I've been buried in this story for many months now, and the more I dig into it, the more convinced I am that the version we were handed by cinema, movies and books bears almost no resemblance to what actually happened. That is where this article comes from, and where my new book will come from too: Antony and Cleopatra — Sex · Blood · Love · Death, whose secondary subtitle is: the great love that set an empire ablaze. The cover you see here beside the text is my favourite, with its nod to Hollywood and to the violet eyes of Elizabeth Taylor, the actress best remembered in the role of the Egyptian queen in the 1963 American film; but the last word on the new cover isn't mine, it's yours, readers. At the end of the article I'll tell you how.
We all have the scene burned into our minds: the two lovers dead, locked in an embrace in the tower of her mausoleum in Alexandria, a basket of figs, the cobra slithering about, the shared poison, the handmaids weeping on their knees, and that great love that reaches beyond death. The End — Curtain — Applause.
Well, no. It didn't happen like that. And the real truth, the minute-by-minute one, is infinitely better than Hollywood's fiction.
First myth to knock down.
Between the death of Mark Antony, in Alexandria on 1 August of the year 30 before Christ, and that of Cleopatra, in the same city on 10 August, nine days went by. Nine long days in which she stayed alive, negotiating, calculating, a prisoner of the man who had just destroyed them both. Nine days that Hollywood has erased from the script because they ruined the romantic ending, and which are, by far, the most extraordinary part of the whole story.
And it isn't the first time cinema compresses time until it warps it to suit itself. Between the storming of the Bastille and the guillotining of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette four years passed, not one afternoon. Vercingetorix surrendered at Alesia and spent six years rotting in a pit beneath the Capitol before they strangled him. A film lasts two hours: you have to bunch the events together and make it look as though they were consecutive. Even when they weren't.
Let's reconstruct them together. And along the way, tear down a few other lies about Antony and Cleopatra that have been standing for two thousand years.
Nine days: what really happened in Alexandria
1 August of the year 30 before Christ. Alexandria has fallen. Cleopatra shuts herself inside her mausoleum with her treasures and with the only two people she trusts —her handmaids Iras and Charmion— and lets the rumour spread that she is dead. It isn't clear whether out of tactics, out of desperation, or both.
The news reaches Antony, carried by one of the court eunuchs, and he does the only thing a Roman general of his rank must do in the face of defeat: throw himself upon his own sword and run it through his heart. He does it. And he misses. He only punctures his guts. A general with thirty years of military campaigns on his shoulders botches the one blow he should never have failed: he opens his belly, bleeds a great deal, but doesn't die. And this is when another two servants from the same guild as the first bring the general the news that no, it was all a mistake, a tragic misunderstanding, and that she is still alive…
Now, if you'll allow me, I'm going to take a liberty. The sources tell us in detail everything Antony did that day, but not one records what he thought or might have said. So I'll imagine it myself, with a touch of macabre humour:
«But… fucking hell. What the fuck did these two faggot eunuchs who just walked in just tell me? That Cleopatra's alive? Right now I could tell every last god of Rome, of Egypt and of the whole damn planet to go fuck themselves. Look what a fuck-up the gods talked me into —them and that other pansy who came in earlier with the fake news of her death. I've slit my own belly open. Like a goddamn idiot! And now I'm bleeding like a pig at the slaughterhouse; all for nothing… And meanwhile she's surely having her six o'clock aperitif out on the big terrace with Charmion and Iras. I'll bet they're drinking, just to spite me, that sweet little Zibibbo wine from Sicily she loves so much… But Cleopatra —her I love more than my own life, so, one way or another, I'm going to her.»
And if he didn't think exactly this, then it was surely something very much like it.
