by Stacy Schiff
Someone embroidered on the sources, and it is difficult to believe that was not Dio. His account is so cinematic as to be suspect, too purple even for a Hellenistic queen. On the other hand, had Cleopatra lacked a flair for drama, she would not have come this far. On the couch beside her she has laid out various busts and portraits of Caesar. At her breast she carries his loving letters. She greets Octavian as her master but at the same time wishes him to understand her earlier distinction. He should know in what esteem the divine Caesar, his father, her lover, held her. To that end she proceeds to read selections from the correspondence, limiting herself to the most ardent passages; Octavian was not the only one who knew how to excerpt a document. She is shy, sweet, subtle. They are related! Surely Octavian had heard of the many honors he had accorded her? She is a friend and ally of Rome; Caesar had crowned her himself! Throughout this performance “she would lament and kiss the letters, and again she would fall before his images and do them reverence.” As she does so, she repeatedly turns her eyes on Octavian, offering up melting looks, subtly attempting to swap one Caesar for another. She is seductive, eloquent, audacious—though naturally no match for Octavian’s Roman rectitude, which may have been Dio’s point. Octavian betrays no glimmer of emotion. He is immune to tender glances. He prided himself on the burning intensity of his gaze but on this occasion refuses to so much as make eye contact, preferring instead to study the floor. Nor will he make any commitment. He will speak—he was laconic to the point of awkwardness, and here probably did not dare wander far from his prepared remarks—neither of love nor of Egypt’s future nor of Cleopatra’s children. Dio focuses on Octavian’s dispassion but something else is noticeably absent from the interview: Cleopatra demands no credit for having yielded Pelusium, for having delivered up Antony’s fleet, or for having induced Antony to kill himself, presumably because there was none to be had. If she had held up her end of a prior bargain, she would surely have demanded her reward now. Finally she bursts into tears and throws herself at Octavian’s feet. She had, she sobbed, no wish to live. Nor could she continue to do so. In memory of his father, would Octavian not grant her a single favor? Could she not join Antony in death? “Grudge me not burial with him,” she begs, “in order that, as it is because of him I die, so I may dwell with him even in Hades.” Again she failed to move Octavian either to pity or a hint of a promise. He could only exhort her to be of good cheer, resolving all over again to sustain her hopes. He wanted her alive. She would brilliantly ornament his triumph.
Cleopatra is physically more disheveled, mentally more dignified in Plutarch’s version, not necessarily more accurate for having derived from Cleopatra’s doctor; everyone was a propagandist now. Gracefully, Octavian bids her to return to her pallet. He seats himself nearby. Cleopatra unfurls a ribbon of justifications similar to that she had unfurled in Tarsus, ascribing her actions “to necessity and fear of Antony.” When Octavian refutes her argument point by point, she changes tack, resorting to pity and prayers. Ultimately she begs for her life. She is desperate and magnificent, where in Dio she is only desperate. She sounds no seductive notes, which indeed appear to have been added later, when all kinds of chroniclers had Cleopatra throwing herself vigorously at all kinds of feet. Certainly she flings herself around more in the literature than she did in life. Downright fictions and convenient distortions aside, Dio and Plutarch agree in substance. Disheveled or not, Cleopatra remains a wonder to look upon: “The charm for which she was famous and the boldness of her beauty” shone forth despite her plight, “and made themselves manifest in the play of her features.” She remains supple and shrewd, modulating the “musical accents” and the “melting tones” as the situation required, her arguments along with them. Half-starved and partly incapacitated, she is as feisty as ever. In both scenarios she leaves Octavian in a puddle of embarrassment.
