CHAPTER 11

Playing Cleopatra in Assassin’s Creed: Origins

Jane Draycott

Introduction

On 27 October 2017, Ubisoft released Assassin’s Creed: Origins, the tenth instalment in the main series of the Assassin’s Creed franchise and the seventeenth instalment overall, a major departure from its predecessors in style and scope.¹ Set predominantly in Hellenistic Egypt between 49–44 BCE, the story follows the Medjay Bayek and his wife Aya on their quest for vengeance for the death of their son Khemu. They become entangled in Egyptian and subsequently ancient Mediterranean politics due to their involvement in the civil war between the Egyptian queen Cleopatra VII Thea Notera Philopator and her brother the Egyptian king Ptolemy XIII. At first, they work for Cleopatra and then switch sides following her alliance with Gaius Julius Caesar, completing tasks for the Roman Republic and the fictional Order of the Ancients.

In this chapter, I am going to examine the way in which Cleopatra is portrayed, first in AC Origins and then in Dante’s Inferno (2010, developed by Visceral Games, published by Electronic Arts), to assess not only the historical accuracy but also the historical authenticity of her portrayals in these games, and to consider why the developers of these games have chosen to portray her in these ways. I am not going to ‘fact-check’ AC Origins as such, but I am going to consider the choices made by Ubisoft, and where there have been significant divergences from the historical and archaeological records, consider why these divergences may have been made, with reference to other representations of Cleopatra in popular culture.

Implying Cleopatra

AC Origins was not the first video game in the Assassin’s Creed franchise to include Cleopatra VII, although it was the first to feature her in person as a non-playable character (NPC). Upon the release of Assassin’s Creed II in autumn 2009, someone playing through the game as Ezio Auditore da Firenze could discover a secret chamber in the Basilica San Marco in Venice containing what at the time appeared to be the tomb of the ancient assassin Amunet, although upon playing AC Origins it would become apparent that the tomb was actually her cenotaph.²

According to the information given to the player in AC II, Amunet was, in-game, the assassin responsible for the death of Cleopatra.³ The caption that appears on screen proclaims: ‘Atop this pedestal stands a statue of AMUNET, the female Egyptian assassin. She killed Cleopatra with A SNAKE’ (sic). Presumably, Ubisoft chose Cleopatra (along with the other occupants of the secret chambers located in the game world: the assassins of Alexander the Great, Xerxes I, Caligula, Qin Shi Huang and Genghis Khan) because of their high profiles and international name recognition. But this is a significant departure from the historical record – although there is no consensus in the surviving ancient sources regarding exactly how Cleopatra died, there is certainly consensus about the fact that she died by her own hand rather than anyone else’s.⁴ That is not to say that the precise circumstances of her death have not been questioned.⁵ As recently as 2013, the American criminal profiler Pat Brown suggested, based on no evidence whatsoever, and no expertise in ancient history, but rather her own contemporary professional experience, that Cleopatra was murdered on the orders of Octavian.⁶ This idea got a lot of press attention internationally and resulted in a book and a documentary, so there is certainly a precedent for the idea of an alternative explanation.⁷ In this way, eight years before the release of AC Origins, players were primed for the possibility of seeing an innovative and creative treatment of Cleopatra in a future game.

Portraying Cleopatra

With that in mind, how is Cleopatra presented in AC Origins? Is her portrayal an innovative and creative one, as the brief references in AC II and its successors had seemed to suggest it would be?

