Cleopatra’s Legacy After Rome

Caesarion was hunted down and executed, ending the Ptolemaic line and the 3,000-year-old tradition of pharaonic

rule. Cleopatra’s three children with Antony were taken to Rome, paraded in Augustus’s

triumph, and raised by Octavia—though Cleopatra Selene would later become queen of Mauretania,

preserving a fragment of her mother’s legacy. For centuries, Roman historians

like Cassius Dio and Plutarch, writing under imperial rule, framed Cleopatra

through the lens of moral warning: a woman whose ambition and sensuality endangered Roman virtue.

But inscriptions, papyri, and coins from her reign reveal a ruler deeply engaged in

administration—signing tax decrees, overseeing grain shipments, consulting priests,