We bring you a recreation of Egyptian and Roman playmobil from the Playmobil collector Aurelio
The Roman province of Egypt (Latin: Ægyptus) was a province of the Roman Empire, comprising most of present-day Egypt, except for the Sinai Peninsula. The province of Cyrenaica to the west, and Judea (later Palestine and Arabia Petraea) to the east, bordered Egypt. The area came under Roman rule in 30 BC. C., after the defeat of Cleopatra and Marco Antonio by Octavio
In the year 44 a. C. Cicero, politician and republican orator, wrote to his friend Atticus: "I hate the queen." Such a statement, born of Cleopatra's controversial stay in the Roman capital invited by Caesar, was going to be prescient. The animosity towards the foreign sovereign was due above all to a political strategy. The ferocious attacks were made as a denunciation of the dangerous approach, first by Caesar and then by Antony, to royal conduct, which the republicans despised and now threatened to settle in Rome.
Converted from the year 27 a. C. under Emperor Augustus, Octavian made Cleopatra the center of careful political propaganda whose ultimate goal was to legitimize her new regime. Rome turned from then on to forge a black legend around the Egyptian queen that did nothing but come alive over the centuries. They elevated her as the greatest threat to the state, not only because of her political ambitions, but also because she violated the most deeply rooted Roman values.
The recently launched empire needed to equip itself with an ideological framework that would legitimize the great turn taken by the State. For the elaboration of it, Augustus surrounded himself with a group of exceptional writers and ideologues placed at his service. From this moment Cleopatra became the protagonist of a series of compositions, true jewels of Latin lyric and epic, in which events are contemplated and manipulated from the triumphalist prism. In fact, the myth of the foundation of the Empire started from the victory of Actium itself. Transformed into a battle between Roman and Egyptian gods, Augustus hid behind the brave Apollo, who came to the rescue of the fleet, while Cleopatra was reserved the cowardly act of abandoning her own. The great Virgil (70-19 BC) brilliantly handled all the allegorical elements in his Aeneid, in which he recounted the origins of Rome: “The queen […] calls her hosts with an Egyptian sistrum and does not look, the sad, two snakes behind his back announce death”.
Cleopatra's death was justified and celebrated as that of an enemy of Rome. In a patriarchal system such as the Roman one, there was an absolute rejection of the feminine condition of the ruler. The harsh words of Horace (65-8 BC), one of the first spokesmen of the new era, attack "a foolish queen, full of crazy ambition and intoxicated by an insolent success", who "plotted the ruin of the Capitol and the destruction of the Empire. But, as the greatness of the victor is also measured by the height of her rival, the poet equally praised the nobility shown by Cleopatra in her last moments: giving herself a worthy end by absorbing the lethal poison of the asps. Her decision was intended to avoid the humiliation of being taken to Rome and displayed in Octavian's triumphal parade.
The figure of Cleopatra quickly adopted a symbolic dimension as a paradigm contrary to Roman virtues and morals. She called "the Egyptian", an adjective used in a pejorative sense, she embodied all the vices that were considered to come from the East. She was associated with the excessive consumption of wine, omnipresent in the main events, compared to Roman moderation. Her beauty was equated with her sexual promiscuity and lust, until she was ridiculed in the version of the queen-prostitute executed by Propertius (45-15 BC). Her fellow adventurers fared better. To avoid reopening the wounds of the civil war, César and Antonio became victims of his deceptions.
But if Augustus made good propagandistic use of the queen's defeat and her love affairs, his interest in the history of the newly annexed territory did not go much further. He ordered the destruction of the statues of Cleopatra and Mark Antony, and the indifference shown on his trip to Egypt when he visited the tomb of Alexander the Great is known. The biographer Suetonius (2nd century AD) tells the anecdote that, after paying honors to the Macedonian ruler, he refused to visit the rest of the Ptolemaic pharaohs saying: “I have come to see a king, not a dead”.
This article was published in issue 487 of the magazine Historia y Vida.
#playmobil #rome #egypt