Cleopatra, page 13
In a video interview, Andrew Gray, curator of herpetology at the Manchester Museum, brings the expertise of a scientist to the question of how Cleopatra died. An Egyptian cobra, often five or six feet long, could hardly have been transported in a basket of figs. More to the point, there was only a small chance that a person would die from a cobra bite. Most such bites were “dry” and only rarely involved an injection of venom. Even if she had been bitten, a full recovery was likely. Only 10 percent of snakebite wounds are fatal, and on the slim chance that this one was, the death would have been agonizing—as Cleopatra would have known. Finally, it was impossible for Cleopatra to pass the snake along to kill her two maids, because a cobra strikes only once.
But if she was not bitten by a snake, something else must have killed her. Yet like so much about her life and death, we will never know what that was.
Plutarch tells that the snake was never found inside the tomb. He adds a brief, haunting story about some witnesses who claimed to have seen from the window of the tomb, the winding trail that the serpent left in the riverbank as it slithered away from the scene of the crime. To say that someone saw from a high window the shallow groove dug in the sand by a serpent is an eloquent way of raising the question of whether the thing actually happened.
“But no one knows the truth,” writes Plutarch.
Cleopatra’s long and steady hold on our collective psyche might have been weaker and less enduring without the perverse romance of the (alleged) method of her suicide: so original, so brave, so dramatic. No other death could have so intrigued and delighted the generations of painters who represented her last moments as a bare-breasted orgasmic swoon.
In the Middle Ages, images of the Egyptian queen were relatively decorous. Rarely far from his prey, the snake is unlike the talking serpents we see in later art: the evil snake tempting Eve as it coils around the forbidden tree. This snake is an assassin, a hired killer, an agent of sudden death.
In the Boucicaut Master’s miniature illustration for Boccaccio’s On Famous Women, Antony and Cleopatra are lifeless, laid out side by side, a medieval king and queen carved in stone on a royal tomb. Both wear a crown and a robe. The scene is calm and stately; the only disruptive elements are the sword protruding from Antony’s chest and the serpent encircling Cleopatra’s bare forearm like a deadly bracelet. A woodcut illustrating a German translation of Boccaccio depicts Antony, here too impaled on a sword, as Cleopatra gazes mournfully at him, while a snake with odd pointy ears embeds its fangs in her arm.
Plutarch specifies that the snake was said to have bitten the queen on the arm. But by the late fifteenth century, the site of the wound has migrated to her breasts. In an illustration for yet another edition of Boccaccio, done in 1480 in Bruges, Cleopatra’s ermine-trimmed red robe has slipped down around her hips. Not just one but two snakes are attached to her, one to each of her breasts.
What is remarkable is not only how often Cleopatra has been painted but how many of these images represent the Egyptian queen entirely nude or, more often, naked from the waist up, one or both breasts bared to receive the serpent’s venom—a serpent smaller, quicker, and meaner than the Egyptian cobra. Her body is invariably creamy, plump, luscious, and notably pale. These works grew in popularity during the centuries of European expansion into Africa and Asia. The fascination with exoticism and the East was perfectly embodied in a beautiful dark-haired woman, preferably naked, ideally dying or dead.
In Giampietrino’s painting The Death of Cleopatra (1504), the queen has removed all her clothes and turned her lovely head away from us. With one hand she raises the lid on a straw basket while the other presses the snake against her chest, its fangs so close to her nipple that it almost appears to be nursing. Later in the century, Michele Tosini dresses the queen in a pale pink gown that she pulls aside, baring her breast so that the snake can reach her pearlescent flesh. In Guido Reni’s Cleopatra (1628) the snake has been shrunk to the size of a worm, but Cleopatra is massive, her broad shoulders, strong arms, and half-bared chest braced for the deadly strike. By the end of the seventeenth century, these images of Cleopatra and the serpent were so common that several appear in painted enamel on the faces of pocket watches.
Most of these Cleopatras are in the throes of rapture. With their heads thrown back, their eyes cast upward, the faces of these Egyptian queens resemble those of the female saints and martyrs or, closer to home, the painters’ wives and mistresses in the midst of, or just after, sex.
