Cleopatra and Caesar review: Egypt's queen, Rome's general, a secret affair

Updated 29 Sep 2026

Quick facts

A setting Candy rarely uses

Most Candy series stay in the present day, inside a family home, an office or a hotel. Cleopatra and Caesar heads back to antiquity and gives the lead roles to history’s most famous lovers. That setting alone makes it a rarity in the catalogue, and few Candy synopses try to carry this much story.

Plot outline

Cleopatra targets Julius Caesar, and before long their forbidden affair has her expecting his child. Then the story widens: the two empires collide, Caesar’s wife joins Mark Antony in a bid for revenge, and Caesar is caught choosing between Rome and a queen who now decides where his life goes.

Treat the history as a launch pad, not a rulebook; Candy’s Fantasy tag says as much. At heart this is a period romance built around an affair that was never supposed to happen.

Where it shines, where it strains

• Big ambitions. A pregnancy, a wife out for revenge, Mark Antony in the role of rival and a decision with an empire riding on it: few five-parters try to keep this many plates spinning.
• Cleopatra runs the show. She makes the first play for Caesar and ends the synopsis holding the power.
• Tight quarters. Fitting all that into five episodes leaves little breathing room, so the big turns will likely arrive in quick succession. Grand battles and deep historical texture are unlikely; leave those hopes at the palace gate.

Price check

The opening pair of episodes costs you nothing and gives you the premise, the palace setting and a fair sense of whether antiquity is your thing. The three locked episodes after them run 12 tokens apiece, so the full set comes to 36 tokens, which a yearly plan turns into about $1.44, a quarterly plan into $3.24 and a monthly plan into $5.04. Explicitness tops out too, with a score of 5 out of 5.

Who it will please

Anyone who has had enough of stepfamilies and office flings gets a dose of spectacle from this series: palaces, power plays and a queen who never hides what she is after. Skip it if your taste runs to modern, everyday settings, or if you are a history fan who cannot stand seeing real events handled loosely.

Next to Candy’s other fantasy series

If the crown is what draws you, Sworn to the Queen is the nearest match: a queen leads that one too, it is tagged both Fantasy and Taboo, and it carries the same rating, 5 out of 5, at the same 36-token price. To lean harder into the supernatural, try Dragon Queen’s Dark Desire or Vampire’s Lust, two standard five-parters that also score 5 out of 5.

Our take

Cleopatra and Caesar reaches higher than almost anything else on Candy, piling a romance out of the history books, a pregnancy, a revenge plot and the fate of an empire into one premise. Five episodes may lack the room to do it all justice, but the ancient backdrop is a welcome break, it sits at the top of our rating scale and it costs no more than the usual 36 tokens. It is worth your time, in our view.