the Romans traditionally associated with prostitutes to really drive home the idea. He 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, 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.”

This highly sexualized portrayal of Cleopatra is almost certainly a fabrication of Roman propagandists. Nonetheless, modern storytellers have run absolutely wild with it.

Cleopatra’s supposed offer to have sex with anyone on the condition that they be executed in the morning

Perhaps the most notorious and persistent piece of popular Cleopatra mythology is the story that she would let any man who wanted to have sex with her do so for one night under the condition that he would be executed the next morning. This apocryphal legend originates from a very late anonymous ancient source: the De viris illustribus 86.2, which most likely dates to around the early fourth century CE, over three hundred years after Cleopatra’s historic death, and is not attested in any earlier source.

In the nineteenth century, the French author Théophile Gautier (lived 1811 – 1872) helped to further popularize this legend through his fictional short story Une nuit de Cléopâtre, which was originally published in French in 1838 and was eventually translated into English in 1882. Gautier’s work portrays Cleopatra as unimaginably beautiful, but also lustful, capricious, and ruthlessly hedonistic.

The narrative essentially goes like this: A handsome young man named Meïamoun, who is hopelessly infatuated with Cleopatra, is caught spying on her while she is bathing. The penalty for spying on the queen naked is death, but Cleopatra, hoping to exploit him for her own pleasure, promises him that they will spend one night of revelry together, under the condition that he will drink a cup of poison in the morning.

Cleopatra takes Meïamoun to one of her lavish orgies, where there are belly dancers and exotic performers. Cleopatra herself even performs a dance for him. In the morning, he drinks a cup of poison and dies. Then Marcus Antonius arrives and asks Cleopatra why there is a dead body on the floor. She simply replies that she has been testing poisons and Marcus Antonius thinks nothing of it.

ABOVE: Illustration of Cleopatra reclining in luxurious decadence from an 1890 printed edition of the book One of Cleopatra’s Nights and Other Fantastic Romances, translated by Lafcadio Hearn (page 11)

Théophile Gautier’s short story has proven to be massively influential. Notably, the American composer Henry Kimball Hadley adapted it into a two-act opera titled Cleopatra’s Night. It premiered on 31 January 1920 at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. In 1929, the opera was broadcast on NBC radio.

This story of Cleopatra offering to spend one night with someone on the condition that they face execution in the morning has resurfaced in some of the strangest places. Notably, the video game Assassin’s Creed Origins, originally released in 2017, includes a scene in which Cleopatra declares at a party that she will have sex with anyone under the condition that they agree to be executed in the morning. Here is a clip of the scene on YouTube:

This whole portrayal is, of course, a fantasy that is clearly derived from Théophile Gautier’s fictional story. The story, however, has been modified so that it doesn’t make any sense and Cleopatra seems even more sadistic than she did in the original.

In Gautier’s story, Meïamoun is already going to be executed and Cleopatra’s offer to spend the night with him is one last attempt on her part to get a little amusement out of him before he has to die. In Assassin’s Creed Origins, it makes absolutely no sense why Cleopatra would just randomly announce to a whole crowd of partiers that she will have sex with any of them, but only if they agree to be executed.

To start out, ancient rulers may have had a lot of power, but they still had to worry about their own reputations. Making this sort of lascivious pronouncement at a party in front of a large number of guests would undoubtedly injure Cleopatra’s reputation. Furthermore, if she is going to make a public spectacle of the fact that she is going to have sex with someone and there’s no particular reason why this individual person should need to be executed, there’s nothing she could possibly have to gain by executing them.

Nothing about the scene makes even a lick of sense.

Cleopatra’s supposed orgies

Ancient Roman writers were keen to portray Cleopatra as sexually licentious, but the idea that she engaged in wild sex orgies is not found in any ancient sources. Instead, this notion originates from a series of obviously forged letters that the Swiss antiquarian Melchior Goldast (lived c. 1576 – 1635 CE) produced well over a thousand years after the real-life Cleopatra’s death.

One letter, purporting to be from Cleopatra’s lover Marcus Antonius to the medical writer Soranos of Ephesos (who lived in the second century CE, about two hundred years after Marcus Antonius’s death), claims that Cleopatra had sex with 106 men in a brothel in a single night and still left unsatisfied:

“I was seized with love for Cleopatra and unduly delighted with the beauty of her body beyond what is fitting for the male mind. I was softened by her blandishments and nevertheless relaxed for her the restraints of marriage. The result was that she, despis-ing me and my fear of the law, stained herself with adultery, and by no means moder-ately.”

“Rather, after her woman’s mind had set aside its modesty, to such an extent did she burst forth into shameful actions, that, in one night, having donned her cloak to go out, she then slept with 106 men, a prostitute in the brothel. As she confessed, she had been so aroused in the tumescence of her rigid organ that she even left the brothel still unsatisfied. Although this was done most covertly, it did not escape my notice.”

You may notice that this story sounds awfully familiar. That’s because Goldast clearly just took Pliny the Elder’s story about Messalina supposedly having sex in a brothel with an extremely large number of men and applied it to Cleopatra, keeping most of the details the same.

Goldast’s fake letters became wildly popular almost as soon as they were printed. They influenced many later depictions of Cleopatra and were even treated as genuine by several prominent classicists. Consequently, the entirely fictional portrayal of Cleopatra engaging in wild sex orgies has become thoroughly embedded in modern popular culture. It appears, for instance, in the HBO drama series Rome (released 2005 – 2007). (This same television series is, as far as I can tell, the original source of the now-recurring portrayal of Cleopatra as a chronic opium addict.)

