Cleopatra: A Life

THE WICKEDEST WOMAN IN HISTORY

“I was equal to gods, except for the mortal part.”

—EURIPIDES

MISFORTUNE, WENT THE saying, has few friends; Cleopatra did not wait to discover if the adage was true. If her ruse had not already been discovered it was confirmed quickly enough now, in blood. The Alexandrian elite had disapproved of her before. She feared their reaction on learning of the Actium debacle; they could now fairly accuse her of having delivered Egypt to Rome. She did not care to watch them exult in her defeat. Nor did she care to be replaced on the throne. She no sooner returned than she embarked on an unbridled killing spree, ordering her most prominent detractors arrested and assassinated. From their estates she confiscated great sums. She appropriated additional monies wherever she could find them, seizing temple treasures. For whatever came next a fortune was required. It would be expensive to buy off the inevitable; in one form or another, Octavian would come calling. She equipped new forces and cast about for allies, whom she courted baldly. Artavasdes, the defiant Armenian king, had remained a prisoner in Alexandria, where his three years of captivity now came to an end. Cleopatra sent his severed head some 1,200 miles east, to his Median rival. She calculated that he would need no further encouragement to rise to her assistance. He demurred.

As in the past, she reached out to the East, where she had trade contacts and longtime partisans, where Octavian was without traction, and where royalty was royalty. When Antony returned to Alexandria he found her consumed by “a most bold and wonderful enterprise.” An isthmus separated the Mediterranean from the Gulf of Suez, at the eastern frontier of Egypt. With a large force Cleopatra attempted to lift her ships out of the Mediterranean and haul them forty miles overland, to be relaunched via the gulf into the Red Sea. With her men and money she proposed to make a new home for herself, well beyond the borders of Egypt, possibly even in India, “far away from war and slavery.” In a blind alley it seemed Cleopatra’s nature to envision broad, unbounded horizons; the grandiosity and bravado were staggering, practically enough to suggest that she truly had contemplated an assault on the Roman world.

Cleopatra’s Red Sea venture was not impossible in a country that had for centuries hauled immense stone blocks across vast distances. A monstrosity of a two-prowed Ptolemaic vessel—it was said to have been nearly four hundred feet long and to sit sixty feet above the water—had centuries earlier been launched along wooden rollers, set at even intervals along a harborside ditch. Greased hides occasionally served the same purpose. Ships could be broken as well into sections. The enterprise was less feasible for a sovereign who had antagonized the tribe on the far side of the isthmus. Those happened to be the Nabateans, the shrewd, well-organized traders who had spent a year fighting Herod, thanks in part to Cleopatra’s sabotage. They did not need Herod—who had finally just defeated them—to remind them that Cleopatra was their common enemy. The Nabateans set fire to each of the Egyptian ships as it was drawn ashore. For Cleopatra the failure was particularly bitter. This was the corner of the world from which she had successfully relaunched herself in 48.

Herod was of course the obvious ally; in the desert, Octavian would be no match for their combined forces. To no one, however, was Cleopatra’s misfortune so profoundly satisfying. Cleopatra had dealt Herod a get-out-of-jail-free card in dismissing him from Actium; he lost no time in making his peace with Octavian. Probably in Rhodes that fall the Judaean king made a great show of contrition. Dressed as a commoner, he removed his diadem as he set foot on shore. Before the new master of the Roman world he was frank and forthright. Indeed he had been loyal to Antony. Such, alas, was his nature. Integrity was his stock-in-trade. In his book, explained Herod, a friend ought to risk “every bit of his soul and body and substance.” Had he not been off assailing the Nabateans he would, he assured Octavian, be at Antony’s side even at that very moment. He abandoned his good friend of over two decades now only on account of that Egyptian woman, he admitted, proceeding to cough up the official version of Octavian’s war on Cleopatra. He had told Antony to do away with her. There is no indication of how Herod got through this speech with a straight face. At its end Octavian professed himself grateful to Cleopatra. She had, he reassured his caller, bequeathed him a fine ally. (Herod had reason to be doubly grateful to Cleopatra. He owed his crown to Roman fears of her in the first place.) Graciously, Octavian replaced the diadem on Herod’s head. He sent him off with Roman reinforcements. Meanwhile Cleopatra continued tirelessly to court neighboring tribes and friendly kings. She was able to mobilize only a troop of gladiators, highly skilled fighters who had been training for what were presumed to be Antony and Cleopatra’s victory celebrations. Answering her call, they headed south from what is today modern Turkey. Herod saw to it that they got no farther than Syria.

Failing the East, Cleopatra could look in the opposite direction. Rome had not fully conquered Spain, a restive region, hugely fertile and rich in silver mines. Even if the Mediterranean were closed to her, even if she were unable to continue the war against Octavian, she might sail west via the Indian Ocean, circumnavigating Africa. With her vast resources she and Antony might stir up Spain’s native tribes and found a new kingdom. It was not such a far-fetched idea; Cleopatra had before her the example of another linguistically gifted, charismatic leader. In 83 a rogue Roman proconsul had seized control of Spain, to the horror of his countrymen. Hailed by his native recruits as “the new Hannibal,” Sertorius had incited a revolt. He had very nearly gone on to establish an independent Roman state.^* Cleopatra considered the prospect seriously; Octavian worried that she would manage to repeat Sertorius’s coup. A military operation at home was after all unlikely; with the defections of Herod and of Antony’s Cyrenean troops, Egypt was all that remained. It was firmly behind Cleopatra—in Upper Egypt her partisans offered to rise up on her behalf, an effort she discouraged—but unlikely to hold out long against Octavian. She had at best four hundred fiercely loyal Gaulish bodyguards, a modest number of troops, and a remnant of a fleet.

Nothing about the battle of Actium had been as brilliant as the blaze of invective that preceded it; most of the drama, and many of the casualties, came after the unspectacular fact. It was anticlimactic in the extreme, which could not be said of the months that followed in Alexandria. Yet again Cleopatra’s plans had miscarried. Yet again she cast about vigorously to ensure that all was not lost. All was a whirl of feverish activity at the palace; Plutarch has her not only looking to Spain and India but experimenting daily with deadly poisons. To one end or another she made a collection of these, testing them on prisoners and on venomous animals to determine which toxin yielded the most expeditious, least painful results. She was neither humbled nor panic-stricken but every bit as inventive as she had been when the first reverse of her life had landed her in the desert. The word “formidable” sooner or later attaches itself to Cleopatra and here it comes: she was formidable—spirited, disciplined, resourceful—in her retreat. There were no hints of despair. Two thousand years after the fact, you can still hear the fertile mind pulsing with ideas.

The same could not be said for Antony. He roamed restlessly about North Africa, mostly with two friends, a rhetorician and an especially clever, steadfast officer. Antony dismissed the rest of his entourage. The relative solitude comforted him. He counted on marshaling reinforcements but in Cyrene discovered that his four legions had defected. Crushed, he attempted suicide. The two friends intervened, to deliver him to Alexandria. He arrived at the palace without the expected reinforcements, and, concedes Dio, “without having accomplished anything.” It was probably late in the fall, toward the end of the sowing season. Cleopatra was in the midst of her ill-fated Red Sea venture. She settled for fortifying the approaches to Egypt. She may also have contemplated Octavian’s assassination. For his part, Antony withdrew from the city and from society. He ordered a long causeway built into the Alexandrian harbor, at the end of which he fixed a modest hut, near the foot of the lighthouse. He declared himself an exile, a latter-day Timon of Athens, “for he himself also had been wronged and treated with ingratitude by his friends, and therefore hated and distrusted all mankind.” Dio slips in a bitter note of sympathy; he cannot help but marvel at the great number of people who—having received lavish honors and favors from Antony and Cleopatra—left them now in the lurch. Cleopatra appeared not to stumble over the injustice. Her understanding of gratitude may have been more realistic than Antony’s. She accepted the rude truths more easily than did he.

