Authors: Joyce Tyldesley
Octavian’s top priority had to be to extract Cleopatra from her flammable tomb. He sent his persuasive friend Gaius Proculeius to the mausoleum to negotiate and, if at all possible, to persuade Cleopatra to return to her palace. Conversing through a grille in the locked door, Cleopatra refused to move and again asked that her children be spared. Proculeius made no promises, but told her to be of good cheer and to trust Octavian. The next day Cornelius Gallus was sent to talk through the mausoleum door. With Cleopatra distracted, the resourceful Proculeius used a ladder to gain access to the upper part of the mausoleum. Accompanied by two servants, he climbed through the window that had earlier admitted Antony. The three crept downstairs towards Cleopatra, but were spotted by one of Cleopatra’s women, who, according to Plutarch, let out a shriek: ‘Wretched Cleopatra, you are taken alive!’ Cleopatra turned, saw Proculeius and, drawing a dagger from her girdle, stabbed herself, inflicting a non-fatal wound. Proculeius disarmed her and had the presence of mind to shake her clothing to see if she was hiding any poison in her garments.
Octavian was at last able to recover the treasure that would allow him to pay his debts. Such was the feeling of relief that interest rates in Rome plunged from 12 to 4 per cent.
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Back in Alexandria, Cleopatra was put in the care of a freedman, Epaphroditus, who was instructed to use utmost vigilance to keep her alive. Dio tells us that, following Antony’s funeral, Cleopatra moved from her tomb to her
palace, where she fell ill from grief and the effects of her stab wound. Plutarch does not mention the move but he agrees about the illness: he tells us that Cleopatra was sick from grief and that her breasts had become inflamed by constant beating. This had led to a fever, which Cleopatra welcomed. She had stopped eating and was looking forward to death. Octavian could only persuade her to start eating again by threatening her children.
Cleopatra and Octavian met for the first time, probably on 10 August and presumably in her palace. Plutarch tells us that Octavian found the sick Cleopatra in the most miserable of conditions; that she threw herself at his feet; that she was dishevelled, with sunken eyes and a trembling voice; and that she bore obvious bruising on her bosom. Nevertheless, beneath the mask of grief, it was still possible for Octavian to detect vestiges of a spirited woman. Cleopatra lay on her bed, Octavian sat beside her, and Cleopatra launched into a flood of self-justification, blaming everything on her fear of Antony. As it became obvious that Octavian was not convinced by her tale she changed tack and started to beg for mercy. Finally she presented Octavian with a complete list of her treasures. When Seleucus, one of her servants, intervened to point out that Cleopatra’s list was in fact incomplete and that she had kept some treasure back, Cleopatra was quick to explain that she had retained some gifts for Octavia and Livia, who, she hoped, might intercede on her behalf. Convinced that she had in fact attempted to keep some treasure for herself, Octavian deduced that Cleopatra was far from suicidal.
Dio tells a very different story. His Cleopatra is still very much the alluring woman who captivated Caesar and Antony, and who is now hoping to captivate Octavian in the same way. She receives Octavian in a splendid apartment, where she reclines on a couch dressed in the most becoming of mourning garments. The room is decorated with portraits of Octavian’s adoptive father, Caesar. Seizing the initiative, she starts the conversation by reminding Octavian of her links with
his adoptive father. She even reads aloud extracts from Caesar’s love letters. Thankfully Octavian, a good Roman husband, is able to resist her feminine wiles. He does not look her in the eye, but merely begs her to be of good cheer. Realising that things are not going too well, Cleopatra starts to plead with Octavian to let her die to join Antony. When this, too, fails to generate a response, she tells Octavian that she is now happy to place her trust in Octavian and Livia. Again, it seems, her intention is to convince Octavian that she is not suicidal.
It is difficult for the modern reader to work out just who is bluffing whom here. The obvious answer is that Cleopatra, who wishes to die, is bluffing Octavian, who wishes to keep her alive. The preplanned and somewhat clumsy revelation about her hidden treasure is therefore a ruse designed to convince Octavian that she still hopes to live. Alternatively, it may be Octavian who is bluffing. He wishes Cleopatra to die, but does not want to be seen to kill her.
