Why cleopatra died

The truth, however, remains elusive. He certainly had a motive to want Cleopatra dead, as the charismatic queen as long as she was alive posed a potential threat to his dominance in Egypt. Octavian then made Egypt a Roman province, with himself as emperor; he later took the name Augustus. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!

Twice a week we compile our most fascinating features and deliver them straight to you. Live TV. Dio, LI. Instead, she may have been given an opportunity simply to die by her own hand, and this she did on August 12, aged thirty-nine years, wearing her most beautiful garments, her body arrayed on a golden couch and the emblems of royalty in her hands. Although Cleopatra poisoned herself, no-one quite knew how.

Plutarch relates that there were two slight pricks on her arm and that poison might have been hidden in a hollow comb knestis , a word used rarely enough to suggest that he may have adhered to an earlier account LXXXVI.

Dio comments upon the marks as well, which may have been caused by a poisonous pin used to fasten her hair LI. Or they may have been from the bite of an asp, which must have been hidden in a basket of flowers or figs or a water jar, although no snake ever was found.

If snakes and figs, the imagery may have been deliberately calculated, given their sexual connotations and the desire to portray Cleopatra as a foreign seductress.

Certainly, Octavian favored the notion that Cleopatra died from a snake bite, which is how she was depicted in his triumphal procession, with an asp clinging to her image Plutarch, LXXXVI. It also is the version adhered to by the Augustan poets, who wrote within a decade after Actium. Horace Odes , I. Martial, too, associates a viper with Cleopatra Epigrams , IV. Whether a rhetorical flourish, the manner of Cleopatra's death was an exotic one, befitting a queen of Egypt.

It would have been ironic as well that the cobra, symbolic of the intention to protect the queen, would have been the means of her death. The Greeks do posit an alternative explanation. The theory by Christoph Schaefer, a professor of ancient history at Trier University, challenges the common, centuries-old belief that Cleopatra committed suicide with the bite of an asp.

An asp is a small venomous snake also called the Egyptian cobra. Schaefer said he studied historic writings and consulted a toxicologist to develop the theory, which is due to be featured Wednesday on the German channel ZDF as part of a program on the Egyptian queen. He also deduced that Cleopatra wouldn't have chosen to die by a snake bite because she was intent on suicide -- and a cobra, he said, is not always fatal.

When a person does die from a cobra bite, he said, "it doesn't go quickly -- it is a horrible death," in which it takes hours to die and the victim suffers paralysis to parts of their body, including the eyes. Cleopatra died a "quiet and pain-free death," according to the Roman historian Cassius Dio, writing about years after she died, Schaefer said. Ancient texts also say Cleopatra's two assistants died with her, but that would be unlikely if she had died of a snake bite, the historian said.

Legend has it she did this by encouraging a snake to bite her, although her two handmaidens died at the same time, suggesting that some other form of poisoning saw her off. He now had absolute power over the richest kingdom along the Mediterranean Sea.

Egypt had become a mere province for Rome, one of the largest, most powerful empires of the ancient world, to plunder. It would remain under Roman rule until the 7th century. Sign in.