• One of the continuing fascinations of the Queen Cleopatra VII story is the endgame: her death by suicide, supposedly abetted by one snake (or two), an asp (or a cobra), dressed in her royal best (or naked as a jaybird).
Author Vicky Alvear Shecter
book cover, Cleopatra Rules!
• I thought it might be interesting and fruitful to do an interview with Vicky Alvear Shecter on the topic, since she’s written several much-praised nonfiction works for older kids, including one published in 2010 called Cleopatra Rules! Vicky also works as a docent at the Michael C. Carlos Museum in Atlanta and is a superb researcher on Cleopatra and the Ptolemaic period. Thirdly, she’s an word prankster after my own heart, as you’ll soon see.
• So, Vicki to Vicky, welcome! And let’s get down to it. First, do you believe that Cleopatra took her own life, and did she do it with a serpent’s help? And if so, why serpents?
VAS: I’d like to start by saying I’m a big fang of the snake theory… I absolutely believe Cleopatra did herself in, and with snakes too. Remember, no one actually knows; we’re all guessing. Here’s why I vote snakes:
• Plutarch (circa 46 – 120 AD) says so: although Mr. P. worked extra hard to make Antony and Cleopatra look bad for political purposes, his Life of Antony is as close as we get to a primary source.
• The heroic ideal: in the ancient world, it was considered honorable to kill yourself rather than be taken by your enemies. In fact, this was the only action taken by Cleopatra that the Romans respected and thought heroic. Horace, in his so-called Cleopatra Ode (1.37) calls the queen “proud” and “serene” in her self-inflicted death—a huge contrast to the insults he’d hissed in previous stanzas.
Queen Cleopatra VII
• Octavian/Augustus may have killed her: A viable alternative;
I believe he was certainly capable of it, but Augustus was a smart guy. No matter how much the Romans hated Cleopatra, he knew that killing a woman who’d already surrendered was just bad form. Imagine the PR headaches!
• Plutarch takes the trouble to describe the actual method/s: He wrote that the snakes arrived in a basket of figs. Or in a jar of water. And then, being a man who covered all bases, he also said she may have died from pricking herself with a poisoned pin. By the way, he also claimed he got the scoop from the Mauritanian King, Juba II, who married Cleo’s daughter, Cleopatra Selene, in 25 BC.
• Octavian believe she died by the snake: According to Plutarch, in his triumph (victory parade) Ocatvian Augustus had Cleopatra depicted in her death throes with a snake attached. So the first emperor of Rome believed in her serpenticide.
• Snakes had great symbolic power: The uraeus or snake crown was associated with Egypt and royalty. Image-savvy Cleopatra VII often upped the ante and wore a crown with three snakes on her brow.
• In earlier dynasties, pharoahs had ritually killed themselves with snakes when they were no longer capable of ruling: Death by snake conferred eternal life for the pharoah. Cleopatra understood the ancient power of snakes and would have likely appropriated the symbol for herself.
author Vicki Leon hanging with Cleo at Egyptian temple
VL: These are pretty awesome points you’ve made.
VAS: Well, some still ‘re-coil’ at the thought of her death-by-snake. This summer, in fact, one scientist claimed that Cleopatra offed herself with a cocktail of hemlock, opium, and aconite (he was bold enough to make this claim despite the fact that we lack her body to do toxicological testing).
VL: Vicky with a “Y,” you’ve explored most of the whys about Cleo’s demise. I’d like to add a few thoughts. As you know, it wasn’t just the Egyptians who had positive feelings about snakes. So did the Greeks and Romans. The Greeks saw them as wisdom, as resurrection. Both cultures viewed snakes as totemic animals–even as sidekicks to various gods and goddesses. The way that snakes annually shed their skins made them a common symbol for eternal rebirth—and of renewed health. That’s why serpents were encouraged to roam freely in various temples, including the famous Greek healing centers of Asclepius and the Roman precinct of the Bona Dea goddess. Even your average Greek or Roman housewife welcomed snakes inside the home.
• On the other hand, when Christianity took hold, adherents were more apt to see serpents as evil tempters than as beneficial creatures or symbols of good.
VAS: It seems we never tire of making asps of ourselves over this question. I consider myself “Team Snake.” After all, that kind of death has way more poison-ality!
VL: I’m with you! Please join us next blogpost for a delicious postmortem of Cleopatran portraiture.
Very interesting discussion — another great mystery of history.
Just to add another voice, this time from Hollywood…
Director Cecil B DeMille was known as a stickler for accurate details.
“When he decided to make Cleopatra, he ordered the sixteen-volume French military survey of Egypt. It provided the blueprint for the style of his film.
DeMille learned that Romans cooled wine in snow, so rather than use marble dust for snow, as was typically done, he had his crew collect real frost by scraping it off the studio refrigeration pipes.”
He had real grapes flown in from Argentina since they were out of season in California.
