Imperial Barge: Cleopatra the Goddess
October 6 @ 5:30 pm - 6:30 pm
AIA Society: New Orleans
Lecturer: Alison Futrell
One of the key motifs in popular representations of the last of the Ptolemies is Cleopatra’s Barge, a nexus of seduction, pleasure, gratification. For the historical Cleopatra VII, the barge was a political and religious platform for shaping positive interactions with diverse audiences in the ancient Mediterranean, meant to stabilize and secure her realm and shape a vision for future authority, with power strongly founded in the past. In Egypt, Cleopatra reinforced connections with local powerbrokers and processed between ritual centers, a dynamic divine ruler enacting key functions that ensured the practical and sacred continuity of her realm. Her famous Nile Cruise with Julius Caesar was a sacred pageant that featured her newly secured strength as queen, goddess, partner and chosen of the gods. Her notorious meeting with Antony on the barque of Isis was both a ritualized performance of royal leadership and the reassertion of dynastic claims, the launch of a new Empire rising in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Charles Eliot Norton Memorial Lectureship
Location TBA
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