Revisionist History Of Cleopatra's Death
Richard Girling, Courier Mail (Queensland, Australia), 1/06/05
The death of Cleopatra from an asp bite is one of history's greatest romantic tragedies. But, asks Richard Girling, can the verdict of suicide, accepted for 2000 years, stand up to a modern-day investigation by a forensic expert?
For 2000 years, the death of Queen Cleopatra VII has worked like a mind-altering drug in the bloodstreams of painters, poets, playwrights and historians. Tragedy and romance have never been so irresistibly entwined: the beautiful young queen, maddened by grief, hastening to join her dead lover, Mark Antony, through the kiss of an asp.
We believe it because we want to. What we don't do is pass the story through a filter of modern, proof-seeking inquiry in which questions have to be matched with answers. Is it likely -- is it even possible -- that the testimony of Plutarch, written more than 100 years after the event, could be true? Yet thanks to him, this is the version handed down through history:
Cleopatra, from her chamber (possibly in her mausoleum, possibly in her palace, where she is under house arrest) sends her conqueror, Octavian -- the future Emperor Augustus -- a sealed tablet, which he opens immediately. He reads her plea, begging to be buried with Antony, correctly interprets this as a suicide note and sends his guards sprinting the short distance to the chamber. What they find there will be etched into the collective memory as indelibly as the crucifixion of Christ. The great queen, seductress of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, lies in her royal robes, dead on a golden couch. One of her two maidservants, Eiras, lies dying at her feet. The other, Charmion, fighting unconsciousness, struggles to straighten the diadem on the royal head before herself falling lifeless. All three women have applied to themselves the poisonous fangs of an asp, which has been smuggled to them in a basket of figs.
Whose word do we have for this? Possibly that of Cleopatra's physician, Olympos, and almost certainly that of Octavian/Augustus himself, whose memoirs -- unseen by any modern historian -- were a likely source for the historical account written by Plutarch, on whose word we are compelled to rely. But Plutarch was not born until 75 years after Cleopatra's death. In any modern court of justice his evidence would be inadmissible. Even if allowed, it would be ripped apart by lawyers. Inconsistency is piled upon inaccuracy; unlikelihood upon frank impossibility.
Wherever you look, there are problems -- problems with the behaviour of the women, problems with the snake, problems with the guards, problems with Octavian. No single aspect of the story is impossible, but the degree of improbability mounts as each new factor is tossed on to the pile, until the resulting accumulator carries the kind of odds that would attach to a donkey in a steeplechase. For a 21st-century criminal investigator, the signals are as plain as bullet holes. This was no suicide pact. This was a plain case of murder.
Even the great queen's beauty is a myth -- her attraction to Caesar and Antony lay more in the political union of Rome and Egypt than in the sweaty coupling of soldier and sex kitten. Certainly Octavian, who had no political need of her after victory at Actium, seems to have found it easy enough to repel her advances (though apparently he had the greatest difficulty in keeping his toga on elsewhere). Ideas of beauty, of course, evolve over time. It may be that a 1.5m-tall, dumpy woman with rolls of neck fat, a huge beaky nose and brown, eroded teeth somehow embodied a pre-Christian physical ideal, and that crocodile-dung contraception was every hero's pre-Viagra turn-on. Or it may not. You could argue that what Cleopatra looked like was the least important thing about her; yet it plants the first red flag, a crucial early warning of the dislocation between reality and myth.
Other red flags follow thick and fast, many of them planted in the body of the "asp". By common consent, Cleopatra's ticket to oblivion would have been the Egyptian cobra, Naja haje. This was the species represented in the Egyptian symbol of royalty, the uraeus, and is the one still employed by snake charmers throughout North Africa. It is a big animal, thick in the body and typically 2 1/2 metres long. Cleopatra would have had to feign an unusual appetite for figs in order to justify to Octavian's guards a basket big enough to conceal it.
Let us assume, however, that this habitual manipulator of emperors, with all her cunning, could have found a way covertly to take delivery of a 2.4m snake. What then? She writes and sends her suicide note to Octavian, then straight away seizes the cobra and encourages it to bite her. Before she falls, she passes the snake to Eiras, who quickly receives a bite of her own before passing it on to Charmion, who does the same. By the time the guards run in, minutes later, they are all either dead or on the brink of death. The snake, meanwhile, has vanished without trace.
Plutarch's yarn begins to crumble. The first snag is the timing. There are reported cases of death occurring within 15 or 20 minutes of a cobra's bite, but it usually takes much longer. Snakebite expert David Warrell, Professor of Tropical Medicine and Infectious Diseases at the University of Oxford says in his experience, the quickest death took fully two hours. In the case of Cleopatra, when Octavian's guards came on the scene in a matter of minutes, we are asked to believe not only that the queen died in record time but that her two maidservants did likewise. You couldn't say it was impossible, but the likelihood is remote. It becomes remoter still when you consider the delivery of the venom. It's not that a single cobra would not have had enough.