AC Origins opens in 49 BCE and covers a period of around five years, culminating in the assassination of Caesar in Rome in 44 BCE, so over the course of the game Cleopatra goes from around twenty years old to about twenty-five, and from being a queen deposed by her brother and co-ruler’s faction to a queen ruling Egypt alongside a different brother and co-ruler, soon to dispense with him entirely in order to rule Egypt alone, nominally alongside her infant son Ptolemy XV Caesar, more commonly known as Caesarion, ‘Little Caesar’.⁸ This is an interesting choice for a period of time to focus on: although it is a very eventful period in Cleopatra’s life, encompassing the civil war between her and her brother Ptolemy XIII (and their younger siblings brother Ptolemy XIV and sister Arsinoe, although they do not feature in the game), Cleopatra’s alliance with Caesar, and the birth of their son Caesarion, we know very little about it.⁹ As far as the Romans recording this period of history were concerned, the civil war between Cleopatra and Ptolemy XIII (or rather, the civil war between Cleopatra and her brother’s advisors Pothinus, Achillas and Theodotus) was only interesting insofar as it played a minor role in the civil war between Caesar and Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, more commonly known as Pompey the Great. In fact, even Caesar barely mentions Cleopatra in his own writings about his activities in this period (twice in his Civil War, and the Alexandrian War, written contemporaneously by an anonymous author, only mentions her once).¹⁰ For the Egyptian perspective, we have no surviving ancient literary sources and are instead reliant on documentary sources and material culture, such as votive stelae set up in her honour by her subjects and her own building projects.¹¹ Consequently, there is enormous scope for dramatizing the few historical events that are known to have occurred during this period, and re-imagining and fictionalizing everything else. This absence of evidence is promising, as it offers considerable scope for experimentation in both the narrative and the character. Unfortunately, however, these aspects of the game do not always live up to their potential.

Cleopatra mainly appears in AC Origins in expository cut-scenes, although there are a few occasions where, playing as Bayek or Aya, you follow her to a specific destination and interact with her, or observe her interacting with other NPCs such as Caesar.¹² These take place at a variety of locations within the game world, including Apollodorus’ villa, where she is living during her exile; Memphis; Heraklion; on board a ship; the Royal Palace at Alexandria; Alexander the Great’s tomb at Alexandria; the Serapeum at Alexandria; and, finally, in Caesar’s villa at Rome. Outwith the game, you can also choose to undertake the Discovery Tour and wander the game world with Cleopatra as your avatar, and there is an educational tour specifically dedicated to her.

First things first: her appearance. What did the historical Cleopatra look like, and how similar or different is the game Cleopatra to this? No physical descriptions of Cleopatra, if any were ever written in the first place, have survived from antiquity. Individuals who knew her during her lifetime, such as Caesar, do not describe her physical appearance.¹³ Cicero comments only on what he perceived as her arrogance.¹⁴ Plutarch, whose grandfather Lamprias was acquainted with the physician Philotas of Amphissa, who was present in Alexandria at the time, focuses on her intelligence, charisma and people skills, going so far as to state that her beauty was not in her physical appearance, but rather in her personality:

For her beauty, as we are told, was in itself not altogether incomparable, nor such as to strike those who saw her; but converse with her had an irresistible charm, and her presence, combined with the persuasiveness of her discourse and the character which was somehow diffused about her behaviour towards others, had something stimulating about it. There was sweetness also in the tones of her voice; and her tongue, like an instrument of many strings, she could readily turn to whatever language she pleased.¹⁵

However, later sources such as Cassius Dio do not go into any sort of detail, simply referring to her as ‘beautiful’.¹⁶ This is something that television and film adaptations have tended to go along with, as it is easier to demonstrate that a female character is attractive and desirable by casting a beautiful actress to play her than by attempting to write a compelling character (see, for example, probably the most famous on-screen iteration, Elizabeth Taylor in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1963 film Cleopatra, frequently referred to as ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’ in press coverage). In recent years, discussions of Cleopatra’s physical appearance have tended towards surprise that such an apparently unattractive woman could have enchanted two such eminent historical figures as Caesar and Antony.¹⁷

With the exception of the coins that she issued over the course of her reign that bear her image in conjunction with her name, none of the naturalistic portraits that are proposed to be of her are securely identified, and, in any case, these are little help in attempting to reconstruct her physical appearance as, assuming they do actually depict her, they come in several different styles, depending upon how she was presenting herself, and to whom she was presenting herself. The bronze coins bearing portraits that she issued in Cyprus in the period covered by the game depict her and Caesarion in the guise of Aphrodite and Eros for the benefit of her Greek audience, and Isis and Horus for the benefit of her Egyptian audience.¹⁸