Antony did not last long as a hermit and turned up at the palace soon enough. Cleopatra purportedly coaxed him out, to the lush groves and the colorful royal lodges on which he had turned his back. If indeed she did so, it was one of the less difficult assignments of her life. The news continued to be bleak: Canidius appeared in Alexandria to report that Antony’s land forces had in the end surrendered to Octavian. Many of them joined that army; Octavian had now more men than he could use. He burned what remained of the captured warships. Antony and Cleopatra learned next of Herod’s defection, especially painful as they had sent their most persuasive messenger to plead for his continued loyalty. (It was the friend whom Cleopatra had enlisted to clear Antony’s head of Octavia.) Not only did he fail with Herod, but he took advantage of his trip to defect. The Roman governor of Syria also went over to Octavian, as would Nicolaus of Damascus.

The recriminations were kept to a minimum. Cleopatra appears to have looked to the future rather than to the past, to have calculated that Antony was well beyond the tickle and tease of admonition, the love bites. She subscribed to Plutarch’s counsel on rebuke: better in time of calamity to opt for sympathy over blame, for “at such a time there is no use for a friend’s frankness or for words charged with grave and stinging reproof.” Antony was, however, a different man, the storied audacity and “irresistible courage” wrung from him by Actium. Cleopatra was left with two projects, to minister to her distressed lover and to plot their escape. Somehow she comforted Antony, or numbed him, so that the dire reports seemed to agitate him less. She addressed his frustrations and calmed his suspicions. She did the thinking for them both.

By relinquishing hope Antony discovered that he could relinquish anxiety as well; he returned to the palace and—never in need of an occasion—“set the whole city into a course of feasting, drinking, and presents.” Together Antony and Cleopatra staged too an elaborate coming-of-age party for their sons by their previous marriages, fifteen-year-old Antyllus and sixteen-year-old Caesarion. By the Greek reckoning, Caesarion was now of military age.^* For his part Antyllus was ready to shed the purple-edged toga of a Roman child. In a mingling of traditions, Antony and Cleopatra ushered the boys into adulthood. Both enlisted in the military to boost Egyptian morale. For days banquets and revels and feasts distracted the city. Dio asserts that Antony and Cleopatra staged the celebrations to stoke a new spirit of resistance; to her subjects Cleopatra conveyed the message that they were “to continue the struggle with these boys as their leaders, in case anything should happen to the parents.” Come what may, the Ptolemaic dynasty would survive, and with a male sovereign to boot. Indeed Caesarion was hailed as pharaoh in inscriptions that autumn. Antony and Cleopatra might just as well have desperately been throwing sand in Octavian’s face. They had sons, by which the future was calibrated. He had none.

Over the fall a flurry of envoys traveled back and forth, with bribes and proposals from one side, threats and promises from the other. Initially Cleopatra pleaded for the only thing that mattered to her: Could she pass down her kingdom to her children? To lose her life was one thing; to sacrifice her children—and with them her country—was unthinkable. They were now between the ages of seven and seventeen; she pinned her hopes on Caesarion, whom she had already promoted to rule in her absence. Later she sent Octavian a golden scepter, crown, and throne. She would abdicate in exchange for clemency, suggests Dio, “for she hoped that even if he did hate Antony, he would yet take pity on her at least.” Antony hoped to be allowed to live as a private citizen in Egypt or—if that was asking too much—in Athens. Octavian had no time for Antony’s proposal but he answered Cleopatra. Publicly he threatened her. Privately he replied that he would be perfectly reasonable with her on one condition: she was to arrange for Antony’s execution, or at the very least his exile. (Octavian kept the gifts.) Antony tried again, defending his relationship with Cleopatra, reminding Octavian of their family ties, their “amorous adventures,” their shared pranks. To prove his sincerity he delivered up a remaining assassin of Caesar’s, then living with Antony. He proposed something else as well. He would kill himself “if in that way Cleopatra might be saved.” Again he elicited only an icy silence. The assassin was put to death.

The sad truth was that Antony had nothing to offer. Cleopatra had a stronger hand, with the greatest treasure still outside Roman control. Octavian could not succeed without her famed gold and pearls and ivory. They had long motivated his men; more than anything else, Cleopatra’s hoard held his rank and file in check. So much were Antony and Cleopatra alone, so regular were the desertions, that they had no emissary to entrust with these messages. They were left to press one of the children’s tutors into service. With his third overture Antony dispatched fifteen-year-old Antyllus and a vast quantity of gold. Octavian kept the gold and dismissed the boy. It is unclear how sincere the proposals were; Dio suggests that Antony and Cleopatra were simply biding their time while plotting revenge. The overtures were in any event no less genuine than the replies. Octavian could not truly expect Cleopatra to murder Antony. Her brother had won no points for eliminating the distressed and defeated Pompey seventeen years earlier. Nor had she any guarantee that Octavian would honor his end of the bargain. Was he likely to pardon a woman on whom he had so theatrically declared war? Cleopatra might well agree to disassociate herself from Antony, but she hardly had reason to go further. She knew an ambush when she saw one. Octavian would have to figure out how to dispense with his former brother-in-law himself.

With Cleopatra’s last messenger Octavian sent to Alexandria an especially clever emissary of his own. (It is notable, though usually forgotten, that Octavian by this arrangement tried his wiles on Cleopatra.) Thyrsus was handsome, persuasive, and more than adequately qualified to negotiate with “a woman who was haughty and astonishingly proud in the matter of beauty,” as Plutarch has it, or who “thought it her due to be loved by all mankind,” as Dio concludes. Dio finds Cleopatra vain to the point of delusion, so taken with her own charms as to allow an emissary to convince her that Octavian, a young general who had never set eyes upon her, was infatuated with her, simply because she wished him to be, and because in the past she had had that effect on Roman commanders. Cleopatra spent a great deal of time closeted with the superbly intelligent Thyrsus, on whom she lavished special honors. She had every reason to win his favor; the two conferred privately and at length. We have no account of his response but we do of another. Antony exploded with jealousy. He had Thyrsus seized, whipped, and returned to Octavian with a letter. Octavian’s man had provoked him, and at a time when he was already irritable. He had enough on his mind. If Octavian objected to what he had done he could easily settle the score. Mark Antony’s man was with Octavian in Asia. (He had defected early on.) Octavian had only “to hang him up and give him a flogging,” suggested Antony, “and we shall be quits.”

Cleopatra too had plenty on her mind but before all else humored Antony. It was difficult to say what value he added to the equation at this juncture, which makes her solicitude all the more remarkable. She calmed him with every imaginable attention. At the end of the year she celebrated her thirty-eighth birthday modestly, in a style “suited to her fallen fortunes.” She spared no expense when it came time for Antony’s in January. He continued to count on a future in which he might live, retired from public affairs, either in Athens or Alexandria, rather unrealistic prospects under the circumstances. Cleopatra saw to it that he rang in his fifty-third year with the greatest of splendor and every kind of magnificence, among friends who had little reason to question their loyalty, as “many of those who were bidden to the supper came poor and went away rich.”

Otherwise Alexandrian affairs took on a melancholy complexion. Octavian continued to threaten Cleopatra publicly while privately he maintained that if she killed Antony she would have her pardon. Silver-tongued messengers aside, she had no intention of accepting the offer. She continued with her poison experiments, though probably not with a cobra, as Plutarch asserts. She was in search of a toxin that subtly, painlessly overwhelmed the senses. Its victim should submit to what appeared to be a profound natural sleep. Much of this was common knowledge to a Hellenistic sovereign, reliably familiar with her toxins and antidotes, and well aware that a cobra bite did not answer to that description. In all such matters Cleopatra’s personal physician, Olympus, at her side over these weeks, would also have been eminently well versed; if you wanted an excellent poison, you procured it in Egypt, from an Alexandrian doctor. The suppers and drinking bouts continued, with as much profligacy as ever but under a different name. Cleopatra and Antony dissolved the Society of the Inimitable Livers to found another, every bit that association’s equal in “splendor, luxury, and sumptuosity.” Out of black humor or bleak despair, they called this new society the Companions to the Death. Those who reclined on the plush palace couches vowed to die with their hosts. And Cleopatra oversaw the hurried construction of an elaborate, two-story building, adjacent to an Isis temple, with a commanding view of the Mediterranean, probably on a sandy strip of palace ground, her “surpassingly lofty and beautiful” mausoleum.

