Before Social Media: How Cleopatra Turned Herself Into a Living God | Natasha Solomons

SPEAKER_00 0:00 Much of what we imagine when we hear the name Cleopatra, the exotic beauty, the seductress, the big nose, the living goddess, is a world-class example of personal branding. Today, we have social media to make ourselves look more impressive than we really are. But before Instagram and PR teams, great rulers of the past had to use other means. So, how did Cleopatra build one of history's most enduring personal brands over 2000 years ago? And how did she make sure the citizens of Egypt saw her as a god? I'm Ollie, and this is What We Did Before, where we explore the history of everyday life. Today I'm speaking with Natasha Solomons, author of Cleopatra, where she reimagines the life of this ancient queen to give us an insight into the real woman behind the myth. Natasha Solomons, welcome to the podcast. It's a pleasure having you on what we did before.

SPEAKER_01 0:56 Thank you so much for having me.

SPEAKER_00 0:58 So, why did you choose to write this book about Cleopatra?

SPEAKER_01 1:03 The answer's quite roundabout because I'd previously written a book called Fair Rosaline, which was sort of an untelling of Romeo and Juliet, written from Rosaline's point of view, sort of Romeo's girlfriend who sort of got away or escaped. And I loved playing in another writer's sandbox. It was really fun having that sort of engaging with another author and just my response to Shakespeare. And so initially I thought I'm gonna have another go at kind of reimagining another Shakespeare story. And I've always really loved Anthony and Cleopatra, but it's a really frustrating play, as much as it sort of intrigues, it drives me a bit crazy because it fails the Bethale test. The Bestdale test is when you have two female characters in a scene, um, whether it's in a play, in a TV show, in a novel, and they're doing something other than talk about a boy. Well, Cleopatra in Ancy and Cleopatra spends most of her time talking about a boy. She says to her her friends, does Anthony still fancy me? I think I'm getting on a bit. Does he still fancy me? She does it in the most glorious iambic pentameter known to man with the most dazzling imagery, but that is most of the content. And we're told that she's this brilliant polymath and politician, and I was kind of, well, yes, but not within the text of the play, she's not. So that was the first thing that drove me a bit bonkers. And then I was rereading Julius Caesar, not my favourite play. I know that it is many people's, but it's not mine. There's a lot of men in rooms talking about getting stuff done. And the thing that completely bewildered me about Julius Caesar is that Cleopatra is in Rome in the lead up to the Eyes of March. She's actually staying in one of Caesar's villas. She's had his child and she's there. And Shakespeare's like, I don't know. I don't think I need Cleopatra. Is she that interesting? Okay, that's not his decision. It's more perhaps he was worried that she would she would take over. She does tend to steal every scene. But as a kind of creative decision, it completely bewildered me that he would leave out Cleopatra. So initially, I decided that I wanted to write quite a small, self-contained, almost domestic novel, if you can have a domestic novel containing Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, but just telling the kind of inverse story of the women in Julius Caesar. But when I started the book and just wrote that Roman section, it was just Caesar and Cleopatra's relationship made no sense unless you went back and looked at how they'd met in Alexandria and all that kind of sort of the time of everything that came before. And then the sort of book evolved and grew from there. But that was what so sent me to it in the first place. And then it just, I mean, it did. It changed so much and kind of changed away from me.

SPEAKER_00 4:03 Yeah, and I mean choosing Cleopatra, you know, one of the most famous women in history, but also one of the most mythologized, um, must have been really challenging for you. What do you think history has got wrong about Cleopatra?

