All in all it is loosely based on a very literal reading of Roman political poetry with a healthy helping of inaccurate tropes. I am going to divide this post into parts and link to them so you can skip directly to the section on The Costumes, Alexandria and Court Culture, The Tl;DR and of course the individual episodes,S2E2: Son of Hades, S2 E7 A Necessary Fiction and S2 E8 Deus Impeditio Esuritori Nullus (No God Can Stop a Hungry Man) and S2E10: De Patre Vostro. Bear in mind that I enjoyed the show and have no hard feelings for it, I just want to compare it to the historical record.

#Part 1: Cleopatra's Life and Times vs Her Story Arc

The show really takes artistic license when it comes to not only the events of her life, but the sequence they happened in as well as the *length of time that elapses (for reference Caesarion should be around 17 at the time of her demise not 10 as is portrayed.).

##Season 1, Episode 8: Caesarion

When Julius Caesar landed in Egypt in late 48 BCE Cleopatra had been ruling Egypt since around 51 BCE and we think she more or less forced her younger brother Ptolemy and his advisors out of the picture until of course she made the mistake of ticking off the commanders of the Roman legions acting as mercenaries to the Ptolemids by supporting Pompey the Great in the civil war (the Gabiniani did not appreciate being sent off to fight in Rome's wars, and they seem to have been disavowed by this time) and they promptly moved to support a brewing coup spearheaded by Ptolemy's tutors Pothinus and Theodotus as well as the Greek-Egyptian general Achillas. The tl;dr is that Cleopatra flees the capital and reaches out to her supporters in Upper Egypt and Syria to attempt to invade Egypt and battle the forces of Ptolemy which had amassed around the fortified city of Pelusium. However nothing can ever be simple in life and Pompey the Great just so happened to have been fleeing Pharsalus and arrived in Egypt only to be betrayed and stabbed/beheaded by his own lieutenants and those of Ptolemy. So far pretty close to what happens in the show, and anything else is attributable to time constraints but then the show first introduces Cleopatra to us and everything goes to pot.

When we first see her she is shown to be an opium addict which there is literally no reason to assume and every reason not to believe. Not only is there not a single reference or even implication of this that is known to historians, but it contradicts both the most positive and negative accounts of her character. No, I am not saying this because recreational opium use is not widely documented in Ptolemaic Egypt, or because I have never heard it mentioned in connection to the Ptolemaic dynasty. I say this because despite her association with medicine, pharmacology, and (in Roman and Jewish literature) potions and magic, she is never once said to indulge in recreational use of drugs or alchemical concoctions. The two closest claims to this I have come across are the implications in the Roman political poetry of Horace that she was dependant on wine

By Fortune's sweet new wine befool'd, In hope's ungovern'd weakness strong To hope for all; but soon she cool'd, To see one ship from burning 'scape; Great Caesar taught her dizzy brain, Made mad by Mareotic grape, To feel the sobering truth of pain,

This is partially reflected in the late poetic epic Pharsalia's characterisation of Cleopatra as a hedonistic schemer and can perhaps be interpreted from Plutarch's anecdote of how Cleopatra came to adopt many of his favourite hobbies and even drank with him which is more damning because this is Marc Antony and not anyone else without a reputation for drunkenness. The other accusations which may have inspired this is the familiar implication of Cleopatra using drugs, potions or magic to bewitch Julius Caesar and/or Marc Antony, as is expressed by Lucan, Josephus, Dio and others. Of course, the potions or drugs are never named and in any case are only ever said to have been used by Cleopatra on others. Of course, the most important thing to note about these claims is that for obvious reasons the vague mentions of drugs and witchcraft are not taken seriously, and that most modern historians disregard the insinuation of alcoholism present in Roman poetic accounts as it happens to be something of a trope applied to the stereotypical decadent tyrant and especially in light of such a lack of supporting literary evidence. In short, nowhere was it ever said by anyone (except the writers of the show I guess) that Cleopatra did opium, unlike Marcus Aurelius (who would have guessed that one?) and there is little evidence that she was of an addictive or reckless personality besides although it is possible that alcoholism may have been a factor at least once Antony entered the picture but again this is conjecture. On the whole however, it is clear that she was capable and personally active in the administration of her kingdom for her reign, as well as being supposedly sharp and charismatic even around the time of her death, and was not debilitated or compromised by substance abuse. And actually, her name was also not "Cleopatra Selene Philopator", there was no Ptolemaic queen bearing that name. Cleopatra Thea Philopater or Cleopatra Neotera Thea were epithets of Cleopatra VII (the one we are talking about) and Cleopatra Selene I was one of her ancestors while Cleopatra Selene II was her daughter. I honestly have no idea why this change was made, in all likelihood the writers thought it sounded good so they just ran with it.

In the show Caesar sends Titus Pullo and Lucius Vorenus to safely retrieve Cleopatra and bring her to Alexandria, and while travelling with them she gets Pullo to impregnate her so she can pass off the child as Caesar's. Well that sentence also happens to be one of the most inaccurate things I have had to type. First of all Caesar never actually sent anyone to bring Cleopatra to Caesar, although she sent several messengers to negotiate with him and eventually went to meet him in person, probably at his invitation. For this reason she sailed up the coast and approached the palace in secret via the harbour, accompanied only by a freedman named Apollodorus the Sicilian (likely a Sicilian) who rowed the boat and aided her in her infiltration of the palace. Not only was she unaccompanied by Roman soldiers, but Pullo and Vorenus in all likelihood never even accompanied Caesar to Egypt in the first place, being only very briefly mentioned in Caesar's (supposedly) account of the Gallic Wars, and for obvious reasons Cleopatra being found by two legionaries seems unrealistic but as I understand it Pullo and Vorenus are supposed to go through some exceedingly unrealistic adventures like having previously found a lost eagle standard in Egypt that was never lost in the first place. Historically she had been at the head of an army and preparing for a confrontation with Ptolemy's forces outside Pelusium and yes Hellenistic rulers could be assassinated while preparing for armed conflict (it seems like people can be assassinated anywhere) but she would certainly not have been helpless as in the show. Then once you try to deconstruct the character of Cleopatra's thought process we run into other problems, after all how dies she know that sleeping with Vorenus or Pullo will ensure a pregnancy and that her pregnancy and the subsequent birth (of a son for sure) will all go off without a hitch with enough certainty that makes it a plan, why does she assume that Caesar will accept the child (which historically he never did), and that no one would find out when it seems as if her entire entourage knows? What are the odds that actually would work? It is a really bad plan if you do not build all kinds of inaccurate but convenient premises around it. Beyond this we actually have no idea when Caesarion was conceived, it might have been around the time they met, but we can only be relatively certain it was sometime before Caesar left Egypt and almost certainly after he began to take her side in the civil war. Some scholars have theorised that it was immediately based on a stela listing the anniversary of a King's reign as June but not only has the translation of the name as King Caesar been hotly disputed by Egyptologists (it has been alternatively translated as Pharaoh Djoser and not even belonging to the same period, but even King Caesar is sometimes used to refer to Roman emperors so it could still be not be Caesarion) but with no way of knowing if it reflects his birth date his conception can certainly not be ascertained, others have argued that it was during the Siege of Alexandria or even their cruise down the Nile, while still others have theorised (far less convincingly) that he was conceived during her visit to Rome based on an interpretation of Cicero's letters.