THERE WAS A reprieve of sorts over the winter, when it became clear that Octavian would make no expedition until the weather warmed. Urgent matters intervened. From Samos he returned to Rome, where there were demonstrations and disturbances of all kinds. Discharging an army was always complicated, and—short on funds—Octavian had thousands of mutinous veterans on his hands. Only early in the spring did he make a lightning trip east. The sailing season had not yet opened; he moved so quickly “that Antony and Cleopatra learned at one and the same time both of his departure and of his return.” His cordial new friend greeted him in Syria; no sooner had Octavian and his men disembarked on the Phoenician coast than Herod was on hand with gifts and provisions. He installed the weary travelers in magnificently appointed apartments. And he saw to it that they lacked nothing for the desert march before them, sending Octavian off precisely as he had sent off Cleopatra six years earlier, though this time tossing goodwill and funds into the bargain. To Octavian’s cause Herod contributed monies equal to four years of Cleopatra’s Jericho revenue. (The logic was transparent. Herod meant to make it blindingly obvious to the Romans that his “realm was far too restricted in comparison with the services which he had rendered them.”) Without any touristic detours Octavian headed to Pelusium, where Herod left him, early in the summer. The idea was to assault Egypt simultaneously from two sides, through Syria and Libya, mobilizing Antony’s former legions in the West.

In Alexandria Cleopatra continued the “strange, wild life” with Antony, without which she could not have reconstituted the Ptolemaic Empire, and on account of which she now found herself in dire straits. There may have been another covert set of negotiations that winter; although their accounts differ wildly elsewhere, both Plutarch and Dio assert that Octavian crossed easily into Egypt, without any resistance at the Eastern frontier, because Cleopatra secretly arranged for him to do so. The accounts may derive from the same inimical report; Cleopatra’s treachery was a fertile subject, on which a Roman could, for a few hundred years, dilate inexhaustibly. She may well have been double-dealing, bowing to the inevitable, bargaining for leniency. She had been ruthlessly pragmatic before. At this point her interests substantially diverged from Antony’s. He could hope for little more than a brilliant last stand. She fought to preserve a dynasty, if not a country. (By one account she both bribed the general at Pelusium to surrender and allowed Antony to murder the general’s family for his cowardice. And, naturally, the accusations of her collusion did not prevent Octavian from asserting later that he took Pelusium by storm.) Cleopatra knew that she could not hold out militarily against Octavian; certainly there was acquiescence, if not treachery. As she had discouraged the partisans of Upper Egypt from rising up in her defense (she claimed she did not care to see them needlessly massacred; she may have been banking still on a negotiation), she discouraged the Alexandrians in their resistance. Dio assigns her a second, infinitely less plausible motive as well. He asserts that she believed Thyrsus when he said that Octavian was smitten with her. Why should Octavian be any different from Caesar and Antony? So obsessed is Dio with Cleopatra’s vanity that he forgets she was also a skilled politician. She yields Pelusium, he asserts, as “she expected to gain not only forgiveness and the sovereignty over the Egyptians, but the empire of the Romans as well.” Cleopatra could generally be counted on to do the intelligent thing. Dio has her engaged with the nonsensical. She was fighting for her life, her throne, and her children. She had ruled for two decades, and was without illusions. She knew Octavian was deeply enamored not with her but with her wealth. Into the mausoleum she heaped gems, jewelry, works of art, coffers of gold, royal robes, stores of cinnamon and frankincense, necessities to her, luxuries to the rest of the world. With those riches went as well a vast quantity of kindling. Were she to disappear, the treasure of Egypt would disappear with her. The thought was a torture to Octavian.

As Octavian advanced on Alexandria Antony experienced a sudden surge of energy. Rallying a modest force, he rode out to meet the enemy’s advance guard in the outskirts of the city, several miles east of the Canopic Gate. Octavian’s army was depleted from the march; Antony’s cavalry won the day, routing Octavian’s, and pursuing them all the way back to camp. At breakneck speed Antony galloped to Alexandria to share the brilliant news: “Then, exalted by his victory, he went into the palace, kissed Cleopatra, all armed as he was, and presented to her one of the soldiers who had fought most spiritedly.” For his courage Cleopatra rewarded the dusty young man with a golden breastplate and helmet. With respect and gratitude, he accepted both. He defected in the night to Octavian. Undeterred, Antony attempted yet again to suborn Octavian’s men, some of whom had after all been his. He sent as well an invitation to his former brother-in-law, challenging him to single combat. This time he got a response. Octavian observed frostily that there were many ways in which Antony might die.

He determined to wage another assault, simultaneously on land and sea. A morbid dinner preceded that sortie, on the evening of July 31. Octavian camped outside Alexandria’s east gates, near the city’s hippodrome. His fleet rode at anchor just beyond the harbor. An eerie calm descended over the hyperkinetic city. Surrounded by friends at the palace, Antony urged his servants to drink copiously. They would have no such opportunity the next day, when they might well have a new master, and he would be, at best, “a mummy and a nothing.” Again his friends wept at his words. Antony consoled them. He would involve them in no useless battles. He aspired only to an honorable death. At dawn on August 1 he marched the remainder of his infantry out of the city gates, stationing them at a vantage point from which they might follow the engagement at sea. Around them the city was hushed. Antony stood motionless in the silvery morning air, tense with the anticipation of victory. His fleet rowed directly for Octavian’s—and saluted the enemy with their oars. Octavian’s ships returned the gesture. From shore Antony watched the fleets return peacefully to the harbor, now united as one. No sooner had their prows aligned than his cavalry deserted as well. His infantry put up a desultory fight. Incensed, Antony flew toward the palace, raving “that Cleopatra had betrayed him to the enemies he had made for her sake.” The charge tallies with his addled state of mind. Dio takes it at face value, again impugning Cleopatra. Obviously she had double-crossed Antony and caused the ships to desert. She was in league with Octavian. It is not impossible; she may well have preferred her own last-ditch efforts—she still had a negotiating position, as Antony had not—to his. On this count the spotty record is less problematic than are the personalities of our two chroniclers, which Cleopatra neatly draws out. Dio is excited by treachery, Plutarch undone by emotion. Now in a panic, the city was Octavian’s.

Whether or not she had betrayed him, Cleopatra did not wait for Antony’s return. She had heard his rants before. She had no desire to hear them again. She knew now that her lover was finally, irrevocably, inconsolably ruined. Fleeing Antony, she rushed to the mausoleum with her maidservants and staff. Behind them they lowered the massive doors, evidently a sort of portcullis. Once in place the panels would not again budge. Cleopatra secured the entry as well with bolts and bars. For Dio, the flight to the mausoleum was all playacting; Octavian had kept up his regular stream of comforting messages. Clearly Cleopatra had agreed to his demand that she sacrifice her lover in exchange for Egypt. She made the dramatic move only to encourage Antony to kill himself. Antony suspected a ruse, “yet in his infatuation he could not believe it, but actually pitied her more, one might say, than himself.” There was no shortage of causes for pity. Dio allows Cleopatra at least a nod to Antony’s affection—she may be duplicitous, but she is not coldhearted—though again he mangles her motives. Were Antony to believe her dead he would surely not care to go on living. Having barricaded herself in the mausoleum, Cleopatra sent a messenger to Antony, with a report of her death.