SPEAKER_01 4:17 That's really hard to say. I mean, it was first part for goodness, yes, it was terrifying. And when I first started writing the book, I was too scared to do a first person. And then I sent pages to my editor and she was like, Look, the writing's lovely, but either do it or don't do it. Either woman up and do it as a first person and give her a voice or do something like you've got to do it. So I just I had to put my big girl pants on and just say, I think, yeah, fine, I'm doing this. And in terms of history's what history's got wrong, it's really difficult because Cleopatra is so long ago. And when it's you're relying on ancient sources, the things that you know with certainty, there's very few things you can be absolutely sure of. You've got a pretty good idea, but in many places the sources can contradict. So I'd say it's more of a question of emphasis that the sort of mythologizing of Cleopatra started early and started sort of even during her lifetime, because she was aware of how she had to kind of turn herself into a living myth and a living goddess in order to engage with her people. So she was kind of party to that kind of mythologizing of self as she groced herself as the goddess Isis, and then it continued with the Romans and Greek historians who are writing about her. But I think that it's difficult because so much of how we see her is as this sort of exotic seductress. And actually, I think that when you see her in her own terms, she very much understood sort of sex as power, and that these relationships, it was power brokering. It's it was like with Elizabeth I, who sort of constantly presented the kind of construction of her, of her virginity and the available queen and the way to kind of seduce um suitors. But the suitors are really states, whether it's sort of whether it's Spain or um or France, she's always presenting herself as this sort of pseudo-coquette as here I am, I'm available. But again, it's it's the seduction and the relationship between states and not individuals. And I think with Cleopatra, she understood that relationship intrinsically of sort of sex politics of power. And in the way now we have kind of sleaze scandals, it just wasn't like that in the ancient world where they understood that sort of sex was part of power broking. That's what you did. You intermarried, and Cleopatra had two relationships in her life, and they were with the two most powerful men in the world. That's good politics, and we've tended to really focus on the sexual aspects of those relationships and those amazing scenes of sort of on the barge where she meets uh Marcus Antonius or where she's carried in to meet Caesar, sort of whether it's in a laundry basket or in a carpet, she sort of carried in this kind of the drama of presentation, but we've really kind of become preoccupied with the sort of eroticism of those moments rather than, I think, is to see the politics in them as well and the politics of performance. She understood that politicians famously now they have to be much more aware of presentation than they did so 50, 70 years ago. And Cleopatra in the ancient world understood that kind of the drama of self.

SPEAKER_00 7:42 Yeah, I find this fascinating because you know, um, you know, you paint this idea of Cleopatra wanting to write her own story. And you know, we in the modern day we can do that ourselves quite easily. We we've got social media, we've got um, you know, PR, we can we can paint a picture of ourself, which might not necessarily be the picture um that's true, it's the one that we want to portray to the world.

SPEAKER_01 8:06 But isn't that very similar?

SPEAKER_00 8:08 Yeah, it's really, really similar, which is quite an amazing to think that thousands of years ago, you know, Cleopatra was doing something that we're still sort of trying to do it by different means today. I just wonder how she was able to do it without things like social media. Like how did rulers of the past communicate this sort of myth message of themselves and mythologize themselves in their lifetime?

SPEAKER_01 8:30 I mean, I love the way you've drawn that comparison with that sort of um performance of self, because I think that's what we all do. I'm I'm terrible on social media and I've always been told by my publisher that I have to, you know, be better. But I find it really difficult because I'm a massive oversharer and I and so I hold back from social media because I don't want to, I want it to be a performance, a curated version of self, not all of it, because I have that old-fashioned version of, you know, the public sphere and the private, and my private sphere I kind of guard quite closely. I think in the ancient world, that notion of the public and private was actually much less distinct. That for a ruler like Cleopatra, there was almost no private space, that you would have servants or slaves in the most intimate of sort of moments, and really the kind of historical Cleopatra, as opposed to the Cleopatra that I've kind of I've presented, she really would have viewed servants in the same way that she viewed furniture. That, you know, you don't worry that when you're on the toilet that there is um a lamp in the room or a pot plant, she would have the same feeling about a person because her sense of of people was just, as modern people, we find it deeply abhorrent. But that's the difference between kind of modernity and our sense of every being, everybody being valuable. And in the ancient world, when they just didn't, there was a hierarchy of people and she didn't have those those values. But in terms of creating that performance, I think that a lot of it is through dress. So when you see sort of images of Cleopatra or versions of her, you tend to see her in the kind of the with the headdress of Isis, which looks like these great horns, and then wedged between the horns is the great eye of Ra. So she has this performance of herself as a living goddess. She does it through the kind of the coins that are minted. So lots of people, this kind of the myth of Cleopatra's nose, whether or not she had a big nose. A lot of that is based on some coins we have from quite early in her reign, where yeah, she has a bit of a honker. But the problem with those coins is that again, it was a presentation of self. What she's trying to say in those coins is I'm actually a pharaoh, I'm a ruler, I'm a king. Not that I'm a queen, I'm a king, because queens are vulnerable, kings are stronger. And so she's actually trying to look masculine. She has no interest in trying to look beautiful. This isn't the met ball. She's trying to look as masculine and to have all those drinks. If you go back to earlier queens like um Hatcher book, she actually has the pharaonic beard because she's trying to so hard to look to look masculine. So it's kind of coins go out, you have public works of art. I don't know if you've, I'm sure you've been to the Egyptian uh wing of the British Museum.

