12/31/2023 0 Comments Julius caesar and cleopatra pictures![]() ![]() In short, Bianchi says, for Cleopatra “there is nothing that approaches the Western concept of a portrait in either ancient Egyptian or ancient Greek art.” But there are some potential leads. Even contemporary works can deceive, says Egyptologist Robert Bianchi, overlaid as they are “with political or ideological concerns.” Cleopatra Coin Most surviving paintings and sculptures of her are anachronistic inventions, more telling of their own times than of the subject herself. Cleopatra's body has never been discovered. Scholars have searched for the visage behind the legend, but it’s often impossible to verify a historical figure’s image. Their smear campaign shaped a legacy, founded upon her looks, that still fascinates us two millennia later, leading many to wonder what Cleopatra really looked like. Historians recognize this as the concept of the whore queen for example, after Mary Stuart fell from power in the 1500s, as she was being led to prison, a crowd of disenchanted Scots cried, “Burn the whore!" The Romans tried a similar tactic with Cleopatra. ![]() Throughout history, female rulers have often been accused of using their sexuality to maintain control. They also doubt she ruled exclusively by means of physical beauty and sexual prowess, like the “whore queen” her Roman enemies made her out to be. But based on the few surviving clues to Cleopatra’s actual appearance, modern historians doubt she resembled this caricature. She greets her Roman lovers, Caesar and Mark Antony, with palpable, barely suppressed passion. She reclines sensually in revealing gowns. Her portrayal in film - epitomized by Elizabeth Taylor’s 1963 performance - is that of a buxom, sultry femme fatale, her steamy eyes wing-tipped and her raven hair falling lushly around her shoulders. Indeed, it defines our perception of Cleopatra even today. It’s a familiar trope: the queen of the Nile, a cunning charmer, deploying her supreme loveliness like a political weapon. In Dio’s telling, the encounter vindicated her vanity: Caesar was, apparently, “so completely captivated” by the young woman that he agreed to reconcile the warring siblings. In 48 B.C., as Cleopatra plotted to regain power amid a civil war with her brother, the Roman historian Cassius Dio wrote that Egypt’s last pharaoh “reposed in her beauty all her claims to the throne.” She arranged a meeting with the Roman dictator Julius Caesar - a man notorious for his affairs with noblewomen - to ask for his help. ![]()
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