Cleopatra - How much you know?
If you think Cleopatra was a beautiful Egyptian queen who committed suicide by getting an asp to bite her, well…not much.
According to Karl S. Kruszelnicki, this is what you should know:
First, Cleopatra was not Egyptian, she was Macedonian.
Second, Cleopatra almost certainly was not beautiful in the physical sense — bearing in mind that the concept of beauty is different for each time period and for each person. Only 10 coins from her reign with representation of her have survived in good condition. They show her as having a fat neck (euphemistically called “Rolls of Venus”), a hooked nose, long ears and a prominent chin.
Cleopatra was, like all the other Ptolemaic women, around 1.5 metres tall. In today’s terms, she was short, dumpy and squat.
Her wisdom and wit are praised in Arabic and Coptic literature.
Cleopatra raised an army, built a fleet to rival Rome’s, made Egypt strong, kept the peace, and successfully played off powerful opponents against each other.
Third, the snake. Shakespeare tells us (in Antony and Cleopatra) that Cleopatra died from the bite of an asp, smuggled into her bedroom in a basket of figs. But that particular species of snake does not live in Egypt. A far more likely contender (if she was killed by a snake) was the cobra.
So even today, we still don’t know how she really died.
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