The young woman holed up with Julius Caesar in the besieged palace of Alexandria was, then, neither Egyptian, nor, historically speaking, a pharaoh, nor necessarily related to Alexander the Great, nor even fully a Ptolemy, though she was as nearly as can be ascertained on all sides a Macedonian aristocrat. Her name, like her heritage, was entirely and proudly Macedonian; “Cleopatra” means “Glory of Her Fatherland” in Greek.* She was not even Cleopatra VII, as she would be remembered. Given the tortured family history, it made sense that someone, somewhere, simply lost count.
