Cleopatra the Great (44 page)

The sources also claim that Octavian himself visited her around 8 August to check on her recovery, and although some authorities doubt whether such a meeting ever took place and are of the opinion that it was simply invented for dramatic effect, it may well be that direct contact was made if both parties were now residing within the same palace complex, particularly if one was anxious to gain a full picture of all the wealth the other still had in her possession. It is said that, when Octavian was admitted, Cleopatra was lying in bed with Olympus still in attendance, but immediately rose up and fell at his feet, playing along as conquered victim ‘as if she desired nothing more than to prolong her life'. Although the recent mourning had left ‘her hair and face looking wild and disfigured, her voice quivering, and her eyes sunk in her head', she nevertheless retained ‘her old charm and the boldness of her youthful beauty' and ‘still sparkled from within'. Some even claimed she had ‘dressed herself with studied negligence — indeed, her appearance in mourning wonderfully enhanced her beauty', presumably in spite of the self-inflicted gouges; having had Caesar and Antonius, they claimed, she now tried to seduce Octavian, only ‘the chastity of the princeps [Octavian] was too much for her'.

This is a risible claim in the light of Octavian's known promiscuity, and in any case it is hard to believe that Cleopatra could have demonstrated any such reaction to this rather mundane-looking little man whose sole intent was to make an inventory of her remaining assets. For, as the sources do in fact reveal, ‘having had by her a list of her treasure, she gave it into his hands', until her finance minister, Seleucus, pointed out that certain articles seemed to have been omitted. At this she is said to have grabbed her minister by the hair and struck him before admitting that she had indeed kept back a few ‘women's toys' — pieces of jewellery she had selected as gifts for Livia and Octavia.

Cleopatra had convinced Octavian that she did indeed intend to live, and so, reassured that she was fit to travel to Rome, he withdrew, satisfied that he had deceived her, ‘but in fact, was himself deceived.' Already well aware of his plans for the Triumph, Cleopatra was determined to avoid this at all costs; she would literally rather die. Octavian's poets claimed, accurately for once, that ‘she, seeking to die more nobly, showed no womanish fear of the sword . . . resolved for death, she was brave indeed. She was no docile woman but truly scorned to be taken away in her enemy's ships, deposed, to an overweening triumph'. When she was informed by Octavian's officer Publius Cornelius Dolabella that Octavian was about to leave for Syria, while she herself would be sent to Rome in three days' time, Cleopatra put her final plan into action.

On 10 August, she requested to be allowed out of her quarters in order to pay her final respects to Antonius before she left Egypt for ever. Still too weak to walk, she was carried in her litter to her funerary complex in the company of Eiras and Charmion and on arrival made appropriate offerings for his soul, perhaps favourites such as ‘pure wine and fragrant oil of spikenard, balsam too, and crimson roses'. As she prayed to Antonius' spirit, she told him ‘no further offerings or libations expect from me; these are the last honours that Cleopatra can pay your memory . . . But if the gods below, with whom you now are, either can or will do anything, suffer not your living wife to be abandoned; let me not be led in triumph to your shame, but hide me and bury me here with you, since amongst all my bitter misfortunes nothing has afflicted me like this brief time that I have had to live without you.'

When she returned to the palace, passing Epaphroditus and the guards, she withdrew behind the emerald-studded doors into her private quarters, ordering her attendants to prepare her a bath. After she had bathed and perfumed herself, Eiras styled her hair into its usual melon coiffure, carefully braiding each section, pulling it back and securing it in a bun at the back of her head with several large hairpins. Then, with Charmion's help, ‘she put on her finest robes' and reclined to eat a splendid lunch, no doubt accompanied by the very finest of wines and polished off with a few large figs brought in fresh from the country.

She then called for a writing tablet and stylus, and in a final missive to Octavian echoed Antonius' desire that they should be buried together in the same tomb. After she had sealed the letter with her signet ring, it was passed out to Epaphroditus who sent it by messenger to Octavian. She dismissed all her staff except Eiras and Charmion, her two most trusted servants, who had supported her through much of her eventful life and would now play their parts in Cleopatra's final performance. Yet it would be a performance which is even now still shrouded in mystery. For, despite the famous snakebite scenario, the ancient sources admit that ‘no one knows for certain by what means she perished' since ‘what really took place is known to no one'.

