"...Cleopatra sent to Caesar a letter which she had written and sealed; and, putting everybody out of the monument but her two women, she shut the doors. Caesar, opening her letter, and finding pathetic prayers and entreaties that she might be buried in the same tomb with Antony, soon guessed what was doing. At first he was going himself in all haste, but, changing his mind, he sent others to see. The thing had been quickly done. The messengers came at full speed, and found the guards apprehensive of nothing; but on opening the doors, they saw her stone-dead, lying upon a bed of gold, set out in all her royal ornaments. Iras, one of her women, lay dying at her feet, and Charmion, just ready to fall, scarce able to hold up her head, was adjusting her mistress's diadem. And when one that came in said angrily, 'Was this well done of your lady, Charmion?' 'Extremely well,' she answered, 'and as became the descendant of so many kings'; and as she said this, she fell down dead by the bedside."
Plutarch, Life of Antony (LXXXV.2-3, Dryden trans.)
Cassius Dio relates that, after the defeat at Actium (31 BC), Cleopatra hurriedly returned to Egypt to forestall any revolt. Once safely there, she had those who now rejoiced at her disaster killed and "proceeded to gather vast wealth from their estates and from various other sources both profane and sacred, sparing not even the most holy shrines" (LI.5.5ff). Her son Caesarion, with a portion of the royal treasury, was sent up the Nile, with the intention that he cross overland by way of Ethiopia and sail on to India. But he was captured while deliberating whether to return and was executed (LI.15.5; Cleopatra, hereself, was to have followed but her ships were burned at the instigation of the Romans). To gain time, emissaries were sent with entreaties that her children be allowed to succeed to the throne, and from Antony that he was willing to retire to private life or even prepared to kill himself if it would save the queen. The accompanying bribes were retained but the replies evasive.
Even so, Octavian was concerned that, despairing of being pardoned, they both "might destroy their wealth, which he kept hearing was of vast extent; for Cleopatra had collected it all in her tomb which she was constructing in the royal grounds, and she threatened to burn it all up with her in case she should fail of even the slightest of her demands" (LI.8.5-6). Without this treasure, his soldiers could not be paid. Privately, therefore, he intimated to Cleopatra of pardon and even of love, so that "by this means at least...she would make away with Antony and keep herself and her money unharmed" (LI.8.7).
On August 1, Antony confronted Octavian, but his fleet and cavalry surrendered without a fight, and the infantry was defeated. Cleopatra fled to her mausoleum and sealed herself and her treasure inside, accompanied only by her maidservants Iras and Charmion (and, says Dio, a eunuch). A message then was sent to Antony that she had committed suicide, perhaps to prompt him to do the same (and so curry favor with Octavian). This he did, but the wound was not immediately fatal and, hearing that Cleopatra was alive, he was taken to her, being hoisted through an upper-story window and dying there in her chamber.
Soon, Octavian sent a member of his staff to the queen, "bidding him, if possible, above all things to get Cleopatra into his power alive; for he was fearful about the treasures in her funeral pyre, and he thought it would add greatly to the glory of his triumph if she were led in the procession" (Plutarch, Antony, LXXVIII.3; also Dio, LI.11.3). By a ruse, Cleopatra was taken but, dispirited at the death of Antony and her own capture, she fell ill (says Plutarch) and was moved to the palace.
Octavian now confronted a problem. Although said to have wanted to parade Cleopatra at his triumph (Dio, LI.13.1; Plutarch, LXXVIII.3), he may have remembered that the appearance of her younger half-sister Arsinoë in chains at the triumph of Caesar had elicited only pity (Dio, XLIII.19). Too, such a display might not reflect well on Caesar, himself, who had placed a golden statue of Cleopatra in the Temple of Venus Genetrix (Dio, LI.22.3; Appian, II.102). Nor could she be allowed to live or Octavian be seen as responsible for her death. Some dissembling, therefore, must have taken place on both sides: Octavian inviting Cleopatra to return to Rome and Cleopatra pretending that she would go (cf. Dio, LI.13). Instead, the queen may have been given an opportunity simply to die by her own hand, and this she did, wearing her most beautiful garments, her body arrayed on a golden couch and the emblems of royalty in her hands.
