Who was Cleopatra and how much can we actually know about her?

The lesson begins with students making inferences about Cleopatra based on a single representation of her from Hollywood. This helps us to pick apart the generic view of Cleopatra as a seductress/ tragic queen as the lesson progresses.

There is a wealth of different secondary history within this lesson. It uses excerpts from Roller, Morgan and Weigall to introduce what she was like as a person (as far as we can know).

The second part of the lesson focuses on the limitations of the ‘primary’ sources from the ancient world we have available to us. There is a comprehension task included with a literacy focus and some challenge questions for HA learners.

The final part of the lesson then moves onto what Cleopatra’s world looked like geographically and some of the potential pitfalls that would befall her thanks to her father’s ‘up and down’ relationship with Rome, the growing superpower of the time vs Egypt, which was on the decline.

The end of the lesson very much sets the teacher up to teach lessons on the events of her life and ensures that students have a sound understanding of what she was probably like vs how she has traditionally been portrayed (both in the ancient world and in the ‘modern’ media).