Certainly Cleopatra's famous asp can be dismissed as a work of fiction based on her caricature-like effigy with snakes coiling up both arms in the manner of the goddess Isis. When the effigy was later paraded around Rome it was described by Octavian's poets Virgil, Propertius and Horace, who pictured ‘the pair of asps in wait for her' and as she ‘handled fierce snakes, her corporeal frame drank their venom.' Like so much else they produced, an historical inaccuracy. But the image for which they are responsible — the tragic Cleopatra expiring with at least one asp in tow, an image endlessly recycled by artists down the centuries — is now firmly lodged in history.

Although some later sources claim that ‘an asp was brought in amongst those figs and covered with the leaves', and that when Cleopatra saw it she simply said, ‘ “So here it is” and held out her bare arm to be bitten', the presence of such a snake raises a considerable number of problems. The term ‘asp' is used to describe any snake capable of puffing wide its neck and can be applied to several kinds of North African viper, including
Vipera aspis
, the horned viper
(Cerastes cornutus)
and
Cerastes vipera
, which has even gained the nickname ‘Cleopatra's asp'. Yet a viper's bite causes an intense reaction: burning pains spread throughout the body, the blood clots, creating disfiguring purple blotches and swellings, and vomiting and incontinence precede the final loss of consciousness.

Since such a snake would have been completely unsuited to Cleopatra's known desire for a dignified end, it has therefore been suggested that the ‘asp' was in fact the Egyptian cobra,
Naja haje
, whose poison acts rapidly on the nerves. Other than two small marks from the fangs, there is no damage to the skin. A slight drowsiness leads to gradual paralysis of the body, ending in a fatal coma in full accordance with the ancient description of Cleopatra's choice of snake-based poison ‘which without convulsion or groaning brought on a heavy drowsiness and lethargy with a gentle sweat on the face, the sense being stupefied by degrees; the patient, in appearance, being sensible of no pain, but rather troubled to be disturbed or awakened like those that are in a profound natural sleep'.

Almost a century ago it was also suggested that Cleopatra's choice of the cobra may have been based on symbolic reasons, since snakes in general and cobras in particular were an integral part of Egyptian, Greek and Roman symbolism from Alexandria's ‘good spirit' Agathos Daimon to the classical ‘ourouboros' representing the beginning and end of all things. Alexander himself was believed to have been conceived by means of a sacred snake which could also be the bringer of death. Isis and her consort Osiris-Serapis were both worshipped as snakes; Isis as the great magician Weret-Hekau appeared as a cobra, and the goddess' acolytes carried snakes in much the same way as did devotees of Dionysos. Yet it is the cobra's identification with the sacred uraeus serpent of ancient Egypt which seems to have generated most interest in terms of Cleopatra's motivation. It was worn as an emblem on the crown of all Egyptian pharaohs, and it is claimed that Cleopatra would have regarded this symbol of divine kingship as the perfect means of achieving immortality and most fitting to her status as the last pharaoh of Egypt.

Yet this ingenious explanation ignores the fact that the uraeus was meant to spit venom at the pharaoh's enemies and not at the monarch — not to mention the fact that she already regarded herself as immortal in the form of the Living Isis. And having done all she could in life to guarantee the succession of her son Caesarion, she could surely never have wanted to depict herself as the last of her line.

The use of a cobra also fails from a logistical point of view; because all its venom is discharged in the first bite, a single cobra could never have supplied the means for all three women to take their lives at the same time. Several snakes would therefore be required; in addition, cobras containing sufficient venom to kill a single human are around six feet in length. To conceal three such snakes would require a basket of figs so large that it could surely never have been smuggled past the guards — an unlikely scenario recalling the way in which Cleopatra herself is usually believed to have been smuggled into the palace by a late-night carpet salesman in another episode of creative embellishment.