At home in Egypt, her Egyptian portraiture was very traditionally Egyptian, in line with that of her predecessors, and Egyptian portraiture in the Hellenistic period tends to be stylized rather than realistic.¹⁹ Egyptian portraits can potentially, however, provide information about the way that she dressed, the traditional accoutrements of Egyptian royalty such as the crowns and headdresses, and it is notable that Roman writers describe her dressing as Isis on special occasions.²⁰ Outside Egypt, in other territories controlled by Egypt, or those controlled by the Roman Empire under the supervision of Antony, we see a very different Cleopatra. The only securely identified portraits of her are found on coins, which are potentially more realistic, done in a naturalistic style, and in these she appears with the standard hairstyle, jewellery and dress for an elite woman of the time, but very different from the Egyptian guise.²¹ There are also some insecurely identified portraits. But there are problems with these, too, as they are all rather different from each other.²²

In AC Origins, she is much closer to the Egyptian style than the Graeco-Roman style, even when she is in Rome at the end of the game.²³ This is in line with previous portrayals of Cleopatra in film and television, going back to Theda Bara’s portrayal in the film Cleopatra released in 1917, which Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones has noted present her in a manner that is more in keeping with the New Kingdom period in Egyptian history than the Hellenistic one.²⁴ He has suggested that depicting Cleopatra as Egyptian rather than Greek, or Graeco-Roman, was a way of distinguishing her from her Roman peers, as Greek clothing and Roman clothing were too similar for members of the audience to be able to differentiate between them.²⁵ Over the course of AC Origins, we see Cleopatra in four different outfits, and she is undoubtedly dressed in an ‘orientalizing’ way, following on from the nineteenth-century artistic portrayals, and racist and sexist ideas about the exotic East, and undoubtedly influenced by previous portrayals in a range of media – these paintings have informed theatre, TV series, films, music videos, adverts, even photoshoots up to the present day (on orientalism in classical video games as it pertains to the depiction of Carthage and Dido specifically, see Andrew Dufton in this volume).²⁶ Interestingly, her outfits are particularly close to HBO Rome’s Cleopatra, as are certain other aspects of her presentation (for example her use of opium, and her casual cruelty to underlings).²⁷ This is despite the fact that, as Gregory Daugherty observes, the HBO Rome presentation of the Ptolemaic court in Alexandria is something of an outlier amongst TV and film recreations:

[The show] went to considerable efforts to create an aesthetic look to the court that is a fusion of Macedonian and Egyptian elements, resulting in a style so bizarre that it appears alien and grotesque even to the Romans, and certainly to the viewing audience. None of the cosmetic face-painting or costumes are authentic to the period, but the producers deliberately tried to depict the Ptolemaic court as neither Greek, Roman, nor classical Egyptian but something different, decadent, and dangerous.²⁸

Intriguingly, however, her jewellery and clothing seem to be something of a hybrid, part Egyptian, part Syrian, the latter not entirely inappropriate as members of the Seleucid royal family did marry into the Ptolemaic dynasty (see Figure 11.1). Most pertinently to this discussion, Cleopatra’s older sister Berenike IV married Cybiosactes of Syria but found him so objectionable that she had him strangled within days of their marriage, then married Archelaus of Pontus.²⁹ We can also see the nineteenth-century penchant for orientalizing Cleopatra applied to her supposed descendent Queen Zenobia of Palmyra.³⁰

Figure 11.1    Screenshot from Assassin’s Creed: Origins.

Considering that the surviving Graeco-Roman literary sources frequently describe Cleopatra as Egyptian rather than Greek (‘the Egyptian’, ‘the Egyptian woman’, ‘the Egyptian queen’, etc.), it is not so surprising that contemporary portrayals would take this rather literally (it also facilitates their consumers in their differentiation and identification of her).³¹

Notably, considering recent debates over Cleopatra’s ethnicity, in AC Origins she is ethnically indeterminate, and considering the fact that the game presents Hellenistic Egypt as extremely ethnically diverse throughout, making a point of including Egyptian, Greek, and Roman NPCs and differentiating between them not only in appearance but also accent and language, this is something of a missed opportunity.³² Were Ubisoft sitting on the fence while attempting to avoid controversy?³³

