Who Was Cleopatra?

1. Alexandria and the Ptolemaic dynasty

Cleopatra VII Thea Philopator was born in early 69 BCE, or possibly late 70 BCE, in Alexandria, the daughter of Ptolemy XII Auletes. Her mother's identity is not certainly known, though she was presumably Cleopatra V Tryphaena, her father's wife. She was a member of the Ptolemaic dynasty, descended from Ptolemy I Soter, a Macedonian Greek general and companion of Alexander the Great, who had taken Egypt after Alexander's death in 323 BCE and founded a dynasty that ruled it for three centuries. The Ptolemies were Greek, not Egyptian: they spoke Greek, they married within the family, and they ruled Egypt as a foreign dynasty. Cleopatra was the exception that proves the rule, and that exception is the key to her reign.

Alexandria, the city where she was born and where she ruled, was one of the great cities of the ancient world. Founded by Alexander the Great, it was the centre of Greek learning, home to the Library and the Musaeum, the scholarly institution attached to it, and a port that traded with the whole Mediterranean. Cleopatra was educated at the Alexandrian court in mathematics, philosophy, oratory and astronomy, and probably studied at the Musaeum. Her childhood tutor was Philostratos, from whom she learned the Greek arts of oratory and philosophy. Her first language was Koine Greek, but she was the first ruler of her dynasty to learn Egyptian, and ancient sources credit her with speaking several other languages, including Latin. That education mattered: it gave her the ability to speak to her Egyptian subjects in their own language, to negotiate with Romans in theirs, and to present herself as both a Greek queen and an Egyptian pharaoh.

The dynasty she inherited was in trouble. Her father, Ptolemy XII, was known as Auletes, the flute player, and he had kept his throne by borrowing heavily from Roman bankers and by paying bribes to Roman politicians. Egypt was rich, but it was in debt, and Rome was the creditor. The kingdom was also divided by famine and by civil war, and the Ptolemaic family itself was divided by murder and rivalry. Cleopatra took the throne in a kingdom that was, in every sense, a prize that Rome was waiting to take. Her achievement was to keep Rome waiting for twenty-one years.

2. The road to the throne: civil war and Caesar

Cleopatra became queen in 51 BCE, on the death of her father Ptolemy XII, co-ruling with her brother Ptolemy XIII, to whom she was married in accordance with Egyptian custom. The marriage was a formality of the dynasty: brother-sister marriage was the Ptolemaic way of keeping power in the family, and it did not prevent the siblings from fighting. A falling-out led to civil war, and Cleopatra was driven from Alexandria by her brother's advisers. She raised an army in Syria and prepared to fight her way back, and the war was still unresolved when Rome intervened, as it always did in the affairs of the eastern Mediterranean.

In 48 BCE the Roman general Julius Caesar arrived in Alexandria in pursuit of his rival Pompey, who had fled to Egypt after his defeat in the civil war. Ptolemy XIII had Pompey killed, hoping to win Caesar's favour, and Caesar took Cleopatra's side instead. The story of how Cleopatra met Caesar is one of the most famous in history: according to Plutarch, she had herself smuggled into the palace rolled in a carpet, or in a sack of laundry, and unrolled at Caesar's feet. The story may be embroidered, but the alliance was real. Caesar was the most powerful man in the Roman world, and Cleopatra needed him; she was a clever, educated queen, and Caesar needed her to give his intervention in Egypt a legitimate face. Ptolemy XIII died in the fighting, and Cleopatra ruled with her younger brother Ptolemy XIV.

Her son by Caesar, Ptolemy XV Caesarion, was born in 47 BCE, and the child's very name — little Caesar — was a political statement. She travelled to Rome as a client queen in 46 and 44 BCE and was staying at Caesar's villa when he was assassinated in March 44 BCE. After Caesar's death and the death of Ptolemy XIV, she named Caesarion co-ruler. The Roman sojourn is often treated as a romantic interlude, but it was a diplomatic mission: Cleopatra was in Rome to secure recognition for her son and for her kingdom, and Caesar's assassination destroyed the settlement she had come to make. She returned to Egypt and began again, with a new Roman partner to find.

