Latest / Beheaded / The Other Ptolemy Girl | Berenice IV

Transcript

The Other Ptolemy Girl | Berenice IV · Beheaded

0:04
SPEAKER_01: Hello and welcome to Beheaded.
0:06
SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Season 7, Episode 1.
0:08
SPEAKER_01: I'm Megan Moore.
0:09
SPEAKER_00: And I'm Elizabeth Black.
0:11
SPEAKER_00: Sorry, that sounded weird.
0:12
SPEAKER_00: Episode 1.
0:13
SPEAKER_00: I know it's been a while.
0:14
SPEAKER_00: We're back at it.
0:16
SPEAKER_00: Seven seasons, you guys.
0:17
SPEAKER_00: Give give ourselves a little hand here.
0:19
SPEAKER_00: Oh, exciting.
0:20
SPEAKER_00: Were they all great?
0:22
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
0:22
SPEAKER_00: Yes, they were for the most part.
0:25
SPEAKER_00: No, I thought we've had some.
0:26
SPEAKER_00: Like I feel like every season we do some really big ones.
0:31
SPEAKER_00: We do some really obscure ones.
0:32
SPEAKER_00: And it's a big mixed bag of executions and torture.
0:36
SPEAKER_00: Our favorite.
0:37
SPEAKER_01: Very eclectic.
0:39
SPEAKER_01: We take executions from all over the world.
0:42
SPEAKER_01: Yep.
0:43
SPEAKER_00: From all eras up until about World War II.
0:46
SPEAKER_00: We yeah, once it gets past World War II, we're a little like that's a bit too modern.
0:50
SPEAKER_00: We don't really enter that territory.
0:52
SPEAKER_01: Once there's still family members who are alive, I feel like that's a good stopping point.
0:58
SPEAKER_01: Too many opinions on things.
1:00
SPEAKER_01: So we do the really old stuff.
1:02
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:02
SPEAKER_00: Um, we've seen like quite an uptick in followers.
1:05
SPEAKER_00: Obviously, we just got off of a really big interview with Professor Susanna Lipscomb.
1:09
SPEAKER_00: Um, so we've seen a lot of renewed interest in the show, which is very exciting for us.
1:14
SPEAKER_00: So, those of you that are new, welcome to the show.
1:17
SPEAKER_00: This is us.
1:18
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:18
SPEAKER_00: We we normally spend the first probably 10, maybe 15, sometimes 20 minutes, just like talking about our lives and each other.
1:27
SPEAKER_00: Because Megan and I like started the show kind of as an excuse to just get together and like drink wine and talk about history.
1:33
SPEAKER_00: And it just turned into like a hey, let's record, let's talk about executions.
1:37
SPEAKER_00: So, yes, the first 10 minutes of our show is us just like chatting.
1:41
SPEAKER_00: Sorry.
1:41
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to our lives.
1:43
SPEAKER_01: And my favorite thing is when people do reach out though and they're like, oh my gosh, there's another Disney slash Swifty slash runner, runner, slash tutor history enthusiast out there.
1:57
SPEAKER_01: We're a very niche group.
1:59
SPEAKER_01: We hit all the little criteria of the ideal, I was gonna say something different.
2:06
SPEAKER_01: The ideal millennial woman in her mid-30s.
2:10
unknown: Perfect.
2:12
SPEAKER_00: Really selling it.
2:13
SPEAKER_00: I recently sent uh Megan that SNL skit that's like forever 31, which is a new like quote unquote clothes store for the 30-year-old.
2:20
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, that's us.
2:22
SPEAKER_00: Like, do you want to be not so stylish but really comfy?
2:25
SPEAKER_01: There's something for everyone on this show.
2:27
SPEAKER_01: And of course, if you're into the gory dark history, we do we do get into that.
2:32
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
2:33
SPEAKER_01: Um, but yeah, Susanna, I mean, we were just nervous on even how do we address her as someone who is uh so prestigious in this industry and this world of history, right?
2:46
SPEAKER_01: So I don't know why I'm talking about my hands so much.
2:48
SPEAKER_01: It's okay, we're on camera now.
2:49
SPEAKER_01: I gotta be talking about spilling things, I gotta be controlled with my hand motions.
2:54
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
2:54
SPEAKER_01: Um we learned something interesting because we asked, like, do you prefer to be addressed as Professor Susanna Lipscomb or Dr.
3:02
SPEAKER_01: Lipscomb?
3:03
SPEAKER_01: Because I got thrown off because I noticed as I was watching different documentaries with her hosting it, it had a sometimes she went by doctor, sometimes she went by professor.
3:13
SPEAKER_00: We asked her, and she said, actually, in England, or I guess the UK, it's a little different because professor is actually higher status in terms of the academic community than doctor.
3:25
SPEAKER_00: So when you're saying professor, like in in our American mindset, you're like, oh, I should address them as doctor, but like technically professor is kind of the upper.
3:33
SPEAKER_01: You were curious about that because she does go by both.
3:36
SPEAKER_01: Um, yeah.
3:37
SPEAKER_01: And then I think by the end we're just like, Susanna, Suzy, Suze.
3:42
SPEAKER_00: Our girl Suze.
3:43
SPEAKER_01: Our girl Suze.
3:44
SPEAKER_01: No, honestly, she is incredible, so eloquent, so amazing, so smart.
3:50
SPEAKER_01: Um, I learned a lot in just the hour we had with her.
3:54
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
3:54
SPEAKER_01: So very cool.
3:56
SPEAKER_00: Very exciting and uh cool.
3:57
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's kind of cool.
3:59
SPEAKER_00: Kind of cool for us.
3:59
SPEAKER_00: And we've had a lot of great historians on before.
4:02
SPEAKER_00: So um, especially now that we've had a little bit more of a bump in visibility, we've gotten some new people reaching out to us that are pretty, pretty high up in the academic community as well, requesting some things.
4:13
SPEAKER_00: So hopefully we've got more juicy sing things in the work for you guys.
4:16
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, more interviews.
4:17
SPEAKER_01: I I definitely like that dynamic because our what we want to bring to the community is a very approachable method to history.
4:25
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
4:26
SPEAKER_01: We don't expect anyone to really know who all of these key figures are.
4:30
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes we're learning along just with everybody else.
4:33
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
4:34
SPEAKER_01: Um, it's a very approachable communication platform.
4:39
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes we get words wrong.
4:41
SPEAKER_01: So help us, please.
4:42
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes we get words wrong.
4:43
SPEAKER_00: You know that about us if you've listened a long time.
4:45
SPEAKER_00: Shout out to our like day one listeners.
4:47
SPEAKER_00: Shout out.
4:48
SPEAKER_00: They've been through a lot with us, and they know that again, this is a comedic podcast.
4:52
SPEAKER_00: We're goofy, we're funny, we make a lot of stupid references to things not related to history.
4:58
SPEAKER_01: You know what?
4:58
SPEAKER_01: We should get the raw footage one day of the dumb crap we have to take out.
5:03
SPEAKER_01: This is us filtered.
5:04
SPEAKER_01: Just keep that in mind.
5:05
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
5:06
SPEAKER_01: Impressive.
5:06
SPEAKER_01: Um, anyway, back to just who we are as people.
5:09
SPEAKER_00: See, what's been going on?
5:10
SPEAKER_00: Tell me about your summer.
5:11
SPEAKER_00: I haven't well, we talked, but for purposes of this show, act like I haven't talked to you.
5:15
SPEAKER_00: Actually, I haven't seen you since May.
5:17
SPEAKER_00: Um, how was your summer or early fall?
5:19
SPEAKER_01: Um, I have done that.
5:21
SPEAKER_01: Was actually kind of the sad thing when Elizabeth was like, okay, so what have we been doing the past what five months?
5:27
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
5:28
SPEAKER_01: I'm like, oh normally we travel.
5:31
SPEAKER_01: Normally we do fun things.
5:34
SPEAKER_01: I got a zoo pass to the we live in Arizona.
5:37
SPEAKER_01: I got a pass to the Phoenix Zoo.
5:39
SPEAKER_01: Very relaxing walks in the morning.
5:42
SPEAKER_01: I've really connected with the orangutans.
5:44
SPEAKER_01: She knows all their names.
5:46
SPEAKER_01: They know me.
5:46
SPEAKER_01: I'm pretty sure.
5:48
SPEAKER_01: Do they wave at you or like just at humans in general?
5:51
SPEAKER_01: Um sometimes when I go early, because in the summer, a member can get in at 6 a.m.
5:56
SPEAKER_01: and it's so nice, like no one is there.
5:59
SPEAKER_01: And I'll come in with like a coffee and I'll sit with my breakfast, and they'll sometimes they'll come up to the glass and sit with me and eat breakfast with me and have a special moment.
6:10
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes though, like once, like Michael was giving me shade.
6:13
SPEAKER_01: He was sitting Michael's an orangutan, by the way.
6:16
SPEAKER_01: He is.
6:16
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
6:17
SPEAKER_01: I was sitting at the glass and he was sitting there and he gave me the biggest side eye I've ever seen and turned his back to me.
6:25
SPEAKER_01: I'm like, what did I do wrong?
6:26
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
6:27
SPEAKER_01: But then other times I've come up and it was the cutest thing.
6:30
SPEAKER_01: He saw that I was coming, and he literally like woke up Raima next to him, who was sleeping under a blanket, and then they both like came and sat next to me through the glass.
6:41
SPEAKER_01: So that has been my journey this summer is connecting with my my inner primatologists.
6:48
SPEAKER_01: I love that.
6:48
SPEAKER_01: Shout out Jane Goodall, R-I-P.
6:51
SPEAKER_01: I know.
6:51
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
6:52
SPEAKER_01: Um, weird, I won't go on too much of a tangent because evidently we're trying to time our banter because we get carried away.
6:59
SPEAKER_01: We do.
7:00
SPEAKER_01: But um, no, I had a really weird obsession with apes all through middle school and high school and part of college.
7:08
SPEAKER_01: Maybe a little bit young adult.
7:10
SPEAKER_01: If anyone knows Coco, the signing gorilla.
7:13
SPEAKER_01: Fun fact, I was like a pen pal with Coco.
7:16
SPEAKER_01: She wrote letters to you?
7:17
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
7:18
SPEAKER_01: Well, Penny, Dr.
7:19
SPEAKER_01: Penny Patterson.
7:20
SPEAKER_01: Okay, her the doctor who taught Coco sign language.
7:24
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
7:25
SPEAKER_01: Um, her and I were pen pals when I was like 12 years old.
7:29
SPEAKER_01: I have a letter right there on my wall.
7:31
SPEAKER_01: You can't see it in this footage, but um there is a letter from her on my wall.
7:35
SPEAKER_01: And I can verify.
7:36
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
7:36
SPEAKER_01: Elizabeth is looking.
7:40
SPEAKER_01: It does.
7:40
SPEAKER_01: That's where she worked.
7:41
SPEAKER_01: And she would have Coco sign it.
7:42
SPEAKER_01: And I have like posters.
7:44
SPEAKER_01: I got Christmas cards from Coco, and she would draw pictures because they were famous for like painting.
7:49
SPEAKER_00: So obviously the words are someone interpreting your sign language, but the pictures are from the apes.
7:56
SPEAKER_00: Yes, from the apes.
7:57
SPEAKER_01: Wow.
7:57
SPEAKER_01: Sounds good.
7:58
SPEAKER_01: So, anyways, that's my summer.
7:59
SPEAKER_01: I just connected with my primatologist.
8:01
SPEAKER_00: I did join Megan on a few occasions this summer.
8:04
SPEAKER_00: And it was nice because obviously Arizona's hot, so you want to escape the heat as much as possible.