Did she deliberately deceive him? She stands accused of so many betrayals that it is difficult to know what to do with this one, arguably the most humane and least surprising. The two were after all partners in death; Antony had already offered to kill himself to save her. Octavian had no further use for Antony, an impediment to Cleopatra at this point as well. Someone had to put him out of his misery, a task defeated Roman generals traditionally handled themselves. The message may have been bungled in transmission, well before it was mauled by historians. In any event Antony lost no time; in Cleopatra’s absence he was without a reason to live. Nor was he particularly eager to be shown up by a woman. He received the news in his room, among his staff. Plutarch has him instantly unfastening his breastplate and crying out, “O Cleopatra, I am not distressed to have lost you, for I shall straightaway join you; but I am grieved that a commander as great as I should be found to be inferior to a woman in courage.” By prearrangement, his servant Eros was designated to kill him should the need arise. Antony now requested he do so. Eros drew his sword and—turning from his master—slew himself. He collapsed at Antony’s feet. Antony could only applaud his courage and his example. Brandishing his own sword—the blade would have been about two and a half feet long, with an extended steel point—he ran it straight into his ribs, missing his heart, puncturing his abdomen. Bloodied and faint, he dropped to the couch. He had not succeeded in his task, however, and shortly regained consciousness. It was somehow typical of Antony to leave the job half-done. He begged those around him to deliver the coup de grâce but again and for the last time found himself deserted. To a man, his retinue fled the room.

An outcry followed, which brought Cleopatra to the upper story of the mausoleum. She peered either through the second-floor windows or the unfinished roof; she had built quickly, but not quickly enough. The sight of her caused a commotion—so she was not dead after all!—though if Dio is correct, no one could have been more surprised than Antony. Again Plutarch and Dio’s accounts are incompatible. It is unclear whether Antony first learns that Cleopatra is still alive, or if Cleopatra first learns that Antony is half-dead. Antony then either orders his servants to take him to her (Dio), or Cleopatra sends her servants for him (Plutarch). Already Antony had lost a great deal of blood. Cleopatra’s secretary found him on the floor, writhing and crying out.

In their arms, Antony’s servants carried him, bleeding to death and in agony, to the mausoleum. From the windows above Cleopatra let down the ropes and cords that had been used to hoist stone blocks atop the structure. To these the servants fastened the limp body. Cleopatra drew her lover up herself, with the aid of Iras and Charmion, long familiar with Antony. It is impossible to improve upon Plutarch’s version of the ordeal; even Shakespeare could not do so. “Never,” Plutarch writes, working from an eyewitness account, “was there a more piteous sight. Smeared with blood and struggling with death he was drawn up, stretching out his hands to her even as he dangled in the air. For the task was not an easy one for women, and scarcely could Cleopatra, with clinging hands and strained face, pull up the rope, while those below called out encouragement to her and shared her agony.” No sooner had she hauled Antony up and laid him out on a couch than Cleopatra began to rip and tear at her robes. It is one of only two recorded moments in which she loses her colossal self-possession. She yields to raw emotion; “she almost forgot her own ills in her pity for his.” The two had been together for the better part of a decade; Cleopatra wiped the blood from his body and smeared it across her face. She beat and scratched at her breasts. She called Antony master, commander, husband; she always knew how to talk to a man. He silenced her cries and demanded a sip of wine, “either because he was thirsty, or in the hope of a speedier release.” Once served, he encouraged Cleopatra to attend to her own safety and to cooperate with Octavian so far as her honor allowed, advice that suggests some doubt on Antony’s part as to her intentions. Among Octavian’s men he recommended that she entrust herself in particular to Gaius Proculeius. He had been a friend as well to Antony. She was not to pity him his fate, but to rejoice for the happiness and honors that had been his. He had been the most illustrious and powerful of men, and he now died a noble death, vanquished in the end only by a fellow Roman. The waves murmured outside. Antony died in Cleopatra’s arms.

AS ANTONY MADE his excruciating trip to the mausoleum, one of his bodyguards sped—with Antony’s sword secreted under his cloak—to Octavian’s camp, outside the city. There he produced the heavy blade, still smeared with blood, and an early account of the botched suicide. Octavian retired immediately to his tent, to weep the same brand of crocodile tears that Caesar had wept for Pompey, “a man who had been his relation by marriage, his colleague in office and command, and his partner in many undertakings and struggles.” The relief must have been great; dispensing with Antony had been a problem. While Antony lay dying in Cleopatra’s arms Octavian indulged in a little ceremony of self-justification, producing copies of the letters that he and his former brother-in-law had exchanged over the previous years. These he read aloud to his assembled friends. Was it not remarkable “how reasonably and justly he had written, and how rude and overbearing Antony had always been in his replies”? (He took care later to burn Antony’s side of the correspondence.) After the dramatic reading Proculeius set off. He was on Cleopatra’s doorstep within minutes of Antony’s death.

To the end Antony proved overly trusting. Proculeius had two commissions. He was to do all in his power to extract Cleopatra from the mausoleum. And he was to see to it that the treasure Octavian so urgently needed to settle his affairs did not go up in flames. Herod had supplied him with a taste of the East; Octavian could not afford to sacrifice the fabulous hoard of Egypt, the subject of dreams and exaggerations since the time of Homer, to a funeral pyre. His debts were his only remaining obstacle in Rome. He also needed a live Egyptian queen, which he calculated would “add greatly to the glory of his triumph.” Dio devotes a great deal of attention to Cleopatra’s wiles and feints over the next days but knew he was writing of two slippery characters, both deeply invested in the duplicity business. Octavian wanted to seize Cleopatra alive, Dio allows, “yet he was unwilling to appear to have tricked her himself.” Mild-mannered Proculeius was to keep her hopes up and her hand from the fire.

Despite Antony’s assurances, Cleopatra refused to grant Proculeius an interview in the mausoleum. If he wanted to speak to her, he would have to do so through the well-bolted door. Octavian had made her certain promises. She wanted guarantees. She threatened to burn her treasure without them. Repeatedly she pleaded that her children—three of them were under respectful guard, with their attendants—might inherit the kingdom. Repeatedly Proculeius circumvented the request. He assured her that she had no worries. She could trust Octavian entirely. She was unconvinced on that front and had taken various precautions. She wore a small dagger at her hip, inserted into her belt; it could not have been the first time she did so. And she had long before dispatched Caesarion up the Nile. She knew she could ask no favors on her eldest child’s count. With his tutor, Rhodon, and a small fortune, he was to make his way overland to the coast and to sail for India, the established source of Ptolemaic ivory and dyes, spices and tortoiseshell. Proculeius made little progress, though he did have ample opportunity to survey the mausoleum, to which he returned with Gaius Cornelius Gallus—who had entered Egypt from the west, at the head of Antony’s legions—for a second interview. Gallus outranked Proculeius. A poet and an intellectual, he enjoyed a facility with language; he was a pioneer of the love elegy. (Ironically, he addressed his work to the actress who had been Antony’s mistress.) Again he faced one of Antony’s women. Perhaps he could negotiate a surrender. Gallus met Cleopatra outside the door for a prolonged conversation, presumably little different from the one she had had with Proculeius. She remained intransigent.

Meanwhile Proculeius fixed a ladder to the side of the building and climbed in the upper-story window through which Antony had been carried. Two servants scurried up the wall behind him. Once inside the three descended to the ground floor, where they stole up on Cleopatra, at the mausoleum door. Charmion or Iras noticed the intruders first and cried out: “Wretched Cleopatra, you are taken alive!” At the sight of the Romans, Cleopatra reached for the dagger to stab herself, but Proculeius was quicker. Throwing himself upon her, he enveloped Cleopatra in both arms. He wrested away the dagger and searched the folds of her clothing for poisons, all the while affably reassuring her, as he had been instructed. She should not act rashly. She did herself a disservice, and Octavian too. Why rob him of the opportunity to prove his kindness and integrity? He was after all—she had heard the claim before, from a messenger who had defected, about a man whose lifeless body lay upstairs in a pool of blood—“the gentlest of commanders.”