3. Mark Antony and the alliance of the East

From 41 BCE Cleopatra was allied with Mark Antony, whom she met at Tarsus, in what is now Turkey. Antony was, after Caesar's death, one of the two most powerful men in Rome, and he needed Egypt's wealth and grain for his wars in the East. Cleopatra needed Antony's armies to protect her kingdom. The meeting at Tarsus is described by Plutarch in one of the most vivid passages in ancient history: Cleopatra arrived on a barge with a gilded stern, purple sails and silver oars, dressed as the goddess Aphrodite, and Antony was captivated. The description is Roman, and it is designed to make her look like a seductress. The reality was a negotiation between two rulers who needed each other, and the romance, if it was a romance, came second to the politics.

They had three children together, and in 34 BCE, at the Donations of Alexandria, Antony proclaimed their children rulers over territories in the east. The Donations were a political act: Antony was giving Roman territory in the East to Cleopatra's children, and he was doing it in a ceremony in Alexandria, not in Rome. Octavian, Antony's rival in Rome and Caesar's adopted heir, used the event to turn Rome against her. He presented Antony as a man who had been corrupted by an Eastern queen, who had abandoned Rome for Egypt, and who was giving away the empire to his lover's children. The propaganda was effective, and it has shaped Cleopatra's reputation ever since. The Donations were also, from Cleopatra's point of view, a success: they made her children kings and queens, and they made Egypt the centre of an Eastern empire that might have rivalled Rome.

The alliance with Antony lasted for a decade, and it was the longest period of stability in Cleopatra's reign. Egypt prospered, Alexandria was rebuilt, and Cleopatra's administration, which had been in chaos when she took the throne, was put in order. The coins she minted show her portrait, and the inscriptions show her as a pharaoh in the Egyptian tradition, not only as a Greek queen. The Egyptian sources, which modern historians have used to revise the Roman picture, describe a ruler who elevated scholars and who administered her kingdom competently. The Roman sources, which dominated the story for two thousand years, describe a seductress. Both cannot be true, and the evidence — the coins, the inscriptions, the administrative records — supports the Egyptian version.

4. Actium and the fall of Egypt

Octavian declared war, and after the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra's fleet at the Battle of Actium on 2 September 31 BCE, his forces invaded Egypt. The battle of Actium is one of the decisive battles of history, and it is also one of the most argued over. The traditional account, from Roman sources, says that Cleopatra's ships fled in the middle of the battle, and that Antony followed her, abandoning his fleet. Modern historians have questioned that account, suggesting that the flight was a planned withdrawal that went wrong, or that the Roman version was written to make Antony look weak and Cleopatra look treacherous. What is certain is that the battle was lost, that Antony and Cleopatra retreated to Egypt, and that Octavian followed them.

Antony died by suicide, and Cleopatra died in August 30 BCE, in Alexandria, aged 39. The manner of her death is not certainly known. The most famous account, from Plutarch, says she died by the bite of an asp, a poisonous snake, smuggled to her in a basket of figs. Modern historians note that other methods are possible, and that the snake story may be Roman propaganda, designed to make her death look exotic and to hide the possibility that she was murdered or that she took poison. The uncertainty is appropriate: the death of Cleopatra is one of those historical events where the legend has replaced the evidence, and where the honest answer is that we do not know. Egypt became a province of the Roman Empire, and Caesarion, her son by Caesar, was killed on Octavian's orders, on the grounds that there could not be two Caesars.

The fall of Egypt was the end of the Hellenistic world, the world of Greek kingdoms that had grown up after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE. Cleopatra was the last active Hellenistic ruler, and her death marks the end of that world. The Roman Empire that replaced it would last for centuries, and it would remember Cleopatra as the enemy it had defeated. The victory was celebrated in Rome with a triumph, in which an image of Cleopatra was carried through the streets, and the poets of the Augustan age — Virgil, Horace and Propertius — wrote about her as a dangerous woman who had threatened Rome. The image they created would dominate European art and literature for two thousand years.

5. The Roman portrait: seductress, witch and enemy

Roman historians and poets left a hostile portrait of Cleopatra as a seductress who ruined Antony, and that image dominated European art and literature for centuries, most famously in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. The play, written around 1607, is the most influential portrait of Cleopatra in English, and it is a great play, but it is not history. Shakespeare's Cleopatra is a passionate, changeable, magnificent woman who loves Antony and destroys him, and the play's poetry has fixed that image in the minds of readers who have never read Plutarch or the Egyptian sources. The play is a work of art, and it should be read as one, not as a biography.