Moving on to Cleopatra’s behaviour, throughout the game she self-identifies as Egyptian: she refers to herself as ‘Pharaoh’ (although some other characters refer to her as ‘Queen’), she states that she is Egypt, that she is a living goddess (presumably Isis is intended here) and shows concern for the Apis Bull.³⁴ She uses Egyptians like Bayek and Aya to accomplish her goals in preference to Greeks (such as her brother’s advisors). In these ways, she is certainly differentiated from the Greeks and the Romans around her. Our first sighting of her is, appropriately enough, at a banquet at the villa belonging to Apollodorus, as many Roman sources present her as an enthusiastic partier.³⁵ According to Plutarch, she and Antony formed a drinking society, The Inimitable Livers, later The Partners in Death.³⁶ Interestingly enough, once Bayek arrives she is all business, leaving the party to go into her war room and strategize with him – should we infer that her previous demeanour was an act? Ancient sources do tell us that she liked to play-act and was in the habit of setting up elaborate scenarios in order to gain the upper hand over men, and she seems to have been particularly successful at doing so with Antony.³⁷

Perhaps unsurprisingly, AC Origins’ Cleopatra is a highly sexualized Cleopatra (somewhat akin to the goddess Aphrodite in God of War III, see Olivia Ciaccia, this volume). As observed by Daugherty, ‘although the emphasis on the predatory sexuality of Cleopatra is not new to the big or the small screen, it has become the clearly dominant motif in other popular culture receptions’.³⁸ As discussed above, her clothing is very revealing, clearly designed with titillation in mind. From her very first line, she is indiscriminately promiscuous, offering herself to anyone on the condition that they agree to be killed in the morning.³⁹ This apocryphal story is the premise of the 1917 Russian Ballet performance, and the costume that the dancer playing Cleopatra wears for this performance is very similar to the outfit that Cleopatra wears for her first appearance in AC Origins, and as the player’s avatar in the Discovery Tour.⁴⁰ She flirts with the sailors on the ship, and with Caesar, offering the latter ‘true marriage’ – presumably we are meant to infer this consists of a marriage that includes sex, unlike her marriage with her much younger brother. Yet, while later Roman propaganda certainly played up her sexuality, with one author claiming that she slept with her slaves, it is probable that she only had relationships with Caesar and Antony.⁴¹ And while these were not recognized as legal marriages in the eyes of Romans, they likely were in Egypt.⁴²

However, there are some positive aspects to her portrayal. She is intelligent and educated, conversing easily with Caesar about Greek and Latin literature as represented by Plato and Catullus.⁴³ She is able to manipulate Caesar, using Alexander the Great’s tomb as an inducement, and Plutarch tells us that she did similar things with Antony, and attempted to do similar things with Octavian, although he proved to be more than a match for her.⁴⁴ She is a political animal, allying herself expediently, first with Apollodorus, then Bayek and Aya, then Pompey, then Caesar, then finally the Order of the Ancients.

More ambiguous is the fact that she is merciless in her dealings with her enemies. She orders the twin priestesses responsible for poisoning the Apis Bull be boiled inside a bronze bull.⁴⁵ She orders Aya to assassinate her brother Ptolemy XIII; while this is a departure from the historical record, which records Ptolemy drowning in the Nile during his army’s retreat from battle, it does present the opportunity for the inclusion of an historical Easter egg in the form of Cleopatra ordering Aya to ‘Make it so.’⁴⁶

Notably, Cleopatra is an antagonist. Despite AC Origins’ presentation of most of the well-known Romans of this period as villains in league with the enemies of Bayek, Aya, and their fledgling brotherhood of assassins, the game leans into the Roman presentation of Cleopatra, which is based on the propaganda disseminated by Octavian, Caesar’s adopted son and heir who would later become the first emperor Augustus, in an attempt to retroactively legitimize his civil war with Antony.⁴⁷ Cleopatra, as a foreign female monarch, three things that the Romans simply could not abide due to a combination of xenophobia, sexism and republicanism, was both anathema and a convenient scapegoat. So, all of her positive qualities were supressed, forgotten, her negative ones promoted, exaggerated, and this has remained the case for two thousand years.⁴⁸

While there are some positive aspects to Ubisoft’s portrayal of Cleopatra (e.g. her intelligence, education and political skill, three qualities that are frequently ignored in dramatizations), considering what could have done with the character, the choices made are somewhat disappointing, embracing two thousand years’ worth of racist and sexist stereotypes.⁴⁹ In contemporary terminology: misogynoir.