8:08
SPEAKER_00: So we would meet at like 6 a.m.
8:10
SPEAKER_00: at the zoo and we would bring bagels and coffee and walk around and highly recommend.
8:15
SPEAKER_01: We love the flamingos.
8:17
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
8:17
SPEAKER_01: I know zoos can be a little controversial, but I do believe that the Phoenix Zoo has they do a lot of conservation ism?
8:25
SPEAKER_01: Conservation effort?
8:27
SPEAKER_01: That's the right word.
8:28
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
8:28
unknown: Yeah.
8:29
SPEAKER_00: What about you, Elizabeth?
8:30
SPEAKER_00: What have you been doing?
8:31
SPEAKER_00: Uh well, Robbie was gone for a good portion of the summer.
8:34
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
8:35
SPEAKER_00: He went on a big fishing trip and he's from the East Coast, so he was kind of off doing his thing with his family, friends.
8:41
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna be even there more next year, so we decided to chill on trips for the end of this year.
8:46
SPEAKER_00: Um, but I had some fun like girl time.
8:49
SPEAKER_00: Like Megan came over a few times.
8:50
SPEAKER_00: I like that you asked me, and I'm telling you what you did also.
8:53
SPEAKER_00: What did we do?
8:54
SPEAKER_00: Tell me.
8:54
SPEAKER_00: I don't remember.
8:55
SPEAKER_00: We we had so much fun.
8:57
SPEAKER_00: We did a few like like movie nights.
8:59
SPEAKER_00: And when we do movie nights, like we don't just sort of like, you know, it's not like plop on my couch, watch a movie, and like scroll on your phone.
9:06
SPEAKER_00: It's like we really make an effort to do like cool charcuterie boards and like wine themes.
9:12
SPEAKER_00: Um, we we did a whole like mummy movie marathon.
9:16
SPEAKER_01: Oh my god.
9:17
SPEAKER_01: Okay, here's the thing Elizabeth Black loves obsessed with the mummy.
9:26
SPEAKER_01: I love it.
9:27
SPEAKER_01: Well you should have seen the look on her face when we pulled up Fandango.
9:32
SPEAKER_01: Is that what it's called now, still, or whatever.
9:34
SPEAKER_00: Voodoo now it's Fandango at home.
9:36
SPEAKER_00: Who knows?
9:37
SPEAKER_01: Did you know that there are eight mummy movies?
9:41
SPEAKER_01: I actually didn't, and I'm a big fan.
9:43
SPEAKER_01: And you should have seen the look on her face of the glow and how big her eyes got when she said, Oh, there's a discounted package price if you buy all eight.
9:52
SPEAKER_01: It's only$150.
9:55
SPEAKER_01: I like I had to talk her out of it.
9:56
SPEAKER_01: I said, okay, anything after four has like eight percent on Rotten Tomatoes.
10:01
SPEAKER_01: I didn't even know there was a four.
10:02
SPEAKER_01: I think anything after three has below ten percent on Rotten Tomatoes.
10:07
SPEAKER_00: Okay, real quick, shout out real mummy people, because if you're if you're into the mummy, you only like one and two.
10:12
SPEAKER_00: Three doesn't make sense.
10:13
SPEAKER_00: Is that the one throck?
10:14
SPEAKER_00: No, that's a that's a two.
10:16
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, it drops after two.
10:18
SPEAKER_00: Okay, well, the rock maybe after the second one.
10:21
SPEAKER_00: But I don't want to recap all of this.
10:23
SPEAKER_00: But one and two, great, three, awful, and then there's a bunch of other random ones that are centered around the Scorpion King universe, I guess.
10:30
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
10:31
SPEAKER_00: But I will say, big fan of one and two.
10:34
SPEAKER_00: And Megan came over to my house and she literally bought me a shirt that was the Mummy Returns like graphic t-shirt.
10:40
SPEAKER_00: And I was like, I I love this.
10:42
SPEAKER_00: I wear it all.
10:44
SPEAKER_02: I did.
10:45
SPEAKER_00: It's very emotional.
10:46
SPEAKER_01: So thank you for that.
10:47
SPEAKER_01: I know how to how to get you, really.
10:49
SPEAKER_01: I know, I know who you are.
10:50
SPEAKER_01: She knows how to speak to my soul.
10:52
SPEAKER_01: After seven years of this damn podcast, I better know what you like.
10:55
SPEAKER_00: Dude, um, so so yeah, overall, chill, fun, I think girly, bonding summer.
11:00
SPEAKER_00: Like nothing fancy, no crazy trips.
11:03
SPEAKER_00: We did do one other thing.
11:04
SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah, more of a Halloween theme thing.
11:07
SPEAKER_01: Because you know us, we love our Halloween.
11:09
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
11:10
SPEAKER_01: Why would two girls with a podcast called Beheaded Love Dark Halloween thing makes no sense?
11:16
SPEAKER_00: It's not my favorite holiday.
11:17
SPEAKER_00: Um, yeah, we found this, we actually Megan found it.
11:20
SPEAKER_00: This really cool tour of this, it's so you wouldn't believe this this is in Arizona, but it's like a French chateau in the middle of the East Valley, uh like uh outside of Phoenix.
11:33
SPEAKER_00: And it's called Chateau de Vie, which is like the house of life, the castle of life.
11:38
SPEAKER_00: And during Halloween time, it's re-themed as Chateau de Mort, which is like the house of death, the castle of death.
11:46
SPEAKER_00: And this year it was specifically an Marie Antoinette themed walkthrough.
11:50
SPEAKER_00: Right up our alley.
11:51
SPEAKER_01: It was perfect.
11:53
SPEAKER_01: It was it was actually a spectacular presentation.
11:56
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
11:57
SPEAKER_00: You uh like stand in a very organized like queue where you have to like arrive at a certain time and you're in a small group.
12:03
SPEAKER_00: I would say maybe like seven people, ten people max, are in a little group.
12:07
SPEAKER_00: You're welcomed at the door and they tell you about like, oh, the French Revolution is coming.
12:11
SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, do we save the queen?
12:13
SPEAKER_00: What do we do with Marie Antoinette?
12:15
SPEAKER_01: Actors in in costume in 18th century garb, all and they all look dead.
12:20
SPEAKER_01: They're all ghosts.
12:21
SPEAKER_01: They're all ghosts.
12:22
SPEAKER_00: And so each uh part of the house is a different ghost guiding you through.
12:26
SPEAKER_00: And it's actually very scary because at any moment it's almost haunted house-like where like a plague doctor will come out, which doesn't really make sense with the catchment.
12:34
SPEAKER_01: If you're going back on the plague doctor, I held my tongue.
12:36
SPEAKER_01: You you should have been so proud of me.
12:38
SPEAKER_01: We went with Dr.
12:39
SPEAKER_01: Lisa, our friend as well, who we brought up in several episodes, who um has a very strong history background.
12:46
SPEAKER_01: But um, yeah.
12:47
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we were a little critical of the plague doctor, but besides that, everything, their storyline and their plot, it was all about the downfall of Marie Antoinette, and the servants were kind of complaining about her, and they're like, Oh, I remember Queen Marie on the day of her execution, and I did her hair, and it was just like creepy and cool and fun.
13:07
SPEAKER_00: And you went into so many different rooms of the house, like the dining room and the kitchen and the ballroom and some of the upper rooms, like uh the bedrooms upstairs.
13:15
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the house itself is a museum.
13:17
SPEAKER_00: It was so cool.
13:18
SPEAKER_00: And it ends with the execution in the attic, which looks like a torture chamber.
13:22
SPEAKER_00: It was amazing.
13:23
SPEAKER_01: The guillotine was in there.
13:24
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
13:25
SPEAKER_01: And they all kind of play around with you, right?
13:27
SPEAKER_01: So the executioner got up in our faces and was like, Are you uh Are you a um what's uh you were either a royalist or uh yeah, either it was it's either loyalist or royalist.
13:39
SPEAKER_00: I forget how they a loyalist, yeah.
13:41
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, or are you like a revolutionary or something?
13:44
SPEAKER_00: Um the revolution.
13:46
SPEAKER_00: It was very cool.
13:47
SPEAKER_00: And then at one point they've I volunteered to go like first in the hallway, and I was very scared because they're like, Elizabeth the brave, come this way.
13:54
SPEAKER_00: And they were guiding me through this dark hallway, and I was like, I'm gonna be set up for something.
13:58
SPEAKER_00: They're gonna like push around the store.
14:02
SPEAKER_01: It was very fun.
14:03
SPEAKER_01: Highly recommend if you're ever in Arizona for for uh Halloween.
14:06
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
14:07
SPEAKER_01: Um perfect, but episode of the evening.
14:13
SPEAKER_01: So um, it must be because you love the mummy so much.
14:16
SPEAKER_00: I was gonna say, pivoting back to our Egypt theme that we had going on the summer excursion, um, we have a very cool episode tonight about Berenice IV.
14:28
SPEAKER_00: And if you're like, who the hell is Berenice the Fourth?
14:31
SPEAKER_00: Join the club.
14:32
SPEAKER_00: We didn't know either.
14:34
SPEAKER_00: I we I actually found this execution story because I'm reading the book Um Memoirs of Cleopatra by Margaret George.
14:40
SPEAKER_00: Margaret George has written uh like thousand-page books on uh Mary Queen of Scots and King Henry VIII.
14:48
SPEAKER_00: I think she just came out with one.
14:50
SPEAKER_00: Oh gosh, I'm gonna kill myself for not knowing who this was.
14:54
SPEAKER_00: There was a there, she's coming out with a new one, but uh but she does these look it up.
14:58
SPEAKER_00: Uh yes, please look it up while I'm telling you about Cleopatra.
15:00
SPEAKER_00: But um one that she did probably decades ago now is on Cleopatra.
15:05
SPEAKER_00: So it's a good mix of like history and you know, it's 82 years old, I imagine.
15:10
SPEAKER_00: She's only written like 34 books.
15:12
SPEAKER_00: Oh, Helena Troy.
15:13
SPEAKER_01: Yes, Helena Troy.
15:14
SPEAKER_01: I have that one.
15:15
SPEAKER_01: You do?
15:15
SPEAKER_01: It's your newest one, I think.
15:17
SPEAKER_01: No, it's 2006.
15:18
SPEAKER_01: No, really?
15:19
SPEAKER_01: Oh, um, Confessions of Young Nero.
15:21
SPEAKER_01: That one's 2017.
15:23
SPEAKER_01: So she wrote a few more.
15:24
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, she's got Elizabeth, Mary Magdalene.
15:27
SPEAKER_01: What's her most recent one?
15:28
SPEAKER_01: 2017.
15:30
SPEAKER_01: Which is uh Young Nero.
15:32
SPEAKER_00: Okay, okay.
15:33
SPEAKER_00: Fabulous.
15:34
SPEAKER_00: She's still doing that.
15:35
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
15:35
SPEAKER_00: Um, but uh fabulous writer, and so she really paints this scene of like Cleopatra's life starting from when she's a young child.
15:44
SPEAKER_00: So I learned in the early probably first 50 to 100 pages of the book, and spoiler alert, you're on a podcast called Beheaded, there are executions here, but someone very near and dear to Cleopatra was executed.
15:56
SPEAKER_00: And I was like, as much as we think we know about Cleopatra, and I've like been her for Halloween, I love Cleopatra, I love Egyptology, I was like, I never knew about this story.
16:04
SPEAKER_00: Loves the mummy, loves the mummy.
16:06
SPEAKER_01: Don't get this girl started on Egypt, which is cool because we bring very different things to this.