When her prayers fail to move him, Cleopatra resorts to her trump card. She had drawn up an inventory of her treasures, which she hands to Octavian, surrender of a kind. As Octavian examines the list, one of Cleopatra’s stewards steps foward; the situation brought out the best in no one. Seleucus cannot help but observe that Cleopatra has omitted several exceptionally valuable items. Before Octavian he accuses his queen of “stealing away and hiding some of them.” At this Cleopatra flew from her mattress, “seized him by the hair and showered blows upon his face.” Unable to suppress a smile, Octavian rose to stop her. The adroit response was vintage Cleopatra, pure sinuous subtlety: “But is it not a monstrous thing, Caesar, that when you have deigned to honor me with a visit in my wretched condition, one of my slaves should denounce me for reserving some women’s adornments—not for myself, indeed, unhappy woman that I am—but that I may make some trifling gifts to Octavia and to your Livia, and through their intercession hope to find you more merciful and more gentle?” Dio too has Cleopatra circling back to Octavian’s wife and sister, though not by way of comic opera. Invoking female solidarity, Cleopatra promises to set aside a few especially striking jewels for Livia. She places great hope in her. Both interviews are composed of feint and farce, of counterfeit claims and artificial emotions. Divergent details aside, they are all bluff and pantomine. Octavian fully intends for Cleopatra to walk through the streets of Rome as his captive but pretends otherwise. Cleopatra suspects as much but purports to steel herself to live. She has no intention of returning to a city, in chains, where she had once lived as Caesar’s honored guest. To her mind that humiliation is “worse than a thousand deaths.” She knew well what Rome meant for captive sovereigns. If they survived they did so in Roman dungeons. Hellenistic sovereigns had killed themselves—and gone mad—there. Much pleased with the overture to Livia, Octavian left Cleopatra reassured, and did some reassuring, promising her “more splendid treatment than she could possibly expect.” At which he went off, well satisfied, “supposing that he had deceived her, but rather deceived by her.”
CLEOPATRA MADE ONE last conquest, but it was not to be Octavian. His staff included a young aristocrat named Cornelius Dolabella. Plutarch tells us Dolabella harbored “a certain tenderness” for Cleopatra; the emotion may have been nearer to pity. She had urged him to keep her abreast of all developments. Dolabella had agreed to do so. On August 9 he sent word to her privately. Octavian planned to depart within three days. Cleopatra and her children were to go with him. Instantly Cleopatra dispatched a messenger to Octavian. Might she be permitted to make offerings to Antony? The request was granted. The following morning a litter carried her to his tomb, along with Iras and Charmion. At the graveside Plutarch offers a wrenching sob of a speech, a rhetorical exercise more likely to derive from Greek tragedy than from Hellenistic history; he is already ten chapters beyond Antony, his ostensible subject, and more than a little taken with his accidental one. Falling on and wrapping her arms around the tomb, Plutarch’s Cleopatra explains to her dead lover that she is a prisoner. Tears well in her eyes. She is “so carefully guarded that I cannot either with blows or tears disfigure this body of mine, which is a slave’s body, and closely watched that it may grace the triumph over you.” Nothing in life had been able to part them, but death is about to. Antony had breathed his last in her country, and she, “hapless woman,” was to meet her end in his. The gods of the world above have forsaken them. If the gods of the afterlife have any power she entreats Antony to appeal to them. Could they spare her from marching in any victory procession over him? She begged that they hide and bury her in Egypt with him, “since out of all my innumerable afflictions not one is so great and dreadful as this short time that I have lived apart from you.” The scene is short on vengeance and long on affection; Plutarch’s Cleopatra is to die of love rather than enmity. Wreathing and kissing his tomb, amid a cloud of myrhh, she tenderly informs Antony that these are the last libations she will be able to offer him.
On the return to the mausoleum that afternoon she ordered a bath to be prepared. Afterward she reclined at table, where she enjoyed a sumptuous meal. Toward da
y’s end a servant appeared outside her doors with a basket of figs, direct from the countryside. The guards examined its contents carefully. The figs of Egypt were especially sweet; the Romans marveled at the succulent fruit. With a smile the traveler offered samples all around, after which he was waved into the monument. Some time later Cleopatra set her seal to a letter she had prepared in advance. She then called for Epaphroditus. Could he relax his guard long enough to carry a communication to Octavian? It concerned a minor matter; there was no fuss. Epaphroditus headed out, across the sand outside. Cleopatra then dismissed her retinue save for Iras and Charmion. The three women closed the mausoleum doors behind them; the bars and bolts had presumably been removed along with the treasure. If they had not done so already, her maidservants fitted Cleopatra in her formal robes, to which they added the ornaments of her office, the pharaonic crook and flail. Around her forehead they tied her diadem, its ribbons dangling down her neck.
