Shelley Haley, professor of classics and a frequent commentator on Cleopatra, says the Queen of the Nile has been portrayed in recent made-for-TV movies as a "sexy siren who distracted good Roman men from their job." But Haley says there?s more to Cleopatra. "I think she was a brilliant political strategist who was very perceptive, ambitious and wanted autonomy and independence for Egypt," she says.
The Field Museum exhibition is the only North American stop for the exhibit, which is on loan from the British Museum. Haley says the exhibit is important because it includes many recent archaeological finds related to Cleopatra.
In fact, Haley thinks it?s so important that she rented a bus and took the 25 students in her Classics 374 class (Ancient Egypt) on a whirlwind 24-hour field trip to the Field Museum in November. "It?s a once in a lifetime opportunity to see these artifacts exhibited together," Haley explains. "It?s about Cleopatra and about the age. Ancient Egypt can seem so distant and inaccessible that it takes on mystical, sci-fi qualities -- the idea that ?aliens had to have built the pyramids.? An exhibit like this brings home the point to students in the 21st century that the ancient Egyptians -- even ones as ?recent? as Cleopatra -- were human just like us, with the same fears, the same loves and desires, the same capacity for good and for evil," Haley said.
Haley has written extensively on ancient Rome and Egypt, and in 1997 appeared in a BBC "Time Watch" segment about the life of Cleopatra. She was also interviewed for The Learning Channel's series, "Rome: Power & Glory." In 1999 she spent a month is South Africa as a Foreign Research Fellow sponsored by the University of South Africa, where she participated in the biennial conference of the Classical Association of South Africa and a Childhood in Antiquity conference. Haley was a contributor to the African American Women Writers Series, 1910-1940 (1995) and has published articles in classical journals such as Historia, Classical World and Classica et Mediaevalia.
Visit the Field Museum Online for more information on Cleopatra.