16:12
SPEAKER_01: And whenever we get into, like, just know, whenever there's an episode that has anything to do more like Egypt, ancient, um, Greek, Roman, Egypt, that's all Elizabeth.
16:25
SPEAKER_01: And I appreciate you for that because I like I might stumble through this a little bit because I really have to understand who's who and the characters and the plot and the timeline, like, okay, who who's in charge right now in this era?
16:37
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
16:38
SPEAKER_01: It's a little bit more unfamiliar to me as it, you know, more 16th century England per se.
16:44
SPEAKER_01: Right.
16:44
SPEAKER_01: But it's so fascinating and kind of effed up, really.
16:47
SPEAKER_01: They're not going to be able to do that.
16:48
SPEAKER_00: Oh, this is a very like murderous, dark time in history where people are being poisoned, people are being executed, like people are being uh, I don't know, there's there's a lot going on.
16:59
SPEAKER_00: And it's it's very incestuous time too, which we'll get into.
17:02
SPEAKER_00: Um, lots of names are very similar.
17:04
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna try to guide you through it as best we can.
17:06
SPEAKER_01: Not just similar, but like the same, literally the same.
17:10
SPEAKER_01: So honestly.
17:11
SPEAKER_01: We'll explain.
17:11
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
17:12
SPEAKER_00: We'll try to explain.
17:13
SPEAKER_00: Bear with us.
17:14
SPEAKER_00: So we're gonna jump into the life and death of Berenice IV.
17:18
SPEAKER_00: And really quick, um, if you don't know about Cleopatra's family, uh, they're actually Greek.
17:23
SPEAKER_00: They're from like Macedonia area.
17:26
SPEAKER_00: Um, so so I've heard some pronunciations of Berenice's name as Berenike.
17:32
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I thought it was Bernice.
17:33
SPEAKER_01: So we did call her Bernice.
17:35
SPEAKER_01: Don't get me started.
17:36
SPEAKER_01: I thought it was Bernie.
17:36
SPEAKER_00: I was gonna call her like my girl Bernie is not.
17:39
SPEAKER_00: For purposes of this episode, we're gonna call her Berenice.
17:42
SPEAKER_00: Um, but again, if you're like diehard, Ptolemy uh Egyptian person and you're like, no, how dare you?
17:49
SPEAKER_00: It's Berenike, let us know.
17:51
SPEAKER_00: We did hear that in one documentary.
17:53
SPEAKER_00: Um, but we're just gonna kick it off with her early life.
17:56
SPEAKER_00: So Berenice was born in Alexandria, Egypt in 77 BC, a long time ago.
18:02
SPEAKER_00: Can I just say the dates here?
18:04
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
18:04
SPEAKER_01: They go backwards because we're in BC.
18:08
SPEAKER_01: So that trust me, that one took me a hot minute to figure out.
18:11
SPEAKER_01: I'm like, wait, how is how did she die in the 50s then?
18:16
SPEAKER_00: Takes your brain a second to adjust.
18:17
SPEAKER_00: So we're in BC, which means the dates are going down closer to the father is Ptolemy Altis of Rome, and her mother is also named Cleopatra V.
18:29
SPEAKER_00: Not the famous Cleopatra that you know, but a different Cleopatra.
18:33
SPEAKER_00: So she's born into the Ptolemy family.
18:35
SPEAKER_00: And again, if you know anything about Cleopatra or the or the Ptolemy family, um they're actually distant descendants of Alexander the Great.
18:43
SPEAKER_00: And Alex Alexander the Great, who he died when he was himself in his 30s, so very young.
18:48
SPEAKER_00: That was in the like the 300s BC, right?
18:52
SPEAKER_00: So it's a good 200 plus years, maybe 250 years before this family is in power in Alexandria.
18:59
SPEAKER_00: But when Alexander the Great kind of ended the his empire, or he died rather young, um his his uh conquers, like all of his conquered territories were broken up into different areas, and they were all given pieces of his empire.
19:14
SPEAKER_00: So this specific Ptolemy family, like sect of the family, took over Alexandria.
19:20
SPEAKER_00: And they've been in power now for hundreds of years.
19:23
SPEAKER_00: So we have this king Ptolemy.
19:26
SPEAKER_00: We're just gonna call him Ptolemy, uh, again, for for ease in this episode, but he is kind of a bad king.
19:33
SPEAKER_00: He is always throwing himself lavish festivals, he's drunk all the time.
19:38
SPEAKER_00: I see nothing wrong with well, I'm getting to that.
19:41
SPEAKER_00: You know, just splurge a little.
19:42
SPEAKER_01: It's okay.
19:43
SPEAKER_01: Like what happened to Marie Antoinette?
19:45
SPEAKER_00: He certainly lives his life to the fullest.
19:47
SPEAKER_00: And I love the Margaret George version of him because he's like always just like drunk and eating and like chatting it up with Cleopatra, his daughter, being like, this is the life kid kind of thing.
19:57
SPEAKER_00: He would get so drunk that he often played the flute.
20:00
SPEAKER_00: That was like his like party trick, his his little parlor trick he liked to uh show everyone.
20:06
SPEAKER_00: So people started calling him the Piper, and but it's kind of mocking.
20:10
SPEAKER_00: They're like, oh, Piper's Pipe, and again, like what they're once the flute comes out.
20:15
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
20:15
SPEAKER_00: So he was again kind of known for just being so debaucherous and silly, and not like aside from just his personality, like he was known for heavy taxation.
20:25
SPEAKER_00: Kind of the same story you hear about any rich man in power who just took it too far, where it's just like, okay, kind of forgot about like the people, just really obsessed with his parties and things.
20:37
SPEAKER_00: And he does have a few children, and this is where it gets a little confusing because again, the names are literally the same.
20:44
SPEAKER_00: He has very creative.
20:46
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he has uh five children, three girls and two boys.
20:50
SPEAKER_00: The two girls are both named Cleopatra.
20:53
SPEAKER_00: There's a Cleopatra VI and a Cleopatra the Seventh.
20:56
SPEAKER_00: If you're curious who's the real Cleopatra, like the Cleopatra you know, that's Cleopatra the Seventh.
21:01
SPEAKER_00: So Cleopatra VI is the other Cleopatra, the sister.
21:05
SPEAKER_00: And then he has Okay.
21:07
SPEAKER_00: Oh, did I say three girls?
21:08
SPEAKER_00: He actually has four, because then he has Baronice.
21:10
SPEAKER_00: Yes, and he has uh Arseneau.
21:13
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so it goes Cleopatra the Sixth, Baronice, Cleopatra the Seventh.
21:19
SPEAKER_01: Right.
21:20
SPEAKER_00: And then Arseneau is the youngest.
21:23
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
21:23
SPEAKER_01: I almost I want to call her Arsenal, and I know that's not right.
21:26
SPEAKER_01: Cleopatra.
21:26
SPEAKER_01: So just stop me.
21:28
SPEAKER_01: Arsenal.
21:29
SPEAKER_01: And then there's two boys who are both named Ptolemy.
21:32
SPEAKER_01: Like, why not?
21:33
SPEAKER_01: Just make it easy, right?
21:35
SPEAKER_01: So just yell one name, everyone shows up.
21:39
SPEAKER_00: It's crazy to me that you have a a dad named Ptolemy, a mom named Cleopatra, who have two Cleopatras, two Ptolemies, a baronice, and an R and so.
21:48
SPEAKER_01: This reminds me when I was her when I was a kid, every single one of my baby dolls was named Samantha.
21:54
SPEAKER_02: Like it's very cute.
21:55
SPEAKER_01: All of them.
21:56
SPEAKER_01: And we had I think my sister too, and we had.
22:00
SPEAKER_01: But they all had their own personalities.
22:02
SPEAKER_01: They were all Samantha's.
22:04
SPEAKER_00: Samantha the swimmer and Samantha the doctor.
22:07
SPEAKER_01: Like Samantha the Well, they were like baby dolls.
22:10
SPEAKER_01: I was one of those baby doll kids.
22:11
SPEAKER_01: I never liked it.
22:12
SPEAKER_01: I was one of those weirdo kids that would like carry the baby doll in through the store and the restaurant.
22:17
SPEAKER_01: Nail note.
22:18
SPEAKER_01: I was one of those.
22:19
SPEAKER_01: I don't which is so odd because I don't have children.
22:23
SPEAKER_01: One maternal instinct in my entire body.
22:26
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
22:26
SPEAKER_01: That is shocking.
22:27
SPEAKER_01: Maybe you just got it all out early.
22:29
SPEAKER_01: You have no interest in motherhood at this.
22:31
SPEAKER_01: I had those baby dolls that like liquid came out of crevices and things, you know, how you would like fill it with water.
22:38
SPEAKER_00: I had one of those.
22:39
SPEAKER_00: It was a gift and I didn't love it.
22:41
SPEAKER_00: I think that is what threw me off of all baby dolls because I had one of the biggest.
22:45
SPEAKER_00: I was like, I don't want this thing that's a lot of effort.
22:47
SPEAKER_00: And to this day, I also don't have children.
22:50
SPEAKER_01: But I was a big Barbie person.
22:51
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I had Barbie's first.
22:53
SPEAKER_01: Make it easy.
22:54
SPEAKER_00: Name them all the same.
22:54
SPEAKER_00: That's true.
22:55
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, name them all Barbie.
22:56
SPEAKER_00: They're all Barbie.
22:57
SPEAKER_00: Linding Nemo, where he's like, we'll name this half Marlon Jr.
23:01
SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, that's exactly how Ptolemy and Cleopatra name their kids.
23:05
SPEAKER_01: It's just like finding Nemo.
23:07
SPEAKER_01: It worked.
23:07
SPEAKER_01: It worked.
23:08
SPEAKER_00: So if at all we get confused throughout the story, we're gonna try and bring it back and let you know which specific sibling we're talking about.
23:14
SPEAKER_00: Famous Cleopatra.
23:15
SPEAKER_00: We'll refer to her as Pat maybe.
23:17
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
23:17
SPEAKER_00: Um, but back to Ptolemy King, bad king.
23:21
SPEAKER_00: Um daddy Ptolemy.
23:25
SPEAKER_00: Um, the reason why, another big reason why he was so unpopular is because he really favored the Romans.
23:33
SPEAKER_00: He tended to bribe the Romans and do things to keep them off of his back.
23:41
SPEAKER_01: But did the Romans like him?
23:43
SPEAKER_01: Good question.
23:43
SPEAKER_01: That was the real question.
23:45
SPEAKER_01: So 59 BC, Julius Caesar is the general of Rome.
23:51
SPEAKER_01: And he is claiming that I don't know why I want to call him bad daddy, Ptolemy now, kind of like it.
23:57
SPEAKER_01: He was claiming that King Ptolemy was illegitimate.
24:02
SPEAKER_01: He should not be king because he was an illegitimate son and he wasn't his father was not that another Ptolemy because it comes from a line of Ptolemies.
24:13
SPEAKER_01: Right.
24:13
SPEAKER_00: I think Alexander the Great was such a great leader, and people questioned the lineage a lot.
24:18
SPEAKER_01: I mean, maybe.
24:20
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
24:20
SPEAKER_01: And they had so much like inbreeding and incest and everything happening, and I'm sure their lineage got a little, a little wonky.
24:30
SPEAKER_01: Uh so he really, so Ptolemy really had to fight for his right and fight for his place on the throne.
24:36
SPEAKER_01: And he really needed to persuade Caesar and make sure that he supported him, which eventually he did, probably with money and with bribing, right?
24:46
SPEAKER_01: Eventually the Romans did pass a law to recognize Ptolemy as Ptolemy XII, and yes, he is the rightful king of Egypt.
24:54
SPEAKER_01: Um, just not so long later, then the Romans what's the word?