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Having determined that Cleopatra should die by her own hand, he is nevertheless concerned to ensure that posterity will remember him as a good man who did everything he could to save the queen’s life. He knows that Cleopatra has already made two suicide attempts – by stabbing and by starvation – and can surely, if so inclined, prevent her from making a third simply by locking her up. Would Cleopatra have wished to die by her own hand? Suicide is barely mentioned in Egyptian myths and writings, where the only clear evidence for self immolation comes from the trial records which confirm that some of those found guilty of murdering Ramesses III were permitted to kill themselves rather than face public execution. But suicide was, under the appropriate circumstances, a Greek virtue, and Greek mythology includes a surprising number of females who hang or stab themselves following the loss of a loved one (Ariadne, Calypso and Thisbe) or as a sacrifice in order that others might live (Alcestis, Iphigenia). These deaths are all seen as rational responses to unkind fate. Cleopatra, killing herself after the death of Mark Antony, and with her children’s
future to consider, fits well into this mould. There was, of course, good Ptolemaic precedent for suicide. Cleopatra’s uncle Ptolemy, king of Cyprus, had taken poison rather than be captured by the Romans.
Plutarch tells us that Cleopatra’s suicide was triggered by a secret (or deliberately leaked?) message from a member of Octavian’s staff, telling her that Octavian had resolved to send the queen and her children to Rome within the next three days. Realising that her time had run out, Cleopatra requested that she be allowed to visit Antony’s tomb (which was almost certainly her own mausoleum) to pour libations for him. She was carried to the tomb, where she embraced Antony’s remains and uttered a beautifully composed speech, which is likely to owe more to Plutarch’s literary talents than to Cleopatra’s own spontaneous oratory:
‘Dear Antony, I buried you but lately with hands still free; now, however, I pour libations for you as a captive, and 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. Do not expect other honours or libations; these are the last from Cleopatra the captive. For though in life nothing could part us from each other, in death we are likely to change places; you, the Roman, lying buried here, while I, the hapless woman, lie in Italy, and get only so much of your country as my portion. But if indeed there is any might or power in the gods of that country (for the gods of this country have betrayed us), do not abandon your wife while she lives, nor permit a triumph to be celebrated over myself in my person, but hide and bury me here with you, since out of all my innumerable ills not one is so great and dreadful as this short time that I have lived apart from you.
’
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Returning to the palace, Cleopatra bathed, dressed and dined in splendour, enjoying as part of her final meal a basket of figs sent in
from the county. The meal over, she gave a sealed tablet to Epaphroditus, for delivery to Octavian. Then she dismissed her servants, keeping only Charmian and Eiras by her side, and retired for the night. The decision to die in front of her female servants made good practical sense, as even the dead needed a chaperone. One of the horrors of a female suicide was that the body might be glimpsed naked, or partially naked, by strangers. Reading Cleopatra’s message, a final request to be buried beside Antony, Octavian realised that the queen was about to kill herself. Soldiers ran to the palace and pushed past the guards, who stood, oblivious, outside her room. Opening the doors, they found Cleopatra lying dead on a golden couch. Eiras lay dying at her feet, while Charmian, already feeling the influence of the poison, was desperately trying to straighten the diadem on her mistress’s brow. Dio tells us that Octavian summoned
psylli
(Libyan snake-charmers famous for curing snakebites by sucking out the venom) to minister to Cleopatra, but they were too late.
Here we have the classic sealed-room mystery. Cleopatra, Eiras and Charmian are found dead or dying, with only (possibly) a couple of puncture marks on the queen’s body to suggest how they died. Why, then, is it so widely accepted that Cleopatra had chosen death by snake? Dio tells what he knows of Cleopatra’s passing:
No one knows clearly in what way she perished, for the only marks on her body were slight pricks on the arm. Some say she applied to herself an asp which had been brought in to her in a water-jar, or perhaps hidden in some flowers. Others declare that she had smeared a pin, with which she was wont to fasten her hair, with some poison possessed of such a property that in ordinary circumstances it would not injure the body at all, but if it came into contact with even a drop of blood would destroy the body very quietly and painlessly; and that previous to this time she had worn it in her hair as usual, but now had made a slight scratch on her arm and had dipped the pin
in the blood. In this or in some very similar way she perished, and her two handmaidens with her. As for the eunuch, he had of his own accord delivered himself up to the serpents at the very time of Cleopatra’s arrest, and after being bitten by them had leaped into a coffin already prepared for him.