Octavian opened the letter—he could not have been far away, and was most likely in the palace—to read Cleopatra’s fervent request that she be buried at Antony’s side. Instantly he guessed what had happened. He was astounded. In haste he began to head off and then, changing his mind—he was flustered—dispatched messengers to investigate for him. They rushed to the mausoleum, where Octavian’s guards stood sentry, unperturbed and unsuspecting. Together they burst through the doors. They were too late. “The mischief,” Plutarch tells us, “had been swift.” Cleopatra lay on a golden couch, probably an Egyptian-style bed with lion paws for legs and lion heads at its corners. Majestically and meticulously arrayed in “her most beautiful apparel,” she gripped in her hands the crook and flail. She was perfectly composed and completely dead, Iras very nearly so at her feet. Lurching and heavy-headed, almost unable to stand, Charmion was clumsily attempting to right the diadem around Cleopatra’s forehead. Angrily one of Octavian’s men exploded: “A fine deed this, Charmion!” She had just the energy to offer a parting shot. With a tartness that would have made her mistress proud, she managed, “It is indeed most fine, and befitting the descendant of so many kings,” before collapsing in a heap, at her queen’s side.
Charmion’s was an epitaph no one could dispute. (Nor could it be improved upon. Shakespeare used it verbatim.) “Valor in the unfortunate obtains great reverence even among their enemies,” notes Plutarch, and in Octavian’s camp there was admiration and pity all around. Cleopatra had demonstrated tremendous courage. How she accomplished her final feat is less evident. Octavian was under the impression—or meant to convey the impression—that she had enlisted an asp. Arriving on the scene after his messengers, he attempted to resuscitate Cleopatra. He called in the psylli, Libyans believed to enjoy a magical immunity to snake venom. By taste they were said to be able to determine what kind of snake had bitten; by murmuring spells and sucking at the wound they were said to be able to extract death from an icy corpse. The psylli who knelt over Cleopatra worked no miracles. The Egyptian queen could not be revived. That was not altogether surprising. Neither Dio nor Plutarch was at all sure of the asp, who surely crept into the story later rather than arriving in Cleopatra’s lifetime, amid a basket of figs. Even Strabo, who landed in Egypt shortly after her death, was unconvinced.
For any number of reasons Cleopatra was unlikely to have recruited an asp, or an Egyptian cobra, for the job. A woman known for her crisp decisions and meticulous planning would surely have hesitated to entrust her fate to a wild animal. She had plenty of quicker, less painful options. It was as well a little too convenient to be killed by the royal emblem of Egypt; the snake made more symbolic than practical sense. Even the most reliable of cobras cannot kill three women in quick succession, and the asp is a famously sluggish snake. An Egyptian cobra, bristling and hissing and puffing itself up to its six-foot splendor, could hardly have hidden in a fig basket or remained hidden in one for long. The job was too great and the basket too small. Poison was a more likely alternative, as Plutarch seems to imply with his survey of Cleopatra’s experiments. Most likely she swallowed a lethal drink—the hemlock and opium of Socrates would have done the trick—or applied a toxic ointment. Hannibal had resorted to poison when backed into a corner 150 years earlier; Mithradates had attempted the same. Cleopatra’s uncle, the king of Cyprus, had known precisely what to have on hand when Rome had come calling in 58. Assuming she died of the same cause as Charmion, assuming she died in the state in which she was discovered, Cleopatra suffered little. There were no shuddering paroxysms, which cobra venom would ultimately have induced. This toxin’s effect was more narcotic than convulsive, the death peaceful, swift, and essentially painless. “The truth of the matter,” Plutarch announces, to centuries of deaf ears, “no one knows.”