Octavian installed a freedman named Epaphroditus at Cleopatra’s side. He had firm instructions. He was to keep the queen of Egypt alive “by the strictest vigilance, but otherwise to make any concession that would promote her ease and pleasure.” All instruments by which she might again attempt to kill herself were confiscated. Presumably the pile of treasure was at this juncture carted away as well. Cleopatra was, however, supplied with all she requested—incense, and oils of cedar and cinnamon—with which to prepare Antony for burial. She spent two days purifying the body, a courtesy Octavian was no doubt happy to grant. He could win points for honoring an unwritten code of warfare while at the same time delivering the scandalous burial that he claimed Antony had requested. Octavian’s men removed none of Cleopatra’s retinue or attendants, “in order that she should entertain more hope than ever of accomplishing all she desired, and so should do no harm to herself.” The three children were treated sympathetically and as befit their rank, for which she had reason to be grateful. Octavian’s men tracked down Antyllus, betrayed by his tutor, entranced by the priceless gem he knew the sixteen-year-old to be wearing under his toga. Antony’s son had sought refuge in a shrine, probably within the massive walls of the Caesareum. He begged for his life. Octavian’s men dragged him out and beheaded him. The tutor lost no time in snatching the jewel from the corpse, for which he was later crucified.

Cleopatra asked for and obtained permission to bury Antony herself. Accompanied by Iras and Charmion, she did so “in sumptuous and royal fashion.” A first-century woman grieved with much ritual screaming and thrashing and clawing at the skin, and Cleopatra was no exception: her display was so extreme that her chest was inflamed and ulcerated by the end of the funeral on what was probably August 3. Infection set in, accompanied by a fever. She was pleased; if she now swore off food, she could, she reasoned, manage a quiet, Roman-free death. She confided as much in Olympus, who counseled her and promised his assistance. Her method was hardly subtle, however; Octavian learned quickly enough of her compromised state. He had a trump card as great as Cleopatra’s treasure. He “plied her with threats and fears regarding her children”—another kind of warfare, concedes Plutarch, and a most effective one. Cleopatra surrendered to food and treatment.

Octavian had by now bought some goodwill, which may have partly reassured Cleopatra. He called for a public assembly; late on the afternoon of August 1, the day of Antony’s death, he rode into the city with a prepared scroll. He always wrote out what he meant to say in Latin; this speech was afterward translated into Greek. In the gymnasium where Antony and Cleopatra had crowned their children Octavian ascended a specially built platform. The terrified Alexandrians prostrated themselves at his feet. Octavian bade them stand. He meant no harm. He had resolved to pardon their city for three reasons: In honor of Alexander the Great; because of Octavian’s great admiration for their home, “by far the richest and greatest of all cities”; and to gratify Areius, the Greek philosopher at his side. The truth of the matter, concedes Dio, is that Octavian did not dare “inflict any irreparable injury upon a people so numerous, who might prove very useful to the Romans in many ways.”

Events, Cleopatra would have noticed, were moving quickly. Urgently she requested an interview with Octavian, granted on August 8. While in broad outline Plutarch and Dio’s accounts of that meeting are similar, the mise-en-scène differs radically. Plutarch is writing for Puccini, Dio for Wagner. There may be more art than truth in both versions; either way, it was quite a performance. (It made too for a revealing contrast to Herod’s interview.) Plutarch sends up the curtain with Cleopatra lying frail and disheveled on a simple mattress, clad only in a tunic, without any kind of cloak. Octavian has elected to surprise her. At the sight of her caller she springs up and throws herself at his feet. The wretched week has taken its toll: “Her hair and face were in terrible disarray, her voice trembled, and her eyes were sunken. There were also visible many marks of the cruel blows upon her bosom; in a word, her body seemed to be no better off than her spirit.” Dio prefers Cleopatra in her regal splendor and at her histrionic best. She has prepared a luxurious apartment and an ornate couch for her visitor. She is groomed to perfection, superbly turned out in mourning clothes that “wonderfully became her.” As Octavian enters she leaps girlishly to her feet, to find herself face to face with her mortal enemy, for what was almost certainly the first time. Octavian had come into his looks, or into his panegyrists; he was highly attractive to women, “for he was well worth beholding,” as Nicolaus of Damascus put it later. Cleopatra must have experienced a certain relief. “To be so long prey to fear is surely worse than the actuality we are afraid of,” Cicero had observed. Before Cleopatra stood after all only a man, about five feet seven, with tousled blond hair, benign in his expression, more comfortable in Latin than in Greek, six years her junior, sallow, stiff, and ill at ease.

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 day’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.

(The counterarguments go something like this: Cleopatra had attempted both to starve and skewer herself. Why had Octavian foiled those attempts, to torture her with threats about her children? Nine days passed between Antony’s death and Cleopatra’s. Surely it would have been preferable to have eliminated her at once? She had already sworn to die with Antony after all. And she would have known of Octavian’s predicament; she was as aware as he of the sensation her sister had caused. She might have gambled that Octavian would not risk parading her and her half-Roman children through the streets of Rome. Octavian seems truly and uncharacteristically unnerved by the news of Cleopatra’s death. He did not make a great deal of the mercy he had shown her, as he might have been expected to have done and as he usually did. Instead he boasted in his memoirs that various kings—and nine children of kings—had marched, in the course of three triumphs, before his chariot. No future historian, even those antipathetic to Octavian, ventures an assertion of complicity, although it could be argued that by then the case was closed, the truth known only to a few in the first place. We are ultimately left chasing our tails. The best that can be said of her last act is that Cleopatra acted heroically in a great set piece that may be on several counts ahistorical and is certainly in some part her opponent’s invention. The sole consolation is a perverse one: The death of Alexander the Great is well documented and no less a perfect riddle.)

Plutarch has Octavian torn between two emotions on the evening of August 10. He is both “vexed at the death of the woman” and in awe of “her lofty spirit.” In Dio too Octavian is admiring and sympathetic, if “excessively grieved” on his own account. His triumph will be less magnificent. While it is unclear who had done so, someone had produced a heroine. Cleopatra’s was an honorable death, a dignified death, an exemplary death. She had presided over it herself, proud and unbroken to the end. By the Roman definition she had at last done something right; finally it was to her credit that she had defied the expectations of her sex. Women inevitably win points in Roman histories for swallowing hot coals or hanging themselves by their hair or hurling themselves from rooftops or handing bloody daggers along to their husbands with three quiet words of encouragement: “It isn’t painful.” (Plenty of female corpses litter the Greek stage as well, the difference being that in Greek drama the women also get the last word.) The panegyrics were immediate. In an ode written shortly after her suicide, Horace set out to condemn Cleopatra for her folly and ambition but wound up eulogizing her. “No craven woman, she,” he concludes, marveling at the clear mind, the calm countenance, the courage. Cleopatra’s final act was arguably her finest one. That was a price Octavian was perfectly happy to pay. Her glory was his glory. The exalted opponent was the worthy opponent.

