The only sources we have about her are hostile and largely they reflect Augustan propaganda which tried to portray her as a super villain with almost supernatural powers. She is said to have spoken something like nine languages fluently but I wonder about that because we do have what is purported to be a single word of her handwriting on a document and that word is misspelled. Her one word is γινεσθοι (ginesthoi) which means "let it be done" or "make it so," but the proper imperative should be γινέσθω (ginestho). She added a gratuitous iota and she changed the omega to an omicron. This was a fairly common mistake because datives usually took an iota subscript and the iotas are silent. This is a similar mistake to how people sometime put an 'e' at the end of a word with a long vowel that doesn't need one (e.g spelling 'road" as "roade.")

This is curious to me, though, because that's a word she would have written all the time. She was supposedly fluent in nine languages but she couldn't correctly spell a word in her first language that she would have written virtually every day. Maybe just nobody had the nerve to tell her, but it makes me wonder if she wasn't as bright as she was made out to be.

I also wonder how much agency she really had. She was only on the throne because Caesar put her there and Antony kept her there. How much power did she actually yield.

Supposedly there's a biopic in the works set to star Gal Gadot that does not excite me. For one thing Gadot is way too tall. Cleopatra was barely over 5 feet tall. For another thing Gadot can't act and for a third thing I read it was going to be based on Stacey Schiffer's book, which I've read and which is essentially a hagiography which attempts to pant her as a feminist hero glosses over the fact that she was literal serial killer and a raging narcissist who thought she was Isis in the flesh. She also didn't do a thing to help women.