SPEAKER_00 11:30 Yes.

SPEAKER_01 11:30 Well, there you have all those sort of monumental works of public art. And they are like sort of Percy Bischelle saying, sort of, look on me, you mighty end despair. It is, it's to try and intimidate, scare, and impress you. So these public works of art would go out, and everything says again and again, power, living goddess, bow down to me, I will protect you. And she's sort of putting herself in this in this way. But obviously, I have the thing that I'm writing for a modern audience, and there's certain aspects that I can't write a character and expect anybody with a sort of modern sentiment to sort of have any empathy or interest in if she's so much of a goddess that she loses all humanity. So I have to kind of bring her down to earth in those waves and try and find ways of having the kind of the public, the grandiose, the goddess, but also the human. And so that's through her relationship with um her slave Charmian, which I've really reinvigorated and reimagined as a much more equal friendship. I mean, there's moments when it's not, um, and and also having the kind of the vulnerabilities, the physical vulnerabilities, the emotional vulnerabilities of Cleopatra.

SPEAKER_00 12:42 Yeah, it's really fascinating to hear that there's uh there's a whole PR spin that goes into looking like a goddess. And I mean, it sounds like Cleopatra was potentially unusually good at identifying what elements of herself she really needed to raise up in the public perception.

SPEAKER_01 13:00 She was really good at it, and one of the things that separated her from the other Ptolemies, and oh my god, try writing a book where all the men are called Ptolemy. Like, oh my editor was just kind of can we not just change something? I'm like, no, we can't, because unfortunately, we do have a historical record. I can't just call one Terence, it's not gonna work. So I've given them kind of nicknames, but uh that was as far as I could go. But yeah, she was unusually good, but also she understood the sort of the connection between the Egyptian people themselves. So Cleopatra and the Ptolemy line comes from Macedonian Greeks. They sort of descended from um Alexander the Great, and by the time we get to Cleopatra, they've been in Egypt about 300 years. And her brother Ptolemy, um, who she was a co-ruler with, he very much appealed to the sort of middle and upper class, if you want to put it in those terms, the sort of of mostly Greek-speaking Macedonian descendants who are in Alexandria, the kind of the wealthy, the merchants. Cleopatra has this profound connection with the sort of local Egyptian people themselves, and they adore her. One of the reasons that they adore her is that unlike all the other Ptolemies, she is the first person, um, the first Ptolemy to actually speak Egyptian, and so she addresses them and speaks to them in their own language, and that's hugely powerful, and they adore her for that, and she worships their gods openly, she presents herself as the goddess Isis, one of their gods, and they respond to her in that way, and she understands the kind of the importance of that connection, and I suppose in a way of giving the people what they want and what they need, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:52 And actually, um, you know, what uh uh you paint a picture of her being very intelligent as well, and and there are some people who argue that maybe her beauty was actually an overblown aspect of who she was, and actually a lot more about her and you know, how influential she was, was about her incredible intelligence and ability to spot things that others don't, and you know, that was how she ruled, really.

SPEAKER_01 15:20 I think the sort of the myth of her beauty really comes later because the sort of closest sources to her, you know, sort of like Plutarch, they they don't really talk about her being beautiful. They talk about her being incredibly charming, that she can charm the birds from the trees, and that the most fascinating, intoxicating part of her is her conversation, that she's so clever, so witty, so funny, so erudite, that that's what that's what is charming. And he doesn't say that she's not beautiful or that she she has a big nose, which is sort of, you know, one of these, he doesn't say there's anything, you know, unattractive about her. So she might well be um a beauty, she might be perfectly attractive. He just says the thing that is most remarkable is her intelligence. And I think from what we know about um sort of Julius Caesar, that was, you know, that's what he was drawn to for long-term connections in women.

