Cleopatra’s death – and cultural afterlife

Welcome to the History Extra podcast. We've got the last installment today of our four-part Sunday series on the life and cultural afterlife of Cleopatra, and I'm joined once again by Islam Issa, Professor of public humanities at Birmingham City University and author of numerous books including Alexandria, The city that changed the world. Today we're going to be exploring the final chapter of Cleopatra's story, the events that led to her death, what happened next, and why this ancient queen continues to captivate us thousands of years later. Here's Lam, thank you so much for being back with us as we go into the fourth and final episode of our series, Exploring Cleopatra.

We left the previous installment on something of a cliffhanger. We were talking about the donations of Alexandria, which was a part party, part coronation, I think it's right to say, that was held that, as we alluded to in that episode, was going to have enormous and unintended consequences. Can you just bring us back up to speed as to what this festival was and then what was to happen next? Yeah, it's a festival that really cemented the relationship between Anthony and Cleopatra.

It's one in which Cleopatra distributed the lands of her empire among her children. who are the son of Caesar and the children of Marc Antony. She named herself Queen of Kings and her son Caesarean King of Kings, but it was seen as something of a a hostile move by the Romans because it was because this is the kind of event that would ordinarily be for huge Roman victories and also because they hadn't approved of all the decisions that she had made. So Octavian at this stage red flags, he has to respond. And how did he respond?

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