Cleopatra, Patriarchy, and the Trap of Honor

Podcast: Afterlives of Ancient Egypt with Kara Cooney · Kara Cooney

Opublikowano: 2025-10-24

CW// self-harm and suicide Kara and Amber take on the most famous death in all of antiquity—Cleopatra VII’s—and ask what “honor” really means when the sources are Roman, i.e. biased AF, and the stakes are imperial, that is Octavian is using Cleopatra’s fall to condense all power into the hands of one person, his own. Starting with a timeline of events, Kara and Amber unpack Octavian’s propaganda about Cleopatra’s death by suicide, and Kara argues that the suicide story serves Rome far more than it serves Egypt’s last queen. Using...