SPEAKER_00 16:14 Yeah, um I I kind of want to take us back to um just the sort of the setting of the book as well, before I ask you a little bit about how you've sort of how you've been able to fit Cleopatra to a modern lens. But just talk to me about you know how how you paint a picture of Alexandria, you know, what what would that have been like potentially for Cleopatra's city? What what would it felt have felt like in history to walk into that ancient city?

SPEAKER_01 17:44 I mean, obviously, all I could do was read lots of books and sort of sources about Alexandria, because modern Alexandria bears almost no relation to ancient Alexandria. And I'm often asked, oh, you know, do you go, did you go and visit Alexandria? And the thing is, in this instance, it would have made no difference, I don't think, because I could not visit Cleopatra's Alexandria. And when I've been researching other books, say set in Renaissance, Florence, actually, by going to Florence, you're walking on Leonardo da Vinci's streets, you can go into spaces designed by um Michelangelo, and yeah, at night, if you walk around at midnight where most of the tourists have disappeared, you really can get a sense with a bit of imagination of the Renaissance city. You can visit other places in Tuscany that have been kind of you know less modernised, and you can really get a sense. But when it comes to the busy modern urban city of Alexandria, there are just ghosts, and it would really be a visit, sort of chasing ghosts. But the sense we get from sort of historical sources is that Alexandria was the place that everyone wanted to visit. That if you were a sort of um middle-ranking uh sort of Roman citizen or Greek citizen, that was the city of culture, of knowledge, it has the great library, um, which is part of the great museum. It's this beautiful sort of, it's on the sea. Um, and it's also a planned city with wide boulevards and the sea kind of air blows through date palms. So it's supposed to be sort of fragrant and it's cool. They understand that if you have these wide streets that are shaded, that the sort of the the ocean air can really can can cool the city. They have public art and really great sculptures just for people to sort of enjoy as they're as they're moving through the city. It was sort of cosmopolitan, clean, and it's I think it had the sort of self-confidence and pride in its in its own modernity and um its sort of intellectualism. And Cleopatra, when she went to Rome, the Rome of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar isn't the Rome that we see now when we go there as tourists, it's an earlier version. It's cramped, it smells, the traffic is terrible, it's nose-to-tail oxen, it stinks of um shits and piss, it's just it's and she when she goes there, she's just kind of really this this is the centre of the of the empire because it's it's pretty grim. And it provides this sort of massive contrast to the kind of the elegance and um the real beauty of of Alexandria.

SPEAKER_00 20:39 You paint such a vivid picture through all the reading that you had to do without without visiting it in real life. Um it sounds like you you were able to almost step into Alexandria yourself in some way and and feel what it was to be in that city as Cleopatra. Do did you get a sense for your yourself that you know of this experience?

SPEAKER_01 21:02 I mean, I think that's what you do as a writer. It is this kind of joyful armchair travel. And I do imagine really quite sort of viscerally what it must have been like. And there's clues and things that you use to help you along the way. I mean, I have been to um Egypt, not to not sort of specifically for researching this book, but it is a place that I've been. I do know how it feels, how it smells. I mean, again, a modern version of it, but I, you know, I I have been, I have camped in the desert, I do, I do have that sense of it. But then there's also um, I would sort of go to museums. So we've mentioned the British Museum, and the British Museum, I think, helped me create the kind of public presentation, the public persona of Cleopatra with the kind of grand public art. And then when you go upstairs, there's some really beautiful frescoes from some of the tombs, and the colours of those are so amazing, and they have the kind of the fish, the herons, and from these tomb paintings, and so I've really borrowed some of the kind of architecture that you can kind of glimpse on the tomb paintings, and I've brought them to life in the palace, and even from the birds and fishes, you can identify what the flora and fauna is, and then again I kind of reanimate them and place them in Cleopatra's palace. But then when it comes to the more intimate things, there's this other um museum that I really, really like called um the Petrie Museum, it's part of UCL, and it's kind of as you imagine, a museum sort of is or should be. It feels quite Indiana Jones. They only let about, I don't know, 10, 15 people in at a time. It's lots of things in cases with little type labels that may or may not correspond directly to the object behind them, and it's things like a shoe or the little pots for um. Michael, and they've got the earliest piece of sort of linen undergarments, there's dresses, um, this amazing beard dress beaded dress that um a slave girl would have worn probably whilst dancing. When I look at the kind of the little objects on the dressing table and stuff, I thought, well, it's not actually that different from what you might find on my messy dressing table. And whilst the public objects, they're they're there, they're they want to create a distance between you. That's the purpose of those sort of grand sculptures. They're to say, you know, I'm a god like Pharaoh and you're tiny. But when you look at an object on a dressing table that is designed to be intimate, to be used, that sense of time and distance actually collapses. And you feel sort of the sort of the scheme of history becoming really, really thin and really, really close. So I love the Puget Museum just going round and that the sort of the intimacy and thinking, well, somebody touched this every single day, probably through their whole life. And here's a shoe that was sort of, you know, dropped, discarded, a children's toy, a comb. And those objects really, for me, kind of evoke the intimacy and the nearness of the past brings it much closer, as opposed to the kind of grandiose objects that we we find in in the other museums.