In 1876, the American sculptor Edmonia Lewis created a very different image of the death of Cleopatra. She chose to portray the queen as Caucasian, though Lewis, who was Black, elsewhere represented Black women in her work. Her image of the dying monarch is neither eroticized, ecstatic, nor sensational. Fully clothed, regal, wearing a crown decorated with a serpent, seated on a throne that is adorned with two sphinx heads, she turns her head slightly to one side, her chin just barely uplifted, awaiting death with fortitude, dignity, and resolve.
Denied the opportunity to bring Cleopatra to Rome in captivity, Octavian, according to Suetonius, was so disappointed by her death that he ordered the Psylli, an African people famous for their knowledge of poisons, to try and reverse the effect of the venom. Their attempt was unsuccessful, and the efforts of the Psylli appear in none of the other classical sources.
Even without the trophy queen, Octavian had won. He ordered that Cleopatra be buried beside Antony with the rites and honors befitting her nobility of spirit. She died at thirty-nine, Antony at fifty-three.
Octavian made an official visit to pay his respects at the tomb of Alexander the Great, placing a golden crown on it and scattering it with flowers. But when he was asked if he wanted to see the tombs of the Ptolemies, he is supposed to have replied that he wanted to see a king—not dead bodies. Statues of Antony were destroyed, but a supporter of Cleopatra’s is said to have paid Octavian to leave her statues in place, another indication of the role that money played in Rome’s dealings with Egypt.
Antony and Fulvia’s son, Antyllus, went into hiding but was betrayed by his tutor and subsequently beheaded. The tutor was in turn killed for having stolen the precious gem that Antyllus wore around his neck—a plot detail that conveys the chaos, desperation, and criminality of a society in which the teacher steals a valuable keepsake from the headless corpse of his pupil.
Caesarion fled to India but was tricked into returning when he was told that he would be crowned king. Upon his return he was killed, thus confirming Cleopatra’s worst fears for her eldest son and suggesting that she may have failed to instill him with her gifts for perspicacity, strategy, and survival. Octavian is supposed to have said that the world only had room for one Caesar, and although Caesarion was raised to believe that he was that singular figure, common sense might have warned him that Octavian would disagree. Soon afterward, Octavian issued an edict proscribing images of Caesarion; a room in Pompeii that was decorated with a wall painting of Caesarion and his mother is said to have been walled off after Octavian’s directive.
Except for Antyllus and Caesarion, the children that Antony and Cleopatra had, separately and together, were sent to Rome to be raised by Octavia.
Octavia is one of the more impressive characters to have emerged from the pages of Plutarch: a woman raising five children, three of whom she inherited from the Egyptian queen for whom her second husband left her and for whom he was said to have died. By the end of her life, Octavia’s brother, by then the emperor Augustus, had accorded her a position and honors rarely given Roman women.
In 23 BCE, her beloved son (and her brother’s designated heir) Marcellus died of an illness ravaging Rome. In his Life of Virgil, Aelius Donatus describes Octavia fainting when Virgil recited aloud a line from his Aeneid (6. 884), a section in which Aeneas meets the ghost of Marcellus—still young, still beautiful—in the underworld. A beautiful neoclassical painting by Jean-Joseph Taillasson, Virgil Reading the Aeneid to Augustus and Octavia (1787), is a tender depiction of melancholy and grief. It is also a dramatization of an artist’s shock on getting a reaction so wholly unlike whatever response he might have expected.
Plutarch tracks Cleopatra and Antony’s offspring through generations, a seemingly rambling list of marriages and children, like the begats in the Old Testament, except that there is a punch line: Two descendants of Antony became emperor and both subsequently went insane, a fact that would seem to defy the laws of coincidence and of averages. One of these was Caligula, who killed his wife and child; the other, Nero, murdered his mother and nearly destroyed the Roman Empire. “He was fifth in descent from Antony,” is how Plutarch ends the Life of Antony, seeming to relish the fact that Antony’s lineage included two deranged and murderous emperors.
