Cleopatra was born to the reigning pharaoh of Ptolemaic Egypt, Ptolemy XII Auletes; the identity of her mother is disputed and is presumed to have been Cleopatra V or Cleopatra VI, who may have been the same person. During her early childhood, Cleopatra was brought up in the palace of Alexandria in Egypt and received a primarily Hellenistic Greek education. By adulthood she was well-versed in many languages, including Egyptian, Ethiopian, Hebrew, Arabic, Median, Parthian, Latin, and her native Koine Greek.
Cleopatra's father was a client ruler of the Roman Republic. When the Romans annexed Cyprus and Ptolemy XII's brother Ptolemy of Cyprus chose to commit suicide rather than go into exile, Ptolemy XII became unpopular with the masses in Egypt for offering no public reaction to the events. He and a daughter, ostensibly Cleopatra and not Arsinoe IV, were exiled from Egypt during a revolt. This allowed Cleopatra's older sister Berenice IV to claim the throne in 58 BC, ruling jointly with Cleopatra VI. Ptolemy XII and Cleopatra traveled to Roman Italy, staying outside Rome at the villa of their Roman patron, Pompey the Great. After Ptolemy XII orchestrated the assassinations of Berenice IV's diplomats in Rome, seeking to gain Roman favor, he and Cleopatra left the city's hostile environment and settled at Ephesus in Anatolia.
Pompey eventually convinced Aulus Gabinius, the Roman governor of Syria, to invade Egypt and restore Ptolemy XII to power. In the spring of 55 BC, Gabinius' army invaded. One of his officers, Mark Antony, prevented Ptolemy XII from massacring the inhabitants of Pelousion for their defiance, and rescued the body of Berenice's husband, Archelaos, after he was killed in battle. Although Antony said years later that it was then that he fell in love with Cleopatra, they did not begin an affair until 41 BC. Ptolemy XII made Cleopatra his regent and joint ruler in 52 BC, naming her and his son Ptolemy XIII joint successors in his will. Ptolemy XII died by 22 March 51 BC, the date of Cleopatra's first known act as queen: restoring the sacred Buchis bull in Hermonthis, Egypt. She may have married her brother, Ptolemy XIII, but it is uncertain if they married before engaging in open hostilities against one another in the Alexandrine war.
Birth and tutelage
Cleopatra VII was born in early 69 BC to the Ptolemaic pharaoh Ptolemy XII Auletes and an uncertain mother, presumably Ptolemy XII's cousin or sister-wife Cleopatra V Tryphaena Ptolemy XII was given the epithet "Auletes" ("the flute-player") due to his adoption of the title "New Dionysos" and his reported flute-playing during the Dionysian festivals. He had a reputation as an aloof monarch who enjoyed a life of luxury.
The classicist Michael Grant, the Egyptologist Joann Fletcher, and the historian Stanley M. Burstein label the wife of Ptolemy XII Auletes as Cleopatra V Tryphaena, while Aidan Dodson, Dyan Hilton, and Duane W. Roller call her Cleopatra VI Tryphaena, due to the confusion in primary sources conflating these two figures, who may have been one and the same. As explained by the scholar John Whitehorne, Cleopatra VI may have actually been a daughter of Ptolemy XII, who appeared in 58 BC to jointly-rule with her alleged sister Berenice IV (while Ptolemy XII was exiled and living in Rome), whereas Ptolemy XII's wife Cleopatra V perhaps died as early as the winter of 69–68 BC, when she disappears from historical records. Roller assumes that Ptolemy XII's wife, whom he numbers as Cleopatra VI, was merely absent from the court for a decade after being expelled for an unknown reason, eventually ruling jointly with her daughter Berenice IV. Fletcher explains that the Alexandrians deposed Ptolemy XII Auletes and installed "his eldest daughter, Berenike IV, and as co-ruler recalled Cleopatra V Tryphaena from 10 years' exile from the court. Although later historians assumed she must have been another of Auletes' daughters and numbered her "Cleopatra VI", it seems she was simply the fifth one returning to replace her brother and former husband Auletes." His three younger children (Cleopatra's sister Arsinoe IV and brothers Ptolemy XIII and Ptolemy XIV) were born during the more than decade-long absence of his wife.
Little is known of Cleopatra's early life. She likely received a good education, as was common among Ptolemaic royalty. Her childhood tutor was Philostratos, from whom she learned the Greek arts of oration and philosophy. During her youth Cleopatra presumably studied at the Musaeum (including the Library of Alexandria), and possibly wrote Greek medical works which may have been inspired by the physicians at her father's royal court. Later Arab historians claimed that Cleopatra wrote medical texts, but the long-held belief that Cleopatra was an author is, as Roller puts it, "obscure and full of problems... [and] Connecting these fragments to Cleopatra VII is, admittedly, difficult". Several works from antiquity, which now only exist as fragments, were labeled as Cleopatra's although Roller argues that "by late antiquity Cleopatra VII was by far the most famous person of that name and there would be a tendency to assume that the fragments were hers. Available to Cleopatra in historical records preserved by the 3rd-century BC Ptolemaic-era native Egyptian historian-priest Manetho were examples of strong, inspirational royal female predecessors (some of whom lived long before the Ptolemaic dynasty), such as Sobekneferu, Hatshepsut, Nefertiti, and Twosret.
