Cleopatra VII: The Face Nobody Recorded

Cleopatra VII ruled Egypt for twenty-one years, died in 30 BCE, and has been described more often than almost any other woman in antiquity. Almost none of those descriptions are contemporary.

No account written by anyone who met her survives. The fullest ancient portrait of her was composed more than a century after she died, and it says nothing whatever about her cosmetics.^[1] What is sold as Cleopatra's beauty routine is a modern composite, assembled out of Egyptian practice she may or may not have followed, Roman invective written by her enemies, and a book that was not hers.

The fullest ancient portrait of Cleopatra is Plutarch's Life of Antony, composed more than a century after her death.^[2] Plutarch is careful in a way his modern readers rarely are. He states that her beauty was not in itself incomparable, and locates her effect on people in her voice, her conversation and her command of languages.

He does not describe her cosmetics. Nor, on this entry's own reading of them, do the other narrative historians — Cassius Dio, Josephus, Appian — but there is no published survey of that silence to send a reader to, so the wider claim should be taken as a reading and not as a finding. The writers closest to her lifetime were Romans describing an enemy of the state, and their interest was in her extravagance, not her pigments. Roman moralists already had a settled vocabulary for attacking women through paint, and Cleopatra arrived into a rhetoric that was waiting for her.^[3]

A treatise titled Cosmetics circulated in antiquity under the name Cleopatra, and the physician Galen quotes from it. The quotations are genuine. The attribution is not.

Rebecca Flemming's argument rests on a weight standard the text uses that did not come into use until after 64 CE. That is a floor, not a point: it places the author at least ninety years after Cleopatra VII died, and possibly much later.^[4] Galen took his excerpts from a compilation assembled by Criton, physician to the emperor Trajan, rather than from any Ptolemaic archive; two further fragments survive through the Byzantine writers Aetius of Amida and Paulus of Aegina.^[5] The author was a later woman writing, or published, under the name. Who she was is not established, and Flemming does not claim to establish it.

What can be said is material rather than personal, and it comes from the wrong centuries. Egyptian eye paint is among the best-studied cosmetic traditions anywhere, and the evidence is chemical. Analysis of kohl from Egyptian containers in the Louvre found galena and cerussite alongside laurionite and phosgenite, two lead chlorides that are rare in nature and appear to have been synthesised deliberately by wet chemistry.^[6]

Green paint came from ground malachite bound in fat or resin. Red came from ochre.^[7] Applicators, palettes and small stone pots survive in large numbers.^[8] Every part of that record is of dynastic date — centuries to millennia before the Ptolemies took the throne — and none of it was excavated from a Greek court at Alexandria. The tradition was old and it was local, and both of those facts are usually used to imply a continuity nobody has demonstrated. What a Hellenistic court in the first century BCE actually kept on its dressing tables, and how much of it was Egyptian rather than imported Greek and Levantine goods, is a separate question, and the evidence assembled here does not answer it.

The story that Cleopatra bathed in ass's milk is repeated constantly and has no ancient source attached to her. Pliny the Elder does describe the practice, and he attributes it to Poppaea Sabina, the wife of Nero, who is said to have kept herds of she-asses for the purpose.^[9] Poppaea died in 65 CE, most of a century after Cleopatra.

The transfer is instructive. Stories about spectacular vanity migrate towards the most famous available name, and in cosmetics that name has been Cleopatra's for two thousand years. Each retelling adds a detail, and nothing in the chain ever sends anyone back to a source.

Cleopatra was the last ruler of a Greek dynasty that had governed Egypt for nearly three centuries, and she was defeated by a man who then controlled how she would be remembered. Octavian's campaign made her a foreign seductress, and the charge was carried in part by descriptions of adornment.^[10]

That rhetoric is the direct ancestor of the modern Cleopatra beauty feature. The people who first talked in detail about how she looked were her opponents, writing after she was safely dead, and they were not taking notes. An entry about her cosmetics is therefore an entry about the limits of the record, which is a duller subject and the only honest one available.