You find me enmeshed in the throes of issuing proceedings against the International Astronomical Union (IAU), an ostensibly benign and inoffensive body that purports to promote and safeguard the science of astronomy in all its aspects through international cooperation. Among other things, it is tasked with assigning names to celestial bodies and any surface features on them and it is here that I have identified a crime of a magnitude surpassing even the invention of the chocolate tsoureki.
I accuse the IAU of deliberately misrepresenting and distorting the nature of august personages of hallowed antiquity with the sole aim of appropriating their legacy to bolster their own perverted ideologies. Exhibit A, Alexander the son of Cleopatra VII Philopator (which literally means ‘Daddy’s girl’), has been given the surname Helios, or Sun. Exhibit B: Daddy’s girl’s daughter, also named Cleopatra, the queen of Mauretania, has been given the surname Selene “the Moon.” One of her ancestors, Cleopatra of Syria, also was referred to as Selene. Now, “Ancient Apocalypse” aside we know that both Alexander and the two Cleopatras were actually human members of our own tribe, no matter the extent of their inbreeding, so why is it that the IAU is intent upon effacing their Greek heritage, ascribing to them instead the nature of planetary bodies? There is a conspiracy here, I’m sure of it. Deed, dark nefarious purposes are at play here. Personally, I blame Kissinger.
The outrage felt by Greeks, primarily from the Diaspora, but also by Egyptians and Slavitsa from Thomastown who dressed up as Kleopatra for the 1993 Miss Bitola beauty pageant, at Netflix’s casting British actor of Adele James to play the iconic queen in Jada Pinkett Smith’s docudrama “Queen Cleopatra,” is thus merely symptomatic of a broader trend to diminish the achievements of ancient Greek civilisation and thus divest the modern Greek people of their identity. After all, Adele James is part Welsh and we know that there were no Welsh people at the Ptolemaic court at the time that Cleopatra was trying to kill her brother, and although the words Welsh and Vlach have the same root in the proto-Germanic “Walhaz” which came to mean foreigner, the whole idea is for us to prove that Cleo was one of us, probably originally hailing from Ano Kleines in Macedonia, and while there are Vlachs in the vicinity, no one even remotely related to Tom Jones has ever lived there, nor likely, ever will.
Controversy over who gets to play Cleopatra is nothing new. In 2020, people around the world were outraged at the casting of Amazonian goddess Gidal Gadot as the enigmatic and bloodthirsty Ptolemaic Queen on the silver screen. Parts of the Arab world were incensed that an Israeli was chosen for the part, while in America, protests centred around the choice of a “white” actress instead of a “black” one, the rationale being that since Egypt is in Africa, all Africans are black, except of course, for Michael Jackson. At the time, I remember writing to the producer politely suggesting that the best to resolve the dispute was by seeking neutral ground: Let Cleopatra be played by a man, of Polynesian descent, named Maui. The story that this was vetoed by Jacinta Ardern is purely apocryphal, as is my suggesting that Cleopatra, in the alternative, be played from Alkistis Protopsalti, who at least was born in Alexandria and could perform a rendition of «Μαλάμω,» during the battle scenes.
If is any consolation to Pinkett Smith, I too have provoked the ire of my compatriots, for employing a picture of Gidal Gadot dressed as Wonder Women to promote my upcoming lecture on “Kick-Arse Women of Pontus,” at the Greek Centre. Enraged compatriots have showered me with invectives, proclaiming that Wonder Woman was not Pontian (which is incorrect considering that Wonder Woman was an Amazon, and according to Greek mythology, Amazons came from Pontus) and would only be assuaged when I informed them that the actor portraying her in Hollywood’s actual full name is Galene Gadotidou whose ancestors migrated from Matsouka near Trapezounta to Tel Aviv in 1821.