"There's a misconception," Professor Warrell says, "that snakes can exhaust the supply of venom with one strike. All the evidence now suggests that repeated strikes, even up to 10 in a row, can deliver lethal doses." The problem again is a matter of odds, for not every bite injects poison. "If you're bitten by a venomous snake and the fangs puncture your skin, there's probably only an average 50 per cent chance that venom will be injected." Again, three in a row may not be impossible, but the statistical hurdle is climbing relentlessly skywards.
You have to consider, too, not only the cobra but the likely behaviour of its victims. Terror of snakes is hard-wired into the human psyche. To reach out and touch even a harmless one is a supreme test of the human will; to confront, grasp and invite the strike of an Egyptian cobra requires the kind of courage that is normal only in saints.
Naja haje is variable in colour. It may be brown, cream, yellowish, greyish, copperish. Very often it is banded. Always it has a long tail, a powerful cylindrical body and a broad head with large, stare-you-down eyes. When aroused, it rears and spreads its hood. Given her identification with it, and her wearing of the uraeus as royal insignia, it is possible to imagine Cleopatra taking it into her last embrace. Cynically, you might argue even that it was a union of approximate moral equivalence, for it would have taken a very active snake to kill more people than the queen herself.
Whatever human life may have meant to her, it was never an obstacle to self-advancement. As was the custom in the Ptolemaic dynasty, Cleopatra was the child of an incestuous marriage between brother and sister. As was the custom, too, she had adopted murder as an everyday instrument of protocol.
Her first husband, who she married when she was 17, was her own 10-year-old brother, Ptolemy XIII, against who she later made war and who ended up face down in the Nile. Her second was another brother, 11-year-old Ptolemy XIV, whose death by poisoning four years later was timed conveniently to coincide with the readiness of Caesarion, Cleopatra's bastard son by Julius Caesar, to join her on the throne. She also procured the murder of her sister Arsino, and shortly before her own death ordered the execution of King Artavasdes of Armenia, whose head she then sent to another monarch, whose co-operation she wanted.
The foxy temptress and swooning beauty of popular imagination was a violent pragmatist for whom death held no chill. Although, as we shall see, there are reasons to believe she would have done no such thing, it is quite possible to imagine such a woman consorting with a snake. Her servants, however, were a different matter.
They raised two more prominent red flags in the mind of investigative criminal profiler Pat Brown. Based in Minneapolis, she specialises in unsolved, "cold" murder cases and sells her analytical skills to prosecutors, defence attorneys and police forces throughout the US.
"I thought about how the handmaidens, after they saw Cleopatra scream after she was bitten by the snake and perhaps dropped it -- because it's hard to hold on to something that has just bitten you -- would then have to run after the snake. If you're reconstructing this crime in your mind, can you imagine two women seeing this and then the next woman has to run after the slithering snake and try to pick up this thing and then apply it to herself and give it to a third woman?"
Higher and higher rises the hurdle of disbelief, and higher yet again; for when Octavian's men arrive, the frenzied snake in its orgy of biting has totally disappeared. Sometimes even hotshot criminal investigators are driven to state the obvious.
"When a suicide is committed," Brown says, "you usually have two things: a body and the implement of death. Because, once you're dead, you cannot yourself remove that implement of death. The only person who could do that would be somebody visiting the crime scene afterwards. In this case, we have Cleopatra's body, we have her two handmaidens' bodies, but Octavian's men say they saw nothing else."
There was no asp, and no other evidence of suicide beyond the presence of three dead or dying women -- no cup of hemlock, no dagger, no poisoned comb.
While none of this proves murder, the lengthening list of anomalies and unlikelihoods leaves Plutarch's account bristling with more red flags than a CIA intelligence dossier. In whose custody was Cleopatra when she died? Who stood to benefit from her death? On whose account did Plutarch have to rely for his verdict of suicide by asp? The answer to all three questions is the same: Octavian. If that is not enough to arouse your suspicion, then consider what the future Emperor Augustus did next (and about this there is no dispute). He killed Cleopatra's son, Caesarion.
ONE of the biggest obstacles that any revisionist faces is the sheer, romantic attraction of Plutarch's version, spun by Shakespeare into one of the greatest of all human tragedies: "Dost thou not see my baby at my breast, That sucks the nurse asleep?" Who could fail to be affected? The exact sequence of events from historical accounts is unclear, but the double suicide of the doomed lovers, Antony and Cleopatra, is as much a "fact" as Nelson's death at Trafalgar or Hitler's in his bunker.
