Feminine yet fearsome, her legend has grown with time.Īnd yet, for all this, it is not easy to locate her in the present day. She told her conqueror Octavian (soon to be Augustus, the first Roman emperor) that “I will not be led in a triumph ” – and died by her own hand on August 10 or 12 in 30BC, a few days after her lover had committed suicide. Her death was, to all intents, the end of ancient Egypt and the moment the Roman Empire emerged from the smoke. She was at the side of Mark Antony for much of the 14 years of Roman civil war which bled out of Caesar’s assassination a political and romantic alliance that produced three more children. She was in Rome when Julius Caesar was murdered in 44BC – three years after she had borne the dictator a son. In fact, she was a power player in her own right, dancing along the faultlines of history – both fighting and falling into bed with figures of immense significance. But if the latter (1963) performance depicted her as a kohl-eyed temptress, it merely echoed Roman propaganda of 2,000 years before a smear campaign which mocked her as an overreaching seductress, interfering in the matters of great men. Most famously, she has illuminated the cinema – reborn on camera as Claudette Colbert and Elizabeth Taylor.
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