25:01
SPEAKER_01: Annex.
25:02
SPEAKER_01: Annex.
25:02
SPEAKER_01: There's a proper term for when they would uh basically take over another region or another territory.
25:08
SPEAKER_01: So they annex Cyprus, and Cyprus is being ruled by Ptolemy's brother.
25:14
SPEAKER_01: Guess what his name is?
25:16
SPEAKER_01: Not Ptolemy.
25:18
SPEAKER_01: It's not?
25:19
SPEAKER_01: Oh no, it is.
25:20
SPEAKER_01: Oh, it is.
25:21
SPEAKER_01: I thought you were.
25:23
SPEAKER_01: It's late.
25:24
SPEAKER_01: That was my Ptolemy joke.
25:25
SPEAKER_01: Took us like two hours to set up.
25:27
SPEAKER_01: I'm already tired.
25:28
SPEAKER_01: I'm like, wait, his name's not Ptolemy?
25:30
SPEAKER_01: We've got new equipment now.
25:31
SPEAKER_01: It took us a while.
25:32
SPEAKER_01: Took us a bit.
25:32
SPEAKER_01: Um, yeah, no, another Ptolemy.
25:35
SPEAKER_01: He basically loses his throne.
25:38
SPEAKER_01: It becomes a debacle, everyone's stressed out.
25:41
SPEAKER_01: That Ptolemy, the brother, yeah, ends up taking his own life because he just couldn't handle how the unrest of it all.
25:49
SPEAKER_00: I think he was kind of forced into it too.
25:51
SPEAKER_00: Oh, was he now?
25:52
SPEAKER_01: That's scandalous.
25:53
SPEAKER_00: It was more like, hey, abdicate the throne, kill yourself.
25:55
SPEAKER_00: Bad.
25:56
unknown: Ooh.
25:57
SPEAKER_00: Unalive yourself.
25:58
SPEAKER_00: Ooh.
25:58
SPEAKER_00: Bad.
25:59
SPEAKER_00: Bad, bad.
26:00
SPEAKER_02: Hmm.
26:01
SPEAKER_01: So I wonder if they like left him in a room full of snakes or something.
26:05
SPEAKER_01: Like, how would they have very Egyptian of them?
26:07
SPEAKER_01: Right?
26:07
SPEAKER_01: I'm just thinking, how would an Egyptian person?
26:10
SPEAKER_00: I mean, we have an episode on Socrates, everyone should check out, and that's kind of how his execution went.
26:15
SPEAKER_01: They forced him to drink the poison.
26:18
SPEAKER_02: Mm-hmm.
26:18
SPEAKER_01: Hemlock.
26:19
SPEAKER_01: We need to, yeah, we should look into that and see what actually the circumstances were.
26:24
SPEAKER_01: Right.
26:24
SPEAKER_01: Um, but because of all of this, there's a huge civil unrest in Alexandria, which is at the time the capital of Egypt, right?
26:32
SPEAKER_01: So um, King Ptolemy, our our father, the father of the story, Bad Daddy.
26:39
SPEAKER_01: Our father, who are in Alexandria.
26:41
SPEAKER_01: In Alexandria.
26:42
SPEAKER_01: King Ptolemy, he decides, okay, I need to start getting some better military support right now because this is going to turn into a full-on rebellion.
26:50
SPEAKER_01: I don't want to end up my like my brother, Ptolemy.
26:53
SPEAKER_01: He doesn't want to end up like future Marie Antoinette, he knows about.
26:56
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, he can already see the future.
26:58
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's crazy.
26:59
SPEAKER_01: So he decides I need to get more military backup.
27:02
SPEAKER_01: He goes from Alexandria to Rome because again, he keeps kind of running over to Caesar, like, hey, buddy, you're pretty powerful.
27:11
SPEAKER_01: Right.
27:11
SPEAKER_01: And which is controversial because as Elizabeth said, there's all this tension between Egypt and Rome.
27:18
SPEAKER_01: But he decides to go, he gets over to Rome and he leaves his family behind.
27:23
SPEAKER_01: He leaves all of his kids who are named the same and decides, like, okay, guys, I'm gonna come back with with the with some guns.
27:30
SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna come up come back with some backup here.
27:32
SPEAKER_01: With an army.
27:33
SPEAKER_01: Um and he's basically leaving behind his wife, who dies shortly after, mysteriously.
27:39
SPEAKER_01: Right.
27:40
SPEAKER_01: No records.
27:41
SPEAKER_01: And we'll talk about that in a second.
27:42
SPEAKER_00: Um, yeah.
27:43
SPEAKER_00: The mother is very mysterious.
27:45
SPEAKER_01: Mother is mysterious.
27:46
SPEAKER_00: Um, so when he's gone, the year is 58 BC at this point.
27:50
SPEAKER_00: And there is some speculation that maybe he didn't like flee to Rome.
27:55
SPEAKER_00: Maybe he was more expelled from the country, too.
27:58
SPEAKER_00: So we're not really sure if he like leaves on, you know, on his own will, or if it's more like a hey, get out of town, and then he tries to go to Rome for help.
28:05
SPEAKER_00: Either way, he's gone.
28:06
SPEAKER_00: And in his um, his absence, there's these politicians in Alexandria who essentially say, Well, we need a ruler, and who's the best person for the job?
28:15
SPEAKER_00: And at this time, Berenice is of pretty much the the right age.
28:20
SPEAKER_00: She's she's 19, which sounds very young in our DNA.
28:23
SPEAKER_00: But for then, it's like, hey, like you're a qualified woman, you can make decisions, like, let's go.
28:28
SPEAKER_00: So they look at Berenice, but they also say, What if we make you co-rulers with Cleopatra the Sixth, her oldest sister, right?
28:36
SPEAKER_00: So the two oldest women of the family um are kind of asked to be co-pharaws, essentially, um, and take over, take over Alexandria.
28:46
SPEAKER_00: There is some strange speculation back to the whole mother thing, that Cleopatra VI is actually just Cleopatra V.
28:54
SPEAKER_00: So some people doubt that Cleopatra VI even existed.
28:58
SPEAKER_00: They were like, oh no, that was just um that was just the mom the whole time.
29:01
SPEAKER_00: Very, very weird.
29:02
SPEAKER_00: It's strange that you get such differing accounts.
29:05
SPEAKER_01: I'm honestly just even shocked that we have what we have because when everything is written back on papyrus and it survived thousands and I mean over 2,000 years, it gets blurry.
29:17
SPEAKER_01: It gets a little blurry.
29:19
SPEAKER_00: So, I mean, take that for what it is.
29:21
SPEAKER_00: Right.
29:22
SPEAKER_00: So it could either have been the mother and the eldest daughter or two eldest daughters taking over.
29:26
SPEAKER_00: Either way, that doesn't necessarily matter because that eldest daughter died.
29:31
SPEAKER_00: So Cleopatra VI ends up dying of maybe natural causes, maybe poison.
29:36
SPEAKER_00: And we're not quite sure how.
29:38
SPEAKER_00: Obviously, because this is a murderous time, there m are some people that claim, well, if there's such a power grab right now, she could have just been killed or poisoned.
29:48
SPEAKER_01: Perhaps by Berenice herself.
29:50
SPEAKER_01: Could be.
29:51
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
29:51
SPEAKER_01: They're all pretty cutthroat of out for themselves, I want the crown on my own.
29:56
SPEAKER_01: And it that is a weird dynamic to have to let's just go with the story of two sisters.
30:01
SPEAKER_01: Right.
30:02
SPEAKER_01: It is an odd dynamic to have two sisters ruling together, both as Pharaoh.
30:07
SPEAKER_00: Especially if there's one eldest one who Why wouldn't it go to her?
30:11
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
30:12
SPEAKER_00: And again, according to Margaret George, which again, partially fiction, but in Margaret George's book, they're two years apart.
30:18
SPEAKER_00: And that seems like perfect.
30:20
SPEAKER_00: Like if one's 19 and one's 21, the 21-year-old's probably gonna be like, girl, this is my throne.
30:25
SPEAKER_00: Like, we've seen Frozen.
30:26
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
30:27
SPEAKER_00: We know how that works.
30:28
SPEAKER_00: We know how this plays out.
30:30
SPEAKER_01: Also, in sorry if you mentioned this, may not have been listening.
30:34
SPEAKER_01: Thanks.
30:34
SPEAKER_01: Um, sorry.
30:36
SPEAKER_01: Uh in Egypt, though, it they were cool with a woman ruling.
30:41
SPEAKER_00: Uh it's so it was never specified when I I was looking up this specific story.
30:46
SPEAKER_00: If the only male heirs were very young, they were like one and four years old.
30:52
SPEAKER_00: So the Ptolemy boy the Ptolemy one and Ptolemy II, the two sons, were like extremely young.
30:59
SPEAKER_00: Thing one and thing two.
31:00
SPEAKER_00: Thing one and thing two were not qualified.
31:04
SPEAKER_01: So but I think what I'm saying though is Egypt was okay with a woman as Pharaoh as long as they wanted her to have a man to rule with her.
31:12
SPEAKER_00: They did.
31:12
SPEAKER_00: And I don't think it was necessarily even a uh woman-man thing.
31:15
SPEAKER_00: I think if you were a ruler, you were expected to have a co-regent.
31:18
SPEAKER_00: So if you were a male pharaoh, you had to have uh like a queen next to you.
31:22
SPEAKER_00: If you're a pharaoh, that's why they had the two sisters, probably.
31:24
SPEAKER_00: Right.
31:25
SPEAKER_00: Or and we talked about a lot of incest going on here.
31:28
SPEAKER_00: Um, it was very common for brothers and sisters to marry each other at this time.
31:32
SPEAKER_00: So in a creepy way, they might have had like again the two Cleopatras and the two Ptolemies being like package deal, like you're gonna get married to each other at some point.
31:42
SPEAKER_00: Sorry, that was an awkward laugh more than anything.
31:44
SPEAKER_00: Very strange.
31:45
SPEAKER_00: Um, again, very different time, different era.
31:48
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
31:49
SPEAKER_00: Um, but so so now that Bert Berenice is the only ruler, she's being she's being pressured to marry.
31:55
SPEAKER_00: So the politicians are coming to her and are saying, like, hey, like your dad's been gone a while, you know, you're you're the ruler now, like figure out a husband situation.
32:04
SPEAKER_00: So she's kind of given a few different suitors who may or may not work out for her.
32:10
SPEAKER_00: But she uh if she goes with the first suitor, they start making negotiations, and while they're in the middle of negotiations, he dies.
32:18
SPEAKER_00: A lot of death going on.
32:20
SPEAKER_00: I mean Did she poison him as well?
32:22
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
32:23
SPEAKER_00: Lives beans for short.
32:24
SPEAKER_00: You gotta go fast, go go quick, they might go.
32:27
SPEAKER_00: And then there was a second suitor who came along, and things were moving along pretty well, but then there was this Roman governor who kind of intervened and said, No, this is not appropriate, you can't marry her.
32:37
SPEAKER_00: So second second suitor, down for the count.
32:41
SPEAKER_00: Then the winner winner chicken dinner comes along.
32:43
SPEAKER_00: So Seleucus comes around, and let's just say he's disgusting.
32:50
SPEAKER_00: She she's really upset with him immediately.
32:54
SPEAKER_00: Like they do end up marrying.
32:55
SPEAKER_00: She's like, great, politicians are happy.
32:58
SPEAKER_00: I have a co-regent, there's a king.
33:00
SPEAKER_00: But Seleucus is apparently so vulgar.
33:02
SPEAKER_00: He's like coarse-mannered, uh, he's like has a vulgar appearance.