The death of Cleopatra from an asp bite is one of history's greatest romantic tragedies. But, asks Richard Girling, can the verdict of suicide, accepted for 2000 years, stand up to a modern-day investigation by a forensic expert?
For 2000 years, the death of Queen Cleopatra VII has worked like a mind-altering drug in the bloodstreams of painters, poets, playwrights and historians. Tragedy and romance have never been so irresistibly entwined: the beautiful young queen, maddened by grief, hastening to join her dead lover, Mark Antony, through the kiss of an asp.
We believe it because we want to. What we don't do is pass the story through a filter of modern, proof-seeking inquiry in which questions have to be matched with answers. Is it likely -- is it even possible -- that the testimony of Plutarch, written more than 100 years after the event, could be true? Yet thanks to him, this is the version handed down through history:
Cleopatra, from her chamber (possibly in her mausoleum, possibly in her palace, where she is under house arrest) sends her conqueror, Octavian -- the future Emperor Augustus -- a sealed tablet, which he opens immediately. He reads her plea, begging to be buried with Antony, correctly interprets this as a suicide note and sends his guards sprinting the short distance to the chamber. What they find there will be etched into the collective memory as indelibly as the crucifixion of Christ. The great queen, seductress of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, lies in her royal robes, dead on a golden couch. One of her two maidservants, Eiras, lies dying at her feet. The other, Charmion, fighting unconsciousness, struggles to straighten the diadem on the royal head before herself falling lifeless. All three women have applied to themselves the poisonous fangs of an asp, which has been smuggled to them in a basket of figs.
Whose word do we have for this? Possibly that of Cleopatra's physician, Olympos, and almost certainly that of Octavian/Augustus himself, whose memoirs -- unseen by any modern historian -- were a likely source for the historical account written by Plutarch, on whose word we are compelled to rely. But Plutarch was not born until 75 years after Cleopatra's death. In any modern court of justice his evidence would be inadmissible. Even if allowed, it would be ripped apart by lawyers. Inconsistency is piled upon inaccuracy; unlikelihood upon frank impossibility.
Wherever you look, there are problems -- problems with the behaviour of the women, problems with the snake, problems with the guards, problems with Octavian. No single aspect of the story is impossible, but the degree of improbability mounts as each new factor is tossed on to the pile, until the resulting accumulator carries the kind of odds that would attach to a donkey in a steeplechase. For a 21st-century criminal investigator, the signals are as plain as bullet holes. This was no suicide pact. This was a plain case of murder.
Even the great queen's beauty is a myth -- her attraction to Caesar and Antony lay more in the political union of Rome and Egypt than in the sweaty coupling of soldier and sex kitten. Certainly Octavian, who had no political need of her after victory at Actium, seems to have found it easy enough to repel her advances (though apparently he had the greatest difficulty in keeping his toga on elsewhere). Ideas of beauty, of course, evolve over time. It may be that a 1.5m-tall, dumpy woman with rolls of neck fat, a huge beaky nose and brown, eroded teeth somehow embodied a pre-Christian physical ideal, and that crocodile-dung contraception was every hero's pre-Viagra turn-on. Or it may not. You could argue that what Cleopatra looked like was the least important thing about her; yet it plants the first red flag, a crucial early warning of the dislocation between reality and myth.
Other red flags follow thick and fast, many of them planted in the body of the "asp". By common consent, Cleopatra's ticket to oblivion would have been the Egyptian cobra, Naja haje. This was the species represented in the Egyptian symbol of royalty, the uraeus, and is the one still employed by snake charmers throughout North Africa. It is a big animal, thick in the body and typically 2 1/2 metres long. Cleopatra would have had to feign an unusual appetite for figs in order to justify to Octavian's guards a basket big enough to conceal it.
Let us assume, however, that this habitual manipulator of emperors, with all her cunning, could have found a way covertly to take delivery of a 2.4m snake. What then? She writes and sends her suicide note to Octavian, then straight away seizes the cobra and encourages it to bite her. Before she falls, she passes the snake to Eiras, who quickly receives a bite of her own before passing it on to Charmion, who does the same. By the time the guards run in, minutes later, they are all either dead or on the brink of death. The snake, meanwhile, has vanished without trace.
Plutarch's yarn begins to crumble. The first snag is the timing. There are reported cases of death occurring within 15 or 20 minutes of a cobra's bite, but it usually takes much longer. Snakebite expert David Warrell, Professor of Tropical Medicine and Infectious Diseases at the University of Oxford says in his experience, the quickest death took fully two hours. In the case of Cleopatra, when Octavian's guards came on the scene in a matter of minutes, we are asked to believe not only that the queen died in record time but that her two maidservants did likewise. You couldn't say it was impossible, but the likelihood is remote. It becomes remoter still when you consider the delivery of the venom. It's not that a single cobra would not have had enough.