Admittedly, it is considerably less offensive that the portrayal of Cleopatra in the game Dante’s Inferno, an action-adventure video game recreation of the famous Italian epic poem, very similar to the early games in the God of War franchise, developed by Visceral Games and published by Electronic Arts, released in 2010.⁵⁰ It sees Cleopatra and Antony, having been condemned to the second circle of Hell, having struck a deal with Lucifer and ruling the circle in exchange for their loyalty. You play as Dante, who, guided by the spirit of the Roman poet Virgil, arrives in the circle in pursuit of his love Beatrice. Cleopatra, endowed with magic powers, summons the Carnal Tower and the Lust Storm.⁵¹ Dante climbs the Tower, reaches the top, Cleopatra summons Antony (she stores him inside her body, he comes out through her mouth) and assists him with magic, Dante slays Antony, Cleopatra mourns him, tries to seduce Dante, and Dante stabs her through the heart. This portrayal of Cleopatra is even more highly sexualized than the one in AC Origins, presenting her as naked apart from her headdress (which is remarkably similar to the one AC Origins’ Cleopatra wears for the majority of the game and as the avatar) and jewellery, and birthing knife-wielding unbaptized babies from her nipples. But saying that AC Origins’ presentation of Cleopatra is better than this is setting the bar extremely low.

Clearly, Ubisoft is not using AC Origins to educate or re-educate gamers about Cleopatra. But should we expect it to? It is, after all, a video game, a piece of entertainment rather than of education. Yet one of the hallmarks of the Assassin’s Creed series has always been its involvement of historians and archaeologists in order to undertake faithful recreations of historical locations (particularly notable here is how the digital recreation of Notre Dame in Assassin’s Creed: Unity: has been presented as a possible aid for reconstructing the cathedral in the wake of 2019’s devastating fire).⁵² The marketing of AC Origins in advance of the game’s release certainly emphasized the historical and archaeological research that had gone into the game.⁵³ The ultimate extension of this has been the introduction of the Discovery Tour mode, which has now been included in the three most recent instalments in the franchise, AC Origins, AC Odyssey and AC Valhalla.⁵⁴ Schools, colleges and universities are being encouraged to use it as a learning experience. The tag line in AC Origins is ‘explore this virtual museum mode, with guided tours and historical locations, set in a combat and quest free environment’. Its content was apparently curated by Egyptologists and was four years in development, so I think it is reasonable to assume that it would be accurate. One of its featurettes is devoted to Cleopatra and provides a brief overview of her life that generally accords with the interpretation presented in AC Origins, although there are a lot of factual inaccuracies (the objects used are not securely identified as Cleopatra; her father’s name is incorrect, it was Auletes, ‘flute-player’, not Aulos, ‘flute’; she did not meet Caesar in a carpet; whether Caesar wanted to or not, he could not make Caesarion his heir because he was not Roman; Antony wanted money to fight his Parthian campaign, not Octavian; she did not die by arsenic poisoning).

So, why go to all the trouble of undertaking extensive historical and archaeological research in conjunction with internationally renowned Egyptologists, creating a complex and engaging narrative, and then resort to the same old racist and sexist clichés regarding the character of Cleopatra? Perhaps because audiences expect certain things from that character, the issue of ‘authenticity’ rather than ‘accuracy’.⁵⁵ Past attempts to deviate from the cliché have met with resistance, such as the portrayal of Cleopatra in HBO’s Rome, or the proposed film adaptation of Stacey Schiff’s Cleopatra, starring Angelina Jolie, which had hoped to present Cleopatra as a political animal rather than a sex kitten.⁵⁶ Significantly, this difficulty people have with reconciling what they believe to be historically accurate and what actually is historically accurate seems to be particularly common with regard to the role of women in historical games (see Kate Cook and Jane Draycott, this volume; Jordy D. Orellana Figueroa, this volume).⁵⁷

