Cleopatra
Cleopatra VII Thea Philopator (born 70/69 BCE — died August 30 BCE, Alexandria; some timelines give 12 August) was the last queen of the Ptolemaic dynasty, the Macedonian-Greek house founded by Ptolemy I Soter that ruled Egypt from 323 BCE until its annexation by Rome in 30 BCE. She came to the throne in 51 BCE on the death of her father Ptolemy XII Auletes and ruled successively with her brothers Ptolemy XIII (51–47) and Ptolemy XIV (47–44) and her son Ptolemy XV Caesar, called Caesarion (44–30). Restored to power with Caesar's help after the Alexandrian war, she visited Rome (46–44 BCE) and was there when Caesar was assassinated; Caesar never married her, and whether he fathered Caesarion cannot now be known. In 41 BCE she met Mark Antony at Tarsus; they had three children, and after Antony divorced Octavia she was his partner in the eastern Mediterranean until Octavian's propaganda war and the naval defeat at Actium (2 September 31 BCE). Antony killed himself on 1 August 30 BCE after a false report of her death; Cleopatra died weeks later. The ancient accounts of her death — the asp in a basket of figs, poison, or, as some modern scholars have hypothesized, murder by Octavian's agents — contradict one another, and only the Roman triumph's effigy gives the story of the snake a firm place in the record. Plutarch documents her command of many languages and her learning; the seductress of Roman propaganda has increasingly been read by scholarship as a working monarch of a diminished kingdom.