Death of Cleopatra

• 1. Introduction

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  Cleopatra VII died on either the 10th or the 12th of August, 30 BC, in Alexandria, at the age of thirty-nine. She was the last ruler of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt, a pharaoh of Macedonian Greek descent, and her death closed one of the ancient world's most turbulent chapters. What happened in her final hours has never been fully settled. Did she die from the bite of an Egyptian cobra smuggled to her in a basket of figs? Did she use a hairpin to scratch poison into her own skin? Or did her Roman rival Octavian, the man who would become Rome's first emperor, arrange her death and then cover it up? Those questions have never stopped being asked. Her tomb has never been found. And the story of her death has been painted, sculpted, staged, and filmed hundreds of times across nearly two thousand years.

• 2. The Road to Alexandria

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  Following the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC, three Roman statesmen, Octavian, Mark Antony, and Aemilius Lepidus, formed the Second Triumvirate. After Lepidus was marginalized and eventually placed under house arrest by Octavian, the remaining two men divided the Roman world between them: Antony took the Greek East, Octavian the Latin West. Cleopatra had already produced a son, Caesarion, through an extramarital affair with Julius Caesar. She later developed a relationship with Antony, and with her encouragement, he officially divorced Octavian's sister Octavia Minor in 32 BC. He had likely already married Cleopatra during the Donations of Alexandria in 34 BC. When Octavian revealed the contents of Antony's will, which outlined Cleopatra's ambitions for Roman territory, the Roman Senate declared war on her. At the naval Battle of Actium in the Ambracian Gulf of Greece in 31 BC, Cleopatra and Antony were defeated and retreated to Egypt. Octavian's forces invaded Egypt early in 30 BC, capturing Pelousion near its eastern border while his officer Cornelius Gallus marched from Cyrene and took Paraitonion to the west. On the 1st of August, 30 BC, Antony scored a small victory near Alexandria's hippodrome, but his naval fleet and cavalry defected soon after.

• 3. The Final Days

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  With Octavian's forces inside Alexandria, Cleopatra withdrew to her tomb with her closest attendants and sent a false message to Antony claiming she had already killed herself. Antony ordered his slave Eros to execute him, but Eros turned the sword on himself instead. In despair, Antony stabbed himself through the stomach. Plutarch recounts that he was still alive when carried into Cleopatra's tomb, telling her in his dying words that he would die honorably and that she might trust a man named Gaius Proculeius on Octavian's side. That same Proculeius used a ladder to climb through a window and detain Cleopatra before she could burn herself and her treasury. She was escorted to the palace, where she met Octavian and where three of her children were also being held: Alexander Helios, Cleopatra Selene II, and Ptolemy Philadelphus. As related by Livy, she told Octavian plainly, "I will not be led in a triumph." His answer was cryptic: her life would be spared. He gave her no details. When a spy later informed her that Octavian planned to parade her as a prisoner in Rome, she made her decision. Plutarch describes her final preparations in almost ritual terms: a bath, and then a fine meal that included figs brought to her in a basket. Octavian had ordered his freedman Epaphroditus to guard her and prevent any suicide attempt. Cleopatra and her handmaidens deceived him. She sent Octavian a note asking to be buried beside Antony. By the time his messengers broke down her door, it was too late. Plutarch records the scene: her handmaiden Iras was dying at Cleopatra's feet, and Charmion was adjusting the queen's diadem before she herself fell.

• 4. What Killed Her

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  Cleopatra's personal physician Olympos, cited by Plutarch, mentioned neither an asp bite nor any other cause of death. Strabo, who provides the earliest surviving account, believed she died by either asp bite or poisonous ointment. Plutarch offered the asp-in-the-basket story but also presented alternatives, including a hollow implement called a knestis, perhaps a hairpin, used to scratch the skin and introduce a toxin. Cassius Dio reported that small puncture wounds were found on Cleopatra's arm but concluded, as Plutarch had, that no one knew the true cause. He also mentioned a needle, possibly from a hairpin, as a possibility. Roman physician Galen described a version in which Cleopatra bit her own arm and introduced venom carried in a container. Suetonius repeated the asp story while expressing doubt about it. Modern scholars have pushed back against the snakebite account on practical grounds. Duane Roller notes that no ancient source addresses how a large Egyptian cobra could have been smuggled in or how it could have been made to behave as intended, and argues that the venom is only fatal when injected into a vital area of the body. Robert A. Gurval, Associate Professor of Classics at UCLA, points out that the bite of an Egyptian cobra contains roughly 175-300 mg of neurotoxin; death in humans requires only 15-20 mg, but the victim typically remains alive for several hours. Francois Pieter Retief and Louise Cilliers, of the University of the Free State, argued that a large snake could not have fit inside a basket of figs and that a poison would more plausibly have killed three adult women, Cleopatra and her handmaidens Charmion and Iras, as rapidly as they appeared to die. The encyclopedic writer Thomas Browne, in his 1646 Pseudodoxia Epidemica, had already noted that artistic depictions showed snakes far too small to be actual Egyptian cobras. In 1888, Ambroise Viaud Grand Marais proposed an entirely different explanation: that Cleopatra had died of carbon monoxide poisoning.