So, is the racist and sexist portrayal of Cleopatra in AC Origins a pre-emptive attempt to appease racist and sexist players, so-called ‘gamers’, and anyone else who has an axe to grind? That is certainly one possibility, and one that is rather damning of Ubisoft if that is, in fact, the case. Yet, it is not beyond the realms of plausibility: in the summer of 2020, the studio was hit by a wave of sexual harassment and sexual assault scandals, which led to an exodus of senior staff, and accusations of a sexist, homophobic, transphobic and racist working environment. An internal survey of staff has since revealed that a quarter of the company’s 14,000 staff have witnessed some form of professional misconduct during the last two years, with female and non-binary employees more likely to experience abuse than male ones, and one in five employees said that they did not feel fully respected or safe in the work environment.⁵⁸ It is worth noting that currently only 22 per cent of Ubisoft’s staff are female, with the company aiming to increase this to 24 per cent by 2023.

Yet, is there an alternative explanation? I think there may well be. Let us consider the character of Aya, later Amunet (see Figure 11.2). How might she factor into this discussion? According to her character information, she is half-Greek, half-Egyptian and the daughter of scholars who was, in turn, educated at the Library of Alexandria in ancient history, philosophy, mathematics and languages.⁵⁹ She was a devoted wife and mother before her separation from Bayek following the death of their son Khemu, after which she devoted herself to Egypt. She is politically engaged, far more so than Bayek, who becomes involved with Cleopatra’s faction because of her involvement with it, and because he believes that it will further his quest for vengeance. She is a good sailor, well-versed in hand-to-hand combat and assassination, including the use of poisons. Despite what we have been led to believe since AC II, in the spin-off AC Origins comic, she does not actually assassinate Cleopatra, but rather gives her the poison that she uses to take her own life.⁶⁰ She is the co-founder of the organization upon which the entire AC franchise depends, and it is unsurprising that in-game a myth grows up around her, perpetuated over centuries by the Hidden Ones and the Brotherhood of Assassins, which neatly ties in with the ambiguity surrounding the historical Cleopatra’s death.

Figure 11.2    Screenshot from Assassin’s Creed: Origins.

There is a considerable amount of overlap between the historical Cleopatra and the fictional Aya – her dual heritage and identity, her education, her spousal and maternal devotion, her concern for the kingdom of Egypt and its survival in the face of Roman expansion, her political skill, her involvement in naval and land battles, her knowledge of poisons. Ultimately, again going by the AC Origins comic, she takes Caesarion under her wing and has him join the Hidden Ones, thereby stepping in as his surrogate mother/mentor. So, perhaps the reason that Cleopatra is presented the way she is, is because her many historically attested positive qualities have been transferred to Aya.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have discussed the way in which Cleopatra is portrayed in AC Origins and, to a lesser extent, in Dante’s Inferno, and observed that while there are some historical accuracies in these portrayals (or at least nods to information contained in the ancient literary sources which we should acknowledge were not written by individuals well-disposed towards her, and the ancient documentary sources which are more open to interpretation), it is clear that more attention was paid to the historical authenticity of her portrayals in both of these games. As a result, the Cleopatra that the player sees in AC Origins is, for the most part, the one that the player expects to see, a result of them having been conditioned by 2,000 years of depictions based predominantly on ancient Roman propaganda. However, what we lose in the portrayal of Cleopatra, we gain in the portrayal of Aya/Amunet. Aya, as an entirely fictional character created especially for AC Origins, is not bound by the same concerns over historical accuracy and historical authenticity that constrain Cleopatra, as not only an historical figure but also a heavily mythologized one. Thus, it can be said that the pair complement each other.

Notes

1.See: https://www.ubisoft.com/en-gb/game/assassins-creed-origins/ (accessed June 2020).

2.See: https://assassinscreed.fandom.com/wiki/Amunet (accessed June 2020).

3.See: https://assassinscreed.fandom.com/wiki/Cleopatra (accessed June 2020).

4.Strabo, c. 18–23 CE: asp, poisonous ointment; Velleius Paterculus, c. 30 CE: asp; Plutarch, c. 110–115 CE: uncertain – asp, poison in a hairpin; Florus, c. 2 CE: snakes; Suetonius, circa 119–121 CE: asp; Cassius Dio, c. 202 CE: uncertain – asp, hairpin; Galen, c. 200 CE: asp. As an additional point of interest, most ancient sources include the detail that her two handmaids Eiras and Charmian died with her.