Dismissed for nearly two hundred years, the snake clings tenaciously to the story. Cleopatra’s asp is the cherry tree of ancient history, a convenience, a shorthand, most of all a gift to painters and sculptors through the centuries. It made poetic sense and good art. (So did the naked breast, also not part of the original tale.) And the snake multiplied immediately: Horace wrote “sharp-toothed serpents” into an ode. Virgil, Propertius, and Martial would follow suit. The beast or beasts figure in every early account. Octavian would further clinch the deal by displaying a model of Cleopatra with an asp in his triumph. Not only was the snake a potent symbol of Egypt, where coiled cobras had adorned pharaonic brows for millennia, but snakes crawled all over Isis statues as well. They had insinuated themselves in the Dionysian cult. Iconography aside, it is easy to see what someone is trying to communicate when he pairs a lady with a snake. Alexander the Great’s mother—as murderous and maniacal a Macedonian princess who ever lived—kept serpents as pets. She used them to terrify men. Before her came Eve, Medusa, Electra, and the Erinyes; when a woman teams up with a snake, a moral storm threatens somewhere. Octavian may have confused the issue for all time with his call to the psylli. He controlled the historical record every bit as firmly as he was said to have controlled his adolescent sexual urges. Very likely he sent us off, for thousands of years, in the wrong direction.
He may have done so intentionally. There is an alternate version of the death; it has long been clear that we may be missing something here, that one farce of August 10 could well conceal another, that the greatest deathbed scene in history is perhaps not what it seems. In the earliest prose account, “Cleopatra cheated the vigilance of her guards” to procure an asp and stage her death. Octavian is vexed, furious that she has slipped through his fingers. He had, however, an immense, dedicated staff. By August few in Alexandria would have hesitated to cooperate with him, as Cleopatra’s steward demonstrated. Octavian was as careless as Cleopatra was naïve; the kind of man who marked both the date and the time on his letters was not the kind of man to let a prize captive slip through his fingers. When Octavian left her on August 8 he may well have deceived Cleopatra into believing he was deceived, and essentially orchestrated her death. He would not have cared to have been outwitted by a woman—unless of course the alternative were more damaging. And Cleopatra was as problematic a captive as she had been an enemy. Octavian had attended the triumphs of 46. He had even ridden in one of them. He knew of the sympathy Cleopatra’s sister had elicited on that occasion. He had publicly condemned Mark Antony for having paraded Artavasdes in chains. That kind of behavior, Octavian had scolded, dishonored Rome. There was too an additional wrinkle in Cleopatra’s case: This particular prisoner had been the divine Caesar’s mistress. She was the mother of his son. In some eyes, she was a goddess in her own right. She could be trusted to live out her days quietly in some Asian outpost about as much as could her younger sister. Twice Cleopatra had tried to kill herself. It was clear that unless guarded carefully she would sooner or later succeed.
Octavian would have been left to calculate which embarrassment was greater: to be outwitted by a woman, or to return to Rome without the villain of the piece. It could be difficult to gauge the occasionally tender sensibilities of his
countrymen. Sometimes they met the children of defeated kings with jeers and ridicule. Sometimes those innocents marred the exercise, eliciting tears and discomfort. Cleopatra had been declared a public enemy, but an effigy would serve perfectly well in a triumph, as had effigies of Roman adversaries in the past. While her death reduced the glory a little, it also eliminated a host of complications. Octavian may have preferred to shuffle Cleopatra off the stage in Alexandria than to make a misstep in Rome. He was genuinely terrified that she might destroy her treasure, by no means terrified that she would destroy herself, in which act he may essentially have colluded. Young Dolabella was then but a tool in Octavian’s game. It was after all unlikely that one of his staff officers would risk a friendship with Cleopatra. And Octavian did not in fact leave Alexandria on August 12, as Dolabella had heatedly warned. He may have delivered the message—possibly even a more ominous one—to hasten the course of events. Both Dio and Plutarch point to Octavian’s repeated injunctions that Cleopatra be kept alive rather than to any complicity in her death. That does not mean there was none. A fourth casualty on August 10, 30, may well have been the truth.