Alexander Helios lived long enough to participate with his twin sister, costumed as the sun and the moon, in Octavian’s triumphal procession after his conquest of Egypt—the ceremonial march in which he had so desperately wanted to exhibit Cleopatra. The ceremony sounds very much like a cruel parody of the Donations of Alexandria. The children were paraded along with an image of their mother with an asp still clinging to her body. Aside from the pain it must have caused the orphaned twins, the image of the snake helped determine the narrative of how Cleopatra died.
Her two younger sons died young, in Rome, presumably of disease.
In 25 BCE, Cleopatra Selene, Cleopatra’s daughter with Antony, the only one of her children to have survived childhood, was married at fifteen to Juba II, the son of Juba I, the late Numidian king. Like Cleopatra’s three children, Juba II had also been raised by Octavia after his father’s death. The newlywed couple were sent to Mauretania, in northwestern Africa. Octavian, now Emperor Augustus, wanted someone he could trust to take charge of this strategically important and commercially lucrative territory.
Together the royal couple transformed a quiet outpost into a vibrant metropolis, a city named Caesarea. Much as her mother had revitalized Alexandria, Cleopatra Selene oversaw building projects and supported education and the arts. She introduced the use of the Greek language, and attracted scholars, philosophers, and historians, who contributed to the cultural and intellectual life of the city. Himself a scholar, Juba II wrote learned histories of North Africa and Arabia.
At some point between 13 and 9, Cleopatra Selene gave birth to a son whom she named Ptolemy. She is believed to have died around that time, leaving Juba II to rule over Mauretania for thirty more years, until he was succeeded by Ptolemy, who appears to have inherited the weaker parts of his grandfather Antony’s character. Self-indulgent and indecisive, he lasted until 40 CE, when he was executed by Caligula, presumably for the sin of having minted gold coins and otherwise exceeded the authorized limits of his official power.
The events that followed Cleopatra’s death have made her accomplishments clear. However turbulent, the decades during which she remained in power contributed to her country’s culture, security, and well-being. She marshaled her skills and powers to fend off the ambitions of Rome until her defeat marked a turning point, after which her powerful legend would long survive the diminution and demolition of much that she had achieved.
PART II
The Afterlife of Cleopatra
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Pearl
Antony’s secretary, Lucius Munatius Plancus, is thought to be the source of a story later recounted in Pliny’s Natural History—an anecdote that was considered to exemplify Cleopatra’s reckless, theatrical decadence. Allegedly she wore as earrings two of the world’s largest pearls. At the end of an especially sumptuous banquet, and in a competitive spirit brought on by the flirty question of which lover, Antony or Cleopatra, hosted more lavish feasts, she removed one of the pearls from her ear, dissolved it in vinegar (or wine) and offered it as a toast to Antony. He proceeded to drink it, aware or unaware that the dissolved pearl was supposedly an aphrodisiac.
Ultimately, the truth of this story (science tells us that pearls are not actually soluble in either wine or vinegar) matters less than its popularity and durability. Its significance lay in the role that it played in the Roman campaign to portray Cleopatra, during her lifetime and after her death, as the personification of Eastern licentiousness and dissolution. It was yet another exemplary fable about how the East needed the West to instill a conscience, a sense of order, a moral uprightness and self-respect in its population— a sense of restraint that, it was hoped, would counter distasteful Eastern stunts like dissolving the world’s largest pearl in wine and offering it to one’s lover.
True or not, the story has become one of the most well-known and frequently portrayed “incidents” in the life of Cleopatra. In a fifteenth-century woodcut illustrating the German translation of Boccaccio’s On Famous Women, Antony and another guest watch Cleopatra drink from the cup in which she has liquefied the giant pearl.
A considerably more elaborate and heavily populated version of this story appears in several paintings by Tiepolo, believed to have been done around 1744. Seated at one end of a table covered with an embroidered white cloth, Cleopatra, dressed in the finery of eighteenth-century royalty, holds the pearl, pinched between her fingers. She is just about to drop it into the cup.