5.For some of the debates surrounding the subject, see Skeat (1953), Baldwin (1964), Griffiths (1961, 1965), Tronson (1998), Retief and Cilliers (2005), Kostuch (2009) and Gurval (2011).

6.Brown (2013).

7.Production on AC Origins began in early 2014.

8.Peek (2008).

9.On Cleopatra’s father’s relationship with the Romans during his reign, which lead to Roman interference in the civil war between Cleopatra and Ptolemy XIII, see Siani-Davies (1997). The fact that ‘there is still a lot of mystery surrounding this time’ was one of the reasons given for the choice of the Ptolemaic setting, Poiron (2021: 80).

10.See Caesar, Civil War 3.103.2, 3.107.2; Caesar, Alexandrian War 33.

11.The Buchis Stela from Hermonthis, currently housed in the New Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, published in Mond and Myers (1934: 11–13 n. 13 [51 BCE]); the Onnophris Stela from the Fayum, currently housed in the Musée du Louvre in Paris, inv. E 27113 (51 BCE); the Apis Stela from Memphis (49 BCE); the temple Cleopatra built at Hermonthis to celebrate Caesarion’s birth (47 BCE).

12.For discussion of Cleopatra’s interactions with Caesar in AC Origins, see Bondoli, Texeira-Bastos and Carneiro (2019).

13.Caesar, Civil War 3.103.2, 3.107.2; Caesar, Alexandrian War 33.

14.Cicero, Letters to Atticus 393 (XV.15).

15.Plutarch, Antony 27.1–3 (trans. B. Perrin). However, see also Plutarch, Antony 83.1–2.

16.Cassius Dio, Roman History 42.34.5.

17.See, for example, Blaise Pascal’s aphorism, ‘The nose of Cleopatra: had it been shorter, the face of the entire world would have been changed.’ See also Armstrong (2007).

18.See British Museum inv. 1844,0425.99 for an example.

19.See, for example, the relief of Cleopatra and Caesarion sacrificing on the wall of the Temple of Hathor at Denderah to the divine mother/son pairs Hathor/Harsomtus and Isis/Horus. Ashton (2008) and Bianchi (2003).

20.See, for example, Plutarch, Antony 54.6.

21.Williams (2003).

22.Higgs (2003), Higgs and Walker (2003) and Johansen (2003).

23.Hamer (1993: 5–18) and Ashton (2008).

24.Llewellyn-Jones (2013).

25.Ibid., 328.

26.For extensive discussion of the reception of Cleopatra, see Hughes-Hallett (1991). For discussion of the depiction of Cleopatra in the nineteenth-century paintings of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, see Smith (2011).

27.Daugherty (2008; and 2015: 18–19).

28.Ibid. (2008: 144).

29.Strabo, Geography 17.1.11; see also Cassius Dio, Roman History 39.13.

30.For Zenobia’s claim to descend from Cleopatra, see numerous references in the Historia Augusta: Thirty Tyrants 27, 30, 32; Aurelian 27; Claudius 1; Probus 9.5. See, for example, Sir Edward John Poynter’s ‘Zenobia Captive’ (1878) and Herbert Gustave Schmalz-Carmichael’s ‘Queen Zenobia’s Last Look Upon Palmyra’ (1888).

31.See, for example, Strabo, Geography 13.1.30; Florus 2.21.1–3.

32.On this diversity, see Banker (2020).

33.For controversy over Cleopatra’s ethnicity, see Haley (1993), Lefkowitz (1996) and Lefkowitz and Rogers (1996).

34.For Cleopatra’s identification with Isis, see Plutarch, Antony 54.5–9. Even when Roman authors do not explicitly name her as Isis, they include the goddess’ paraphernalia in their discussions of her such as the sistrum, see Virgil, Aeneid 8; Propertius, Elegy 3.11; see also the aforementioned Buchis Stele, n. 11. For Cleopatra’s patronage of the Apis Bull, see the aforementioned Apis Stele, n. 11.