SPEAKER_00 24:20 And also you you mentioned uh before the Great Library of Alexandria, you know, one of history's most legendary places. Um how did you approach bringing that to life? Because it's you know it's within Alexandria, but it's almost a different um mythos to that space, isn't there?

SPEAKER_01 24:40 Again, just reading the work of other historians who've sort of tried to imagine or I suppose research as well as they can any information that still has sort of percolated down through time about the about the library. So things like I think the um the statue we have of one of Plato and one of Aristotle looking at each other. Um I I didn't imagine that it was it's taken from some either historian, I think they found some evidence of that. And again, you know, I've rendered it, I've brought it to life, and I've looked at other kind of plans of other ancient buildings. We have some information about what we think it was likely um the library would have been like. Things like um sort of the Ptolemy's ship collection of books in the library, or of I mean, they would all been on papyrus and some probably on possibly on parchment, but most of um the work in the Alexandrian library would have been on papyrus, um, in these sort of scrolls, that famously Ptolemy had a whole section of the library called the ship collection, and the ship collection had absolutely nothing to do with sort of maritime law. It was work that when ships came into the great harbour at Alexandria, if there were sort of books on board, he would insist that they all had to come into the library and be copied, and then the ships could have their originals back. Of course, that's not what happened. He would take all the books, copy them, give them the copy back, keep the original. And so the ship collection in the Great Library was an assembly of all these texts, essentially kind of pilfered or pirated from the boats in the Alexandrian Bay. So we have sort of sources that that tell us about these, and then it's sort of my role to then kind of weave that into the fiction. And I always think it's much more satisfying as a reader when you know that as much as possible is as sort of as authentic as we can make it with the with the knowledge that we have.

SPEAKER_00 26:49 And if we head back to Julius Caesar now, and you mentioned, you know, how you were sort of stunned that in the play Cleopatra's really not mentioned. Um, how do you sort of address their relationship differently?