ABOVE: Scene of Lyndsey Marshal as Cleopatra in the HBO drama series Rome (released 2005 – 2007)—a show in which she and Marcus Antonius are portrayed as engaging in rampant orgies and drug abuse

Cleopatra’s supposed bee-powered vibrator

One of the most popular stories about Cleopatra on the internet claims that she invented a primitive vibrator made of a hollow gourd filled with angry bees. This claim appears all over the place on the internet. For instance, an article by Jesus Diaz published on the website Gizmodo on 13 May 2012 claims:

“The tale says that it was the sexy Cleopatra who had the original idea that resulted in the first vibrator: a hollow gourd full of angry bees. Whether this was true or not, we will never know.”

A short comedy animation titled “Cleopatra had a VIBRATOR?” produced by BBC Three and uploaded to YouTube on 20 January 2017 includes a sequence in which a man introduced as “historian Donald Greenacre” (whose credentials I am unable to verify) claims:

“Female sex toys have existed for thousands of years. In fact, there are unconfirmed accounts of Cleopatra making the first vibrator by filling a gourd full of angry bees.”

Unfortunately, the “accounts” Greenacre refers to are not just “unconfirmed”; they are verifiably fabricated.

Dr. Helen King, a British scholar of ancient history known for her work on women and medicine in the ancient Mediterranean world, demonstrates in this post she made in August 2017 on her blog Mistaking Histories that every reference to Cleopatra’s supposed bee-powered vibrator can be traced back to one source: The Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices by Brenda Love, originally published in 1992. Love cites no sources to support her claim about Cleopatra having a bee-powered vibrator and the claim is not attested in any earlier source, so it is probably safe to say that she just made the whole story up for shock value.

Even if there were some kind of historical source supporting the bee-powered vibrator claim from before 1992, the story would still be wildly implausible, since I’m virtually certain that it would be impossible to create a workable vibrator using a gourd full of angry bees and, even if it were possible, someone would have to be completely insane to actually try it.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a honeybee. The popular legend about Cleopatra inventing a vibrator powered by angry bees is certainly a hoax.

Other articles on the internet have rejected the story about the supposed bee-powered vibrator only to insist that Cleopatra must have really used dildos made of wood or stone. For instance, an article by Julia Reiss published on the website Thrillist on 30 November 2015 claims:

“There’s an old rumor contending that Cleopatra DIY-ed the first vibrator by filling a hollowed-out gourd with angry bees. In reality, it’s more likely that she used insertive toys made of polished wood or stone. There’s even record of Julius Caesar presenting Cleopatra with an ornately carved, gold-inlaid, phallic sculpture. Sure beats the hell out of flowers.”

We know for certain that dildos did exist in the Mediterranean world, both at the time when Cleopatra was alive and centuries before. There are depictions of dildos in Attic red-figure vase paintings from the early fifth century BCE. In the comedy Lysistrata, written by the Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes and first performed in Athens in 411 BCE, the character Lysistrata complains that, due to the ongoing Peloponnesian War, Athenian women can no longer purchase fine leather dildos manufactured in the city of Miletos in Asia Minor.

Similarly, in Mime VI, a comedic poem written by the obscure Alexandrian Greek poet Herodas in the third century BCE that has survived only in fragments, a woman named Metro asks another woman where she managed to acquire a red leather dildo. This poem has received some degree of notoriety due the fact that the poem was first published in 1891, based on a papyrus that had recently been discovered in Egypt.

Classical scholars at the time desperately sought to argue that the dildo explicitly referenced in the text was really some sort of article of clothing, such as maybe a hat or a shoe or a bodice. It was only in the early twentieth century that scholars came to accept that the women in the poem were indeed talking about a sex toy.

In any case, even though we do know that dildos existed in ancient times and that some women did use them for sexual pleasure, we have no specific evidence that Cleopatra used them. Moreover, I am unable to trace the story about Julius Caesar supposedly presenting her with an “ornately carved, gold-inlaid phallic sculpture” to any known ancient source. As far as I can tell, this is just another story that someone has made up to sexualize Cleopatra.

ABOVE: Greek red-figure amphora painting by the Flying Angel Painter depicting a naked woman holding a dildo, dated to around 490 BCE

Why this hypersexualized conception of Cleopatra persists

The persistent western oversexualization and, indeed, fetishization of Cleopatra is inherently tied to two major factors: gender and ethnicity. Cleopatra was a politically powerful woman in a time when women were expected to be quiet, demure, and submissive. Turning her into a hyperactive sexpot is a way of making her fit into a patriarchal framework by converting her from the powerful and dangerous woman she really was into a mere object of male desire.

Another factor is Cleopatra’s ethnicity; as I discuss in this article from January 2020, Cleopatra was a queen of mostly Greek ancestry who most likely saw herself as culturally Greek and who ruled over the land of Egypt. The ancient Romans perceived both Greece and Egypt as exotic, “eastern” lands. Thus, in their eyes, she was thoroughly “eastern.”

Throughout history, western Europeans, including the ancient Romans, have envisioned so-called “eastern” lands as places of sensual delights ruled by hypersexual despots. The image of Cleopatra as a hypersexual eastern queen is therefore part of an ancient and ingrained Orientalist fantasy.

This is not to say that we should deny Cleopatra her sexuality; judging from the ancient sources, she was not asexual and she did indeed feel sexual desire and attraction. Nonetheless, we should be careful not to exaggerate her sexuality either, or we risk falling into the sexist, Orientalist narrative that I have outlined here.