To circumvent the problem, the ancient sources suggest that a snake may already have been well hidden within Cleopatra's quarters, ‘kept in a vase, and that she vexed and pricked it with a golden spindle till it seized her arm'. As a tale which grew in the telling, it was eventually claimed that she had actually been killed by a ‘two-headed serpent capable of bounding several feet in the air', and after biting her it had hidden in a pot-plant until Octavian arrived, when it jumped out and bit him too.

The popular desire to believe in a snake-induced suicide seems to ignore the fact that a snake itself did not have to be physically present for its poison to be employed, particularly by a woman apparently so well versed in toxicology. With cobra venom providing a relatively pain-free death without unfortunate side-effects on the body, it was surely simply a matter of hiding its poison prior to use, perhaps blended into some form of ointment as mentioned in one source compiled only a few years after the event. Furthermore, little notice seems to have been paid to several ancient sources which claim that ‘she had smeared a pin with some poison whose composition rendered it harmless if the contact were external, but which, if even the smallest quantity entered the bloodstream, would quickly prove fatal, although also painless; according to this theory, she had previously worn the pin in her hair as usual', for ‘it was also said she carried poison in a hollow bodkin, about which she wound her hair'.

Such pins would have been a key part of her trademark melon coiffure, tucked away within the hair mass, their portrayal in sculpted images or in the hair of female mummies of the time revealing how such a lethal object could be secreted innocuously about the person. And since female hair was in many ways regarded as inviolable in Roman culture, the Roman soldiers who searched her for concealed weapons and even shook her robes for poisons seem never to have considered investigating her hairstyle. Given that Cleopatra chose to die in the company of her hairdresser Eiras, a woman whom Octavian himself had ridiculed as ‘Cleopatra's hair-dressing girl' alongside other courtiers and eunuchs deemed to be incapable of any significant deeds, it must have been with a tremendous sense of satisfaction that Eiras now provided the very means by which Octavian was deprived of his greatest triumph.

In a final flourish, Cleopatra had even directed the layout of this final tableau which would be played out for greatest effect to an audience who would throw open the doors at any time once Octavian had read the letter. Perhaps pausing for a last look out at the sea, the domain of Isis Pharia which stretched out far beyond her window, Cleopatra lay down upon her golden bed and ‘with majestic grace, took in her hands all the emblems of royalty'. After neatly arranging Cleopatra's robes about her, Charmion took her place at the head of the bed as Eiras took hers at the foot — specific positions at either end of the body which were the traditional places of Isis and Nephthys as chief guardians of the deceased. With Charmion the royal dresser taking the place of Nephthys, the goddess responsible for the linen which decked out the dead, Isis' close association with the hairdresser's art meant that Eiras was equally well placed to perform this sacred duty as she handed over the hollow hairpin with its lethal contents.

Cleopatra ‘made a slight scratch on her arm and had dipped the pin in the blood'. Since the skin was slightly broken, the venomous contents were rapidly absorbed intravenously. As the poison began to take effect, Cleopatra closed her eyes and a gradual numbness crept across her body. The last sounds she heard would have been the low voices of her two women preparing to follow, and the steady lapping of the waves, growing increasingly distant until vanishing completely.

The silence would only have been broken by the sound of hobnailed soles against the palace's marble floors as Octavian's men hurried through the ante-rooms and flung open the doors, to find Cleopatra dead, ‘lying upon a bed of gold, set out in all her royal ornaments. Eiras, one of her women, lay dying at her feet, and Charmion, just ready to fall, scarce able to hold up her head, was adjusting her mistress's diadem' inherited from Alexander as her symbol of power. Clearly stunned by the calculated effect of the stage-managed sight before them, one of the men asked angrily, ‘Was this well done of your lady, Charmion?' ‘Extremely well done,' she answered defiantly with her final breath, ‘and as befitting the descendant of so many kings.'

As soon as Octavian received Cleopatra's letter requesting burial with Antonius, he rushed to her quarters since ‘he was so anxious to save Cleopatra as an ornament for his triumph'. Ordering specialist physicians to try to revive her, the men were unable to find any obvious cause of death, and no signs of violence: ‘the only marks that were found on her body were tiny pricks on the arm'.

