ABSTRACT
Born in Cleopatra VII in 69 B.C.E., Cleopatra was the daughter of Ptolemy XII Auletes of the Hellenistic, Greco-Macedonian dynasty established by Alexander III (Alexander the Great) 300 years earlier. An intelligent, cultured, and well-educated woman who could speak many languages, Cleopatra learned early from her father the need to manipulate the powerful Romans to maintain Egypt's independence. Cleopatra was the last pharaoh of an Egyptian monarchy that had lasted 4,000 years. Egypt became a province of Rome, supplying the new empire with agricultural wealth (provided by the Nile River) amounting to approximately five million bushels of grain a year. The Hellenistic ideal of peaceful community under one law, which Cleopatra attempted to construct and defend in Egypt, was adopted by Augustus, who adapted the ideal to imperial rule, creating a bureaucracy based in the part on the Ptolemaic model.
