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Queen Cleopatra was so overcome by the sight of her lover Mark Antony’s mutilated body that she wiped the blood from his body and smeared it across her face.
Antony had committed suicide by stabbing himself in the stomach with a 2-foot blade after he heard rumors of Cleopatra’s death. Still very much alive, the queen beat and scratched her breasts and called to him, “master . . . commander . . . husband!”
He died that night in her arms.
A short time later, Cleopatra would take her own life while prisoner of Roman ruler Octavian. Unlike the legend, Cleopatra’s life didn’t end at the mouth of an asp; instead, she likely swallowed a poisonous drink, an area of study she found fascinating during the 22 years she ruled Egypt.
It’s just one of the popular myths that Pulitzer Prize-winning author Stacy Schiff debunks in her engaging and meticulously researched biography. But, as is often the case, the truth is much more fascinating than fiction.
It’s been more than 2,000 years and we’re still obsessed with this mighty queen, who lived from 69 BC to 30 BC. And, amazingly, there are still things left unsaid about Cleopatra, whose reign extended through almost all of the Mediterranean coast during her height.
She “lost her kingdom once, regained it, and then lost it again,” Schiff says.
Although she was named a deity in her lifetime, she did some very un-godlike things, such as killing her two younger brothers (whom she also married). She only had sex with two men, the book claims, but they were Rome’s most powerful: Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. All four of her children were out of wedlock with these married men.
Schiff doesn’t have much material to draw from; almost all of the primary sources have not survived. So she bases her story much on speculation and rumor, derived from the pages of Roman historians (who did not care for Cleopatra; various words for “whore” were commonly used to describe her).
The only surviving written word thought to be from Cleopatra is from 33 BC. No one knows what the command was for, but, in keeping with her strength, it is fitting: “Let it be done.”
Julius Caesar, the Protector
The book opens with Cleopatra, then 21 years old, banished from Egypt by her 13-year old brother and husband Ptolemy. According to customs of the day, siblings often married and ruled together. But Cleopatra was unhappy with the union (and most likely with the sharing of power).
Desperate to survive, she did the unthinkable — she made herself completely invisible. She secured herself in a sack made of hemp and leather as a soldier delivered her, slung over his soldiers, to the great Caesar.
“Many queens have risen from obscurity, but Cleopatra is the only one to have emerged on the world stage from inside a sturdy sack,” Schiff says.
Caesar was likely taken with her immediately. She wasn’t traditionally pretty, as the descendent of Macedonian Greeks (not Egyptian!) sported severe cheekbones, a prominent chin and a hooked nose. But it was her way with words that drove men crazy. She was said to have “a thousand” forms of flattery.
Caesar, who was 52, was still very much the lothario, despite the receding hairline. He was well-known for his multitudes of dalliances, especially with other married women. Unlike the myth, Cleopatra was most likely a virgin, Schiff attests.
The two aligned quite quickly, their personalities and political ambitions on equal step. He waged the Alexandrian War, resulting in her brother’s death, and bequeathed her the throne.
As Caesar was named a dictator and Cleopatra a goddess, the queen gave birth to his son.
She took charge on the international stage, taking a hands-on approach to running the state. She read dispatches, had advisors brief her on foreign affairs, corresponded with other high-ranking officials, and even “reviewed her secretary’s official journal daily.” It all sounds much like a president would do 2,000 years later.
Her wealth was unprecedented (she was far richer than Caesar). According to one contemporary count, she is the 22nd-richest person in history, behind J.D. Rockefeller but ahead of J.P. Morgan. Her worth? Around $95.8 billion.
But on the Ides of March in 44 BC, it all came close to crashing down. Her beloved protector Caesar was knifed to death shortly after being named Dictator for Life.
“She had lost her champion,” Schiff says. Cleopatra was only 26 years old.
Mark Antony, the lover
Without a Roman protector, her position in the world was fragile. Two men were now fighting for the highest position of power — former general Mark Antony and Caesar’s grandnephew Octavian. Octavian was unthinkable, because he was fighting against her own son’s right as Caesar’s natural heir. Antony would have to do.
Even though Cleopatra needed Antony, she was not one to show her cards too soon. When Antony called upon her several times, she ignored the requests and waited until she felt she was ready.
She sailed to the general in one of the most outrageous spectacles of wealth ever displayed. Her boat had 170 rowers, an orchestra of flutes, pipes and lyres, and incense billowed smoke into the air.
“She herself reclined beneath a gold spangled canopy, dressed as Venus in a painting, while beautiful young boys, like painted Cupids, stood at her sides and fanned her,” Schiff says.