Although Cleopatra poisoned herself, no-one knew quite how. Dio says that the only marks on her body were slight pricks on the arm (LI.14.1). Some thought that they might be the bite of an asp, which had been hidden in a basket of figs or a water jar (although no snake was found), or a scratch to which poison was applied from a pin used to fasten her hair or hidden in a hollow comb. The bite of a snake would seem more likely (how else to account for the deaths of the two handmaidens) and was the version favored by Octavian. That, at least, is how Cleopatra was depicted in his triumphal procession, with an asp clinging to her image (Plutarch, LXXXVI.3; cf. Dio, LI.21.8, "an effigy of the dead Cleopatra upon a couch was carried by, so that in a way she, too,...was a part of the spectacle and a trophy in the procession").
It also is the version adhered to by the Augustan poets, who wrote within a decade after Actium. In the Aeneid, Virgil speaks of the queen not turning her head "to see twin snakes of death behind" (VIII.696-697). Horace (Odes, I.37, "Nunc est bibendum") and Propertius (Elegies, III.11.53-54) also speak of two snakes, not one, although the other primary source, Velleius Paterculus, does mention a single asp (II.87). Whether a rhetorical flourish, certainly it was an exotic death, befitting a queen of Egypt. If by the bite of a cobra, it would have been even more symbolic, as the snake was emblematic of the uraeus, the stylized image that Cleopatra would have worn on her pharaonic headdress, and sacred to the goddess Isis, of whom she felt herself to be the incarnation, the "New Isis" (Plutarch, Antony, LIV.6).
It is only the Greeks who posit an alternative explanation for the death of Cleopatra. Strabo is the earliest source for her suicide and even may have been in Alexandria at the time. (Plutarch wrote more than a century after the events he describes, Dio, a century later still, although his source probably was a history by Olympus, Cleopatra's personal physician, whom he mentions, LXXXII.2; also Plutarch, LXXXII.2.) He is of two minds: whether it was "by the bite of an asp or (for two accounts are given) by applying a poisonous ointment "(XVII.10). Galen, writing in the second century, says in De Theriaca ad Pisonem (CCXXXVII) that she broke the skin by deeply biting her own arm. Roman authors continued to insist that the death of the queen was by snake bite. Suetonius, a contemporary of Plutarch, indicates in his Life of Augustus that she died from the bite of an asp, the poison of which Octavian had tried to have sucked from the wound by the Psylli, snake charmers from North Africa famous for that ability (XVII.4). Florus, a younger contemporary, has Cleopatra, dressed in her finest raiment, apply two serpents (II.21.11).
Shakespeare, too, has the queen bitten by two snakes, once on the breast: "Dost thou not see my baby at my breast,/That sucks the nurse asleep?" (Antony and Cleopatra, V.ii.), a tradition in popular culture that has replaced her being bitten on the arm, assuming that she was bitten at all and by how many snakes.
"The truth of the matter no one knows" (Plutarch, LXXXVI.2).
The picture is by Jean André Rixens, The Death of Cleopatra (1874) and is in the Musée des Augustins (Toulouse).
References: Dio Cassius: Roman History (1914-) translated by Earnest Cary and Herbert B. Foster (Loeb Classical Library); Plutarch: Parallel Lives (1916-) translated by Bernadotte Perrin (Loeb Classical Library); Appian: Roman History, The Civil Wars (1913) translated by Horace White (Loeb Classical Library); Strabo: Geography (1917-) translated by H. L. Jones (Loeb Classical Library); Propertius: Elegies (1990) translated by G. P. Goold (Loeb Classical Library); Velleius Paterculus: Compendium of Roman History (1924) translated by Frederick W. Shipley (Loeb Classical Library); Virgil: The Aeneid (1981) translated by Robert Fitzgerald; Florus: Epitome of Roman History (1929) translated by Edward Seymour Forster (Loeb Classical Library); Cleopatra (1972) by Michael Grant; "Vergil, The Augustans, and the Invention of Cleopatra's Suicide: One Asp or Two?" (1998) by Adrian Tronson, in Vergilius, 44, 31-50.
