Queen Cleopatra Netflix: Cleopatra, the Queen of the Rile, is beset with dispute.
Queen Cleopatra Netflix: Cleopatra, the Queen of the Rile, is beset with dispute.
It’s enough to make Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi exclaim “Aswan damn!” in outrage. A US-based media company which has a global reach as a television streaming platform is scheduled to release a docudrama about Cleopatra – the fabled Queen of the Nile who reigned over Egypt from 51 BCE to 30 BCE, and who was born in Alexandria – which portrays the ruler, played by an actress of mixed heritage, as being of African descent.
Egyptian historians and scholars are up in arms at what they claim is a blatant case of lese-majeste, which is literally all Greek to them, as Cleopatra VII Philoprator, to give her her full name, was of Grecian origin, being a descendant of Ptolemy 1 Soter, a Macedonian Greek general and a campaign comrade of Alexander the Great.
With social media pitching in, the issue has assumed black-and-white overtones, those protesting against the TV show vociferously denying that Cleopatra was African, i.e., black, and insisting on her European, i.e., white, pedigree.
An Egyptian lawyer has reportedly filed a plea that legal measures be adopted to stop the airing of the telly series in Egypt as it violated the country’s media laws.
The waters of the Nile could be further muddied if, referring to the folkloric anecdote that Cleopatra stage-managed her captivating introduction to Julius Caesar by having herself unrolled from a carpet before him, Ankara claims that not only was the rug in question of Turkish origin but so was its occupant.
Taking into account the historic antagonism between Greece and Turkey, largely over the island of Cyprus which Athens claims as its own on the principle of ‘enosis’, or unification, and which is partly occupied by Turkish incursion, such an eventuality mightn’t be off the cards.
Turkey apart, Athens doesn’t see aye-to-aye with the neighbouring Republic of Northern Macedonia, with Greek irredentism asserting hegemonistic ownership of the word ‘Macedonia’ as it refers to a region of Greece and is not a separate entity.
Macedonians, however, lay claim to an autonomous identity and lineage, which includes Alexander the Great of Macedonia, and his buddy Ptolemy 1, founder of the Ptolemaic dynasty and Cleopatra’s forebear.
If the Republic of Macedonia were to enter the fray, Cleopatra’s ethnicity could well become a four-ring circus, perhaps calling for international adjudication by the UN.
Had she been around today, the centre of the controversy might have cited as a footnote to the recent hullabaloo about her Shakespeare’s encomium, “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.”
Just how stale-proof she is in popular culture is attested to by no less than four Hollywood stars, Theda Bara, Vivian Leigh, Claudette Colbert, and perhaps most notably Elizabeth Taylor, portraying her on the silver screen.
The British comedic Carry On series featured her as the main squeeze of Caesar who, just before his comeuppance at the hands of Brutus and the other conspirators, famously expostulates, “Infamy, infamy! They’ve all got it infamy!”
In the early 1900s, American poet/satirist Don Marquis gave literal endorsement to the Egyptian queen’s reputation of being one of history’s cool cats by reincarnating her in the form of Mehitabel, a streetside feline, whose chequered past is recorded by her friend, Archy, a cockroach with a poetic streak who composes verses on a typewriter but is unable to use the capital letters and punctuation:
With social media pitching in, the issue has assumed black-and-white overtones, those protesting against the TV show vociferously denying that Cleopatra was African, i.e., black, and insisting on her European, i.e., white, pedigree.
An Egyptian lawyer has reportedly filed a plea that legal measures be adopted to stop the airing of the telly series in Egypt as it violated the country’s media laws.
The waters of the Nile could be further muddied if, referring to the folkloric anecdote that Cleopatra stage-managed her captivating introduction to Julius Caesar by having herself unrolled from a carpet before him, Ankara claims that not only was the rug in question of Turkish origin but so was its occupant.
Taking into account the historic antagonism between Greece and Turkey, largely over the island of Cyprus which Athens claims as its own on the principle of ‘enosis’, or unification, and which is partly occupied by Turkish incursion, such an eventuality mightn’t be off the cards.
Turkey apart, Athens doesn’t see aye-to-aye with the neighbouring Republic of Northern Macedonia, with Greek irredentism asserting hegemonistic ownership of the word ‘Macedonia’ as it refers to a region of Greece and is not a separate entity.
Macedonians, however, lay claim to an autonomous identity and lineage, which includes Alexander the Great of Macedonia, and his buddy Ptolemy 1, founder of the Ptolemaic dynasty and Cleopatra’s forebear.
If the Republic of Macedonia were to enter the fray, Cleopatra’s ethnicity could well become a four-ring circus, perhaps calling for international adjudication by the UN.
Had she been around today, the centre of the controversy might have cited as a footnote to the recent hullabaloo about her Shakespeare’s encomium, “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.”
Just how stale-proof she is in popular culture is attested to by no less than four Hollywood stars, Theda Bara, Vivian Leigh, Claudette Colbert, and perhaps most notably Elizabeth Taylor, portraying her on the silver screen.
The British comedic Carry On series featured her as the main squeeze of Caesar who, just before his comeuppance at the hands of Brutus and the other conspirators, famously expostulates, “Infamy, infamy! They’ve all got it infamy!”
In the early 1900s, American poet/satirist Don Marquis gave literal endorsement to the Egyptian queen’s reputation of being one of history’s cool cats by reincarnating her in the form of Mehitabel, a streetside feline, whose chequered past is recorded by her friend, Archy, a cockroach with a poetic streak who composes verses on a typewriter but is unable to use the capital letters and punctuation:
“being cleopatra was/only an incident/in my career/…the things that/have been said/about me archy/exclamation point/and all simply/because i was a/live dame/the palaces i have been kicked out of/in my time/but wotthehell/little archy wot/the hell/its cheerio/my deerio/that pulls a/lady through/exclamation point”.
Despite the press she’s received over the centuries for being the archetypal femme fatale, Cleopatra was no bimbo bombshell. Though Roman historian Dio Cassius called her “a woman of surpassing beauty”, Plutarch describing her a century after her death wrote “Her beauty, as we are told, was in itself not altogether incomparable, nor such as to strike those who saw her.”
However, he noted her “irresistible charm” of manner and presence, which enraptured both Caesar and Mark Antony. Following Antony’s defeat in battle against Octavian, both he and Cleopatra committed suicide, though she through poison and not the bite of an asp, as legend has it.
Annalists claim that her image as a temptress was a canard spread by Octavian to distract from her notable aptitude for administration which enabled Egypt to reach its peak of glory.
Paint her whatever colour, black, white, or wanton scarlet, had she a magical looking-glass well might she have asked it with regal assurance, “Mirror, mirror on the wall/Who’s the Pharaohest of them all?”
Despite the press she’s received over the centuries for being the archetypal femme fatale, Cleopatra was no bimbo bombshell. Though Roman historian Dio Cassius called her “a woman of surpassing beauty”, Plutarch describing her a century after her death wrote “Her beauty, as we are told, was in itself not altogether incomparable, nor such as to strike those who saw her.”
However, he noted her “irresistible charm” of manner and presence, which enraptured both Caesar and Mark Antony. Following Antony’s defeat in battle against Octavian, both he and Cleopatra committed suicide, though she through poison and not the bite of an asp, as legend has it.
Annalists claim that her image as a temptress was a canard spread by Octavian to distract from her notable aptitude for administration which enabled Egypt to reach its peak of glory.
Paint her whatever colour, black, white, or wanton scarlet, had she a magical looking-glass well might she have asked it with regal assurance, “Mirror, mirror on the wall/Who’s the Pharaohest of them all?”
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