The Roman portrait was political, and its politics are easy to understand. Octavian, who became the emperor Augustus, needed to justify a war against a fellow Roman, Antony, and the easiest way to do it was to blame a foreign woman. If Antony had been corrupted by Cleopatra, then the war was not a civil war but a war against a foreign enemy, and Octavian was not a usurper but a saviour. The poets who wrote for Augustus took up the theme, and the image of Cleopatra as a witch, a drunkard and a seductress was born. The image was useful, and it was repeated for centuries, in painting, in opera and in film. The 1963 film Cleopatra, starring Elizabeth Taylor, is the most famous version of the Roman portrait, and it is a spectacle, not a history.

The modern revision of Cleopatra began in the twentieth century, when historians started to read the Egyptian sources and to study her coins and inscriptions. The coins show a woman with a strong nose and a determined chin, not the beauty of legend, and the inscriptions show a ruler who presented herself as a pharaoh, in the Egyptian tradition, and as a Greek queen. The administrative records show a competent government. The revision does not make Cleopatra a saint: she was a ruthless politician who had her siblings killed and who made alliances for power. But it does make her a stateswoman rather than a seductress, and that is a more accurate picture. The lesson of Cleopatra's reputation is a lesson about sources: the history of a defeated ruler is written by the victors, and the victors are not reliable witnesses.

6. The stateswoman: language, administration and survival

Cleopatra's achievement was political survival. She took the throne of a kingdom crippled by her father's debts, famine and civil war, and kept it independent for 21 years while Rome absorbed the rest of the Mediterranean world, doing it through diplomacy, alliances with Caesar and then Antony, and administration at Alexandria. She was the first ruler of her dynasty to learn Egyptian, spoke several languages, and was educated in mathematics, philosophy, oratory and astronomy. Egyptian sources described her as a ruler who elevated scholars, and modern historians have come to see her as a capable stateswoman rather than the figure of Roman propaganda. The survival was not an accident: it was the result of a deliberate policy, carried out over two decades, by a ruler who understood both Rome and Egypt.

The language is the key to understanding her. The Ptolemies had ruled Egypt for three centuries without learning Egyptian, and they had governed through Greek officials. Cleopatra learned Egyptian, and she presented herself to her Egyptian subjects as a pharaoh, in the Egyptian style, with Egyptian titles and Egyptian rituals. The decision was political: it told the Egyptians that their queen was one of them, and it told the Greeks that she was a ruler who could speak to both peoples. The ability to speak several languages was also a diplomatic asset: she could negotiate with Romans in Latin, with Greeks in Greek, and with Egyptians in Egyptian, without an interpreter. In a world where rulers depended on translators, that was a real advantage, and it is one of the reasons ancient sources praise her intelligence.

The administration is the other half of the achievement. Egypt was a rich country, and its wealth came from the Nile, from grain, and from the taxes that the Ptolemaic bureaucracy collected. Cleopatra's government kept that system working, through famine and civil war, and it kept Alexandria as a centre of learning. The patronage of scholars was not vanity: it was a way of showing that Egypt was still a civilised kingdom, and that its queen was a patron of culture as well as a politician. The comparison with Alexander the Great, the founder of her dynasty, is instructive. Alexander conquered the known world in a decade and died at thirty-two; Cleopatra held a single kingdom together for twenty-one years and died at thirty-nine. The conquest is more famous, but the survival is, in its own way, the harder achievement.

7. Legacy: the last pharaoh and the afterlife of a reputation

Cleopatra was the last active ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt and the last active Hellenistic pharaoh, and her death in 30 BCE marks the end of an era. The Hellenistic world, which had begun with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE, ended with hers. The Roman world that followed would remember her as an enemy, and the memory would be shaped by the victors. But the memory has changed, and the change is itself part of her legacy: the story of how a reputation is made, unmade and remade is one of the most interesting stories in history, and Cleopatra's is the best example of it.

Her afterlife in art and literature is enormous. Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra is the most famous play about her, but she has been painted by hundreds of artists, from the Renaissance to the present, and she has been played on screen by some of the most famous actresses in the history of film. The images vary: sometimes she is a beauty, sometimes a witch, sometimes a stateswoman. The variety is the point: each age has made the Cleopatra it needed, and the Cleopatra of the twenty-first century, the multilingual stateswoman who held her kingdom together, is as much a product of our age as the seductress was a product of Rome's. The honest reader should be aware of that, and should ask, of every portrait, who painted it and why.