SPEAKER_01 27:03 It's completely different from Shakespeare because she's not in it. So if that makes it in that way, it's sort of I mean, she's in Anthony and Cleopatra, but she's not in Julius Caesar at all. So in that way, I had a sort of clean sake to imagine her relationship with Caesar. But there's uncomfortable parts of the relationship in that when they first meet, she's 18 or 19, we can't know for sure, and he's in his 50s. It's quite an age gap. And she almost certainly would have been a virgin when she meets him. He, Caesar, was an absolute ladies' man and um is a man who's had wives' mistresses and is in kind of middle age, um, and in terms of the ancient world, in late middle age. But I wanted to both kind of not gloss over any aspects of discomfort, and I think that certainly in the initial scenes between them, we do get a sort of a profound sense of um Cleopatra's unease, but I also wanted to acknowledge that she does have some power, and that the reason that she is entering into a relationship with him is because she wants more power politically. I also was sort of looking at what is the nature of the relationship between them, and the Caesar that I have created is one who sort of he's conquered the world, and there's almost a sense of ennui. And then Cleopatra comes along, and she's what he's attracted and drawn to is just the sheer scale of her ambition, and there's something about this energy, this vigour, this just relentless, ferocious ambition hotter than the sun, that reminds him of how he used to be. And there's that sort of intoxication of youth, but it's not just, oh well, yes, you know, she's young and she's pretty. It's not, it's about the the ferocity of her political ambitions. And I think that provokes something within him, and when he's with her, he's reminded of the man he had been before he'd conquered the world, and I think it's that that charms him. Yet there are two people who also in a relationship are sometimes honest and often lie because their interests align some of the time, and other times they really don't. So there's the personal manoeuvring of a relationship, but there's also the political maneuverings of the relationship, and neither of them judge one another too harshly because of that. They accept it as a reality, though, even when, particularly, I think, with Cleopatra, because we're in her mind, we sort of we get the the stings of when she feels the rejection, but the rejection she feels is less personal and more she realizes that she's still vulnerable and she still has sort of more work to do in order to kind of shore up the political aspects. And this goes back to the way that with her, bedroom politics and politics are one and the same. They just are. Um, that she's she's not just you know a woman having a relationship with a man, she is Egypt having a relationship with Rome, and each of them are proxies for their entire countries, and she does not forget that, not even when she's naked.

SPEAKER_00 30:25 Yeah, it's quite um important to reframe it that way because it shows that the power was still with her, you know, that she had this sort of political ambition, and it wasn't that she, you know, I think often she can be overshadowed by Caesar and Anthony. But actually, what you're painting a picture of is somebody with this incredible political intelligence who who had her own say in the matter.

SPEAKER_01 30:50 She absolutely does, but she doesn't have all the political power, she's still in a much weaker position. So, for instance, when she first meets Caesar, as we know, he's living in the palace, it's her palace, but she goes there sort of in supplication to him, and he puts on a feast and says, Here you are. And it's like, well, this is my food. These are my slaves, this is my and he's sort of gifting back to her her own, you know, with with sort of tremendous kind of like, here we go, here you are, aren't you lucky? And she's kind of no, I'm this is mine. But then part of that is all is all a play. She's got to act as though she's already got it in order to kind of um win his respect. And it is very much this kind of game of of presentation, and in that sense, it is this sort of tightrope walk for her where she has to always sort of suggest and pretend more power than she actually has in order to gain what it is that she wants. And I think she's very aware of her vulnerabilities. She would be um, she would be foolish not to be, and what she has to do is just play the play the game, play the hand that she has, and she plays it really, really well. I think, particularly, I mean, the story that I've chosen to tell isn't the whole story of Cleopatra. I think that for me, lots of writers have tried to tell the sort of cradle to grave story of Cleopatra, and actually it's too much, in my view, to put into one book. You just can't do it. I mean, you can, but it means that you're having to compress so much or kind of rush through or just have an enormous unwieldy book. And as storytellers, we have to obey the rhythms of the story. So I've worked really hard to find the complete rhythm of the story, but within this sort of this first act, if you like, of Cleopatra. So we just go up to just beyond the end of the Ides of March, but I don't tell the story of um Marcus Antonius and that relationship because yeah, to me, that's another whole novel.

SPEAKER_00 32:50 And for you, obviously, you've had to do some fictionalising, and you mentioned that maybe this relationship uh that she demonstrates with her slave would have been, well, less than um what the modern uh I would like to read um in reality. How close do you think you have been able to get to what could have been the reality for Cleopatra in a historical telling that we just don't know the answer to?