Octavian arranged for Cleopatra to be buried “with royal splendor and magnificence.” To do otherwise was to risk inciting the Alexandrians, who no doubt mourned their queen publicly, despite the Roman presence. According to Plutarch, Octavian honored also her request to be laid to rest at Antony’s side. Iras and the eloquent Charmion received similarly fine burials, with their queen. It is unclear if the three were mummified. Their splendid joint monument would have been lavishly and colorfully decorated, as were the royal tombs of Cleopatra’s ancestors, with Roman twists in the iconography. By one account, statues of Iras and Charmion stood sentry outside. Plutarch implies that the burial place was in the center of Alexandria, along with those of previous Ptolemies. Octavian ordered the mausoleum to be finished as well, work presumably completed in a subdued city, numb with uncertainty; the Alexandrians were now Roman subjects. That Cleopatra’s monument was adjacent to a temple of Isis essentially means it could have been anywhere. The most recent theory is that Antony and Cleopatra’s final resting place is twenty miles west of Alexandria, on a sun-bleached hillside in Taposiris Magna, overlooking the Mediterranean. Neither the tomb nor the mausoleum (they were almost certainly separate structures) has been found.

Cleopatra was thirty-nine years old and had ruled for nearly twenty-two years, about a decade longer than had Alexander the Great, from whom she had inherited the baton that she inadvertently passed on to the Roman Empire. With her death, the Ptolemaic dynasty came to an end. Octavian formally annexed Egypt on August 31. His first year was Cleopatra’s last; he started the clock again with August 1, the date on which he had entered Alexandria. Cleopatra is said to have brought down the curtain on an age, although of course from the Egyptian perspective Antony too could be said to have done so. It is easy to forget he was Cleopatra’s undoing every bit as much as she was his.

TO THE END Ptolemaic tutors proved fickle. Caesarion got as far as a port on the Red Sea when Rhodon convinced him to return to Alexandria, possibly to negotiate with Octavian in his mother’s stead. The ancient world was at times an uncomfortably small place; Octavian could afford neither to let his cousin live nor to exhibit a son of the divine Caesar in a triumph. The name “Caesarion” alone posed a problem. The much publicized coming-of-age ceremony did not help. Octavian’s men returned the seventeen-year-old to Alexandria, where they murdered him, possibly having tortured him first. As they posed no real danger, Alexander Helios, Cleopatra Selene, and Ptolemy Philadelphus returned to Rome with Octavian, to be raised by his always amenable sister. They grew up in her large, comfortable household, with Antony and Octavia’s daughters, and with Antony’s surviving children by his previous marriages. (Iotape, Alexander Helios’s intended, returned to her family in Media.) A year after the death of their mother, Cleopatra’s surviving children walked in Octavian’s triumph, surely an awkward event for three youngsters said to be raised as attentively as if they were his own. He later married Cleopatra Selene off to Juba II, who at the age of five had walked in Caesar’s African triumph and was thereafter educated in Rome, where he developed a passion for history. Husband and wife had known similar formations and similar humiliations; the Roman civil wars made orphans of them both. A man of culture, something of a poet, a favorite of Octavian’s, Juba was sent with his bride to rule Mauretania. (It is today Algeria.) Cleopatra’s daughter was probably fifteen at the time, Juba twenty-two. As a favor to the young royals, Octavian spared Cleopatra Selene’s brothers, who may have traveled to western Africa as well. After the triumph we lose sight of the two boys forever.

On the Mauretanian throne Cleopatra Selene continued her mother’s legacy; her coins bear her likeness and are inscribed in Greek. (Juba’s are in Latin.) Together the couple transformed their capital into a cultural and artistic center, complete with a splendid library. Plenty of Egyptian sculpture—including a piece from July 31, 30, the day before Octavian entered Alexandria—has turned up in the area, where Cleopatra Selene evidently assembled a gallery of Ptolemaic busts. She continued the Isis association, and named her son Ptolemy. She kept sacred crocodiles. Cleopatra’s only known grandson, Ptolemy of Mauretania, succeeded Juba in AD 23. Seventeen years into his reign he visited Rome at the invitation of Caligula. Both men descended from Mark Antony; they were half cousins. The Roman emperor greeted the African king with honors, until Ptolemy one day swept into a gladiatorial show in a particularly splendid purple cloak. Heads turned, to Caligula’s displeasure. He ordered Ptolemy’s murder, an appropriate end to dynasty steeped, from the start, in blazing, supersaturated color.^*

Octavian obliterated all traces of Antony in both Rome and Alexandria. January 14, his birthday, was deemed an unlucky day, on which no public business could be transacted. By Senate decree, the names “Mark” and “Antony” were never again to be conjoined. Otherwise he was discarded, a historical inconvenience. Octavian would mention neither Antony nor Cleopatra by name in his account of Actium. He sentenced several of Antony’s close associates to death, Canidius and the Roman senator who supervised Cleopatra’s textile mills chief among them. Those who had sworn to perish with Antony and Cleopatra were presumably relieved of the need to see to the job themselves. Other partisans disappeared. The influential high priest at Memphis—who was born the same year as Caesarion, and who had remained personally bound to Cleopatra—died mysteriously several days before her. It was imperative that no one survive who might exercise authority, rally the people, reassemble Cleopatra’s kingdom. Octavian’s men collected the pile of Ptolemaic treasure from the palace and exacted fines throughout the city, inventing misdemeanors as they went. Where imagination failed, they simply confiscated two thirds of a victims’ property. It was a polite kind of plunder; the Romans made out handsomely. Octavian removed from Alexandria the fine statuary and precious art that Antony and Cleopatra had pillaged throughout Asia, restoring it, for the most part, to the cities to which it belonged. A few of the finest pieces wound up in Rome, where the best art had long come from the second-century sack of Corinth. Seventeen years after Cleopatra’s death, Octavian finished the Caesareum, that pharaonic and Greek marvel, in his honor.

Cleopatra had plenty of partisans, as faithful as had been her ladies-in-waiting, whose devotion was the talk of Alexandria. A servant did not normally die for her mistress. Those who had offered to rise up for their queen remained loyal. Cleopatra had her country’s favor; there had been no revolts under her reign. Alexandria must have given itself over to mourning. There were processions and hymns and offerings, the city would have been loud with keening and wails as the women of Alexandria shredded their garments and beat their breasts. On behalf of the native priests, a cleric offered Octavian 2,000 talents to preserve Cleopatra’s many statues. She might remain noble, but she was also dead; the offer was too attractive to refuse. It saved Octavian as well from the thorny business of tangling with Isis, who continued to be worshipped for some time. Cleopatra was often indistinguishable from that goddess; Octavian could not very well go around volatile Alexandria toppling religious statuary. Cleopatra’s statues, and her cult, lived on actively for hundreds of years, no doubt reinforced by her steely last stand against the Romans.

Octavian did not tarry in Egypt, henceforth a Roman province, to which no prominent Roman traveled without express permission. One of the few imperialists in history who did not care to be Alexander the Great—all would have worked out very differently for Cleopatra if he had—he was more invested in raw power than its glorious accessories. He evidenced little interest in Egyptian history, to the dismay of Cleopatra’s former subjects, eager to display the remains of her ancestors. Octavian made it known that he had little patience for dead Ptolemies. He paid his respects only to Alexander the Great, removed from his sarcophagus for the visit. The story goes that Octavian accidentally brushed against the body—he may have been strewing flowers—detaching a piece of mummified nose in the process.

Susceptible as Octavian was to sunstroke—he went nowhere without his broad-brimmed hat—he could not have much enjoyed the liquid heat of an Alexandrian August. In the fall he withdrew to Asia. No one profited more from Cleopatra’s death than Herod, who hosted the Romans again on their northbound trip. Octavian returned to him his precious palm and balsam groves and the coastal cities that Antony had appropriated for Cleopatra, supplementing them with additional territories. Herod’s kingdom swelled finally to dimensions commensurate with his kindnesses. Rome’s new favorite among non-Romans, he inherited as well the four hundred strapping Gauls who had served as Cleopatra’s bodyguard. Nicolaus of Damascus stepped in as his tutor, to become his close confidant. He produced a court history for Herod, from which Josephus—a major source for the life of Cleopatra, and himself a midcareer convert to the Roman cause—would work. Octavian left Gallus in charge of Egypt, as prefect. He too would discover that the province was difficult to rule—in 29 he subdued the people around Thebes, “the common terror of all kings”—and that its riches went to one’s head. He exceeded his command, commissioned too many statues of himself, inscribed his great deeds on the pyramids, and, indicted by the Senate, wound up a suicide.

