Cleopatra the Character, Historical Figure, and Myth

Cleopatra the Character, Historical Figure, and Myth

Cleopatra is a character in a Shakespeare play. Cleopatra is a historical figure. Cleopatra is a myth of our culture. Although each of these statements may be true, neither they, nor any other such statements can hope to adequately describe Cleopatra. Cleopatra is an emergent feature of a complex system; Cleopatra is greater than the sum of her parts.

Emergent features are properties associated with complex systems that cannot be deduced simply from an analysis of the elements in the system; emergent features can only be explained in terms of the causal interaction among elements in the system. Cleopatra’s current status as an emergent entity is a result of the causal interactions between elements of the complex system that is our Heideggerian socio-cultural immersion, here represented by our notions of historical fact, our acceptance of dramatic representation, and our human predilection towards sin and vice. Cleopatra represents the salacious East, sensuality, and the immoral desire for the forbidden fruit; she captivates the imagination as the inheritor of the Egyptian myths, with the embalming of the dead, rituals, tombs, pyramids, gods, scarabs, scorpions, and horror film mummies.

Central to Cleopatra’s emergence is our fascination with her powers to charm the virtuous, upright paradigmatic Roman, leading him, like the Serpent, down the path of Sin. Plutarch is explicit in his description of the corrupting influence of the East:

But when he [Marc Antony] was once come into Asia…and that he had felt the riches and pleasures of the east parts…he easily fell again to his old licentious life. For straight one Anaxenor a player of the citherne, Xoutus a player of the flutes, Metrodorus a tumbler, and such a rabble of minstrels and fit ministers for the pleasures of Asia (who in fineness and flattery passed all the other plagues he brought with him out of Italy), all these flocked in his court, and bore the whole sway: and after that, all went awry. For everyone gave themselves to riot and excess…(696)

On a larger view, Cleopatra is the embodiment of our western conception of the East as a realm of guilty, sensuous pleasures: it is the origin of spices, and the exotic tales of the Arabian Nights, and occult knowledge. The western notion of vice is encapsulated by the Seven Deadly Sins of the Roman Catholic Catechism, which are described by Chaucer in The Parson’s Tale:

Now it is a fitting thing to tell what are the deadly sins, that is to say, the chieftains among sins.