Paying little attention to any hairpins scattered around or indeed reinserted into the hair, they assumed that such marks must have been made by a snake. Yet of the three large cobras which would have been needed to kill all three women, not a single snake was found, ‘only something like the trail of it was said to have been noticed on the sand by the sea, on the part towards which the building faced and where the windows were'. Nevertheless, it was said that Octavian ‘actually summoned Psylfian snake-charmers to suck the poison from her self-inflicted wound, supposedly from the bite of an asp'. Renowned for their ability ‘if sent for immediately, to suck out the venom of any reptile before the victim dies', some of these Libyan Psylfi presumably practised in Alexandria.

Their Egyptian equivalents were priests of the scorpion goddess Selket, experts in the treatment of scorpion stings and snakebites, who employed complex rites set down in the medical texts. A Ptolemaic treatment specifically for snakebite listed twenty-one types of snake and the different gods associated with them, followed by a prognostic test to find out ‘Will the patient live or die?' Treatment then involved cutting out the bite and applying natron salt to reduce swelling, in the way that magnesium sulphate might be used today; alternatively the wound might be treated with various combinations of onion, beer, carob, terebinth, kyphi, mustard or a decoction of mandrake root.

Certainly some form of emergency treatment was administered to Cleopatra, since Octavian ‘not only came to see her body, but called in the aid of drugs and of the Psylli in an attempt to revive her', their reciting of the correct incantation an equally vital part of such treatment. For, as one Ptolemaic spell stated, ‘the poison does not enter the heart here, nor burn the breast here . . . Osiris' sword destroys the poison, it cools the burn, when the snakes — merbu, wartet, ketet — come out!' Such spells also listed the traditional gods Selket, Ra and Horus, although the deity most often invoked was Isis, consummate physician and the expert healer in cases of snakebite.

Yet despite every medical and magical attempt to revive her, it was too late. Cleopatra had escaped. She had defiantly predicted, ‘I will not be shown in a Triumph', and it is said that Octavian ‘was bitterly chagrined on his own account, as if all the glory of his victory had been taken away from him'.

But he also realised that, to be seen as her legal successor by the Egyptians, some of whom rose up in revolt at news of her death, he must give his predecessor proper burial. So, honouring her last wishes, he ordered her tomb to be completed and her body to be buried alongside that of Antonius, presumably handing her body over to the embalmers since the sources maintain that the couple ‘were both embalmed in the same manner and buried in the same tomb'.

The timing of Cleopatra's funerary rites was certainly significant from a ritual point of view, for, only two days after her death on 10 August, the Egyptians celebrated the Birthday of Isis, the Lychnapsia or ‘Festival of Lights' to commemorate the time when Isis searched the darkness by torchlight for the body of Osiris. So, as every Isis temple across Egypt and beyond blazed with light, the body of Living Isis was laid out in her tomb beside the goddess' temple on Alexandria's Lochias peninsula, her devotees taking comfort in the legend that the goddess could never die. For, unlike her husband Osiris, Isis herself had never suffered death but was perceived as a human queen who had simply passed into another dimension in order to resurrect the dead. A later literary work, based on the pharaonic Ancestor Ritual, had Cleopatra describing how the dead await the waters of rebirth to be reborn, and the idea that Isis' temples allowed the souls of the dead to be revived was reflected in the belief that at least one of her shrines was ‘full of ghosts'.

Accompanying their mistress into the beyond were Charmion and Eiras, whose loyalty became proverbial in Alexandria. Octavian ordered that ‘her women also received honorable burial by his directions', presumably within Cleopatra's mausoleum following the age-old practice of burying servants with those they had served in life during Egypt's earliest periods. Statues of the two serving women were also set up at the burial site. However, claims that Octavian gave orders for Cleopatra to receive a burial ‘with royal splendour and magnificence' failed to mention that she was nevertheless deprived of her vital, albeit precious funerary equipment. It is said that ‘great quantities of treasure were found in the palace', and in his rampant asset-stripping, Octavian melted down the royal plate and all the precious metals he could find, sending back to Rome all Cleopatra's other treasures including her personal jewellery and her remaining great pearl worth around 10 million sesterces. And although his biographer was keen to point out that he only kept for himself'a single agate cup', he somehow found sufficient funds to purchase the ultimate status symbol, his own island, when he bought himself Capri the following year.