For readers who want to go further, Plutarch's Life of Antony is the best ancient source, read with the knowledge that Plutarch was writing a century after the events and that he was a Greek writing for Romans. The modern biographies by Stacy Schiff and by Duane Roller are the best starting points for the revised picture, and the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art hold the coins and the artefacts that show her as she presented herself. The biography on this site gives the verified facts of her life, and the sources below are the best places to follow the argument about her reputation. She was a queen who spoke many languages, who ruled for twenty-one years, and who died at thirty-nine; the rest is interpretation, and the interpretation is still changing.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Cleopatra, queen of Egypt
• Wikipedia — Cleopatra
• World History Encyclopedia — Cleopatra VII
• BBC History — Cleopatra

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• Who Is Wasim Akram? — Wasim Akram is Pakistan's greatest fast bowler, the first to 500 ODI wickets and hero of the 1992 World Cup final, famed as the master of swing.
• Who Is Xi Jinping? — Xi Jinping has led China since 2012 as general secretary of the Communist Party and since 2013 as president, shaping its policies and vision.
• Who Is Zinedine Zidane? — Zinedine Zidane won the World Cup as a player and three Champions Leagues as a manager, and in July 2026 was appointed head coach of France.
• Who Was A. P. J. Abdul Kalam? — A. P. J. Abdul Kalam rose from a poor boyhood in Rameswaram to lead India's space and missile programmes, then served as the country's 11th president.
• Who Was Abdul Sattar Edhi? — Abdul Sattar Edhi built Pakistan's largest welfare network from a single free dispensary. This explains his life, his foundation and his legacy.
• Who Was Abdus Salam? — Abdus Salam won the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for unifying two forces of nature. This explains his science, his institutions and his contested legacy.
• Who Was Abraham Lincoln? — Abraham Lincoln preserved the Union through the Civil War and ended slavery. This explains his rise, his presidency and his contested legacy.
• Who Was Ada Lovelace? — Ada Lovelace published the first program for a programmable machine in 1843. This explains her notes, her vision of computing and the debate over her role.
• Who Was Adolf Hitler? — Adolf Hitler led the Nazi Party and ruled Germany as dictator from 1933 to 1945, started the Second World War in Europe and was central to the Holocaust.
• Who Was Alan Turing? — Alan Turing defined modern computing, broke German naval Enigma and proposed the Turing test. This explains his science, his war work and his tragic end.
• Who Was Albert Einstein? — Albert Einstein rewrote physics with relativity and won the Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect. This explains his ideas, his life and his legacy.
• Who Was Alexander Graham Bell? — Alexander Graham Bell patented the first practical telephone in 1876. This explains his work with the deaf, the patent fight and his wider inventions.
• Who Was Alexander the Great? — Alexander the Great built one of history's largest empires before dying at 32. This explains his conquests, his cities and the debate over his legacy.
• Who Was Alfred Nobel? — Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, held 355 patents and founded the Nobel Prizes. This explains his explosives empire, his will and the prizes' legacy.
• Who Was Allama Iqbal? — Allama Iqbal was Pakistan's national poet, whose ideas shaped the case for Pakistan. This explains his poetry, his philosophy and his legacy.
• Who Was Benazir Bhutto? — Benazir Bhutto was the first woman to lead a Muslim-majority country, serving as prime minister of Pakistan in 1988-90 and 1993-96.
• Who Was Bob Marley? — Bob Marley took reggae from Jamaica to the world and became a symbol of peace, resistance and unity. This explains his life, his music and his legacy.
• Who Was Bruce Lee? — Bruce Lee was the martial artist and actor who carried Hong Kong action cinema to the world and founded Jeet Kune Do, leaving a lasting influence.
• Who Was Charles Darwin? — Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, published in On the Origin of Species in 1859, became the foundation of modern biology.
• Who Was Charles Dickens? — Charles Dickens was the greatest novelist of the Victorian era, whose serialised novels mixed comedy, social criticism and unforgettable characters.
• Who Was Charlie Chaplin? — Charlie Chaplin created the Little Tramp, the most famous screen character of the silent era, and directed classics City Lights and The Great Dictator.
• Who Was Diego Maradona? — Diego Maradona was an Argentine footballer who captained Argentina to the 1986 World Cup and is widely regarded as one of the greatest players in history.
• Who Was Don Bradman? — Don Bradman was an Australian cricketer who averaged 99.94 in Test cricket, a record so far ahead of any other batsman that it remains famous in sport.
• Who Was Elvis Presley? — Elvis Presley took gospel, country and rhythm and blues and turned them into rock and roll, becoming the most famous singer of his century.