33:07
SPEAKER_00: He's like, he's so bad that he gets these weird nicknames.
33:10
SPEAKER_00: People call him Salty Fish or Saltfish Monger.
33:14
SPEAKER_00: Um, or they or there's also translations to dirty worker.
33:18
SPEAKER_00: Like people did not like this man.
33:20
SPEAKER_01: I could imagine what he smelled like if your nickname is salty fish.
33:27
SPEAKER_00: Not really a nickname you want to have.
33:30
SPEAKER_00: Not a good one.
33:31
SPEAKER_00: And she, being the new pharaoh, being, you know, 19 years old, ready to take over the country, she's like, I really can't have this like unsuitable, disgusting man next to me.
33:41
SPEAKER_00: Like, as shallow as it sounds, like she she was so unbearable.
33:45
SPEAKER_00: Just, you know, she was like, he's not princely.
33:48
SPEAKER_00: Like he's he's ill-mannered, he can't rule a country.
33:50
SPEAKER_00: She's like, This is a bad look for me.
33:52
SPEAKER_00: So does she divorce him?
33:54
SPEAKER_00: No.
33:55
SPEAKER_00: A few too easy.
33:56
SPEAKER_00: A few days or weeks later, that's very quick, very soon.
34:00
SPEAKER_00: She has him strangled.
34:02
SPEAKER_00: He dies, she murders him.
34:04
SPEAKER_01: Probably would have been easy if he was just drunk at a feast or something.
34:08
SPEAKER_01: And he's eaten his salty fish, and just soldier comes from behind.
34:14
SPEAKER_01: And who's gonna question it?
34:16
SPEAKER_01: Jokes him out.
34:17
SPEAKER_01: If yeah, if every no one liked him and that was the Pharaoh who ordered it.
34:22
SPEAKER_01: Right.
34:22
SPEAKER_00: But she, I mean, she obviously was happy with her choice.
34:24
SPEAKER_00: She knew he couldn't uh command the respect of the people.
34:28
SPEAKER_00: So uh she's looking for a husband again.
34:30
SPEAKER_00: She's looking for a second husband.
34:32
SPEAKER_00: The first one didn't work out.
34:33
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
34:34
SPEAKER_00: But then she gets paired with a gentleman from Greece, um, who she does, I think, find suitable for the throne.
34:42
SPEAKER_00: His name is uh Archiles.
34:44
SPEAKER_00: Is am I saying that correctly?
34:46
SPEAKER_00: Arclaeus.
34:47
SPEAKER_00: Arklaeus.
34:48
SPEAKER_00: So Arclaeus comes along.
34:49
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna assume handsome Greek man.
34:52
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
34:53
SPEAKER_00: Polar opposite of salty fish.
34:55
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
34:56
SPEAKER_00: He is more like he's like butter cookie, butter cookie.
35:01
SPEAKER_00: You gotta think of something strong and Greek.
35:02
SPEAKER_00: Oh, um like a like a spanic warm Spanish how do you say it?
35:10
SPEAKER_01: Spanic copita.
35:11
SPEAKER_01: We had that for dinner.
35:12
SPEAKER_01: We did a little Mediterranean themed dinner.
35:14
SPEAKER_01: It's lovely.
35:15
SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Megan.
35:16
SPEAKER_01: That's what he is.
35:17
SPEAKER_01: He's or some like dolmas.
35:20
SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah, dolmas is better.
35:22
SPEAKER_00: Good good one.
35:23
SPEAKER_00: Um, so he's officially made co-regent.
35:26
SPEAKER_00: Uh, it's it's question whether or not he was actually made like king, like if it came to that, because his rule was a little bit short.
35:33
SPEAKER_00: Um, but by the spring of 55 BC, unfortunately, who comes back but Ptolemy with his Roman army?
35:43
SPEAKER_01: He uh came back pretty strong.
35:46
SPEAKER_01: And Ptolemy is not happy to see all that's changed in the past few years.
35:51
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
35:52
SPEAKER_01: Also, I wonder.
35:54
SPEAKER_01: Well, he was doing business over there.
35:56
SPEAKER_01: I was gonna say, what how long is this trip from Alexandria to Rome?
35:59
SPEAKER_01: But he was there.
36:00
SPEAKER_01: He was there for about three years.
36:02
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, he was rounding up troops.
36:04
SPEAKER_00: And he he was uh at least what I read, he was in a few different places.
36:07
SPEAKER_00: He was in um like parts of Greece, he was in parts of Rome, essentially just seeing which senators he could bribe and seeing how he can like like weasel his way around court.
36:17
SPEAKER_00: So I think he had a hard time.
36:19
SPEAKER_00: I don't think people loved the idea that he was back asking for money and military and support again.
36:25
SPEAKER_01: And people liked Berenice.
36:28
SPEAKER_01: They did.
36:29
SPEAKER_01: They did, yeah, despite her habit of strangling husbands that she didn't like.
36:33
SPEAKER_01: Well, who doesn't?
36:34
SPEAKER_01: And potentially a sister or so.
36:36
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, she had it coming.
36:37
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, she was seen as like a strong ruler.
36:41
SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think also in comparison to her father, like why not?
36:47
SPEAKER_01: But spring of the spring of 55, that's all I have in my notes.
36:51
SPEAKER_01: Spring 55.
36:52
SPEAKER_01: Beautiful.
36:53
SPEAKER_01: Spring 55 BC.
36:55
SPEAKER_01: Uh, yeah, Ptolemy's back and he has full Roman force behind him.
36:59
SPEAKER_01: So he has a full military.
37:01
SPEAKER_01: Julius Caesar has still got his back, and he invades Egypt, which the Romans had a pretty big, big muscle behind him.
37:11
SPEAKER_01: They did, yes.
37:12
SPEAKER_01: Um, sadly, our our buttery dolmos, Archelaus, Archelaus, dies in battle, but he dies very heroically, and he was memorialized by the people for that because he was seen as a true fighter, too, a true soldier, true warrior, fighting for Egypt.
37:32
SPEAKER_01: And I think there is something noble about assuming he had the title of king, yeah.
37:38
SPEAKER_01: That king goes into battle and dies right there with everyone else.
37:41
SPEAKER_01: So exactly.
37:42
SPEAKER_01: Again, kudos to him.
37:44
SPEAKER_01: But this is where it gets dark is Ptolemy has zero tolerance policy for an uprising or for anybody taking his crown.
37:54
SPEAKER_01: Any usurper.
37:55
SPEAKER_01: Usurper.
37:56
SPEAKER_01: I like that word.
37:57
SPEAKER_01: That's a good word.
37:58
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
37:59
SPEAKER_01: An usurper is someone who takes a crown.
38:03
SPEAKER_01: Usurps.
38:05
SPEAKER_00: It's funny because I feel like you naturally want to say unsurper.
38:08
SPEAKER_00: It just sounds correct, but it's not.
38:10
SPEAKER_00: It's usurping.
38:11
SPEAKER_00: I'm like they know what this word is.
38:13
SPEAKER_00: It's like, you know, when you stage a coup, you're like, Yes, a coup.
38:17
SPEAKER_00: She's like, oh yes.
38:18
SPEAKER_00: Ah, yes, a couple.
38:20
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, it's like when you go in and you're not technically the ruler, but it's like you you're assuming power.
38:26
SPEAKER_00: It's like, how dare you, you're not the rightful ruler of this person.
38:29
SPEAKER_00: You're an usurper.
38:30
SPEAKER_00: Like, I hope I'm saying now I'm saying it so often I'm questioning it.
38:34
SPEAKER_01: Do you ever do that when you say a word over and over again?
38:36
SPEAKER_01: Like, or when you write it down and you're like, that can't be the right spelling.
38:39
SPEAKER_01: Like, what?
38:40
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
38:40
SPEAKER_01: Like you just say it like ice.
38:43
unknown: Ice.
38:44
SPEAKER_00: Ice is your go-to word that you're not sure if it's your usurper.
38:49
SPEAKER_01: I like that.
38:49
SPEAKER_01: No, you know, like you have that weird thought where you keep thinking of the same word so much that it seems like foreign language.
38:56
SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
38:57
SPEAKER_01: I feel yeah.
38:57
SPEAKER_01: Try it.
38:58
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
38:58
SPEAKER_01: Try it in a dark room and like just think of like one common word and it just messes with you after a while.
39:04
SPEAKER_01: It messes with your head after a while.
39:05
SPEAKER_01: True.
39:06
SPEAKER_01: That's why you just gotta fly by the seat of your pants and fly right through.
39:09
SPEAKER_01: Say it confidently.
39:10
SPEAKER_01: That's what we do.
39:11
SPEAKER_01: So Ptolemy has zero tolerance.
39:15
SPEAKER_01: He arrests Berenice, his own daughter.
39:19
SPEAKER_01: He sentences her to death.
39:22
SPEAKER_00: And this is where the execution comes in.
39:24
SPEAKER_00: And really quick, I mean, we should we should note that he was pretty much installed as king right away.
39:30
SPEAKER_00: Like the role, once the Romans came, once um they won.
39:33
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, once they once they won't battle, the battle happened.
39:36
SPEAKER_00: Like he's installed as king right away again.
39:38
SPEAKER_00: So Alexandria, hey, he's back under Paul.
39:41
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's really whoever has the biggest sword at this point, right?
39:44
SPEAKER_01: Like whoever has the biggest military.
39:45
SPEAKER_01: And um, so at the time, Berenice is only 22 years old.
39:50
SPEAKER_01: She ruled for about three years.
39:52
SPEAKER_01: Little sister, famous Cleopatra, is only 14 years old at the time.
39:57
SPEAKER_01: Right.
39:57
SPEAKER_01: So just to kind of put things and timelines into perspective.
40:00
SPEAKER_01: Also, something just really sad about a woman in her young 20s getting this fate.
40:06
SPEAKER_01: Right.
40:06
SPEAKER_00: I mean, not that she was like the cleanest of and most innocent of people, but and even if she did all these crimes, such as murder, um, at the end of the day, it's not like she asked to be queen necessarily.
40:19
SPEAKER_00: Like her father was the one that left or was expelled.
40:22
SPEAKER_00: It's like she just kind of you know played the hand that was dealt to her.
40:25
SPEAKER_00: And so if you have a father that has left you behind and these politicians are coming up to, like, hey, someone needs to lead this country.
40:32
SPEAKER_00: Like, what are you supposed to do?
40:33
SPEAKER_00: Like, no, I'm gonna flee to Rome too, or like, no, I'm gonna poison myself and end it.
40:37
SPEAKER_00: Like, you kind of have only a couple options.
40:39
SPEAKER_00: And if you have half a heart, you're like, yeah, I'll take the throne and try and lead this country forward.
40:47
SPEAKER_01: So uh we were really trying to dive in on the details of her execution.
40:52
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
40:52
SPEAKER_01: And again, because this is over 2,000 years ago, quite limited.
40:56
SPEAKER_01: But what we can look at, and what we were looking at, is some articles from historians on what they believed would have been the most likely scenario.
41:05
SPEAKER_01: Right.
41:05
SPEAKER_01: And by doing that, we just have to look in general at ancient Egyptian execution style.
41:12
SPEAKER_01: There were a lot of royals who were sentenced to death in this time.
41:17
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
41:17
SPEAKER_01: And I think something different from what we've seen in England, France, other countries, especially later on in the as the centuries go on, is um it was more of just like a task that needed to be done.
41:32
SPEAKER_01: It wasn't so much of a public spectacle to to prove a point or to make an example.
41:37
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
41:38
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, make it an example and um try to teach others this is what happens if you defy us.
41:44
SPEAKER_01: It was more like we actually just physically literally need this person gone.