The Egyptian wealth sent back to Rome ended thirteen years of economic depression overnight as ‘the rate of interest fell from 12 to 4%'. Octavian could also now guarantee huge supplies of Egyptian grain each year, and was finally able to give his troops their long overdue back pay. One later Roman source claimed that he ‘seduced the army with bonuses, and his cheap food policy was successful bait for civilians. Indeed, he attracted everybody's goodwill by the enjoyable gift of peace', eliminating all possible opposition as ‘war or judicial murder had disposed of all men of spirit' and clearly one woman.

Following Cleopatra's death on the 17th day of Mesore, to 10 August, Egypt was apparently ruled by her children for a period of some three weeks until Octavian's regime began on the first day of the following month, 1st Thoth, 31 August 30
BC
, when Egypt was formally annexed by Rome. Having made himself Cleopatra's legitimate heir by ordering her burial and completing her tomb, Octavian ordered the execution of her eldest son and co-regent Caesarion, the fifteenth and final Ptolemy whose dynasty had ruled Egypt for almost three hundred years.

Agreeing with Arius' opinion that ‘it is bad to have too many Caesars', paraphrasing a line from the Iliad, Octavian had finally made himself sole heir of Julius Caesar, ordering work to be carried out on the Caesarium which Cleopatra had created in Caesar's honour and which he rede-dicated in honour of himself. He nevertheless continued with Cleopatra's plans by ordering the pair of granite obelisks she had selected from Heliopolis to be set up at either side of the huge entrance way. Each stood on the back of four giant bronze crabs whose claws, inscribed in Greek and Latin, announced that they had been set up on the orders of Octavian; the obelisks, however, eventually taken to London and New York, are still quite rightly known as ‘Cleopatra's Needles'.

The Caesarium's interior was home to numerous statues in keeping with Egypt's long tradition of ancestor worship, but Octavian now set up marble statues of himself to replace those of the previous regime. Female images were required to compete with those of Cleopatra, so statues of his wife Livia were set up together with those of other female relatives. The bust of a young woman recently found in Alexandria's harbour had been identified on the basis of her hairstyle as Octavia's youngest daughter, Antonia Minor.

Yet there were no such favours for her father Antonius, whose statues were pulled down and smashed wherever they were found. The obelisk that Cleopatra had erected in his honour was rededicated to Rome's conquest of Egypt, and, with his name chiselled out of every official inscription, Octavian declared 14 January, the day of Antonius' birth, to be ‘nefastus' or unholy.

The destruction of Cleopatra's own statues was only prevented when ‘Archibius, one of her friends, gave [Octavian] two thousand talents to save them'. Such a sum would support the Roman army for a whole year, and it was an offer that even Octavian could not refuse. Although Archibius is generally assumed to have been a courtier with more money than sense, only the temples would have been capable of finding such an extraordinary sum, particularly since they would have needed Cleopatra's statuary to remain intact as a vital part of Egypt's divine ancestor cult. And given that Archibius' Egyptian name was Horemakhbyt, it has been plausibly suggested that he was spokesman for the Egyptian clergy following the death of the teenage high priest Petubastis.

Not only had the high priest's death seriously affected national administration, it had deeply changed matters within the ancient Egyptian capital, Memphis, where new rulers of Egypt were traditionally confirmed and crowned by the hereditary high priest. This was now no longer possible since ‘the Memphite dynasty was extinguished at the same moment as the House of the Ptolemies'. The Egyptian records even suggest that Octavian's forces had ransacked the tomb of the previous high priest, Pasherenptah III, for although he had died ten years before and been buried alongside his wife Taimhotep, his body had to be remummified and reburied in 30
BC
, presumably following its desecration. So, to prevent the body of his unfortunate son and heir Petubastis sharing the same fate, it was kept in the embalmers' workshop for a staggering seven years before it was felt sufficiently safe to bury his mummy with its ‘gold and silver ornaments with protective amulets of all sorts of genuine precious stones'.