Almost precisely a year after Cleopatra’s death, she paraded in effigy down the streets of Rome, in the last and most sumptuous of Octavian’s three days of triumph. With her a veritable river of gold, silver, and ivory flowed down the Via Sacra and through the Forum. Dio tells us that the Egyptian procession surpassed all others “in costliness and magnificence.” After the coffers of gold and silver; the wagons of jewelry, weapons, and art; the colorful placards and pennants; the defeated soldiers, marched the prized prisoners, the ten-year-old twins and six-year-old Ptolemy Philadelphus, in chains. Cleopatra was featured on her deathbed, in plaster or paint, along with the asp who may have started it all. Surrounded by his officers, the purple-cloaked Octavian followed behind. Cleopatra had been wrong in one assessment: Antony was conspicuously missing from the occasion. She was right in another: The only sovereign who did walk in that triumph, an ally of Antony’s, was executed soon afterward. The city glimmered with the spoils of Egypt; tons of Ptolemaic gold and silver, breastplates and tableware, crowns and shields, gem-studded furniture, paintings and statuary, had sailed with Octavian, as had several crocodiles. Some have placed a lumbering hippopotamus and a rhinoceros at the triumph as well. Octavian could well afford to be generous, and there were substantial gifts all around. The Egyptian victory was celebrated with particular élan, not only because it could afford to be. There was a civil war to camouflage.

Cleopatra’s statue remained in the Forum. It was the least Octavian could do for the woman whose golden couches and jeweled pitchers financed his career. Cleopatra allowed him to discharge every one of his obligations. She guaranteed Roman prosperity. So vast were the funds Octavian injected into the economy that prices soared. Interest rates tripled. As Dio summed up the transfer of wealth, Cleopatra saw to it that “the Roman empire was enriched and its temples adorned.” Her art and obelisks decorated its streets. Soundly defeated, she was nonetheless celebrated, in the beauty of a foreign city. With the riches came a rush of Egyptomania. Sphinxes, rearing cobras, sun disks, acanthus leaves, hieroglyphs, proliferated throughout Rome. Lotus blossoms and griffins decorated even Octavian’s personal study. Cleopatra earned a second backhanded tribute: In her wake, a golden age of women dawned in Rome. High-born wives and sisters suddenly enjoyed a role in public life. They interceded with ambassadors, counseled husbands, traveled abroad, commissioned temples and sculptures. They become more visible in art and in society. They joined Cleopatra in the Forum. No Roman woman would ever attain the exalted status or enjoy the unprecedented privileges granted Livia and Octavia, which they owed to a foreigner, to whom they served as counterweight. Livia compiled a fat portfolio of properties, one that would include lands in Egypt and palm groves in Judaea. Octavia would go down in history as the un-Cleopatra, supremely modest, prudent, and pious.

Cleopatra got a promotion as well, from pretext to punctuation point. If you were looking for a date for the beginning of the modern world, her death would be the best to fix upon. With her she took both the four-hundred-year-old Roman Republic and the Hellenistic Age. Octavian would go on to effect one of the greatest bait and switches in history; he restored the Republic in all its glory and—as would be apparent within a decade or so—as a monarchy. Having learned from Caesar’s example, he did so subtly. Octavian was never a “king,” always a “princeps,” or “first citizen.” For a title that was at once sufficiently grand and free of all monarchical odor, he turned to Cleopatra’s former friend Plancus, the painted sea nymph. Plancus coined the name “Augustus,” to signify that the man formerly known as Gaius Julius Caesar was more than human, that he was precious and revered.

There was some irony in fact that the West quickly began to resemble Cleopatra’s East, the more so as Octavian had advertised Cleopatra as a threat to the Republic, something she had never intended. Around Octavian formed a kind of court. He fell out with nearly every member of his immediate family. The Roman emperors became gods. They had their pictures painted as Serapis, following Antony’s Dionysian lead. And professions of austerity aside, the mantle of magnificence passed easily. While Octavian was said to have melted down Cleopatra’s fabulous gold tableware, Hellenistic grandeur prevailed. “For it is fitting that we who rule over many people,” reasoned one of Octavian’s advisers, “should surpass all men in all things, and brilliance of this sort, also, tends in a way to inspire our allies with respect for us and our enemies with terror.” He counseled Octavian to spare no expense. Rome represented the new luxury market. The artisans and industries followed. Livia had a personal staff of more than a thousand. So impressed was Octavian by Cleopatra’s lofty mausoleum that he built a similar one in Rome; Alexandria deserves much credit for Rome’s transformation from brick to marble. Octavian died at age seventy-six, at home in his bed, one of the few Roman emperors not murdered by close kin, another Hellenistic legacy. Having ruled for forty-four years—twice as long as Cleopatra—he had plenty of time in which to refashion the events that had brought him to power.^* He had too cause to note “that no high position is ever free from envy or treachery, and least of all a monarchy.” The enemies were bad but the friends arguably worse. The office, he concluded, was utterly dreadful.

THE REWRITING OF history began almost immediately. Not only did Mark Antony disappear from the record, but Actium wondrously transformed itself into a major engagement, a resounding victory, a historical turning point. It went from an end to a beginning. Augustus had rescued the country from great peril. He had resolved the civil war and restored world peace after a century of unrest. Time began anew. To read the official historians, it is as if with his return the Italian peninsula burst—after a crippling, ashen century of violence—into Technicolor, as if the crops sat suddenly upright, plump and golden, in the fields. “Validity was restored to the laws, authority to the courts, and dignity to the senate,” proclaims Velleius, very nearly cataloguing the duties with which Caesar had been meant to contend in 46. Augustus’s ego is embedded in the calendar, where it remains to this day, commemorating the fall of Alexandria and Rome’s reprieve from a foreign menace.^* Calendars of the time acknowledge the date as one on which he freed Rome “from a most grievous danger.”

Cleopatra was particularly ill served; the turncoats wrote the history, Dellius, Plancus, and Nicolaus of Damascus first among them. The years after Actium were a time of extravagant praise and lavish mythmaking. Her career also coincided with the birth of Latin literature; it was Cleopatra’s curse to inspire its great poets, happy to expound on her shame, in a language inhospitable to her and all she represented. Horace wrote exuberantly of Actium. The first to celebrate Octavian’s splendid victory, he did so while Cleopatra was still frantically fortifying Alexandria. He celebrates her defeat before it has occurred. Virgil and Propertius were on hand for the Egyptian triumph, by which time both the asp and Cleopatra’s pernicious influence were already set in stone. In every reckoning Antony is made to flee Actium on Cleopatra’s account. She helpfully illuminated one of Propertius’s favorite points: a man in love is a helpless man, shamefully subservient to his mistress. It is as if Octavian delivers Rome from that ill as well. He has restored the natural order of things: men ruled women, and Rome ruled the world. On both counts, Cleopatra was crucial to the story. Virgil composed the Aeneid in the decade after Cleopatra’s death; he put snakes in her wake even at Actium. She had no hope of faring well in a work read aloud both to Augustus and Octavia, as were portions of that epic poem. For the rest, her story would be shaped by a Roman she met once, in the last week of her life, who elevated her to a perilous adversary, at which altitude thick mists and obscuring myths settled comfortably around her. She counts among the losers whom history remembers, but for the wrong reasons.^* The mythmakers all aligned on one side. For the next century, the Oriental influence and the emancipation of women would keep the satirists in business.