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Plutarch gives more detail. He has already prepared us for the possibility of Cleopatra’s suicide by detailing her experiments with poison, but he, too, seems less than convinced by the story of the snake:
It is said that the asp was brought with those figs and leaves and lay hidden beneath them, for thus Cleopatra had given orders, that the reptile might fasten itself upon her body without her being aware of it. But when she took away some of the figs and saw it, she said: ‘There it is, you see,’ and baring her arm she held it out for the bite. But others say that the asp was kept carefully shut up in a water jar, and that while Cleopatra was stirring it up and irritating it with a golden distaff it sprang and fastened itself upon her arm. But the truth of the matter no one knows; for it was also said that she carried about poison in a hollow comb and kept the comb hidden in her hair; and yet neither spot nor other sign of poison broke out upon her body. Moreover, not even was the reptile seen within the chamber, though people said they saw some traces of it near the sea, where the chamber looked out upon it with its windows. And some also say that Cleopatra’s arm was seen to have two slight and indistinct punctures; and this Caesar [Octavian] also seems to have believed. For in his triumph an image of Cleopatra herself with the asp clinging to her was carried in the procession. These, then, are the various accounts of what happened.
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As many historians have observed, suicide by snakebite is not the easy matter that it might first appear, particularly when one snake is expected to kill three people. At best it would be a risky business with
a high chance of failure. One cannot, after all, force a reluctant snake to bite and, even if the snake does bite, not every bite injects poison and not every poisoned bite kills. And, as most of the poison is injected with the first bite, it is unlikely that one snake would kill three adults with three consecutive strikes. In Cleopatra’s case, the preliminaries would have been fraught with the additional danger of detection. If we accept Octavian’s often expressed desire to keep Cleopatra alive, we must assume that she was effectively on ‘suicide watch’: an order for a snake would have had to be smuggled out of the palace, and the snake would have had to be smuggled back in. Although relatively slender, the Egyptian cobra,
Naja haje
, the principal suspect, can grow to just over six feet in length. An adult cobra, or three, would have needed an exceptionally large fig basket or water jar.
However, in the absence of any obvious weapon, death by snakebite was accepted by everyone as a symbolically suitable means of female royal suicide. Egypt is currently home to some thirty-nine varieties of snake and there seems no reason to assume that things were very different in antiquity.
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The dynastic Egyptians had a love-hate relationship with these snakes. They knew all too well that snakes could kill, but they also knew that snakes played an important role in pest control. A snake living beside the granary was infinitely preferable to a nest of rats. This ambivalent attitude is best expressed in the pantheon, home to both good and bad snakes. The serpent Apophis was pure evil: every night he attacked the boat of the sun god Re as it sailed through the dark and dangerous underworld. Fortunately Re had the tightly coiled good snake god Mehen to protect him. Female snake deities were considered to be exemplary mothers. We have already met Wadjyt, ‘The Green One’, the cobra goddess of the Nile Delta, who appears as the uraeus that decorates and protects the royal crown. Meretseger, ‘She Who Loves Silence’, guarded the dead of the Theban cemetery. Renenutet, a deadly hooded cobra, was the goddess of the harvest. She protected granaries and families and, as a divine
nurse, cared for both babies and the king. Isis, herself a famously good mother, occasionally appeared as the snake Isis Thermoutharion. Alexandria even had its own protective snake deity.
The Alexander Romance
tells how the workmen who built the city were pestered by a snake. Alexander had the snake killed, then built a sanctuary on the spot where it had died. Soon the sanctuary filled with snakes, which squirmed into the neighbouring houses. These were known as the Agathoi Daemones, ‘The Good Spirits’.