Pop History Moment: The Death of Cleopatra

On this day in 30 BCE the much-mythologized Cleopatra VII, Queen of Egypt, committed suicide following a series of military defeats during the Final War of the Roman Republic; these culminated with the Battle of Actium, following which her lover Mark Antony was also defeated by Octavian, who then invaded Egypt and became the first Roman Emperor for his trouble. Mark Antony beat her to the grave by a scant eleven days. Cleopatra took the extreme measure she did rather than being paraded through Rome in chains, which was the favoured means of pre-execution humiliation at the time; her fellow queen Boadicea did much the same thing, only without the same high-quality PR her Egyptian counterpart had.

It seems like ever since the moment she died, the greatest writers of their day (and the series of hacks who wrote the Bible besides) have fallen all over themselves describing her beauty, reign, and death; in fact, Cleopatra is one of a handful of historical figures for whom a pop culture cottage industry has been created.

Chief among her artistic champions is William Shakespeare, who fiddled with the facts so well he could have had a great career writing biopics in Hollywood; for instance, he's the one who first said that she died by pressing an asp to her breast. Prior to 1609's Antony and Cleopatra most chroniclers agree that the snake bit her on the arm. A close second - in terms of theatrical cachet, at least - is Caesar and Cleopatra, by George Bernard Shaw; like Shakespeare, Shaw's work was later adapted for the movies.

In addition to plays, numerous movies, operas, novels, poems, and paintings* have all extolled Cleopatra's supposedly extraordinary beauty; fittingly, she's also been portrayed in movies by some of the most beautiful actresses who've ever lived - women such as Theda Bara, Claudette Colbert, Vivien Leigh, Rhonda Fleming, Elizabeth Taylor, and Amanda Barrie - any of whom could have (and a number of whom actually did) cause great men to lose their minds over them. She was even played by both Ginger Grant and Lovey Howell in a single episode of the first season of Gilligan's Island, entitled Angel of the Island. Despite this, no contemporary descriptions of her appearance exist.

Still, living as she did at a time when few women exerted power, it's no wonder that we're still talking about her; accuracy aside, cultural depictions of Cleopatra have always been made to suit the political timbre of the times rather than from some slavish devotion to historical fact, and likely will be for a long time to come.

*Including the one shown above, by Reginald Arthur, painted in 1892.
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POPnews - August 1st

[Video Killed the Radio Star, by The Buggles, was the first video ever to air on MTV.]

30 BCE - Octavian (later known as Augustus) entered Alexandria and brought it under the control of the Roman Republic, causing his foe Mark Antony to commit suicide that very day and his foe's ho Cleopatra to follow suit soon after.

1291 - The Swiss Confederation was formed with the signing of the Federal Charter.

1492 - The Alhambra Decree - passed by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain in March - took effect, either driving the Jews out of Spain or else forcing them to convert to Roman Catholicism.

1820 - London's Regent's Canal opened.

1828 - Britain's Bolton and Leigh Railway opened to freight traffic, connecting the Manchester Bolton & Bury Canal at Bolton to the Leeds and Liverpool Canal at Leigh.

1831 - A new John Rennie-designed London Bridge opened, replacing the far more famous medieval one; King William IV and Queen Adelaide attended a banquet in a pavilion erected on the bridge in honour of the event. In April 1968 the bridge was sold to oilman Robert P. McCulloch, who ordered it painstaking disassembled and rebuilt as part of an Anglophilic theme park in Lake Havasu City, Arizona It has since been replaced by yet another bridge, this time designed by Mott, Hay and Anderson.

1842 - The Lombard Street Riot erupted - not in San Francisco, as you might expect, but in Philadelphia.

1876 - Colorado became the 38th US state.

1907 - Robert Baden-Powell opened a Boy Scout camp on Brownsea Island in Dorset's Poole Harbour to field test the ideas laid out in his acclaimed book Scouting for Boys.

1936 - The Games of the XI Olympiad were opened in Berlin.

1944 - Anne Frank made the last entry in her diary.

1966 - Charles Whitman killed 15 people at The University of Texas at Austin before being killed by the police.

1968 - Hassanal Bolkiah was crowned the 29th Sultan of Brunei.

1977 - Former Lockheed U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers crashed the news helicopter he was flying in the Sepulveda Basin Recreation Area just a few miles short of the Burbank Airport; also killed in the crash was NBC newsman George Spears, with whom he'd been covering forest fires in the vicinity of Santa Barbara. According to his son, Francis Gary Powers Jr., the experienced pilot crashed because he'd reported a fuel gauge error to a mechanic - when the plane's fuel gauge indicator displayed 'Empty' there was actually had enough fuel for thirty more minutes of flight time - who apparently made the repair without telling anyone.

