Cleopatra Timeline

Publications on ancient Greek medicine attributed to Cleopatra are likely to be the work of a physician by the same name writing in the late first century AD.

The Jewish Roman historian Josephus, writing in the 1st century AD, provides valuable information on the life of Cleopatra via her diplomatic relationship with Herod the Great.

Image source: Josephus

Plutarch lived a century after Cleopatra but relied on primary sources, such as Philotas of Amphissa, who had access to the Ptolemaic royal palace, Cleopatra's personal physician named Olympos, and Quintus Dellius, a close confidant of Mark Antony and Cleopatra.

Image source: Plutarch

Despite not being a biography of Cleopatra, the Life of Antonius written by Plutarch in the 1st century AD provides the most thorough surviving account of Cleopatra's life.

Image source: Antonius

The Roman History published by the official and historian Cassius Dio in the early 3rd century AD, while failing to fully comprehend the complexities of the late Hellenistic world, nevertheless provides a continuous history of the era of Cleopatra's reign.

Image source: Cassius Dio

Rowland highlights that the 'Berenice called Cleopatra' cited by the 3rd- or 4th-century female Roman physician Metrodora was likely conflated by medieval scholars as referring to Cleopatra.

Image source: Metrodora

Ptolemy of Mauretania was the last known monarch of the Ptolemaic dynasty, although Queen Zenobia, of the short-lived Palmyrene Empire during the Crisis of the Third Century, claimed descent from Cleopatra.

Image source: Ptolemy of Mauretania

Works of Islamic historiography written in Arabic covered the reign of Cleopatra, such as the 10th-century Meadows of Gold by Al-Masudi, although his work erroneously claimed that Octavian died soon after Cleopatra's suicide.

Image source: The Meadows of Gold

Chaucer wrote his works partly in reaction to the negative depiction of Cleopatra in De Mulieribus Claris and De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, Latin works by the 14th-century Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio.

Image source: Giovanni Boccaccio

The 14th-century English poet Geoffrey Chaucer, in The Legend of Good Women, contextualized Cleopatra for the Christian world of the Middle Ages. He highlighted Cleopatra's relationships with only two men as hardly the life of a seductress.

Image source: Geoffrey Chaucer

Cleopatra appeared in miniatures for illuminated manuscripts, such as a depiction of her and Antony lying in a Gothic-style tomb by the Boucicaut Master in 1409.

Image source: Boucicaut Master

Early prints depicting Cleopatra include designs by the Renaissance artists Raphael and Michelangelo, as well as 15th-century woodcuts in illustrated editions of Boccaccio's works.

In the visual arts, the sculpted depiction of Cleopatra as a free-standing nude figure committing suicide began with the 16th-century sculptors Bartolommeo Bandinelli and Alessandro Vittoria.

The Renaissance humanist Bernardino Cacciante, in his 1504 Libretto apologetico delle donne, was the first Italian to defend the reputation of Cleopatra and criticize the perceived moralizing and misogyny in Boccaccio's works.

The death of Elizabeth I of England in 1603, and the German publication in 1606 of alleged letters of Cleopatra, inspired Samuel Daniel to alter and republish his 1594 play Cleopatra in 1607.

Image source: Samuel Daniel

William Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, largely based on Plutarch, was first performed in 1608 and provided a somewhat salacious view of Cleopatra in stark contrast to England's own Virgin Queen.

Cleopatra was featured in operas, such as George Frideric Handel's 1724 Giulio Cesare in Egitto, which portrayed the love affair of Caesar and Cleopatra; Domenico Cimarosa wrote Cleopatra on a similar subject in 1789.

Image source: Giulio Cesare

In 1818, a now lost encaustic painting was discovered in the Temple of Serapis at Hadrian's Villa, near Tivoli, Lazio, Italy, that depicted Cleopatra committing suicide with an asp biting her bare chest.

Image source: Hadrian's Villa

A chemical analysis performed in 1822 confirmed that the medium for the painting was composed of one-third wax and two-thirds resin.

In his unfinished 1825 short story The Egyptian Nights, Alexander Pushkin popularized the claims of the 4th-century Roman historian Aurelius Victor, previously largely ignored, that Cleopatra had prostituted herself to men who paid for sex with their lives.

Image source: Alexander Pushkin

Rider Haggard's Cleopatra (1889) and Théophile Gautier's One of Cleopatra's Nights (1838) depicted the queen as a sensual and mystic Easterner, while the Egyptologist Georg Ebers's Cleopatra (1894) was more grounded in historical accuracy.

Image source: Théophile Gautier

A steel engraving published by John Sartain in 1885 depicting the painting as described in the archaeological report shows Cleopatra wearing authentic clothing and jewelry of Egypt in the late Hellenistic period, as well as the radiant crown of the Ptolemaic rulers.

Image source: John Sartain

Its popularity led to the perception that the 1885 painting by Lawrence Alma-Tadema depicted the meeting of Antony and Cleopatra on her pleasure barge in Tarsus, although Alma-Tadema revealed in a private letter that it depicts a subsequent meeting of theirs in Alexandria.

Image source: Lawrence Alma-Tadema

Rider Haggard's Cleopatra (1889) depicted the queen as a sensual and mystic Easterner, while the Egyptologist Georg Ebers's Cleopatra (1894) was more grounded in historical accuracy.

Image source: H. Rider Haggard

Georges Méliès's Robbing Cleopatra's Tomb (French: Cléopâtre), an 1899 French silent horror film, was the first film to depict the character of Cleopatra.

Hollywood films of the 20th century were influenced by earlier Victorian media, which helped shape the character of Cleopatra played by Theda Bara in Cleopatra (1917). In addition to her portrayal as a 'vampire' queen, Bara's Cleopatra incorporated tropes familiar from 19th-century Orientalist painting.

Image source: Cleopatra (1917 film)

Hollywood films of the 20th century were influenced by earlier Victorian media, which helped to shape the character of Cleopatra played by Claudette Colbert in Cleopatra (1934).

Image source: Cleopatra (1934 film)

Hollywood films of the 20th century were influenced by earlier Victorian media, which helped to shape the character of Cleopatra played by Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra (1963).

Image source: Cleopatra (1963 film)

Also based on Shakespeare's play was Samuel Barber's opera Antony and Cleopatra (1966), commissioned for the opening of the Metropolitan Opera House.

Image source: Antony and Cleopatra

In his Kleopatra und die Caesaren (2006), Bernard Andreae contends that the basalt statue, like other idealized Egyptian portraits of the queen, does not contain realistic facial features and hence adds little to the knowledge of her appearance.

Image source: Sperlonga sculptures