Cleopatra

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Cleopatra. The last pharaoh to rule Egypt, Cleopatra was a woman of intelligence and charisma, later celebrated as a great beauty. During an eventful life she was ousted from her throne and later restored to it with the help of her lover Julius Caesar. A later relationship with another Roman statesman, Mark Antony - and Cleopatra’s subsequent death at her own hands - provided Shakespeare with the raw material for one of his greatest plays. Today Cleopatra is still an object of fascination, her story revealing as much about the Roman world as it does about the end of the age of the Pharaohs.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Catharine Edwards 9 episodes
  Professor of Classics and Ancient History at Birkbeck, University of London
• Maria Wyke 8 episodes
  Professor of Latin at University College London
• Susan Walker No other episodes
  Keeper of Antiquities at the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford

Related episodes

• Hatshepsut
  
  6 Nov, 2014 930 History of the Ancient World
• Julius Caesar
  
  2 Oct, 2014 930 History of the Ancient World
• Queen Zenobia
  
  30 May, 2013 930 History of the Ancient World
• Is Shakespeare History? The Romans
  
  18 Oct, 2018 820 English and Old English literatures
• Akhenaten
  
  1 Oct, 2009 930 History of the Ancient World
• Cicero
  
  25 Jan, 2018 930 History of the Ancient World
• The Roman Republic
  
  30 Dec, 2004 930 History of the Ancient World
• Aphra Behn
  
  12 Oct, 2017 820 English and Old English literatures
• Boudica
  
  11 Mar, 2010 900 History
• Tutankhamun
  
  26 Dec, 2019 930 History of the Ancient World
• Hannibal
  
  11 Oct, 2012 930 History of the Ancient World
• The Mamluks
  
  26 Sep, 2013 950 History of Asia
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream
  
  18 Apr, 2019 820 English and Old English literatures
• Seneca the Younger
  
  23 Feb, 2017 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism
• Sappho
  
  9 Apr, 2015 880 Classical and modern Greek literatures
• Catullus
  
  9 Jan, 2020 870 Latin and Italic literatures
• Thebes
  
  23 Nov, 2017 930 History of the Ancient World
• Is Shakespeare History? The Plantagenets
  
  11 Oct, 2018 820 English and Old English literatures
• Pericles
  
  17 Sep, 2020 930 History of the Ancient World
• Eleanor of Aquitaine
  
  28 Jan, 2016 940 History of Europe

---

Programme ID: b00w7clj

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00w7clj

Auto-category: 932 (Ancient Egypt and the Nile Valley)