The same cries of consternation were heard when “Troy: Fall of a City,” cast David Gyasi, of Ghanaian descent, as Achilles and Nigerian-born Hakeem Kae-Kazim, as Zeus. Admittedly, I did not make it past the second episode, for having read Homer, the suspense was kind of ruined but I noted my people’s bewilderment. Interestingly however, I have never seen any concerted effort by diasporic Greeks to protest the manner in which Olympian Gods and indeed ancient Greeks have been portrayed by the West since the time of “Hercules: The Legendary Journeys,” as a cross between Conan the Barbarian and the Vikings. I also have not seen much in the way of protest at the manner in which classical Greek culture and mythology has been historically subverted in order to fuel an ideology based on Western racial superiority – that same discourse that feeds the modern Greek ontopathology of inadequacy, and causes us to constantly seek the West’s approval by playing to their imposed stereotypes of who we were and who we should be.
While there can be no doubt that Cleopatra was predominantly Greek in origin (her mother Laodice III was a daughter born to King Mithridates II of Pontus, a scion of the Persian Mithridatic dynasty) and spoke Greek as her mother tongue, she was also the first multilingual Ptolemaic monarch, the first of her line to learn Egyptian, along with, if one believes Plutarch, Ethiopian, Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, Median, and Parthian and Latin.
As an iconic, flawed and doomed figure, her valiant and often ruthless attempts to navigate the macho world of Rome as a powerful Hellenistic woman and retain power and independence for her family and her kingdom, her role as a skilled naval commander and a true goddess in that she was worshiped in Egypt for four hundred years after he death are what should move is and not the colour of her skin. Similarly, like her ancestor Alexander who was considered by the Egyptians to be the son of their last pharaoh, Nectanebo, and by the Persians to be a grandson of Darius II, Cleopatra has come to mean all things to all peoples. The manner in which people appropriate myths or historical figures not their own, for whatever reason (in case of the African-Americans it is relevant to a search for empowerment, as Pickett-Smith reveals: “We don’t often get to see or hear stories about Black queens, and that was really important for me……The sad part is that we don’t have ready access to these historical women who were so powerful and were the backbones of African nations,”) deserves to be studied and celebrated, not excoriated. After all, it was Herodotus himself two millenia and a half ago who wrote that ethnicity often is manipulated for political reasons and it has perhaps escaped Pickett-Smith in her quest for appropriate role models for the modern African-American, that for all her tragic life, Cleopatra was the scion of one of the first colonialist monarchies in history, ruling over a people with which she had no kinship and save for the sake of convenience or to preserve her rule, from which she, her family and her people remained segregated.
Of course to bolster those claims there is the story that Vavo Machi from Syrrako once told me:
In 59BC the young Cleopatra of Egypt was sent to accompany a Ptolemaic delegation to the kingdom of Epirus. While sojourning in Metsovo, she was accosted by an old woman who asked her:
– Ω Πάτρα! Τι φτιανς η μαύρη;
She has been considered to be black in Metsovo and indeed the whole of Epirus, ever since.
We can, like me, be deeply saddened and offended by Netflix’s casting of Brad Pitt to play Manolis Angelopoulos in the upcoming biopic of same name, considering that Tim Curry whose skin is of a lighter hue would have eminently been a more historical choice.
We can also again, like me, write to Netflix and to the various outraged Greek online media suggesting a compromise whereby the promotional photo from the 1912 silent film Cleopatra, starring Helen Garner conclusively proves, that the Ptolemaic Queen of Egypt was both black and white.
Or, specific to the Hellenic zeitgeist, we can raise this question: If each culture portrays historical and mythological characters according to its own set of references, to fit its own prevailing narratives, rather then complain about the inaccuracy or irrelevancy of those portrayals, why are not the Greeks in Greece and indeed, the Greeks in the diaspora (for even among these two connected groups there are a plethora of socio-cultural differences) producing their own?
For my money if you are seeking a rollickingly good rendition of a Cleo-flick, you cant go past the 1970’s British classic Carry on Cleo. Replete with lines such as “Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for me.” In my Greek-Australian version: “Cleopatra in Clayton,” Cleopatra takes the last stand against the City of Monash before Eaton Mall is turned into a multi-story carpark, her last line being, as in Carry on Cleo: “I have a poisonous asp.” The rest, as they say, is history.