• Who Was Emily Dickinson? — Emily Dickinson was an American poet who wrote nearly 1,800 poems in private in Amherst, Massachusetts, and was barely published in her lifetime.
• Who Was Faiz Ahmed Faiz? — Faiz Ahmed Faiz was Pakistan's most celebrated modern Urdu poet, whose verse joined romantic lyricism with resistance to injustice.
• Who Was Franz Beckenbauer? — Franz Beckenbauer was a German footballer known as Der Kaiser, who won the World Cup as captain in 1974 and as manager in 1990.
• Who Was Freddie Mercury? — Freddie Mercury was the lead singer of Queen, a four-octave voice and fearless showman who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions.
• Who Was Frida Kahlo? — Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for uncompromising, brilliantly coloured self-portraits exploring identity, the body and death.
• Who Was Galileo Galilei? — Galileo Galilei reshaped astronomy with his telescopic discoveries of 1610, defended a Sun-centred universe, and was tried by the Inquisition in 1633.
• Who Was Genghis Khan? — Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes and built the largest contiguous land empire in history, a conqueror and lawgiver whose legacy is still argued over.
• Who Was George Washington? — George Washington won American independence, presided over the Constitutional Convention, and as first president defined the office — then walked away.
• Who Was Guglielmo Marconi? — Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor who built the first practical wireless telegraph and sent the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901.
• Who Was Henry Ford? — Henry Ford was an American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company, built the Model T and perfected the moving assembly line.
• Who Was Isaac Newton? — Isaac Newton wrote the laws of motion and universal gravitation, invented calculus and transformed optics, leaving a lasting legacy in science.
• Who Was James Watt? — James Watt did not invent the steam engine, but his separate condenser of 1765 made it efficient enough to power the Industrial Revolution.
• Who Was Jane Austen? — Jane Austen published six novels in her lifetime, anonymously, and died at 41. This explains her life, her novels, her irony and her growing reputation.
• Who Was Jesus Christ? — Jesus of Nazareth is the central figure of Christianity, the world's largest religion. This explains his life in the Gospels, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Johan Cruyff? — Johan Cruyff was the star of Total Football, won three Ballon d'Or awards, and as a manager built the Barcelona team that shaped modern football.
• Who Was Johannes Gutenberg? — Johannes Gutenberg built the first mechanised printing press in Europe and printed the Gutenberg Bible around 1455, changing how the world shared ideas.
• Who Was John Keats? — John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome at 25, having written his six great odes in a single year. This explains his short life, his poetry and his fame.
• Who Was Joseph Stalin? — Joseph Stalin led the Soviet Union from the 1920s until 1953, industrialised the country and led it through the Second World War, ruling through terror.
• Who Was Julius Caesar? — Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, crossed the Rubicon and remade Rome's calendar and government, and was murdered by senators who feared he would be king.
• Who Was Kobe Bryant? — Kobe Bryant won five NBA championships with the Los Angeles Lakers and became known for the Mamba Mentality, on and off the court.
• Who Was Leo Tolstoy? — Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, then abandoned literary fame for a radical moral philosophy that influenced Gandhi and the world.
• Who Was Leonardo da Vinci? — Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and filled notebooks with anatomy and engineering, becoming the symbol of the Renaissance.
• Who Was Ludwig van Beethoven? — Ludwig van Beethoven wrote nine symphonies, 32 piano sonatas and the Missa Solemnis, much of it while deaf. This explains his life and legacy.
• Who Was Mahatma Gandhi? — Mahatma Gandhi led India to independence through nonviolent resistance, and his ideas shaped civil-rights movements worldwide.
• Who Was Mao Zedong? — Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China in 1949 and led it until 1976, bringing unification and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
• Who Was Margaret Thatcher? — Margaret Thatcher was the first woman to serve as British prime minister, leading the UK from 1979 to 1990 through reform, the Falklands War and division.
• Who Was Marie Curie? — Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, a pioneer of radioactivity research.
• Who Was Marilyn Monroe? — Marilyn Monroe was the biggest star of the 1950s, the blonde bombshell of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot, who fought the studio system.
• Who Was Mark Twain? — Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and became America's most famous humorist.
