I’ll set a bourn how far to be beloved. — Cleopatra in William Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra”
The latest tizzy in the culture wars pits Egypt against the Netflix series “Queen Cleopatra,” which bowed Wednesday, May 10, starring a Black actress, Adele James, in the title role. Many Egyptians and some historians have taken exception with this, pointing out that Cleopatra was the last of the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt and as such was of Greco-Macedonian descent. But I think with a little imagination and a lot of understanding we can have a Black Cleopatra and an historically accurate one as well.
First a few indisputable facts and some deductive reasoning: Cleopatra (69 to 30 B.C.) was descended from Ptolemy I, a general of Alexander the Great’s who was reputed to be an out-of-wedlock child of Alexander’s father, Philip II of Macedon in northern Greece. After Alexander conquered the Persian Empire in 331 B.C. at the ripe old age of 26 and died a month short of his 33rd birthday in June of 323 B.C., Ptolemy in effect hijacked his golden sarcophagus and took it to Egypt where he carved up a piece of Alexander’s empire and set himself up as his pharaonic successor.
The Egyptians, having had many different dynasties, now had a Greco-Macedonian one that adopted the Egyptian habit of keeping marriage en famille. The Ptolemies, descended from conquerors and one conqueror in particular, kept to themselves and their culture in other ways. Cleopatra — the name, Greek for “father’s glory,” was that of Alexander’s full-blood sister — was the first in her family to speak the Egyptian language and worship the Egyptian gods. She would also be the last, committing suicide when she and her husband Mark Antony were defeated by Rome’s Octavius Caesar in the Battle of Actium in 31 B.C.
In other words, the Ptolemies, including Cleopatra, saw themselves as Greek. The chances that they would marry one of their subjects or royalty from sub-Saharan Africa were slim, although there are some historians who believe that Cleopatra may have had a Black ancestor. More likely she had some Persian ancestry.
However, heads in the Vatican Library collection that were part of the “Pergamon and the Hellenistic Kingdoms of the Ancient World” exhibit at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2016 depict a woman with Hellenistic (post-Alexandrian) features, her hair in a Hellenistic chignon. We also know that she was the keeper of Alexander’s tomb in the city he founded, Alexandria, her capital. (Whatever else you may think of the 1963 “Cleopatra” film starring Elizabeth Taylor in the title role, it gets this much right.)
Indeed, her very Greekness is what attracted the Romans — first Julius Caesar and then Antony — to Egypt and to her. The Romans adopted all things Greek in their culture. Greek would become the lingua franca of the empire. (Latin was spoken at home.) Yes, Rome needed Egypt’s bread basket, its strategic locale, its seeming exoticism.
But it also needed the imprimatur of Alexander — the ultimate in military leadership. It got all that and more in the presence of a captivating woman who, in the manner of Elizabeth I centuries later, had been educated like a man and could hold her own in conversations on a wide range of topics.
That is the historical reality. The artistic reality is that Cleopatra has been imagined in a variety of guises, as has Alexander (who has been portrayed even as a Persian) or, for that matter, Jesus. Artists tend to remake people they identify with in their own image. So it doesn’t matter who plays Cleopatra as long as she conveys the spirit and intelligence of a woman who dazzled Rome itself. Adele James certainly has the look of a woman who has the confidence to decide, as Shakespeare has his Cleopatra say, how far she wants to be loved.
There is more to this, of course. After centuries of White people playing minorities — something they can no longer do — turnabout is more than fair play. Indeed, it is the least we can do as recompense for years of inequality and yes, I realize that it is poor compensation at best.
So people of color turn up in all kinds of roles, including those in which someone may or may not have had a Black ancestor. It’s called art.
But art isn’t history and given the failure of the LOL crowd to understand history — as recent stories about eighth graders failing civics and history courses and the demotion of the humanities in colleges suggest — we have to be careful here. We need to separate the historical figure from the artistic one. The artistic Cleopatra can be played by anyone. The historical Cleopatra was a particular woman living in a particular time and place who identified as Greco-Egyptian.
We talk a lot about identity in this world. So we need to respect the identity not only of Egypt but of a long-ago queen and one thing more. We need to respect history itself.