41:48
SPEAKER_01: We don't need a lot of hoopla about it, but there was nowhere to just like outcast them over to.
41:54
SPEAKER_01: It was just it's almost do you ever get this impression, Elizabeth, that like I'm gonna get a little deep here.
42:01
SPEAKER_01: Oh, I love it.
42:02
SPEAKER_01: I just I feel like they didn't value life as much.
42:06
SPEAKER_00: I think about that often, actually.
42:08
SPEAKER_00: It's funny you say that because I don't know if it's because maybe in different time frames they have such strong belief in afterlife or something.
42:17
SPEAKER_00: But I feel like you're right, like life is a little cheaper in this day and age where it's like, oh, this person did something wrong, like kill him.
42:24
SPEAKER_00: Like everything was just straight to murder.
42:26
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
42:26
SPEAKER_00: And they it was swift and efficient.
42:29
SPEAKER_00: And again, not a ton of spectacle or like you said, like, I don't know, um hoopla pageantry.
42:36
SPEAKER_00: Did I use the word hoopla's a great word for it?
42:38
SPEAKER_00: I just didn't want to say it again, but yes, hoopla.
42:39
SPEAKER_00: That's the word of the evening.
42:41
SPEAKER_00: Um you server.
42:43
SPEAKER_00: And and again, I I don't know why that is, but it's treated, yeah, like an easy task to just get done instead of like valuing and contemplating like, is this life worth taking, or what's what's the moral dilemma we're faced here of taking someone's life?
42:58
SPEAKER_00: It's almost like, oh yeah, I'll get rid of them.
43:00
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's the only answer.
43:01
SPEAKER_01: It's like it was just the default.
43:03
SPEAKER_01: Like you think of Elizabeth, Queen Elizabeth I, right?
43:07
SPEAKER_01: How for years and years contemplating if she wanted to end marry Queen of Scott's life because that was her cousin.
43:15
SPEAKER_01: And you feel like the, you know, the the torture going on in her own mind of making this decision and her own morality, and you know, we can go on forever about that.
43:26
SPEAKER_01: Right.
43:26
SPEAKER_01: But then, yeah, here in Egypt, the solution was write them off.
43:30
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
43:31
SPEAKER_01: End it.
43:32
SPEAKER_00: We've got a bunch of Cleopatras and Ptolemies around.
43:35
SPEAKER_00: Who are you?
43:36
SPEAKER_01: Talk about having a spare, like copy, paste, repeat.
43:41
SPEAKER_00: There was only only one Bernice at this time, though.
43:44
SPEAKER_00: So Bernie.
43:46
SPEAKER_01: Bernice.
43:47
SPEAKER_01: Um, so so kind of getting back to their methods of execution then.
43:52
SPEAKER_01: It was private, and specifically for royal women, the main method would have been strangulation, which is Is wild.
44:01
SPEAKER_01: And yeah.
44:02
SPEAKER_00: I will say, like, I wanna I wanna read a little excerpt from the book.
44:05
SPEAKER_00: Um, please.
44:06
SPEAKER_01: I don't know if you want me to read it now or if you want to go through what you um let let's get through a little bit on what we know of the execution and then let's hear Margaret George's interpretation.
44:16
SPEAKER_01: Because it's a bit more colorful.
44:17
SPEAKER_01: I mean, she's an amazing uh historical fiction writer.
44:21
SPEAKER_01: So so I there are some historians who thought maybe she would have been beheaded.
44:28
SPEAKER_01: But the reason why most historians lead lead lean into strangulation is again because they didn't need it to be a spectacle.
44:39
SPEAKER_01: This sounds terrible, but you're listening to a show called Beheaded, so you can handle it.
44:44
SPEAKER_01: But it was the cleanest method.
44:46
SPEAKER_01: Like quite literally, there was no blood.
44:48
SPEAKER_01: It wasn't it was an easy method.
44:50
SPEAKER_01: Right.
44:50
SPEAKER_01: And also, Egyptians did value so much of the afterlife.
44:56
SPEAKER_01: They wanted to keep their body intact for the rituals that took place afterwards.
45:00
SPEAKER_00: When once you told me that, that made a lot of sense why strangulation was the go-to method.
45:04
SPEAKER_01: Genius.
45:05
SPEAKER_01: Kind of like, how can we do this while also being efficient?
45:08
SPEAKER_00: It's really, it's really terrible.
45:09
SPEAKER_00: And really quick, there are some accounts that say she was beheaded, like, you know, with an axe or a sword or something, but that tended to be the Roman method of execution.
45:18
SPEAKER_00: So at this point, we're down to like, okay, now that Rome's kind of back in charge of Alexandria, are we using that Roman method?
45:25
SPEAKER_00: Or again, are we using the Egyptian method of we're valuing the body in the afterlife so is a strangulation?
45:31
SPEAKER_01: That would have come down to her father's decision, I'm assuming.
45:34
SPEAKER_01: At the king's pleasure.
45:36
SPEAKER_01: At the king's pleasure.
45:37
SPEAKER_01: So he's Greek.
45:39
SPEAKER_01: Also, that whole family never spoke Egyptian.
45:43
SPEAKER_00: Oh, I think once you get to the famous Cleopatra, Cleopatra VII, she was known for being multilingual.
45:49
SPEAKER_01: She was the first person in the family who gave a shit about the country she lived in.
45:54
SPEAKER_01: That's why she became a little famous.
45:56
SPEAKER_01: Maybe I should learn the the language of my people.
45:58
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
45:59
SPEAKER_01: So she, yeah, she's the first in the family to learn Egyptian.
46:02
SPEAKER_01: All the Ptolemies before that just spoke Greek in Egypt.
46:05
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
46:06
SPEAKER_01: Interesting, right?
46:07
SPEAKER_01: Another fun fact.
46:08
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, fun fact.
46:08
SPEAKER_00: Okay, fun fact.
46:09
SPEAKER_00: Um, is and I I kind of, again, when you look at history, especially the ancient times, you would assume it's all kind of muddled together and it's hard to like create timelines in your head.
46:20
SPEAKER_00: But when Cleopatra was a pharaoh, I always assumed, like, oh, she was around the time where they built the pyramids.
46:27
SPEAKER_00: The pyramids were ancient in her time.
46:29
SPEAKER_00: Like, you know what I mean?
46:30
SPEAKER_00: Like they had been around so so long.
46:33
SPEAKER_00: So it's like in Margaret George's book, she talks about how Cleopatra like reflects on the pyramids and the building of them, and they, it's a mystery to them.
46:41
SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, oh, we know why.
46:43
SPEAKER_00: It's not just like this, like, uh, what do you what is schoolhouse rock?
46:47
SPEAKER_00: Remember that show?
46:48
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but I don't know what you're referring to.
46:50
SPEAKER_00: Like, it's not this like cheesy schoolhouse rock episode of like, here's Cleopatra, here's the pyramids, like all of it too.
46:55
SPEAKER_00: Just watching them being built.
46:56
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, like at the same time, it's like even like 1500 years or something.
47:00
SPEAKER_00: I think it was maybe, yeah, I I don't know the exact.
47:02
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna be corrected on this, I know, but like maybe 2000 years before her.
47:06
SPEAKER_00: Should we should we correct ourselves?
47:07
SPEAKER_02: Oh, you want to Google it real quick?
47:08
SPEAKER_02: I'm Google it.
47:09
SPEAKER_01: I guess we do have the resources to check for when or pyramids about God.
47:14
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes I'm embarrassed by my Google history.
47:17
SPEAKER_01: Like right before that, it's like, yeah, what was the previous search for how to pronounce like can I combine Day Cool with this?
47:24
SPEAKER_01: No, I don't know.
47:25
SPEAKER_01: Um, when were the periods pyramids?
47:27
SPEAKER_01: Whoa.
47:28
SPEAKER_01: Pyramids 2600 BC.
47:33
SPEAKER_01: So it was about 2,000 years before that.
47:35
SPEAKER_00: I'm glad I got that roughly correct.
47:36
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
47:37
SPEAKER_01: Even more than that.
47:39
SPEAKER_01: Because if this was like the 50s, so let's just say 2600.
47:46
SPEAKER_01: I can't tell if this is how good my math is.
47:48
SPEAKER_01: Are you just like you're saying 20 or 2600?
47:51
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
47:51
SPEAKER_01: Oh, okay.
47:52
SPEAKER_01: That would have been 2,545 years.
47:54
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
47:55
SPEAKER_01: That's a long time.
47:57
SPEAKER_00: That's like us looking at something that's literally like created around late.
48:02
SPEAKER_00: Cleopatra's time.
48:03
SPEAKER_00: Sorry, Epiphany.
48:04
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
48:07
SPEAKER_01: We live closer to Cleopatra than she lived to when the pyramids were built.
48:13
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
48:14
SPEAKER_01: Isn't that crazy?
48:15
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
48:16
SPEAKER_01: Okay, now I can't sleep tonight.
48:19
SPEAKER_00: That's gonna bother me.
48:20
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
48:21
SPEAKER_00: That I that's like, I mean, to sound very millennial here, but when they're like, oh, it's like if we were to make a movie about the like, you know, like Wedding Singer was in like their 90s, but it came out.
48:32
SPEAKER_01: Or like Back to the Future.
48:33
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you know, and it's like it talks about the distance between like present day and that movie, and it's like, oh yeah, I forget.
48:39
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
48:40
SPEAKER_00: Time works.
48:41
SPEAKER_01: Man, crazy.
48:42
SPEAKER_01: So what were we saying?
48:44
SPEAKER_01: Well, we're talking about the rituals, the the afterlife rituals.
48:47
SPEAKER_01: Right.
48:48
SPEAKER_01: Um, so Greek.
48:49
SPEAKER_01: Okay, it's all wow, trains.
48:51
SPEAKER_01: It's all coming back to me.
48:52
SPEAKER_01: We're talking about the Greek language, right?
48:54
SPEAKER_01: Execution.
48:55
SPEAKER_00: So we're saying that um Ptolemy Ptolemy was Greek, but he obviously kissed the ring to the Romans and bribed the Romans.
49:00
SPEAKER_00: But we're in Alexandria, Egypt.
49:02
SPEAKER_00: So it's like we're not exactly sure the execution method.
49:06
SPEAKER_00: It's not said anywhere other than it was like a swift execution.
49:10
SPEAKER_01: Um if and I did look because again, my Google history, it's very colorful.
49:16
SPEAKER_01: Um, the way that they would have strangled somebody in a form of execution would have been either a rope or a cord behind their neck, or like behind placing behind them and tying it around their neck and tightening it.
49:29
SPEAKER_01: And it typically was done by a mercenary, a soldier, um, someone.
49:34
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so well, no, it was someone more um higher higher up.
49:37
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it wouldn't have been a servant.
49:38
SPEAKER_01: It w it was, I don't want to say like it was an honor, like a prestigious role to do, but it wasn't similar to how executioners, like again in Europe, were seen as bad juju.
49:50
SPEAKER_01: I see.
49:51
SPEAKER_01: Mm-hmm.
49:51
SPEAKER_01: It would have been someone in a a pretty decent role.
49:55
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
49:56
SPEAKER_01: It would have taken place indoors, not just private, but inside, either inside of the palace, or she could have been held in a prison in a cell, and it could have been it could have happened there as well.
50:07
SPEAKER_01: But likely it would have been, I mean, yeah, inside and private.
50:13
SPEAKER_01: Those are all my notes.
50:14
SPEAKER_00: Do you want to hear Margaret George's version?
50:16
SPEAKER_01: I do.
50:16
SPEAKER_01: Let's do a little story time.