• Who Was Maya Angelou? — Maya Angelou was a poet, memoirist and civil rights activist whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings made her widely read.
• Who Was Michael Jackson? — Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, made Thriller, the best-selling album in history, and changed music video, dance and pop stardom.
• Who Was Mirza Ghalib? — Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) is the pre-eminent Urdu and Persian poet of the last Mughal era, whose ghazals on love, loss and doubt are still recited.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali Jinnah? — Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the barrister and statesman who led the All-India Muslim League and became Pakistan's first Governor-General in 1947.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali? — Muhammad Ali was the three-time heavyweight champion who called himself The Greatest, and the most famous athlete of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Napoleon Bonaparte? — Napoleon Bonaparte rose from Corsica to Emperor of the French, redrew the map of Europe, and left a legal code that still shapes law across the world.
• Who Was Nelson Mandela? — Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison under apartheid, then became South Africa's first democratically elected president and a Nobel Peace laureate.
• Who Was Nikola Tesla? — Nikola Tesla developed the alternating-current power system, the induction motor and the Tesla coil, making long-distance electric power practical.
• Who Was Osama bin Laden? — Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in 1988 and organised the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed.
• Who Was Pablo Neruda? — Pablo Neruda was Chile's great poet, a Nobel laureate, a communist senator and a diplomat. This explains his poetry, his politics and his death.
• Who Was Pablo Picasso? — Pablo Picasso co-founded Cubism, painted Guernica, and spent 75 years breaking the rules of art — the most influential artist of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Pelé? — Pele is the only footballer to win three World Cups, the youngest winner, and the game's first global icon. This is his life, his goals and his legacy.
• Who Was Pope Francis? The People's Pope — Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit pope, led the Catholic Church from 2013 to 2025 with an emphasis on mercy and the poor.
• Who Was Prophet Muhammad? — The Prophet Muhammad is the founder of Islam, the world's second-largest religion. This explains his life, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Queen Elizabeth II? — Queen Elizabeth II reigned for 70 years, from 1952 to 2022 — the longest reign in British history. This explains her life, her reign and her legacy.
• Who Was Rabindranath Tagore? — Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the author of the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
• Who Was Rosa Parks? — Rosa Parks was not a tired seamstress who acted on impulse. She was a trained activist and NAACP secretary whose bus refusal was a deliberate act.
• Who Was Rosalind Franklin? — Rosalind Franklin's X-ray image, Photograph 51, gave Watson and Crick the key evidence for the double helix. This is her life and the credit debate.
• Who Was Rumi? — Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet of Konya, wrote the Masnavi and the Divan-e Shams, and became the most widely read poet in the world.
• Who Was Shane Warne? — Shane Warne took 708 Test wickets, bowled the Ball of the Century in 1993 and won the 1999 World Cup with Australia. This explains his career.
• Who Was Stephen Hawking? — Stephen Hawking was a theoretical physicist who showed that black holes emit radiation and wrote A Brief History of Time. He died in 2018, aged 76.
• Who Was Steve Jobs? — Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, was forced out in 1985, built Pixar, and returned to launch the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. He died in 2011, aged 56.
• Who Was Thomas Edison? — Thomas Edison held 1,093 US patents, invented the phonograph and the practical incandescent lamp, and built the first commercial electric power system.
• Who Was Vincent van Gogh? — Vincent van Gogh produced about 2,100 artworks in a single decade, including The Starry Night and Sunflowers, and became famous only after his death at 37.
• Who Was William Shakespeare? — William Shakespeare is the most performed playwright in history, yet almost nothing is reliably known about his private life.
• Who Was William Wordsworth? — William Wordsworth launched English Romanticism with Lyrical Ballads and wrote The Prelude, the great autobiographical poem. This explains his life.
• Who Was Winston Churchill? — Winston Churchill led Britain through the Second World War and won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his record on empire is still debated.
• Who Was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who composed more than 600 works before his death at 35, defining the Classical era.
• Why Van Gogh Became Famous After Death — Vincent van Gogh died in 1890 almost unknown, and within a few decades his paintings were among the most loved in the world.