WOULD A CHOCOLATE FONDANT WITH CARAMEL SAUCE KILL CLEOPATRA?
I was asked to plan my dream dinner party and it devolved as quickly as you'd expect.
qotd: Cleopatra [to Alexas]
“If you find him sad, say I am dancing. If in mirth, report that I am sudden sick.”
Act 1 Scene 3, Antony and Cleopatra, William Shakespeare.
So Alex, the mastermind/powerhouse behind
, recently started up a podcast, called A Seat At The Table, to accompany all the fabulously informative and feminist projects she’s got going on. I first met Alex IRL when she asked me to speak at her feminist book club as part of Mythology March ~ we ended up having the MOST dreamy evening discussing Madeline Miller’s Circe (I actually wrote a newsletter all about the evening which you can read here: Kill, F*ck, Marry: Circe, Clytemnestra and Medea - GO.).
I was absolutely thrilled when she asked me to be a part of her podcast ~ it’s just the most fabulous concept, she asks you to curate your dream dinner party and you get to invite three feminist icons and plan your ideal menu. MY dream dinner party includes Cleopatra VII (the v famous one), Boudicaa, Hatshepsut, and chocolate fondant. And barrels of red wine.
I’ve thieved a few sentences from Alex’s episode description; “We discuss the incredible stories of her three guests, the importance of making classicism and the ancient world accessible, and bridging the gap between the modern and ancient world to undo the 'bad press' given to women throughout ancient history.”
It was seriously so fun to record ~ Alex is a dreamy host who had me cackling one minute and deeply reflective the next ~ listen to the full podcast here:
A Seat At The Table with Cosima Carnegie (Cosi's Odyssey)
If you’re not a podcast person but would still like to learn a smidge about these historical figures, I’ve thrown together some of my favourite fun facts for you (is this now a listicle? also, what is a listicle?).
Starting off strong with the one and only:
Cleopatra VII, Κλεοπάτρα Φιλοπάτωρ, Beloved of Her Father
Technically the 7th woman to bear her name, Cleopatra was born around 70-69 BCE and died in 30 BCE. She was the last ruler of the Macedonian dynasty that was installed in Egypt after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE. Famously the lover of both Julius Caesar and Marc Antony, what people don’t discuss ENOUGH is that she was well versed in mathematics, debate and philosophy as well as being fluent in at LEAST nine languages.
She was Macedonian but according to the classical writer Plutarch she was one of the few and potentially the only ruler who bothered to learn Egyptian !!
She was only 18 when her father died and she took power
Apparently her and Marc Antony started some sort of saucy/depraved cult together (couple goals?)
Augustus (the Roman dude that defeated Cleo and Marc Antony and took over Rome) was so good at marketing - he turned Cleopatra into this caricature of the minxy foreigner/femme fatale who tempted a whole bunch of upstanding Roman men 🙄 she became a massive scapegoat as Augustus wasn’t exactly rushing to remind everyone of the time he battled another Roman.
CW // sexual assault
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Boudicca, Warrior Queen of the Iceni Tribe
An ancient queen of Britain, celebrated for her courage in the face of tyranny in trauma, Boudicca led a revolt against the Romans, dying in 60/61 CE.
When her husband, the king, died he, her family, and her tribe got completely screwed over and humiliated by the Romans, essentially becoming slaves after the death of the king. When Boudicca protested, she was publicly stripped and flogged and her two daughters were raped by Roman soldiers. She sought vengeance (!!), mustering a rebel army to fight back against the Romans. Various accounts suggest that she was responsible for the death of around 70 to 80 THOUSAND Romans and pro-Romans. Most of what we know about Boudicca comes from two Roman historians, Tacitus and Cassius Dio. Tacitus recounts an address she gave her troops (it gives me full on chills):
‘It is not as a woman descended from noble ancestry, but as one of the people that I am avenging lost freedom, my scourged body, the outraged chastity of my daughters. Roman lust has gone so far that not our very persons, nor even age or virginity, are left unpolluted. But heaven is on the side of a righteous vengeance; a legion which dared to fight has perished; the rest are hiding themselves in their camp, or are thinking anxiously of flight…This is a woman's resolve; as for men, they may live and be slaves.’
Last but not LEAST:
Hatshepsut, the fifth Pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt
Also known as the female king of Egypt, Hatshepsut reigned in her own right between 1473 and 1458 BCE, exercising unprecedented power as a woman, adopting the full titles and regalia of a pharaoh. When her husband died, the throne passed to her stepson who was a teeny baby, so she ruled as regent. In the beginning she behaved, colouring well within the lines, acting as a conventional, compliant regent. By the end of her 7th year as ruler, however, things had escalated; Hatshepsut had been crowned KING. She and her stepson were still technically co-rulers but she was very much running the show.
Hatshepsut was first depicted as a typical queen, then there was a middle chunk of time where she/the royal artists experimented with combining a female body with kingly, masculine regalia, but then eventually/finally her formal portraits started showing her with a male body, even with the traditional false beard
Her reign was actually pretty peaceful ~ focussing on trade rather than war, Hatshepsut famously championed a seaborne trading expedition to Punt, an ancient trading centre (that has since vanished??) on the east African coast
When she died, her stepson Thutmose the 3rd ran his own marketing campaign, attempting to remove all traces of her rule, and you can still see evidence of this when you visit the temple of Hatshepsut in Luxor - images of her have literally been scratched out, like that was supposed to work??
Here is a close up photo of the scratch marks in question ~ I took this when visiting the Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut in Luxor last year and god I cannot tell you how happy it made me that various men tried to get rid of her/literally erase her presence from the historical record and yet the whole TEMPLE is still standing, and is DEDICATED to her by NAME.
And that’s a wrap. If you’ve all of a sudden become a podcast person in the handful of minutes it took to get to the end of this, here is the link to the episode:
A Seat At The Table with Cosima Carnegie (Cosi's Odyssey)
Hatshepsut depiction as a King is fascinating… one of the few pharoahs’ biographies that intrigued me in Egypt, but it was 2pm in Luxor in March and I was so dazed by the sun I could barely look at her temple from the outside & had to run inside it. Sweat streaming off me. I wd like to explore Luxor’s most exposed temples one winter bc the desert heat is bound to be more forgiving then.