Augustus

The main palace building stood on Cape Lochias, a promontory at the harbor opening. A twentieth-century historian writes: “No Latin ruler, gasping for air in the hot Roman summer, had nearly so attractive a situation as these Greek rulers of the Egyptian people.”

Somewhere in the vicinity, Cleopatra sat desolate in her mausoleum, awaiting her conqueror. She had gathered there all the most precious items of royal treasure—gold, silver, emeralds, pearls, ebony, ivory, and cinnamon (an extremely costly spice in those days and regarded as a fit present for royalty)—and also a great quantity of firewood and tinder. These preparations transmitted an implicit threat to Octavian: if he did not treat her well, she would set fire to the lot.

The ancient sources report that this consideration weighed heavily with him, although it cannot have been decisive: the queen can hardly have had personal possession of the kingdom’s entire reserves of precious metals—and, even if she had, they would survive a fire. The loss of the jewelry and other precious items would be a pity, but was not a matter of high importance.

Proculeius soon arrived outside the mausoleum, to which he managed to gain entry by a trick. He noted that the upper window through which the dying Antony had been dragged was still open; while someone distracted the queen by engaging her in conversation through the door of the mausoleum, Proculeius leaned a ladder against the wall and climbed in through the window accompanied by two servants. He captured Cleopatra and placed her under guard. She was allowed to preside at Antony’s funeral (not before Octavian had inspected the corpse), but her spirit was broken and she fell ill. She remained a prisoner inside the mausoleum.

(Possession of Egypt solved Octavian’s financial problems once and for all. When in due course the kingdom’s bullion reserves were transported to Rome, the standard rate of interest immediately dropped from 12 percent to 4 percent. There was plenty of money to settle his account with the veterans and to buy all the land they required [unsurprisingly, land values doubled]. Ample resources were also available for investing in public works, and the much-tried people of Rome received generous individual money grants.)

Not long after her arrest, Octavian called on the queen. He knew her (one assumes) from her stay at Rome as Julius Caesar’s guest and lover nearly fifteen years previously, but her bedraggled appearance now must have made her nearly unrecognizable. According to Plutarch, “she had abandoned her luxurious style of living, and was lying on a pallet bed dressed only in a tunic, but, as he entered, she sprang up and threw herself at his feet. Her hair was unkempt and her expression wild, while her eyes were shrunken and her voice trembled uncontrollably.”

Octavian asked her to lie down again and sat beside her. Cleopatra then tried to justify her part in the war, saying she had been forced to act as she did and had been in fear of Antony. Octavian demolished her excuses point by point, and she changed her manner, begging for pity as if desperate to save her life. Octavian was pleased by this, for it suggested that the queen did not intend to kill herself. He wanted her to live, the ancient sources claim, for she would make an admirable display in the triumph he intended to hold in Rome.

However, Publius Cornelius Dolabella, a young aristocrat on Octavian’s staff who was “by no means insensible to Cleopatra’s charms,” warned her that Octavian was about to leave Egypt and that she and her children were to be sent away within three days. So far as she was concerned, this was the end. She arranged for an asp—the Egyptian cobra—to be smuggled in to her in a basket of figs. She dismissed all her attendants except for two faithful ladies-in-waiting, and closed the doors of the mausoleum.

“So here it is,” she said, lifting away the figs to reveal the snake, and held out her arm to be bitten (another version has her provoking the snake with a golden spindle till it jumped out of a jar and bit her). She was thirty-nine. Plutarch reports that she was found “lying dead upon a golden couch dressed in her royal robes. Of her two women, Iras lay dying at her feet, while Charmion, already tottering and scarcely able to hold up her head, was adjusting the crown which encircled her mistress’s brow.”