He stopped filming and had a memo sent to his costume department when he noticed an extra was wearing a belt that was not historically accurate.
And as for the snake…
“Since Colbert (playing Cleopatra) feared snakes, her scenes with the snake were put off until the very end. Even the asp that bites Cleopatra was real, having had its poison extracted before being used.” — From: George Lucas’s Blockbusting c2010 p185.
What a delightful post by Vicki and Vicky!!
@Vicky – I giggled at ‘Team Snake’ – I think that is a super merchandising idea for something like zazzle.com!!
Thanks for this wonderful treat
H
Wow, I love learning all these details, Narukami. DeMille surely was obsessive. BTW, this back-and-forth was all Vicki (with an “eye”)’s idea. It’s great fun!
@ “Team Snake” fans—Vic and I had a ball, working on this…although we kindof gulped at the temerity of venturing into your terraine of art criticism. glad you liked it! @Narukami, Many thanks for your detailed and thoughtful feedback. Just love those insider factoids! here’s another one: De Mille had the set built onto the sands south of Pismo Beach, where it still lies, hidden beneath the restless dunes of my county.
Just to be a fly in the ointment, I have to take an opposing view of the serpenticide theory. Look at it from the snake’s perspective. It would have to be SOME snake to off three people at once. (Cleo’s two servants died with her) A poisonous snake ejects most of its venom in the first bite. Okay, Cleopatra could have been killed in this manner. But two other people? The second one to be bitten would probably (50-50) survive and the third one would more than likely only be ill for a while. Also the deaths occured in a relatively short time. A cobra bite can take anywhere from 4 to 10 hours to kill, and its a very painfull, agonizing death. Certainly not the the exit a luxury-loving queen would choose. Also, there is a black swelling at the point of the snake’s fang entry. No ancient writer mentions any mark being on Cleopatra’s body.
Octavian would be wiling to go along with the cobra bite story for political purposes. He had just conquered Egypt and certainly did not have the hearts and minds of all the Egyptians. If they were led to believe that their queen would live forever by her manner of death, it would help to smooth their feelings. The Romans would think that the “evil queen” got what she deserved.
There are many sources on Cleopatra’s death, including several contemporary sources. (Plutarch is rather late, although based on contemporary authors like Asinius Pollio, maybe Strabo etc.). But there is no agreement and much discrepancy, and at least two historians wrote that the true events were unknown. So it is unclear to me how someone can vote for a specific option, when only looking at the historical sources. That would be pseudoscientific. At any rate, it all boils down to one main aspect that needs to be explained by those opting for the snake bite theory: a viper ejects all venom when biting its prey, and so it is incapable of harming or killing another person for quite some time. Since Cleopatra, Eiras and Charmion died, you would need three snakes—and there are at least a couple of sources that have twin snakes, while one source (Horace) has snakes in the plural (serpentes)—, and you would need to explain how they were able to smuggle in not one, but three asps. So it seems more probable that the three people were killed by poison, possibly extracted snake poison (or “poisonous ointment”, as the contemporary witness Strabo calls it), not by three bites from three asps. In this respect the sources come in handy: It was reported that no asp was seen, that no signs of poisoning were visible. It was further reported that Cleopatra had always carried poison on her, and that she had been experimenting with snakes. (Cassius Dio even delivers a non-serpent explanation for the scratch marks, altough Plutarch by the way says that no marks were visible.) Hiding three snakes from the guards is almost impossible, while it’s pretty easy to smuggle in a vial of venom, in a hollow barrette or comb, as it is mentioned in the sources. So the ointment/venom theory is more probable, and I haven’t yet seen a convincing case for the historicity of the asp bite, let alone three asp bites. Furthermore, the legend of the snake bite(s) could have developed from the serpent iconography connected to Cleopatra’s death during Octavian’s triumph at Rome. The possibility of such a development would need to be refuted by the proponents of the snake bite theory.
A belated welcome/thank you! for your fly-in-ointment post, Franary—I’m handing off to the other Vicky to ably respond. She says: I don’t think you’re being a fly in the ointment at all. I think you make valid points. Even Plutarch wonders about it, saying that she had two small prick-points on her inner arm, which could have been how poison was delivered. ACtually I tend to think that the image-savvy Cleo would have been smart enough to use both–a poison to die without agony and the snake (perhaps in her last death throes) as a symbol of her crown and immortality (which the snake provides to pharoahs, it was believed). Truth is, we’re all guessing. Until her body is found and tests can be performed, we’ll all continue to be guessing! but that is the fun of it, isn’t it?
@ Divus Iulius: many thanks for your additional comments. The one-snake, two-snake, three-snake, no-snake controversy continues to fascinate us…and the clues and sources are contradictory enough to further fuzzify the issue. I tend to agree with Vicky Alvear Shecter and her one-two punch of poison as the delivery vehicle and a snake for show and proper iconography.