• 5. Murder or Suicide

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  A minority of researchers argue that Cleopatra did not die by her own hand at all. Gregory Tsoucalas, a lecturer in the history of medicine at the Democritus University of Thrace, and Markos Sgantzos, Associate Professor of Anatomy at the University of Thessaly, believe the evidence points to Octavian having ordered her poisoning. Criminal profiler Pat Brown, in her book Murder of Cleopatra, argues the details of her death were covered up by Roman authorities. Historian Patricia Southern speculates that Octavian may have allowed Cleopatra to choose the manner of her death rather than executing her outright. That reading would mean her death was coerced rather than freely chosen. James Grout suggests Octavian had political reasons to be careful: he may have wanted to avoid generating the kind of public sympathy that had surfaced for Cleopatra's younger sister Arsinoe IV, who was paraded in chains during Julius Caesar's triumph. Octavian also had to consider that Cleopatra's statue stood in the Temple of Venus Genetrix, erected there by his own adoptive father, Caesar. Killing a queen with that kind of symbolic standing carried its own risks. Cassius Dio writes that Octavian called in trained snake charmers of the Psylli tribe from ancient Libya to attempt an oral venom extraction and revive Cleopatra, but they failed. The same Cassius Dio notes that Octavian "was robbed of the full splendor of his victory." Despite his outrage, he honored her request and had her buried beside Antony.

• 6. Aftermath and Legacy

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  During her final days, Cleopatra had sent Caesarion away to Upper Egypt, with a possible plan for him to flee eventually to Nubia, Ethiopia, or India. It did not save him. Caesarion reigned as Ptolemy XV for only eighteen days before he was captured and executed on Octavian's orders on the 29th of August, 30 BC. The decision followed advice from the Alexandrian Greek philosopher Arius Didymus, who cautioned that two rival heirs to Julius Caesar could not share the world. Roller notes that Caesarion's alleged reign was "essentially a fiction" invented by chroniclers such as Clement of Alexandria in his Stromata, constructed to account for the gap between Cleopatra's death and the moment Egypt formally became a Roman province. The deaths of Cleopatra and her son marked the end of the Ptolemaic dynasty, which had ruled Egypt since the time of Alexander the Great, who reigned from 336 to 323 BC. Egypt became a province of the Roman Empire; Octavian was renamed Augustus in 27 BC and became Rome's first emperor. Antony's three children with Cleopatra were spared and brought to Rome. Their daughter Cleopatra Selene II eventually married Juba II of Mauretania. The location of the tomb where Cleopatra and Antony were buried together remains unknown. Archaeologists Kathleen Martinez and Zahi Hawass, excavating the temple of Osiris at Taposiris Magna southwest of Alexandria, have discovered six burial chambers and artifacts including forty coins minted by Cleopatra and Antony, an alabaster bust depicting Cleopatra, and an alabaster mask with a cleft chin resembling ancient portraits of Mark Antony.

• 7. Two Thousand Years of Depictions

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  In his triumphal procession at Rome in 29 BC, Octavian paraded Cleopatra's children Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene II while presenting the crowd with an effigy of Cleopatra with an asp clinging to her. The poet Propertius, who witnessed the procession along the Via Sacra, recorded that the paraded image showed multiple snakes biting each of her arms. That effigy is likely the same painting later discovered in the emperor Hadrian's Villa in 1818, now lost but preserved in a steel engraving by John Sartain. Statues of Cleopatra were generally spared the destruction visited on those of Mark Antony, including the statue Caesar had placed in the Temple of Venus Genetrix. Horace, writing in the Augustan period, depicted Cleopatra's suicide as a bold act of defiance. Virgil cast her as a figure of epic melodrama and romance. By the 15th century, illustrated versions of Giovanni Boccaccio's writings, authored in France by Laurent de Premierfait, began circulating images of Cleopatra and Antony's suicides. Woodcut illustrations of Boccaccio's De Mulieribus Claris were published at Ulm in 1479 and at Augsburg in 1541. Michelangelo created a black-chalk drawing of Cleopatra's suicide by asp bite around 1535. The Sleeping Ariadne, acquired by Pope Julius II in 1512, was widely mistaken for a depiction of Cleopatra and inspired three poems carved into its pilaster frame, the first published by Baldassare Castiglione and circulated by 1530. African American artist Edmonia Lewis, in her 1876 sculpture The Death of Cleopatra, depicted the queen post-mortem on a throne decorated with two sphinx heads representing the twins she bore with Antony, Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene II. Georges Melie's 1899 French silent film Robbing Cleopatra's Tomb was the first film to depict the character of Cleopatra at all. By the end of the 20th century, she had appeared in forty-three films. The 1963 Hollywood production by Joseph L. Mankiewicz featured Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra in a slap-fight with Richard Burton as Antony inside the very tomb where they would be interred, a detail that says something about how freely later artists departed from the ancient record while still borrowing its gravity.