35.See, for example, Lucan, Civil War 10. 107–92; Plutarch, Antony 28–9, 71. Tucker (1975).

36.Plutarch, Antony 28; see also Horace, Odes 1.37. Amethyst ring = Greek Anthology, Gutzwiller (1996). Drugs = Scarborough (2012).

37.Antony’s unsuccessful fishing expedition = Plutarch, Antony 29. Antony and Cleopatra’s pearl wager = Pliny the Elder, Natural History 9.119–21; see also Ullman (1957), Flory (1993) and Jones (2010).

38.Daugherty (2008: 149).

39.Sextus Aurelius Victor, On the Caesars 86.2; taken up by Pushkin, 1825, and then the Russian Ballet, 1917. Potentially stock invective weaponized against female rulers as Diodorus Siculus relates virtually the same anecdote about the Babylonian queen Semiramis, although, in her case, she chooses her partners from among the most handsome of her soldiers, Historical Library 2.13.4.

40.For discussion of this costume, see Bellow (2009). This is despite the decision made by Ubisoft to censor the nudity of ancient statues in the Discovery Tour so as to make it suitable for children ‘in classrooms around the world, potentially in countries where nudity might be offensive’, Poiron (2021: 83).

41.Sex with slaves = Propertius, Elegies 3.11.29–56. Sex as diplomacy = Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 15.96.

42.Johnson (1978), Huzar (1985) and Ager (2013).

43.Cleopatra’s education was undoubtedly facilitated by her access to the Museion and Library at Alexandria; according to Cicero, she made literary promises to him, perhaps some books from the Museion and Library, but when these failed to materialize he was rather annoyed = Letters to Atticus 15.15.2. She was also believed to be the author of numerous scientific treatises on cosmetics, gynaecology and alchemy in antiquity; El-Daly (2004).

44.Plutarch, Antony 83 and Cassius Dio, Roman History 51.12.

45.There is documentary evidence for the twin priestesses Tages and Taous from an earlier point in Hellenistic history, and literary evidence for the method that she decrees for their execution being used by Phaleris, tyrant of Akragas in Sicily = Diodorus Siculus, Historical Library 9.18–19.

46.For Ptolemy XIII drowning in the Nile, see Florus, Epitome of Roman History 2.13.60. Cleopatra saying ‘Make it so’ here clearly corresponds to what has been identified as her signature on a royal decree dating to 33 BCE = Papyrus Berlin 25.239; for identification and discussion, see Van Minnen (2000, 2003).

47.For discussion of the Roman propaganda of this period, see Scott (1933).

48.For discussion of Cleopatra’s own propaganda, see Hughes-Hallett (1991: 14–15), Rice (1999: 2–3), Foreman (1999: 27) and Wyke (2013: 74–5).

49.On the initial Roman reception of Cleopatra, see Wyke (2002: 195–243).

50.See https://www.ea.com/games/dantes-inferno?isLocalized=true (accessed October 2020). A playthrough of the section featuring Cleopatra can be found on YouTube at: https://youtu.be/UscmbvGLACA (accessed October 2020).

51.The association of Cleopatra with magic can be found in some ancient sources such as Plutarch, Antony 37, part of the Roman stereotype of women controlling men using magic, Stratton (2007: 104).

52.See: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47963835 (accessed June 2020).

53.See Nielsen (2017).

54.See: https://www.ubisoft.com/en-gb/game/assassins-creed/discovery-tour (accessed October 2020). Ubisoft’s website presents the Discovery Tour as ‘a dedicated game that lets visitors freely roam Ancient Greece and Ancient Egypt to learn more about their history and daily life. Students, teachers, non-gamers, and dedicated players can discover these eras at their own pace, or embark on guided tours curated by historians and experts.’

55.Lozano (2020: 54–6).

56.Daugherty (2008, 2015).

57.Beavers (2020b).

58.See Gartenberg (2020).

59.See: https://assassinscreed.fandom.com/wiki/Amunet (accessed June 2020).

60.See: https://assassinscreed.fandom.com/wiki/Assassin%27s_Creed:_Origins_(comic) (accessed June 2020).