The Death of Cleopatra and the End of the Ptolemies

This is the story of a single week in August 30 BCE. In that week, the last pharaoh of Egypt killed herself in a small mausoleum overlooking the harbor of Alexandria, the last king of the Ptolemaic line was murdered on the orders of his Roman rival, and an empire that had endured for three thousand years was folded into another. It is told here in chronological order rather than as a topical overview, because the order is part of the meaning.

The Aftermath of Actium

After the Battle of Actium in September 31 BCE, the writing was on the wall for Cleopatra and Mark Antony. Their forces had been defeated at sea, and the Roman general Octavian, the adopted son and heir of Julius Caesar, was determined to finish the conquest. For the political background, see Cleopatra’s alliances with Rome and our guide to the Late Period of Egypt.

In the winter of 30 BCE, Octavian invaded Egypt from the east. He brought a large force, including a contingent of Nubian archers under the king of the Blemmyes, who had agreed to support Rome. Antony’s forces, demoralized and reduced, met him in a final battle on the outskirts of Alexandria. The Egyptian-Roman army was defeated.

Antony, who had by now received a false report that Cleopatra was already dead, stabbed himself in the abdomen with his own sword. He died, slowly and painfully, in Cleopatra’s arms. The most famous account is that of Plutarch, written a century after the events but drawing on earlier sources.

The Mausoleum at Alexandria

Before the final battle, Cleopatra had withdrawn to a small mausoleum she had built on the royal grounds in Alexandria. She had been collecting poisons, and she had made several attempts to take her own life before Antony’s death. According to Plutarch, her attendants stopped her, fearing the disorder that a suicide might cause.

After Antony’s death, Cleopatra locked herself inside the mausoleum with two handmaidens, Iras and Charmion. She sent a message to Octavian, who was approaching, asking for an audience to discuss the future of her children. Octavian refused; he wanted Cleopatra alive and in his power, as a prize to be displayed in his Roman triumph.

According to Plutarch, Cleopatra was at first afraid that Octavian would harm her children. But what changed her mind, in the end, is unclear. Some sources say she feared the humiliation of being dragged through the streets of Rome in chains. Others say she had been testing poisons on condemned prisoners, and had decided on the most painless. The decision, whatever the cause, was hers.

The Death Itself: 12 August 30 BCE

On 12 August 30 BCE, by the most likely ancient reckoning, Cleopatra took her own life in her mausoleum in Alexandria. The cause, according to one famous tradition preserved by Plutarch (Life of Antony 71-86), was the bite of an asp, a sacred Egyptian snake associated with the goddess Wadjet. Modern historians, including Rolf Krauss in Die 3. Zwischenzeit (2006), are skeptical.

An asp bite, although it would kill, would not produce an immediate and painless death; in fact, its venom causes convulsions, vomiting, and a slow, agonizing death. Plutarch himself notes that the evidence was not clear. Two handmaidens died with her, and the snake was never found. Modern theories have included poison hidden in a hairpin, poison applied to a self-inflicted wound, or simply a self-inflicted wound with a poisoned needle. The truth will never be known, but the dramatic story has shaped the popular imagination for two thousand years.

Cleopatra was 39 when she died. She had been pharaoh for 22 years. She was buried beside Antony, in a tomb the two of them had prepared.

Caesarion

Within days of her death, Octavian, now the future emperor Augustus, turned his attention to Caesarion, Cleopatra’s son by Julius Caesar. The boy was 17, and a potential political threat. Octavian is said to have quoted Homer’s Iliad 2.204, “Many rulers is not good”, as a justification for killing Caesarion; the Greek sources (Plutarch, Life of Caesar 49.6; Life of Brutus 36) attribute the line either to the Iliad or to Alexander the Great, not to the Athenian runner Pheidippides. Caesarion was hunted down and killed. The line of the Ptolemies was over.

Cleopatra’s three children with Antony, Alexander Helios, Cleopatra Selene II, and Ptolemy Philadelphus, survived for several more years. They were taken to Rome, raised in the household of Octavian’s sister, and eventually married into other Roman families. Cleopatra Selene, the only one to marry, became queen of Mauretania (in modern Algeria) and was the ancestor of a long line of North African and Iberian royal families.

Egypt as a Roman Province

In 30 BCE, Egypt became the personal property of the Roman emperor, governed by a prefect (later called the praefectus Aegypti) appointed by the emperor himself. No Roman senator was permitted to set foot in Egypt without the emperor’s permission, and no army was allowed to enter except at the emperor’s express order. The reason was simple: Egypt’s wealth, especially its grain, was the food supply of Rome itself.

Egypt remained a Roman province for nearly seven hundred years, until the Arab conquest in 641 CE. During that time, the country gradually lost its ancient religion, its hieroglyphic writing, and most of its ancient traditions. The Ptolemaic and Roman periods were the last era in which ancient Egyptian culture was a living presence.

The Afterlife of the Afterlife

Cleopatra’s death was an event with global consequences. The Roman Empire, having taken over Egypt, was now the unchallenged power of the Mediterranean world. The grain of Egypt fed the city of Rome, and Rome in turn governed a vast multi-ethnic state. The pharaonic tradition, three thousand years old, was over, but its memory persisted in Egyptian religion, in Egyptian art, and in the way the new Roman rulers of Egypt presented themselves to the people they governed.

Cleopatra herself has been remembered and reimagined countless times. In Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, she is the great tragic heroine of the ancient world. In the modern era, she has been played by Theda Bara (1917), Claudette Colbert (1934), Vivien Leigh (1945), and Elizabeth Taylor (1963). The 1963 film in particular, in the middle of the Cold War, transformed her into a symbol of independence and dignity in the face of overwhelming power.

In Egypt itself, Cleopatra is an ambiguous figure. She is the last pharaoh, but she was of Greek descent, ruled a Greek-speaking dynasty, and rarely appears on the modern Egyptian tourist trail. The Egypt that lives in the modern imagination, the pyramids, the temples, the hieroglyphs, belongs to a much earlier era. Cleopatra’s Egypt, by then, was a Hellenistic kingdom on the way to becoming a Roman province.

Her tomb has never been found. Plutarch reports that she was buried beside Mark Antony in a tomb they had prepared together, but the site of this tomb in Alexandria, sunk beneath the modern city and lost to earthquakes and rising sea levels, remains one of Egypt’s great unsolved archaeological mysteries. There is a reason the underwater archaeologists keep going back to the eastern harbor.