Having secured Alexandria, Octavian moved on to Memphis where the high priest's nearest living relative, Psenamun of Letopolis, had to be drafted in to become Octavian's high priest, designated ‘divus films', ‘divine son' of Julius Caesar, or ‘god and son of a god' in Egyptian. Although he was worshipped as such within the great temple complex of Memphis, it is perhaps telling that Psenamun was the first and last high priest of Octavian. After the unfortunate Petubastis was finally buried seven years after his death, priestly records ceased in 23
BC
.

Refusing to follow his female predecessor's enthusiasm for native religion, Octavian ‘would not go out of his way, however slightly, to honour the divine Apis bull'. He claimed ‘to worship gods, not cattle', and his feelings were echoed by his spin doctor poets who ridiculed the ‘demented', ‘deranged' Egyptians and their absurd devotion to such sacred creatures. In a complete break with Ptolemaic practices, the new regime were reluctant to pay for the animals' costly burials, and they were increasingly wrapped in recycled papyri rather than best-quality linen. A similar situation was reflected in burials of the Buchis bulls at Hermonthis. When the twenty-four-year-old bull which Cleopatra had once rowed along the Nile at the very start of her reign died soon after she did, the sandstone stela marking its burial named Octavian but lacked any accompanying titles or even a cartouche.

The Hermonthis clergy, ‘the angry priests', were apparently unwilling to acknowledge the legitimacy of a successor by using his official titles, even though they had already been devised. Anti-Roman feelings are also suggested by the requirement that all temple personnel, from the highest priest to the lowliest worker, had to swear an oath that they would not abandon their posts and take part in rebellion. A surviving document from the Fayum refers to two men,

both lamplighters in the temple of Serapis, most great god, and of the Isis shrine there, and Paapis son of Thonis and Petorisris son of Patoiphos, both lamp-lighters in the temple of Taweret, most great goddess, at Oxyrynchos. All four swear by Caesar, god and son of a god, to the overseers of the temples in the Oxyrynchos and Kynopolitye nomes, that we will superintend the lamps of the above named temples in the Oxyrynchos and Kynopolitye nomes, that we will superintend the lamps of the above named temples and will supply proper oil for the daily lamps burning in the temples signified from Thoth 1 to Mesore 5 of the present year 1 of Caesar in accordance with what was supplied up to the 22nd which was year 7 of Cleopatra; and we the aforesaid are mutually sureties and all our property is security for the performance of the duties herein written.

Yet clearly such oaths proved ineffective, so in reaction to ongoing native unrest which, as always, focused on the temples, Octavian confiscated all temple lands and placed the clergy under the ‘high priest of Alexandria and all Egypt', a new appointee responsible for enforcing strict rules concerning everything from priestly dress to their behaviour. He also gave orders for his statuary to be set up throughout the country, a giant bronze image erected in the far south at Aswan embellished with large, inlaid eyes to reflect his own which gleamed ‘like those of horses, the whites being larger than usual'; it was also a means of keeping a symbolic watch over the border with Nubia, home of the nomadic Blemmyes and Nobatae.

These volatile peoples were devotees of Isis too, which perhaps explains why, regardless of his true feelings towards Egypt and its gods, Octavian was keen to have himself portrayed at Philae in full pharaonic garb, bringing myrrh, wine and all good things to Isis and her fellow gods. He was even named ‘beloved of Ptah and Isis'. Further south at Kalabsha in Nubia, he ordered towering figures of Cleopatra and Caesarion offering to Isis on a 23-foot-high gateway to be recarved as himself, accompanied by cartouches naming him ‘the Roman' and ‘Caesar the god, son of the god'.

Although Octavian was portrayed as a traditional pharaoh on Egypt's monuments in order to conform to a culture built entirely around the central figure of a king, the country was soon ruled in absentia when he left Egypt for Syria, finally returning to Italy in the summer of 29
BC.
Although he and his Roman successors would continue to use the traditional pharaonic titles ‘King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Lord of the Two Lands, son of Ra', they added the additional phrase ‘he whose power is incomparable in the City par excellence that he loves, Rome', making clear that Egypt's pharaoh no longer resided in Egypt.