How Cleopatra Crafted Her Divine Image

Only days after the death of her father in March 51 B.C., 18-year-old Cleopatra VII attended the burial of a sacred Buchis bull, an animal worshiped by ancient Egyptians as a manifestation of the war god Montu. A stele erected for the ceremony hailed the young queen as Thea Philopator, "the Father-Loving Goddess," one of the earliest surviving inscriptions bearing Cleopatra’s divine titulary.

Over the next two decades, Cleopatra built on that divine identity, ultimately presenting herself as the "New Isis,” the living embodiment of Egypt's most revered goddess.

Cleopatra belonged to the Ptolemaic royal family, the Macedonian dynasty that ruled Egypt after Alexander the Great’s death. She inherited what Tara Sewell-Lasater, a historian at Montana State University, describes as “a dynasty whose legitimacy depended in part on presenting its rulers within Egypt’s religious traditions.”

The kingdom brought together a Greek-speaking elite and an Egyptian population that regarded the pharaoh as a divinely sanctioned ruler charged with upholding Ma'at, the cosmic order. Cleopatra’s association with Isis offered a powerful way to bridge those cultural traditions.

“There were many Greek devotees of Isis,” says Duane Roller, author of Cleopatra: A Biography and professor emeritus of classics at Ohio State University. "As early as the fourth century B.C., temples of Isis began to be built in the Greek world." But as Isis was an Egyptian divinity, he adds, “Cleopatra as Isis was primarily a gesture toward her Egyptian subjects.”

From the beginning of her reign, Cleopatra put religion to political use. When Ptolemy XII Auletes died, his will named his daughter Cleopatra joint ruler with her 10-year-old brother Ptolemy XIII. In an attempt to establish herself as Egypt's sole monarch, Cleopatra immediately courted the native priesthood and population. She toured Upper Egypt's great temples, led an elaborate Nile procession with the new Buchis bull and delivered ritual prayers in its honor. 

The strategy appeared to pay off. In July 51 B.C., Wennefer, one of Egypt’s chief priests of Isis, erected an inscription that referred to the young ruler as “the female king Cleopatra Father-Loving Goddess,” omitting her younger brother altogether.

Support from Egypt's priesthood alone, however, couldn’t save Cleopatra when in 49 B.C., Ptolemy XIII's advisers forced her into exile in Syria. There, she raised an army of mercenaries to confront her brother's forces at the fortress city of Pelusium.

Before the battle could begin, though, another opportunity presented itself: Julius Caesar had arrived in Alexandria. Cleopatra secretly arranged to be smuggled into the royal palace to plead her case for support. Whether concealed in a bedding sack, as Plutarch describes, or in the rolled-up rug of later legend, the gamble paid off.

Caesar defeated the forces of Ptolemy XIII during the Alexandrian War, and Ptolemy XIII is believed to have drowned in the Nile River. Caesar then restored Cleopatra to the throne alongside her other brother, Ptolemy XIV. As the Roman historian Cassius Dio observed, however, the joint-rule was “a mere pretence which she accepted, whereas in truth she ruled alone and spent her time in Caesar's company."

Cleopatra's alliance with Caesar not only transformed her political fortunes but also reshaped her divine image. After giving birth to their son Caesarion, she increasingly associated herself with Isis, Egypt’s great mother goddess. 

Her image drew on centuries of Egyptian and Ptolemaic ideas of sacred kingship. The association between royal women and goddesses stretched back to Egypt's New Kingdom (circa 1550–1070 B.C.). In the Ptolemaic period, queens such as Arsinoë II, Berenice II and Cleopatra III had already been linked with Isis, explains Sally-Ann Ashton in The Last Queens of Egypt: Cleopatra’s Royal House.  

"Cleopatra inherited that tradition but embraced it more completely than any of her predecessors, making her identification with Isis central to how she presented herself as Egypt's rightful ruler,” says Sewell-Lasater. “Her innovation was in making that identification especially visible and politically effective during one of the most challenging periods of Ptolemaic rule.”

During ceremonial occasions, Cleopatra appeared in the guise of Isis, wearing the goddess's traditional headdress of cow's horns and a solar disc. She also had coins struck depicting Caesarion as Horus, the son of Isis.

After Caesar's assassination in 44 B.C.—and his subsequent deification by the Roman Senate—Cleopatra drew an even closer parallel with the myth of Isis, who mourned her slain husband, Osiris, while protecting their son, Horus. After elevating Caesarion as her co-ruler, Cleopatra reinforced that imagery through temple reliefs, most notably at the Temple of Dendera, where mother and son appeared together.

By the early 40s B.C., Cleopatra had firmly established herself as Egypt's divinely sanctioned ruler. Then, in 41 B.C., Mark Antony, one of the three rulers of Rome's Second Triumvirate, summoned Cleopatra to Tarsus in Asia Minor to answer charges that she had aided his enemies. Cleopatra responded with a dazzling display of wealth, power and charm.

According to the first-century Greek biographer Plutarch, she sailed up the Cydnus River aboard a lavish barge with purple sails and silver oars, reclining under a golden canopy—a spectacular entrance that inspired Shakespeare's description of "the barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne" in "Antony and Cleopatra."

She also deliberately tailored her divine image to her audience. To Mark Antony, Plutarch says she appeared like Aphrodite (Venus to the Romans), the goddess of love.

The performance worked. Antony returned with Cleopatra to Alexandria, where the two continued their affair. In 40 B.C., she gave birth to twins, Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene.

Back in Egypt, Cleopatra's public image shifted decisively back toward Isis. At the Donations of Alexandria in 34 B.C.—a grand public ceremony at which Antony distributed eastern territories and royal titles to Cleopatra and her children—Plutarch writes that Cleopatra “assumed a robe sacred to Isis, and was addressed as the New Isis.”

For the Romans, the spectacle was seen as a direct challenge to their authority. Octavian devised a propaganda campaign that cast Cleopatra as a dangerous eastern queen whose influence had corrupted Antony. His campaign soon shifted from words to a declaration of war. After his forces defeated those of Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium in 31 B.C., Octavian invaded Egypt and captured Alexandria the following year.

Rather than face the humiliation of being paraded through Rome in Octavian's triumph, Cleopatra took her own life around August 10, 30 B.C., ending nearly three centuries of Ptolemaic rule. Some modern historians, including Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, argue that Cleopatra died dressed in the ceremonial robes of Isis.