SPEAKER_01 33:16 I mean, that's really hard to know because the simple answer is, of course, we can't possibly know, because there are no, you know, as we stand at the moment, there are no sources that could tell us these intimate details, and it is unlikely that one is going to be kind of dug up somewhere. On the other hand, I mean, I'm not the first person to explore the relationship between um Cleopatra and Charmion. Shakespeare does it really, you know, beautifully and really movingly in um Antony and Cleopatra. There's both um Charmian and Iras who are mentioned in Plutarch. They almost certainly were women who were part of Cleopatra's entourage. So um they've had kind of many imaginings and kind of um incarnations uh over the centuries. But what I like to do in the fictional places is, for instance, if we take um the example of a scene, there's a scene that I've written where Cleopatra goes with her father Ptolemy to see Cato um in Rome, and her father is appealing to Cato because there's been a rebellion at home in Egypt and Alexandria, and he really needs some Roman legionaries and he needs money to help him put it down. And Cato, in a massive power play, holds the audience with Ptolemy and Cleopatra whilst he's on the toilet. He's taken a laxative, and they're all having this meeting about kind of the fate of Egypt, whilst Cato's having a shit. And Sevilia, who is another sort of character in my book and is another kind of is says is Cato's sister, is there kind of in the background, and Cleopatra and Sevilia withdraw from the scene and they end up having kind of a conversation where it's a bit less smelly out in the garden. Now, the scene of Cato on the toilet is one of the most famous bathroom scenes in sort of ancient history. It's there in Plutarch, it's there in other sources, it almost certainly happened. I've altered it in that it didn't take place in Rome, it actually took place in Cyprus, where um Cato was the governor. I've moved it to Rome because otherwise I wanted the sort of the symmetry in the narrative of having Cleopatra go to Rome as a young girl and then return to Rome as a woman with her toddler, Caesarean. So there was a kind of, yeah, a sort of narrative need. The other thing was that I knew that Ptolemy has to be speaking to the Senate and making his appeal in Rome. As soon as we have stops along the way, suddenly it's like, you know, Cleopatra and dad's road trip, and it feels like a kind of road trip narrative. So these are the sort of moments where the fact of history, I'm making little changes, and some people will be very upset that the meeting actually should have been in Cyprus. It was ludicrous it would take place in Rome. They're not wrong, but I've made these, made these adjustments for when you're writing historical fiction, the demands of the narrative and of the characters you've created have to always be the ones that you listen to. It's like sort of almost listening to a piece of music. You can't just make sure you can't let facts absolutely dominate where you sort of you want. You have to when it's kind of, you can't change the date of the Second World War unless that is the purpose of your novel and your writing alternate history. These big dates have to stay. But within that, moving a meeting from Cyprus to Rome, I think for me, that's okay. The other thing that I've done is that there's no absolute historical record that Cleopatra and Cato's sister Civilia were in this meeting. But I spoke to a couple of historians and they said, well, there's also no record that they weren't there, and they were women. So why would anybody bother writing down that they were there? So I feel when you take those scenes, and it's possible, and it's orchestrated to run alongside history, and there's no evidence that it didn't happen, I think that it's alright, and you can you can use it to kind of create those moments.

SPEAKER_00 37:33 Do you ever hear any pushback of people who have this sort of other imagining of Cleopatra, whether, you know, rightly or wrongly, because as you say, we we don't we just simply don't know a lot of the answers to these questions. But do you get people who say, no, there's no way she would have been like that, or you've uh you've really got that relationship wrong? And and if you do ever get those, what what do you do in that situation? Do you just take it on the chin?

SPEAKER_01 37:56 Or I mean I think it depends. I I I I know some authors absolutely read everything, any sort of every review, and every I read nothing. I just don't. I did with my first few novels, and now I just don't. If I get a lovely review in the Times, somebody will say to me, Oh, you should check out this. So yeah, I'll read those. I have not been on Amazon or Goodreads probably for a decade, because for me, that way lies madness. And it's also the way that you write a novel that goes down the middle, that you end up writing the sort of book that everybody quite likes, but nobody feels passionate about. And one of the things that I've learned as a writer as I've got older is that if you want to write a book that somebody loves, that is the book that they grab onto and say, This is my favourite book this year, I just loved it with that passion, you'll find somebody else who just hated it. And I would always rather write a book that will be somebody's favourite book and accept the fact. I'm not setting out to write a book that somebody, you know, really dislikes, but I want to write books that are brave, make bold choices that some people will love, and correspondingly some people really won't. But I think that when I was writing my um book about Romeo and Juliet, Fair Rosaline, I there was a stage where I got quite anxious writing that novel because it's sort of it is such a kind of beloved work of literature, it's one of the most iconic plays. And I was chatting with um a friend of mine who's a well-known Shakespeare director, theatre director, directed a lot at the RSC, and he was saying to me, look, calm down. You have to not approach this as a writer, but as a director. When you put on a play as a director, you're always saying, This is my vision of it. And he said, It's exactly the same for you. He said, Imagine your book between the boards of the covers is the the curtains of the play. Within that space, this is your production of the story, this is your version. Every other version still exists. This is yours, and that to me was really liberating. And it's kind of it is, this is my version. I'm not saying this is the only one, I'm just saying this is mine. Come spend time in my vision, engage with my version, return to the original, return to yours and see whether it enriches your experience and whether it brings something for you. Because even if you dislike and butt up against parts of it, it will probably clarify your own thinking and your own view. And if somebody feels so strongly about their version of Cleopatra, they can write their own book, they can write their own short story. You know, she still exists, um, you know, in their kind of the imaginative space, and we can all have our own version of her.