At the opposite end of the table, Antony, in a golden helmet and an improbably orange robe, sits back, watching intently. His surprise is echoed in the postures and faces of the courtiers and servants gathered around the table, avidly observing the wild excess and casual exhibitionism of the Egyptian queen. She has captured their full attention. Beneath the dais on which she sits, a man tries to control his horse, but he is among the very few not looking at Cleopatra. What is remarkable is how much drama Tiepolo extracts from a relatively static moment—a woman is dropping something into a cup—as well as the artist’s assumptions about his culture and the milieu in which he lived; the painting’s intended audience would have understood what they were being shown.
Tiepolo’s vision is rather like a three-ring circus compared to Carlo Maratta’s Cleopatra, painted four decades earlier. Cleopatra occupies nearly the whole canvas, on which there is only a woman, a cup, and a pearl. The queen could not be more classically European—not remotely Egyptian, or even what we might imagine as Greek: Northern Italian, perhaps. She is dressed like a goddess—that is, like an extremely rich woman of Maratta’s time—swathed in gorgeous material, in dazzling colors, draped in heavy cloth embroidered with flowers and edged with gold brocade.
At the center of the canvas is the pearl. It is pear-shaped, as long as Cleopatra’s thumb and considerably thicker. It shines with a wholly different light from that of anything else in the painting. In Cleopatra’s other hand is a heavy chalice with a handle that, like the ribbon coiled on the queen’s shoulder, resembles a snake.
In the late seventeenth century, Maratta was a popular painter, with important patrons from the Roman aristocracy and higher echelons of the church. Their Cleopatra was not precisely the greedy monster that the ancient Romans imagined; for them, her display of excessive wealth might have represented something aspirational. She had to be foreign, indeed Eastern, in name if not in appearance to enable their frank enjoyment of a beautiful, decadent woman, richer even than they were and without whatever vague anxiety they might have felt about their own costly tastes.
Though Plutarch’s portrait of Cleopatra would turn out to be more nuanced and sympathetic than perhaps he intended, it contained more than enough ammunition for later writers to use against women in general, and Cleopatra in particular. Boccaccio found her “truly notable for almost nothing, except her ancestry and beauty; she was known throughout the world for her greed, cruelty, and excess” (quoted in Jones). Antony’s passion for the wicked monarch has been seen as a warning about how a hero can be ruined by a real-life Eve or Circe, a scheming proto–Lady Macbeth.
Her sinful “desires” prompted Dante to send her to the second circle of hell, where she was doomed to spend eternity among the lustful. The Latin historian Sextus Aurelius Victor (fourth century CE) tells us that she prostituted herself in an effort to cool her burning sexual heat, and that she was “so beautiful that many men bought a night with her at the price of their lives” (quoted in Jones).
This last view of Cleopatra may have inspired Alexander Pushkin, whose unfinished story “Egyptian Nights” (1837) features an Italian who performs improvisations on topics suggested by his audience. Asked to invent a poem on the subject of Cleopatra and her lover, the actor creates a scenario in which the queen announces that her love is for sale, but at enormous cost. The lucky winner will pay with his life for one night in her bed. Three men—a gray-haired soldier, Flavius; a young philosopher named Kriton; and an even younger unnamed boy—volunteer to accept the fatal bargain. Cleopatra promises them each a night of “sensual fires” but reminds them that at dawn, “The deadly axe will fall upon / The heads of all my lucky ones.” And no one seems to feel that the price is too steep to pay.
Her actual lovers Julius Caesar and Mark Antony appear to have been less important to Pushkin than what Cleopatra represented: sex worth dying for, and the cruelty and capriciousness—so supposedly female, so allegedly Eastern—to make death the cost of the bargain.
A similar dynamic propels in Théophile Gautier’s story “One of Cleopatra’s Nights,” published in 1838. After catching her hopelessly besotted admirer, Meïamoun, spying on her in her bath, the queen agrees to host him for one night of love. She entertains him at a lavish banquet, at the end of which, at daybreak, she serves him a cup of poison. When Antony returns and inquires about the corpse, Cleopatra tells him that she was only testing the efficacy of the poison she intends to take if she is captured by Augustus, and she invites Antony to join her watching the Greek clowns dance.