50:18
SPEAKER_00: So, first of all, I'm gonna just take excerpts because I feel like this is like a straight up page, a very tiny font of the execution.
50:25
SPEAKER_00: I'm not gonna bore you for minutes on end.
50:27
SPEAKER_00: Um, so I'm gonna read you just a few parts of it.
50:29
SPEAKER_00: But she has a very specific description.
50:32
SPEAKER_00: And when I read this, I was like, is this real?
50:34
SPEAKER_00: Like, again, this is what brought me to the whole Berenice story in the first place.
50:38
SPEAKER_00: So, according to Margaret George, Berenice was led out before the barracks, her hands down behind her back.
50:45
SPEAKER_00: She was not blindfolded, but forced to look at us all.
50:48
SPEAKER_00: This is in the voice of Cleopatra, by the way.
50:50
SPEAKER_00: Her ghoulish audience.
50:52
SPEAKER_00: You have been found guilty of treason, of usurping the throne.
50:56
SPEAKER_00: There's that word again.
50:56
SPEAKER_00: Is that where you got it from?
50:58
SPEAKER_00: Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt.
50:59
SPEAKER_00: It's okay.
50:59
SPEAKER_00: Sorry.
51:00
SPEAKER_00: Um in the absence of your rightful king, skipping forward ahead.
51:04
SPEAKER_00: For this you must pay the penalty and die.
51:07
SPEAKER_00: Have you any words?
51:09
SPEAKER_00: asked the king.
51:10
SPEAKER_00: It was only a formality.
51:11
SPEAKER_00: Did he truly wish to hear any?
51:14
SPEAKER_00: This is what Berenice apparently says.
51:16
SPEAKER_00: Slave of the Romans, she cried, there they sit, and she points at the Romans.
51:21
SPEAKER_00: Again, skipping ahead.
51:23
SPEAKER_00: There they sit, never to be dislodged from Egypt.
51:26
SPEAKER_00: Who then is the traitor to this country, father?
51:30
SPEAKER_00: Enough! This will be your last breath.
51:32
SPEAKER_00: He motioned to the soldier who was to strangle her.
51:35
SPEAKER_00: The man stepped behind her, his forearm the size of most men's thighs.
51:40
SPEAKER_00: Ooh.
51:41
SPEAKER_00: Margaret.
51:42
SPEAKER_00: This is erotic reading now.
51:44
SPEAKER_00: Uh I'm skipping ahead a little bit.
51:47
unknown: Yeah.
51:47
SPEAKER_01: We need to get her home the power.
51:49
SPEAKER_00: Basically, what she looks like, and then it says uh the soldier finally lifted her up by the neck and held her there as the life was snuffed out of her body and it stopped twitching.
52:02
SPEAKER_00: Then she talks about her sandals falling off and a bunch of stuff.
52:05
SPEAKER_00: But this goes on for a very long time.
52:06
SPEAKER_00: It's a long excerpt.
52:08
SPEAKER_00: But I thought that was a very colorful rendition.
52:09
SPEAKER_00: Good job, Margaret.
52:11
SPEAKER_01: I wonder if her family, if it was private, maybe it was still you think her family still saw it?
52:15
SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
52:16
SPEAKER_01: There would have had to have been a witness to prove it was done.
52:19
SPEAKER_00: That's true.
52:20
SPEAKER_00: But otherwise, you get people coming up later being like, oh, I'm actually Baronice from 50 years ago.
52:25
SPEAKER_00: Remember me?
52:26
SPEAKER_00: Little war bet war uh Perkin Warbegg.
52:29
SPEAKER_00: Perk and Warbeck situation.
52:31
SPEAKER_00: Refer to season six.
52:33
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
52:33
SPEAKER_00: Episode one.
52:34
SPEAKER_00: Um, but this is a very monumental, I think, point in history because maybe Baronice isn't that famous, but she really clears the way for Cleopatra and teaches her a lot of lessons.
52:48
SPEAKER_00: Because Cleopatra, again, is only 14 at this time.
52:51
SPEAKER_00: Cleopatra is extremely intelligent.
52:54
SPEAKER_00: She's looking around at the world that she's born into.
52:57
SPEAKER_00: She's looking at the mistakes of her father, the mistakes of her sister, and saying, How do I navigate this?
53:02
SPEAKER_00: Like all of my family is dying around me.
53:06
SPEAKER_00: Like, if one day the throne is most likely gonna be mine.
53:08
SPEAKER_00: Like, how do I navigate this world?
53:10
SPEAKER_00: And again, she becomes extremely intelligent.
53:13
SPEAKER_00: She learns multiple languages.
53:15
SPEAKER_00: She learns that Rome is not just to be, I guess, uh, they're not just there to defeat Rome.
53:23
SPEAKER_00: They're not just there to be like, we're gonna be in a constant battle with Rome.
53:26
SPEAKER_00: She learns how to essentially like seduce and manipulate Rome and men.
53:31
SPEAKER_00: And men.
53:31
SPEAKER_00: You know, she she knows, she understands her role and how to get what she wants.
53:36
SPEAKER_00: So it's like, you know, Cleopatra, it's funny that we only know one Cleopatra.
53:40
SPEAKER_00: Like we don't know Cleopatra V, the Sixth, we don't know Berenice, we don't know all the Ptolemies, you know, but we just know Cleopatra.
53:47
SPEAKER_00: And that's again, I think a big reason is because of Berenice in her story.
53:51
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
53:53
SPEAKER_01: And there is another sister, if we can remember, who also gets completely overlooked in history that And Megan actually found this out because I haven't gotten to this part in my book.
54:02
SPEAKER_01: So she kind of spoiled it.
54:04
SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry, I kind of spoiler alert.
54:05
SPEAKER_01: If you're in the middle of reading the thousand pages of Margaret George's take me a whole The Memoir of Cleopatra?
54:12
SPEAKER_00: It's called The Memoirs of Cleopatra.
54:14
SPEAKER_00: And let me tell you how many pages.
54:16
SPEAKER_01: What's funny is I remember my mom getting this book circa 1997, I want to say.
54:22
SPEAKER_02: Probably.
54:24
SPEAKER_01: And I just remember this book sitting in her living room for like ever because it is a beefy book.
54:31
SPEAKER_01: Not wow, Megan.
54:32
SPEAKER_01: It says 97 on here.
54:33
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
54:33
SPEAKER_01: Congratulations.
54:34
SPEAKER_01: Wow, that's good because I remember she bought it as a like a new, like new book.
54:38
SPEAKER_01: New book.
54:39
SPEAKER_01: I remember I like have this memory of going to Barnes and Noble, her getting the book.
54:42
SPEAKER_01: She's like, I'm gonna finish this.
54:44
SPEAKER_01: But not only is it how many pages?
54:46
SPEAKER_01: 963 and like tiny font.
54:48
SPEAKER_01: Tiny font and big pages.
54:50
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
54:51
SPEAKER_01: It's like a big book.
54:52
SPEAKER_01: This book sat, that's why it's so iconic in my life.
54:55
SPEAKER_01: It sat in our living room for like a year, and I don't know how far she got, but I'm only at 137.
55:01
SPEAKER_00: I've got to be.
55:02
SPEAKER_00: I've been I've been distracted from some, I've done some other books in the meantime.
55:06
SPEAKER_00: We've read a couple of Susie Lipscomb's books.
55:08
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
55:08
SPEAKER_00: But uh, yeah, this is gonna take me like another year.
55:12
SPEAKER_01: But um yeah, so spoiler alert, if you you're um, you know, page, if you're five percent into that book and you've been at it for three years.
55:20
SPEAKER_01: Um our other friend, Arsineau, the youngest sister.
55:26
SPEAKER_01: Arsineau has just as dark of an ending as Baronice.
55:30
SPEAKER_01: Right.
55:30
SPEAKER_01: So I won't go into it's not enough for a full episode, but I do think that Arsenault is worth mentioning, honorable mention in this because there was not one execution out of her siblings, but there were two of her sisters.
55:44
SPEAKER_01: So basically, Arsenaux is younger sister of famous Cleopatra and very much a rival because the people love Arsino.
55:54
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, she is just like charismatic, and Cleopatra sees that she's a threat to the crown.
56:03
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, I I know there's I'm skimming, there's a lot more that goes into this.
56:09
SPEAKER_01: Um, there was a rebellion at some point where people were trying to rally up behind Arsino to get her on the throne instead of Cleopatra.
56:16
SPEAKER_00: I will say too, like Arsenal, at least from what I've read for from Margaret, Margaret George, like I feel like Arsenaux had a lot of natural leadership where people kind of gravitated towards her.
56:27
SPEAKER_00: Whereas as amazing as Cleopatra was, I think she was really the catalyst for her own success.
56:32
SPEAKER_00: She was like, no, like I'm important and you'll listen to me.
56:34
SPEAKER_00: But Arsenault had kind of the opposite where she was very unassuming and people just gravitated towards her and it drove Cleopatra crazy.
56:41
SPEAKER_01: I think it did.
56:42
SPEAKER_01: I think it just I can imagine her like pacing around at night and being up and thinking about her little sister of like, well, again, this like sister rival like rivalry, and not to keep bringing it back to the tutors, but right, that's where my heart is.
56:56
SPEAKER_01: But thinking of like Mary versus Elizabeth, and there's just always that tension.
57:00
SPEAKER_01: Oh yeah.
57:01
SPEAKER_01: So um Cleopatra turns to Mark Antony, because he's now in the picture, right, and convinces him how big of a threat Arsenal is.
57:12
SPEAKER_01: Arsenal's living in the temple of Artemis.
57:16
SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
57:17
SPEAKER_01: The temple of Artemis, which I think is in Greece.
57:21
SPEAKER_01: It is in.
57:22
SPEAKER_01: Oh, I had it.
57:23
SPEAKER_00: Oh, I wrote that down because uh Ptolemy actually went there for a bit.
57:27
SPEAKER_00: It was in I'm not gonna say this correctly, but we never do.
57:33
SPEAKER_00: Ephesus.
57:34
SPEAKER_00: Sounds great.
57:35
SPEAKER_00: Euphysis.
57:36
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
57:36
SPEAKER_01: That's it.
57:37
SPEAKER_00: One of those.
57:38
SPEAKER_01: Um, but basically she's like living in a sanctuary.
57:41
SPEAKER_01: And this is where it got really scandalous because they dragged her out of the temple.
57:48
SPEAKER_01: And it's funny because her ending to life, some articles notated it as murder, while others called it execution.
57:58
SPEAKER_01: Right.
57:58
SPEAKER_01: But they dragged her out, which is a complete like violation of the sanctuary rights.
58:04
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
58:05
SPEAKER_01: I just don't think I'm tobacco Notre Dame.
58:08
SPEAKER_01: I was not gonna bring it up.
58:09
SPEAKER_01: Oh sorry.
58:10
SPEAKER_00: Oh sorry, here we are.
58:12
SPEAKER_00: But sanctuary.
58:13
SPEAKER_00: She claims sanctuary, so there's nothing we can do.
58:17
SPEAKER_00: Continue.
58:19
SPEAKER_01: Sorry.
58:20
SPEAKER_01: They drag then drag her out on the street.
58:24
SPEAKER_01: That's exact they Frodo'd it.
58:25
SPEAKER_01: That's that's where he got it from.
58:28
SPEAKER_00: Not Frodo, Frodo's from Lord of the Rings.
58:30
SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
58:31
SPEAKER_01: That's exactly what they did.
58:32
SPEAKER_01: That's where he got it from.
58:33
SPEAKER_01: They dragged her out.
58:35
SPEAKER_01: And then this again beheading or strangulation.
58:40
SPEAKER_01: This one they actually think was beheading.