Since Cleopatra’s death her fortunes have waxed and waned as dramatically as they did in her lifetime. Her power has been made to derive from her sexuality, for obvious reason; as one of Caesar’s murderers had noted, “How much more attention people pay to their fears than to their memories!” It has always been preferable to attribute a woman’s success to her beauty rather than to her brains, to reduce her to the sum of her sex life. Against a powerful enchantress there is no contest. Against a woman who ensnares a man in the coils of her serpentine intelligence—in her ropes of pearls—there should, at least, be some kind of antidote. Cleopatra unsettles more as sage than as seductress; it is less threatening to believe her fatally attractive than fatally intelligent. (Menander’s fourth-century adage—“A man who teaches a woman to write should recognize that he is providing poison to an asp”—was still being copied out by schoolchildren hundreds of years after her death.) It also makes a better story. Propertius sets the tone. Cleopatra was for him a wanton seductress, “the whore queen,” later “a woman of insatiable sexuality and insatiable avarice” (Dio), a carnal sinner (Dante), “the whore of the eastern kings” (Boccaccio), a poster child for unlawful love (Dryden).^* Propertius has her fornicating with her slaves. A first-century Roman would assert (falsely) that “ancient writers repeatedly speak of Cleopatra’s insatiable libido.” In one ancient account she is so insatiable that “she often played the prostitute.” (She is also both so beautiful and toxic that “many men bought nights with her at the price of their lives.”) In the estimation of one nineteenth-century woman, she was “a dazzling piece of witchcraft.” Florence Nightingale referred to her as “that disgusting Cleopatra.” Offering her the movie role, Cecil B. DeMille is said to have asked Claudette Colbert, “How would you like to be the wickedest woman in history?” Cleopatra stars even in a 1928 book called Sinners Down the Centuries. In the match between the lady and the legend there is no contest.

The personal inevitably trumps the political, and the erotic trumps all: We will remember that Cleopatra slept with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony long after we have forgotten what she accomplished in doing so, that she sustained a vast, rich, densely populated empire in its troubled twilight, in the name of a proud and cultivated dynasty. She remains on the map for having seduced two of the greatest men of her time, while her crime was to have entered into those same “wily and suspicious” marital partnerships that every man in power enjoyed. She did so in reverse and in her own name; this made her a deviant, socially disruptive, an unnatural woman. To these she added a few other offenses. She made Rome feel uncouth, insecure, and poor, sufficient cause for anxiety without adding sexuality to the mix. For some time she haunted the ancient imagination, primarily as a cautionary tale. Under Augustus the institution of marriage took on a new luster, a development that boded poorly for Cleopatra, the destabilizing, domineering home wrecker.

She elicited scorn and envy in equal and equally distorting measure; her story is constructed as much of male fear as fantasy. From Plutarch descends history’s greatest love story, though Cleopatra’s life was neither as lurid nor as romantic as has been made out. And she became a femme fatale twice over. For Actium to be the battle to beat all battles, she had to be the “wild queen” plotting Rome’s destruction. For Antony to have succumbed to something other than a fellow Roman, Cleopatra had to be a disarming seductress “who had already ruined him and would make his ruin still more complete.” It can be difficult to say where vengeance ends and homage begins. Her power was immediately enhanced because—for one man’s historical purposes—she needed to have reduced another to abject slavery. It is true that she was a dutiful, father-loving daughter, a patriot and protector, an early nationalist, a symbol of courage, a wise ruler with nerves of steel, a master at self-presentation. It is not true that she built the lighthouse of Alexandria, could manufacture gold, was the ideal woman (Gautier), a martyr to love (Chaucer), “a silly little girl” (Shaw), the mother of Christ. A seventh-century Coptic bishop termed her “the most illustrious and wise of women,” greater than the kings who preceded her. On a good day Cleopatra is said to have died for love, which is not exactly true either. Ultimately everyone from Michelangelo to Gérôme, from Corneille to Brecht, got a crack at her. The Renaissance was obsessed with her, the Romantics yet more so. She sent even Shakespeare over the top, eliciting from him his greatest female role, his richest poetry, a full, Antony-less last act, and, in the estimation of one critic, a rollicking tribute to guilt-free middle-aged adultery. Shakespeare may be as much to blame for our having lost sight of Cleopatra VII as the Alexandrian humidity, Roman propaganda, and Elizabeth Taylor’s limpid lilac eyes.

A center of intellectual jousting and philosophical marathons, Alexandria did not immediately surrender its vitality. It continued as the brain of the Mediterranean world for another century or so. Then it began to dematerialize. With it went legal autonomy for women; the days of suing your father-in-law for the return of your dowry when your (insolvent) husband ran off and had a baby with another woman were over. After a fifth-century earthquake, Cleopatra’s palace slid into the Mediterranean. The lighthouse, the library, the museum, have all vanished. The Alexandrian harbor bears no relation to its Hellenistic proportions. The Nile itself has changed course. The city has sunk more than twenty feet. Even the coast of Actium—which Cleopatra must practically have memorized—has changed. Her Alexandria has long been almost entirely invisible, either underwater or buried beneath a teeming city that has largely forgotten its Hellenistic chapter. Ptolemaic culture evaporated as well. A great deal that Cleopatra knew would be forgotten for fifteen hundred years. A very different kind of woman, the Virgin Mary, would subsume Isis as entirely as Elizabeth Taylor has subsumed Cleopatra.

Our fascination with Cleopatra has only increased as a result; she is all the more mythic for her disappearance. The holes in the story keep us under her spell. And she continues to unsettle. All the issues that disrupt the dinner table, that go to our heads like snake venom, combine in her person. Two thousand years after she taunted Octavian with a very costly bonfire, nothing enthralls so much as excessive good fortune and devastating catastrophe. We still fight the battle of East and West, still lurch as uneasily as did Cicero between indulgence and restraint. Sex and power continue to combust in spectacular ways. Female ambition, accomplishment, authority, trouble us as they did the Romans, for whom Cleopatra was more a monster than a marvel, but undeniably a little of both.

Two thousand years of bad press and overheated prose, of film and opera, cannot conceal the fact that Cleopatra was a remarkably capable queen, canny and opportunistic in the extreme, a strategist of the first rank. Her career began with one brazen act of defiance and ended with another. “What woman, what ancient succession of men, was so great?” demands the anonymous author of a fragmentary Latin poem, which positions her as the principal player of the age. Boldly and bodily, she inserted herself into world politics, with wide-reaching consequences. She convinced her people that a twilight was a dawn and—with all her might—struggled to make it so. In a desperate situation, she improvised wildly, then improvised afresh, for some a definition of genius. There was a glamour and a grandeur to her story well before either Octavian or Shakespeare got his hands on it. Hers was an exhilarating presence; before she sent Plutarch many pages out of his way she had the same effect on his countrymen. From our first glimpse of her to the last, she dazzles for her ability to set the scene. To the end she was mistress of herself, astute, spirited, inconceivably rich, pampered yet ambitious.

In her adult life Cleopatra would have met few people she considered her equal. To the Romans she was a stubborn, supreme exception to every rule. She remains largely incomparable: She had plenty of predecessors, few successors. With her, the age of empresses essentially came to an end. In two thousand years only one or two other women could be said to have wielded unrestricted authority over so vast a realm. Cleopatra remains nearly alone at the all-male table, in possession of a hand both flush and flawed. She got a very good deal right, and one crucial thing wrong. It is impossible to fathom how she could have felt at the end of the summer of 30, as Octavian closed in, as it became more and more clear that there were to be no further reversals of fortune, no more brilliantly salvaged futures, that she and Egypt were this time plainly lost. “What is it to lose your country—a great suffering?” a queen asks her son in Euripides. “The greatest, even worse than people say,” he replies. The fear and fury must have shattered Cleopatra as she realized she was to become the woman “who destroyed the Egyptian monarchy,” as a third-century AD chronicler has it. For her monumental loss there were no consolations, including—assuming she believed in one—a brilliant afterlife.