Ptolemaic pharaohs were crowned by Egyptian priests of Ptah at Memphis but resided in the multicultural and largely-Greek city of Alexandria, founded by Alexander the Great of Macedon in 331 BC. They spoke Greek and governed Egypt as Hellenistic Greek monarchs, refusing to learn the native Egyptian language. Cleopatra could understand and speak many languages by adulthood, including Egyptian (being the first of her dynasty known to speak it), Ethiopian, Trogodyte, Hebrew (or Aramaic), Arabic, Syrian (perhaps Syriac), Median, Parthian, and Latin, although her Roman contemporaries would have preferred to speak with her in her native Koine Greek. Aside from Greek, Egyptian, and Latin, the three languages she had a known ability to read and write in, these languages reflected Cleopatra's expansionist territorial ambitions and her desire to regain African and Asian territories which had belonged to the Ptolemaic Empire.
Although Egyptians were the dominant ethnic group in Cleopatra's kingdom, large minorities of Greeks, Jews, Celtic and Germanic peoples, Syrians, Nubians, and others inhabited Egypt during her reign and well before it. Greeks and Jews were primarily concentrated in the multicultural cities of Alexandria, the old colony of Naukratis, and Ptolemais Hermiou (near Thebes in Upper Egypt). Greeks, Jews, and Egyptians in these cities were legally segregated and lived in different parts of the city. In Alexandria and other Greek city-states (poleis) of Egypt, intermarriage was forbidden, although it was permitted in other parts of Egypt.
Reign of Ptolemy XII and Roman interventionism
Roman interventionism in Egypt predated the reign of Cleopatra VII; the Romans had long desired to annex the wealthy kingdom. In 168 BC, after the Seleucid ruler Antiochus IV invaded Ptolemaic Egypt, he obeyed the demands of the Roman Senate to withdraw and return to Seleucid territory instead of warring with the Roman Republic. When Ptolemy IX Lathyros died in late 81 BC, he was succeeded by his daughter Berenice III. With opposition building at the royal court against the idea of a sole female monarch, Berenice III accepted joint rule and marriage to Ptolemy XI Alexander II, the son of Ptolemy IX's brother Ptolemy X Alexander I. The match was arranged by the dictator Sulla, the first powerful Roman figure to intervene directly in the dynastic affairs of kingdoms east of the Roman Republic.
Ptolemy XI had his cousin-wife killed shortly after their marriage in 80 BC, but he was killed soon thereafter in the resulting riot over the assassination. Ptolemy XI (and perhaps his uncle Ptolemy IX or his father) willed the Ptolemaic Kingdom to Rome as collateral for loans, so the Romans had legal grounds to take over Egypt (their client state). They chose instead to carve up the Ptolemaic realm to be ruled by Ptolemy IX's two illegitimate sons, bestowing Cyprus to Ptolemy of Cyprus and Egypt to Ptolemy XII.
In 65 BC the Roman censor Marcus Licinius Crassus argued before the Roman Senate that Ptolemaic Egypt should be annexed (perhaps based on the previous will in exchange for loans), but his proposed bill was scuttled by Cicero's rhetoric. This was followed by another failed proposal for annexation by tribune Servilius Rullus in 63 BC. Ptolemy XII responded to the threatened Roman annexation of Egypt by offering lavish gifts to powerful Roman statesmen and military commanders, such as Pompey the Great (during his campaign against Mithridates VI of Pontus in the Third Mithridatic War) and Julius Caesar after the latter became consul in 59 BC.
After Crassus, Pompey, and Caesar formed the alliance of the First Triumvirate in 60 BC, they gave Ptolemy XII the title of "friend and ally of the Roman people" for his efforts in financing Pompey's eastern campaigns and Rome's conquests of West Asian territories which had belonged to the Seleucid Empire. The title cost 6,000 talents, nearly the entire annual tax revenue of Ptolemaic Egypt. Ptolemy XII's profligate behavior bankrupted him, and he was forced to acquire loans from Roman banker Gaius Rabirius Postumus. In order to repay the loans, Ptolemy was required to collect the equivalent amount of money, as well as added interest, from his subjects. His increase of the tax rate to pay for these expenditures angered the poor and led to strikes by farmers.
Exile of Ptolemy XII and Cleopatra
In 58 BC, after Roman senator Publius Clodius Pulcher accused Ptolemy of Cyprus of aiding pirates who disrupted Roman shipping, the Roman Republic annexed Cyprus, and Ptolemy of Cyprus chose to commit suicide rather than face exile to Paphos as a priest of Apollo. Ptolemy XII remained publicly silent on the death of his brother, a decision which (along with ceding traditional Ptolemaic territory to the Romans) damaged his credibility among subjects already enraged by his economic policies.
Whether by force or voluntary action, Ptolemy XII left Egypt in exile for Rhodes. There he held an audience with his Roman host Cato the Younger, who while seated on a latrine and undergoing laxative treatment, castigated Ptolemy for losing his kingdom. Ptolemy XII then traveled to Athens, where he erected a monument in honor of his father and half-sister Berenice III, and finally to the triumvir Pompey's villa in the Alban Hills near Praeneste. Ptolemy XII spent nearly a year on the outskirts of Rome, ostensibly accompanied by his 11-year-old daughter Cleopatra.
Fletcher expresses little doubt about this, noting an ancient Greek primary source stating that Ptolemy XII traveled with one of his daughters; since Berenice IV was his ruling rival and Arsinoe IV was a toddler, it must have been Cleopatra (who was later made his regent and named his successor in his will). Grant likewise argues in favor of this notion, stating that Ptolemy XII would have found it imprudent to leave all of his daughters in Egypt, given the political turmoil.