58:42
SPEAKER_01: Really?
58:44
SPEAKER_01: Death by sword.
58:45
SPEAKER_00: Okay, a Roman did it.
58:47
SPEAKER_00: I wonder if that means beheading, or they just like oh, or they just like, you know, got her a few times.
58:52
SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
58:53
SPEAKER_00: Actually, you're right.
58:54
SPEAKER_01: It didn't, I mm, I take back what I said.
58:56
SPEAKER_01: It didn't actually say beheading, it just said death by sword.
58:58
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
58:59
SPEAKER_01: That can mean a lot of that.
59:00
SPEAKER_01: That's that's open to interpretation.
59:03
SPEAKER_01: Use your creativity there.
59:04
SPEAKER_01: Right.
59:04
SPEAKER_01: Um, so, anyways, I thought again, just so much death and darkness and accusations and no love in this family.
59:13
SPEAKER_01: Was and did anyone support well, no, they married each other.
59:16
SPEAKER_00: They all married each other.
59:17
SPEAKER_00: They all married each other.
59:18
SPEAKER_00: People don't know this about Cleopatra's because every everyone knows, you know, obviously she was married to Julius Caesar and then she was married to Mark Antony.
59:26
SPEAKER_00: Um, but she actually was first betrothed to her brother.
59:29
SPEAKER_00: I think the I don't even know if it was the oldest Ptolemy.
59:33
SPEAKER_00: I think it was the younger Ptolemy.
59:34
SPEAKER_01: 20 years or 15 years younger than she was.
59:36
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so much younger than her and her brother, and he was gross.
59:40
SPEAKER_00: He was a salt fish monger or whatever.
59:42
SPEAKER_00: Oh no, but he uh so she ended that real quick.
59:46
SPEAKER_00: She was like, no, sorry.
59:48
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
59:49
SPEAKER_01: Um we do love Cleopatra though.
59:51
SPEAKER_01: I think everyone, fabulous woman, like powerful woman.
59:55
SPEAKER_01: I for anyone who's ever seen the traveling, well, I mean, sorry, you've been to Egypt.
1:00:00
SPEAKER_01: But for for those of us who have not been to Egypt, I did see the traveling artifacts that they have.
1:00:07
SPEAKER_00: Um the science center.
1:00:09
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, I saw it in Milwaukee like 10 years ago.
1:00:12
SPEAKER_01: And when when are you?
1:00:14
SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
1:00:14
SPEAKER_01: Oh, you didn't know I went to Milwaukee.
1:00:17
SPEAKER_01: Long story.
1:00:18
SPEAKER_01: But um, I went to go see the Egyptian artifacts.
1:00:21
SPEAKER_01: That's cool.
1:00:22
SPEAKER_01: And they still have um, man, they had Cleopatra's jewelry.
1:00:26
SPEAKER_01: They had her makeup containers, like how she got her eyeliner on.
1:00:31
SPEAKER_01: Where when you think Cleopatra, you think the big winged eyeliner.
1:00:34
SPEAKER_01: Hell yeah.
1:00:35
SPEAKER_01: And they had the actual containers and her brushes that she did her makeup with.
1:00:40
SPEAKER_01: And I was I remember just staring at it in awe, like that is something.
1:00:46
SPEAKER_00: What would you want people to find of yours in 2000 years?
1:00:49
SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's a good question.
1:00:50
SPEAKER_01: Remember in season one, we tried to like play a game at the end of every episode?
1:00:54
SPEAKER_01: We did.
1:00:54
SPEAKER_00: If you look back to our early seasons, we had things called segments of it.
1:00:58
SPEAKER_00: And we, it was kind of I think we might have done it for two seasons.
1:01:01
SPEAKER_00: Oh, embarrassing.
1:01:02
SPEAKER_00: Um, it was kind of we just tried to make it a little fun at the end and we tried to ask each other a fun like with our guitar hero microphones from the goodwill.
1:01:09
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, that we recorded on the glass table with tile floor.
1:01:14
SPEAKER_00: Thank you, listeners, for purchasing us new equipment.
1:01:16
SPEAKER_00: We love them.
1:01:16
SPEAKER_00: New microphones.
1:01:17
SPEAKER_00: The dragons are here.
1:01:18
SPEAKER_00: We called them dragons.
1:01:20
SPEAKER_01: Oh, do they have names yet?
1:01:21
SPEAKER_01: Not yet.
1:01:21
SPEAKER_00: We gotta we gotta think about that.
1:01:23
SPEAKER_00: We can't just spring that on everybody.
1:01:24
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
1:01:24
SPEAKER_01: Well if you can think of one item.
1:01:26
SPEAKER_01: One item.
1:01:27
SPEAKER_01: My microphone.
1:01:28
SPEAKER_01: No, I'm just kidding.
1:01:29
SPEAKER_01: I have I'm looking around my room.
1:01:31
SPEAKER_01: This is actually the perfect room to look at because this is all your like treasured possessions.
1:01:34
SPEAKER_01: This room, you you can't see if you're watching the YouTube.
1:01:37
SPEAKER_01: It's only showing my that is what that.
1:01:41
SPEAKER_01: Where's my finger?
1:01:45
SPEAKER_01: This is really hard to do on camera.
1:01:47
SPEAKER_01: Where does it go?
1:01:49
SPEAKER_01: My giant An Boleyn mug.
1:01:51
SPEAKER_00: Why is that so hard to do on camera?
1:01:53
SPEAKER_00: Is that weird?
1:01:54
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you can't do it.
1:01:55
SPEAKER_01: You can't do it like it's because it's smeared.
1:01:57
SPEAKER_01: It's weird.
1:01:58
SPEAKER_01: It's hard.
1:01:58
SPEAKER_01: Um yeah, I don't know.
1:02:00
SPEAKER_01: What about you?
1:02:01
SPEAKER_01: Is that your answer?
1:02:02
SPEAKER_01: It's really stupid.
1:02:03
SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
1:02:03
SPEAKER_01: What's your answer?
1:02:04
SPEAKER_01: Your An Bolyn Mm.
1:02:05
SPEAKER_00: It's not good enough.
1:02:05
SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry.
1:02:06
SPEAKER_00: No, I just didn't think, you know.
1:02:07
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I have to think about it.
1:02:09
SPEAKER_00: You just got that like last year.
1:02:10
SPEAKER_00: I thought it would be something more sentimental.
1:02:12
SPEAKER_00: I really like it.
1:02:13
SPEAKER_00: Oh, damn, you're making me choose.
1:02:14
SPEAKER_00: I'm not in my office.
1:02:15
SPEAKER_00: I don't know what I have in my life.
1:02:16
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, Mrs.
1:02:17
SPEAKER_00: Hedgehog.
1:02:17
SPEAKER_01: That's actually probably the one.
1:02:19
SPEAKER_01: Should I show the audience this?
1:02:20
SPEAKER_00: I have to pause this for the for the actual podcast.
1:02:24
SPEAKER_00: Now we're doing YouTube stuff.
1:02:25
SPEAKER_01: Now we're doing show and tell.
1:02:27
SPEAKER_01: Um, I have the most hideous toy that I got when I was seven.
1:02:31
SPEAKER_01: Mrs.
1:02:32
SPEAKER_01: Hedgehog.
1:02:33
SPEAKER_01: I can't believe she's a last show.
1:02:35
SPEAKER_01: For those of you that are not on the YouTube, I have to describe her.
1:02:40
SPEAKER_01: She's um she's a stif, a German stife toy.
1:02:43
SPEAKER_01: And she's like an old lady-looking hedgehog wearing a dress.
1:02:47
SPEAKER_01: She's hideous.
1:02:49
SPEAKER_01: Everyone hates her, and I don't know why.
1:02:51
SPEAKER_01: Because she's scary.
1:02:52
SPEAKER_00: She's got hedgehoggy hair and like an apron.
1:02:55
SPEAKER_00: Like, what the hell is she?
1:02:56
SPEAKER_00: She's got this little face of like, hmm.
1:02:58
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, she looks like like a my fourth grade teacher.
1:03:02
SPEAKER_01: She looks like my fourth grade teacher too, Mrs.
1:03:05
SPEAKER_00: Fallon.
1:03:05
SPEAKER_00: I'm not gonna say my teacher's name, so I don't want to embarrass her.
1:03:08
SPEAKER_00: I think she passed away.
1:03:09
unknown: That's awful.
1:03:10
SPEAKER_01: Anyways, this represents me.
1:03:11
SPEAKER_01: What would you want them to find of yours?
1:03:15
SPEAKER_01: Oh gosh.
1:03:17
SPEAKER_00: I would really have to think about this.
1:03:20
SPEAKER_00: But as embarrassing as it sounds, like stuck in the past as it sounds, like really like my college class ring.
1:03:28
SPEAKER_00: You're making fun of Mrs.
1:03:30
SPEAKER_00: Hedgehog.
1:03:30
SPEAKER_00: I am, I am.
1:03:31
SPEAKER_00: Because I can't think of anything but has held a lot of sentimentality.
1:03:35
SPEAKER_00: But like every Saturday when like our football team plays, I still wear my class ring.
1:03:39
SPEAKER_00: It's like obviously engraved with like your year and the activities that you did and all of that.
1:03:44
SPEAKER_00: And like it's it's cheesy, but it's just like I wore that for like my whole senior year, and it holds a lot of memories and a lot of value, and it's like it's very corny, but I'm sorry, but it's the only thing that came to my head.
1:03:56
SPEAKER_00: I couldn't think of anything that's very important to me.
1:03:57
SPEAKER_01: So you choose whose artifacts would you be more excited to find well they're gonna pick yours because old ring or the ugliest hedgehog toy you'll ever see.
1:04:08
SPEAKER_01: You have a lot of cute kitschy stuff.
1:04:09
SPEAKER_01: I need a little I need a few more things.
1:04:11
SPEAKER_01: This is my junk room because my husband has very low tolerance to these things being around the house.
1:04:16
SPEAKER_01: So they end up in this room of artifacts.
1:04:19
SPEAKER_01: It's kind of like the conjuring, how like Ed and Lorraine Warren have their room of demonic objects.
1:04:25
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, Miss Petsy.
1:04:26
SPEAKER_01: None of these are denominals in that case.
1:04:30
SPEAKER_00: I will say to wrap it up, Susanna Livescombe did call this room Swish.
1:04:35
SPEAKER_00: She did say Swift, which is pretty cool.
1:04:37
SPEAKER_00: We got on the Zoom call together, the Riverside, whatever, and she's just like, oh, I love what you all.
1:04:42
SPEAKER_00: That's a very swish room.
1:04:44
SPEAKER_00: And Megan died.
1:04:45
SPEAKER_01: That's when my heart just fell because just imagine your hero.
1:04:50
SPEAKER_01: I don't want to be.
1:04:52
SPEAKER_01: Okay, let's not fangirl out over here.
1:04:54
SPEAKER_01: Really not.
1:04:54
SPEAKER_01: But to feel like she saw my office and called it swish, just very cool.
1:04:59
SPEAKER_01: Made I I'm I'm at peace.
1:05:03
SPEAKER_01: I don't mind what happens the rest of my life because that happened, and I'm very happy with that.
1:05:09
SPEAKER_01: So on that note, Miss Elizabeth, any final words?
1:05:16
SPEAKER_00: Remember, now I'm gonna give a monologue at the end.
1:05:20
SPEAKER_00: No, but on the topic of Cleopatra, just remember like Berenice, sometimes it's not the decisions that you make or you pursue in your life.
1:05:30
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes you're put in situations that are beyond your control, and it's just a matter of how you deal with the cards that are dealt.
1:05:37
SPEAKER_00: Beast wish.