SPEAKER_00 40:53 Yeah, exactly. And and actually to feel that strongly means that in some ways your book could, like you say, could cement their idea and could further their understanding of Cleopatra in the way that they viewed her, perhaps, or any story. I mean, for a recent episode of the podcast and another series that I produced about the lives of the Guernsey deportees is a group of islanders from Guernsey who were deported during World War II to sort of Nazi internment camps. My grandma tells a story about um this plane flying over the camp, and uh another deportee, Ralph, tells a similar story, but some of the details are subtly different. And my grandpa said he archived a lot of the stories from the deportation, and there are variations on this same plane story of these Hitler youth flying over the camp. And everybody, you know, all the stories that exist out there are subtly different in some way. And he says, you know, it occurs to me that it's it's unlikely that this happened more than once. So what you're seeing is misremembering or remembering in a different way, or remembering from a certain viewpoint. And, you know, what is very clear is history isn't just one story, it's an amalgamation of stories and perspectives that unfortunately is often just written by the victor, as you mentioned at the start. So what we get is this one version of history, when in reality, history is experienced by each individual in a different way. So your version of Cleopatra may be just as accurate as somebody who has like an anti-version of Cleopatra. It just depends on from which perspective you're taking it.

SPEAKER_01 42:30 I think that's absolutely true. And I think that um with modern history, it's sort of easier and harder because there are still so many living voices telling us kind of what their experiences are. And I know that kind of we often try and now archive and find a way of recording those testimonies and those voices before they disappear, because it's sort of so important for our understanding going forward of the past to have sort of as many um perspective and as many memories as possible before they disappear. And that as a kind of both for a historian and as a sort of writer of um fiction or creator of any art, that's both brilliant and also totally overwhelming because if you're writing a novel, whether it's sort of World War II or even World War I, the sources are basically infinite, and you have to do your research to a point, and then you, as the creator, have to decide at some point to stop and then write your own sort of creation, whatever it is, inspired by based on, because otherwise you would spend your entire life researching and you would never finish because you really could read everything on First World War, Second World War, 20th century history forever. With the ancient world, it's different because actually there's a lot of secondary sources with people sort of telling you their interpretation of things that they that that happened, and you could read forever about sort of Rome and the ancient world, but actually, when you come down to not what do we think we know, but what do we actually know with certainty, it's much, much smaller, and so in that way it's harder because you have to kind of imagine more and you have to take more kind of imaginative leaps and risks, but on the other hand, it's there's also a relief in that because the pool of of research, um, certainly in terms of the primary resources, is just smaller, and that's the kind of the challenge and the liberation.

SPEAKER_00 44:33 And as somebody who spent her life mythologizing herself and turning herself into a god, um, do you think Cleopatra would recognize the version of herself that history has handed down to us?

SPEAKER_01 44:47 I would say she would be both devastated and delighted. Devastated because she was so much more than the colied seductress, the Elizabeth Taylor coquette, and yet also delighted that thousands of years later, here she is still sort of terrifying and um mystifying people. I think that she would prefer, though, we dwelt more on her power than um on her sort of seduction.

SPEAKER_00 45:21 Well, Natasha, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on what we did before. Thank you very much for joining me.

SPEAKER_01 45:26 Thank you so much for having me.

SPEAKER_00 45:28 A massive thank you to Natasha Solomons for joining me on the podcast. Her book, Cleopatra, is out now. You've been listening to What We Did Before. I'm Ollie Giu, and I will see you next time.