Antony was impressed and intrigued. Rome’s coffers were terribly low and Cleopatra seemed to have all the wealth in the world at her fingertips.
Cleopatra insisted on having Antony and his friends at her house, where she draped herself in all the fashionable jewels of the time, pearls, agate, lapis, amethyst, garnet, topaz, all set in gold. All the items she gathered for the banquet were given to Antony and his guests as gifts, “the textiles, the gem-studded tableware, and the couches as well,” Schiff quotes Roman historian Plutarch.
In addition to flattery, the more sophisticated 28-year-old Cleopatra had a skilled ability to mold into what a man desired. She laughed at his off-color jokes, played dice games with him, drank with him, even hunted with him.
Antony was dead meat. “The moment he saw her, Antony lost his head to her like a young man,” one historian said.
One time while they were relaxing together on a fishing boat, Antony was annoyed that the fish were not biting. Never to be outdone, he secretly “orders his servants to dive into the water and fasten a series of pre-caught fish to his hook.”
Cleopatra was no dummy. She pretended not to notice, but said, “Leave the fishing rod, General, to us. Your prey are cities, kingdoms, and continents,” a Greek historian noted her as saying.
But still he did not marry her. Instead, he took the opportunity to patch up relations with his ex-foe Octavian by marrying his sister Octavia. While he was married and away in Rome, Cleopatra gave birth to his twins, naming them Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene (evoking the sun and the moon, or the uniting of the east and the west).
When Antony returned to Egypt to see his twins and Cleopatra, he never saw his wife again. And war was again on between him and his rival.
‘Two most magnificent people’
Antony showered a vast collection of territories on his eastern queen, extending her rule to Lebanon, parts of Libya and up to Turkey, across to Crete. She named herself “Queen Cleopatra, the Goddess, The Younger, Father-Loving, and Fatherland Loving.” A long-winded title, but an effective one. The Romans and the Egyptians had fallen head over heels for them.
In 36 BC, she gave birth to her fourth child. When Antony insisted that he must return to his wife, Cleopatra feigned illness and stopped eating, a theatrical display of her love for him. He stayed.
Two years later, the two made a great spectacle of their unofficial union in what is now called the Donations of Alexandria. They sat on golden thrones — she in the garb of the ancient Greek goddess Isis, the paradigm of motherhood and wifedom and the matron of nature, and he as Dionysus, the god of wine. Historians would call them “the most magnificent people in the world.” Antony followed up with this ceremony by placing their pictures on Roman coins, the first time a foreigner was on its currency.
But Octavian, slighted by Antony’s dismissal of his sister, used this outrageousness as fodder for a backlash against the celebrity couple. He received reports about how Antony would rub Cleopatra’s feet in view of their company, as evidence that Antony had lost his manliness and power.
She “melts and unmans him,” people said. Many of Antony’s closest allies decamped to that of Octavian.
On the coattails of their bad image, Octavian decided to declare war, not on Antony, but on Cleopatra.
‘Inferior to a woman in courage’
Antony steeled for battle, but his army ultimately surrendered to his foe. He was a broken man.
Cleopatra took the reins as Antony “set the whole city into a course of feasting, drinking and presents,” while Octavian developed a strategy to defeat him for good.
Cleopatra was keenly aware that death was near, so she oversaw the construction of a mausoleum for her and Antony to share (the remnants of which archaeologists believe they may have recently discovered off the coast of Alexandria).
After Antony made one pathetic effort to fight Octavian, he was again defeated and became convinced that Cleopatra had betrayed him.
She knew that he was ruined. According to some accounts, she then rushed to her mausoleum, barricaded herself in, and sent a messenger to tell Antony that she had died, in all likelihood to make him commit suicide and to end the feud between herself and Octavian. Schiff also gives the possibility that maybe Cleopatra’s message had been bungled — think Romeo and Juliet. Nevertheless, the outcome was the same: Antony stabbed himself, crying, “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.”
Cleopatra was distraught. She ordered her servants to bring Antony to the mausoleum where she summoned the strength to pull his body onto the roof by herself.
Before she, too, could commit suicide, Octavian’s men broke the barricade. She was worth much more alive than dead.
But not for long. Things ended, aptly, on Cleopatra’s terms.
She managed to get free of Octavian’s grasp long enough to visit the mausoleum built to her dead lover. There, Cleopatra donned formal robes, laid down on a golden bed and never woke up.
Cleopatra: A Life
by Stacy Schiff
Little, Brown and Company