Cleopatra

Part of Life of Caesar

Over three hours in Egypt: a head in a basket, a queen who needed a Roman, and a war in the streets of Alexandria that Caesar had not planned and nearly lost.

Part of Greeced Lightning · Myths and movies with a doctor of classics; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of Emperors of Rome

An hour live on a queen who spoke nine languages, ruled Egypt for twenty-one years, and is remembered for two affairs. The reign gets the attention here.

Part of The Rest Is History

Part two of four on Cleopatra, covering the Alexandrian war and the years she spent in a villa across the Tiber while Caesar was alive. Forty-one minutes.

Part of Emperors of Rome

The two hundredth episode, live: the Donations of Alexandria, in which Antony handed Roman provinces to a foreign queen's children. An hour on the gift that made Actium inevitable.

Part of The Ancients

With Joyce Tyldesley

Cleopatra before the Romans got hold of her story: a Ptolemaic ruler who learned Egyptian when her dynasty had not bothered for three hundred years, playing the only hand a client kingdom had.

Part of Emperors of Rome

Fifty-four minutes on the eleven months in Alexandria after the defeat, and two suicides staged with care. The asp arrives late in the tradition and may be entirely literary.

Part of The Ancients

With Daisy Dunn

Daisy Dunn on the pair from Tarsus to the tomb, fifty-three minutes. The political arithmetic gets as much room as the romance, which is the only way the ending makes sense.

Part of The Ancients

With Jeffrey Tatum

Jeff Tatum on the stretch from Philippi in 42 BC to Actium, the years when Antony was the senior partner in the triumvirate and spent that advantage. Forty-five minutes, the second of two parts.

Part of The Rest Is History

Part three of four, forty minutes on what Plutarch and then Shakespeare did to the story before anyone alive today met it.

Part of The Ancients

With Jane Draycott

Jane Draycott on Cleopatra Selene, walked through Octavian's triumph as a child and later ruling Mauretania as queen. Thirty-six minutes on the one who got out of that family alive.

Part of Emperors of Rome

With Jane Draycott

The daughter who survived, was walked in a triumph, and ended as queen of Mauretania with a capital named for Augustus. Thirty-five minutes on the Ptolemy nobody mentions.

Part of The Pax Romana Podcast

Twenty-eight minutes on Cleopatra as a player in Roman politics with her own interests, which is how she behaved and rarely how she is written.

Part of Historia Civilis

Twenty-six minutes of coloured rectangles on the last year of both of them, Actium to the asp. Historia Civilis is strongest on sequence, and 30 BC is almost entirely sequence.

Part of The Partial Historians

The Taylor and Burton epic held against what is actually known, which is less than the film assumes and stranger. An hour and a half, and the costume budget gets the scrutiny it deserves.

Part of The Partial Historians

The second half of the Taylor and Burton epic, and the studio that nearly went under making it. Eighty-three minutes, with the history checked as they go.

Part of The Partial Historians

With Yentl Love

Fifty-four minutes on two thousand years of reinvention: Roman propaganda, Shakespeare, Hollywood, and the argument about who gets to play her.