"There's a misconception," Professor Warrell says, "that snakes can exhaust the supply of venom with one strike. All the evidence now suggests that repeated strikes, even up to 10 in a row, can deliver lethal doses." The problem again is a matter of odds, for not every bite injects poison. "If you're bitten by a venomous snake and the fangs puncture your skin, there's probably only an average 50 per cent chance that venom will be injected." Again, three in a row may not be impossible, but the statistical hurdle is climbing relentlessly skywards.
You have to consider, too, not only the cobra but the likely behaviour of its victims. Terror of snakes is hard-wired into the human psyche. To reach out and touch even a harmless one is a supreme test of the human will; to confront, grasp and invite the strike of an Egyptian cobra requires the kind of courage that is normal only in saints.
Naja haje is variable in colour. It may be brown, cream, yellowish, greyish, copperish. Very often it is banded. Always it has a long tail, a powerful cylindrical body and a broad head with large, stare-you-down eyes. When aroused, it rears and spreads its hood. Given her identification with it, and her wearing of the uraeus as royal insignia, it is possible to imagine Cleopatra taking it into her last embrace. Cynically, you might argue even that it was a union of approximate moral equivalence, for it would have taken a very active snake to kill more people than the queen herself.
Whatever human life may have meant to her, it was never an obstacle to self-advancement. As was the custom in the Ptolemaic dynasty, Cleopatra was the child of an incestuous marriage between brother and sister. As was the custom, too, she had adopted murder as an everyday instrument of protocol.
Her first husband, who she married when she was 17, was her own 10-year-old brother, Ptolemy XIII, against who she later made war and who ended up face down in the Nile. Her second was another brother, 11-year-old Ptolemy XIV, whose death by poisoning four years later was timed conveniently to coincide with the readiness of Caesarion, Cleopatra's bastard son by Julius Caesar, to join her on the throne. She also procured the murder of her sister Arsino, and shortly before her own death ordered the execution of King Artavasdes of Armenia, whose head she then sent to another monarch, whose co-operation she wanted.
The foxy temptress and swooning beauty of popular imagination was a violent pragmatist for whom death held no chill. Although, as we shall see, there are reasons to believe she would have done no such thing, it is quite possible to imagine such a woman consorting with a snake. Her servants, however, were a different matter.
They raised two more prominent red flags in the mind of investigative criminal profiler Pat Brown. Based in Minneapolis, she specialises in unsolved, "cold" murder cases and sells her analytical skills to prosecutors, defence attorneys and police forces throughout the US.
"I thought about how the handmaidens, after they saw Cleopatra scream after she was bitten by the snake and perhaps dropped it -- because it's hard to hold on to something that has just bitten you -- would then have to run after the snake. If you're reconstructing this crime in your mind, can you imagine two women seeing this and then the next woman has to run after the slithering snake and try to pick up this thing and then apply it to herself and give it to a third woman?"
Higher and higher rises the hurdle of disbelief, and higher yet again; for when Octavian's men arrive, the frenzied snake in its orgy of biting has totally disappeared. Sometimes even hotshot criminal investigators are driven to state the obvious.
"When a suicide is committed," Brown says, "you usually have two things: a body and the implement of death. Because, once you're dead, you cannot yourself remove that implement of death. The only person who could do that would be somebody visiting the crime scene afterwards. In this case, we have Cleopatra's body, we have her two handmaidens' bodies, but Octavian's men say they saw nothing else."
There was no asp, and no other evidence of suicide beyond the presence of three dead or dying women -- no cup of hemlock, no dagger, no poisoned comb.
While none of this proves murder, the lengthening list of anomalies and unlikelihoods leaves Plutarch's account bristling with more red flags than a CIA intelligence dossier. In whose custody was Cleopatra when she died? Who stood to benefit from her death? On whose account did Plutarch have to rely for his verdict of suicide by asp? The answer to all three questions is the same: Octavian. If that is not enough to arouse your suspicion, then consider what the future Emperor Augustus did next (and about this there is no dispute). He killed Cleopatra's son, Caesarion.
ONE of the biggest obstacles that any revisionist faces is the sheer, romantic attraction of Plutarch's version, spun by Shakespeare into one of the greatest of all human tragedies: "Dost thou not see my baby at my breast, That sucks the nurse asleep?" Who could fail to be affected? The exact sequence of events from historical accounts is unclear, but the double suicide of the doomed lovers, Antony and Cleopatra, is as much a "fact" as Nelson's death at Trafalgar or Hitler's in his bunker.
[Editor's Note: This is only approximately one-half of the original piece.]