1981 - MTV made its broadcast debut.

1993 - The Great Flood of 1993, which had inundated an area of Missouri 1200 km (745 miles) long and 700 km (435 miles) wide - or about 840,000 km² (320,000 square miles) - since April, and would continue to do so until October, came to a peak; at it's worst, the rising water at St. Louis topped 15.1 m (49.6 feet), nearly 6 m (20 feet) above flood stage and easily surpassing the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. The 16 m (52-foot)-high St. Louis Floodwall, built to handle the volume of the 1844 flood, was able to keep the 1993 flood out with just over 60 cm (two feet) to spare!

2004 - A supermarket fire in the Paraguayan capital of Asunción killed as many as 396 people and injured 500; according to survivors doors within the complex were closed under the direction of the owners, Juan Pío Paiva and his son, Víctor Daniel, deliberately trapping people inside in order to prevent them from fleeing with merchandise without paying for it - a claim the management of the shopping centre has denied.

2007 - The I-35W Mississippi River Bridge - spanning the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, Minnesota - collapsed during the evening rush hour, killing thirteen people and injuring 145; the tragedy sparked a brief public debate about the state of America's crumbling infrastructure... That is until (and I'm guessing here) some celebrity or other did something stupid, at which point the media got back to reporting on what's really important.
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POPnews - July 31st

[Leave it to a bunch of men to find some way to get a car on the Moon!]
30 BCE - At the Battle of Alexandria Roman general Mark Antony achieved a minor victory over the forces of Octavian near the end of the Final War of the Roman Republic; although most of Antony's army subsequently deserted - which later led to his suicide - Octavian successfully invaded Egypt and became the first Roman Emperor.

1009 - Sergius IV succeeded John XVIII to become the 142nd pope.

1423 - During the Hundred Years' War a combined Scottish, Breton, and French army under John Stewart, 2nd Earl of Buchan was defeated at the Battle of Cravant, on the banks of the river Yonne; following the victory the English and Burgundian forces of Thomas Montacute, 4th Earl of Salisbury took more than 2,000 prisoners.

1451 - Jacques Cœur was arrested on the orders of France's King Charles VII, accused of poisoning in the February 1450 death of the King's mistress, Agnès Sorel.

1498 - On his third voyage to the Western Hemisphere, Christopher Columbus became the first European to visit the island of Trinidad.

1667 - The Treaty of Breda ended the Second Anglo-Dutch War.

1777 - The Second Continental Congress passed a resolution that the services of Marquis de Lafayette 'be accepted, and that, in consideration of his zeal, illustrious family and connexions, he have the rank and commission of major-general of the United States.'

1856 - The city of Christchurch was granted a Royal Charter, a first for New Zealand.

1865 - The first narrow gauge mainline railway in the world opened at the Australian town of Grandchester.

1930 - The radio mystery program The Shadow was aired for the first time as part of the Detective Story Hour.

1945 - John K. Giles attempted to escape from Alcatraz aboard the Army launch General Frank M. Coxe; very nearly successful, he was apprehended at Fort McDowell on Angel Island and returned to prison.

1948 - New York City's Idlewild Field was rededicated New York International Airport (only to be later renamed John F. Kennedy International Airport).

1961 - The first All-Star Game tie in major league baseball history occurred when the game was stopped in the 9th inning because of rain at Biston's Fenway Park.

1964 - Ranger 7 sent back the first close-up photographs of the moon, including images 1,000 times clearer than anything ever seen from earth-bound telescopes.

1971 - Apollo 15 astronauts David Scott and James Irwin became the first to ride in a Lunar Rover on the moon while Alfred Worden orbited overhead with a camera, comprehensively mapping the lunar surface.

1981 - General Omar Torrijos - commander of the Panamanian National Guard and de facto leader of Panama - died in a plane crash; it is now thought that the crash was an assassination masterminded by the CIA, although the best source of information on that matter is Manuel Noriega. Best known for negotiating 1977's Torrijos-Carter Treaties, which returned sovereignty of the Panama Canal to Panama, in May 2004 his son, Martín Torrijos, won the presidential election, taking office the following September.

1998 - The British Government announced a total ban on the use of landmines, less than a year following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, whose last campaign before she died called for the elimination of the devices.

2006 - Fidel Castro handed over power temporarily to his brother Raúl Castro, which was a cause for celebration in Miami's La Pequeña Habana.

2007 - Operation Banner - the presence of the British Army in Northern Ireland, and the longest-running British Army operation ever - came to an end.
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