What comes next is not the romantic scene Hollywood has painted for us. The Roman invaders cannot open the doors of the mausoleum —nor can anyone else—: Cleopatra has barred them from the inside and has no intention of risking the soldiers of the future emperor Octavian coming in through the main door. So the only way in for Antony, who has meanwhile dragged himself as far as the mausoleum, is the window. They throw him three ropes. The Egyptian servants tie him up like a sausage and three small women, alone, haul him up: Cleopatra, Iras and Charmion.
Down there he dangles, turning slowly in the air, a fifty-three-year-old Roman general, fat and heavy as an ox, soaked in his own blood and already unable to string together a single coherent sentence. Cleopatra and the handmaids pull on the rope with their hands raw; the three of them hang from it with the whole weight of their bodies, they stumble, slip, puff, pant and pull again. Plutarch records the verdict of the eyewitnesses watching from below, who said «that no more sorrowful, pitiful sight worthy of compassion had ever been seen in the world than that one». The man who believed himself a direct descendant of Hercules ended up hoisted through a window like a bale of merchandise.
In the end the three women manage it and pull him inside. Their joy, however, lasts rather little: Mark Antony dies up there, melted into her arms, only a few minutes later.
And then begins what no one tells. Cleopatra VII does not follow him into death. Whether out of survival instinct, out of political calculation, or out of the secret hope of also charming —after Julius Caesar and Mark Antony— this third powerful Roman, the young Octavian, the queen decides to stay alive and negotiate.
Octavian sends her his most trusted officer, Proculeius. She refuses to open and speaks to him through the door, asking for impossible things utterly detached from reality for someone who has lost a war, such as being left the throne of Egypt for her children. The next day, while the tribune Lucius Gallus, another envoy, keeps her busy negotiating from the door below, Proculeius and a handful of centurions lean a ladder against the façade and climb in through the very window through which the dying Antony had been hoisted. It's an ambush. When one of her handmaids screams «poor Cleopatra, they've taken you alive!», the queen reaches for the dagger at her belt. The Roman throws himself on her, disarms her and shakes out her clothes in case she is carrying some hidden poison.
Let it be clear, because this changes the meaning of everything that follows: Cleopatra did not leave the mausoleum of her own free will, she was dragged out by force. From that moment on she is a prisoner watched day and night precisely so that she cannot kill herself.
And even so she holds out for over a week, playing her last game of political chess. She buries Antony with full honours. She receives Octavian in person and hands him the inventory of her entire treasure; and when her own administrator contradicts her in front of the Roman about the real amount of gold and jewels she is going to hand over —Cleopatra had secretly kept back a certain amount for herself— the queen flings herself at him, screaming and landing a good many slaps across his face. A detail that already tastes of legend and that won her a certain admiration from Octavian, a man generally very cold, cynical and calculating.
Before the future Octavian Augustus, Cleopatra deploys her whole arsenal of cunning and femininity and, speaking in perfect Latin, pleads for the lives of her children —three of whom, Alexander Helios, Cleopatra Selene II and Ptolemy Philadelphus, are Mark Antony's, and one, the eldest, called Caesarion, is the son of Julius Caesar himself, Octavian's uncle. Until she understands the one thing she cannot bear nor allow to happen: that Octavian is only keeping her alive to exhibit her in chains in his triumphal parade through the streets of Rome.
That day Cleopatra decides to die. Not for love, but for sovereignty. It is the last political gesture of a queen who snatches from the victor the chief jewel of his triumph. Nine days after Antony, and not before she had exhausted every card in the deck.
The asp —that is, the cobra— that Octavian sold you
Second myth brought down, and this one's a painful one.
The Greek physician Olympos was there and left us a written account, and in it he mentions no serpent. Strabo, Plutarch and Cassius Dio speak of poison, yes, but in the form of some ointment, powder, potion to be drunk, or perhaps a hollow pin loaded with toxin. And modern toxicology finishes the job. The Egyptian cobra measures between a metre and a half and two and a half metres, something impossible to hide in a basket of figs as the legend claims; its bite, moreover, is slow and uncertain, and doesn't fit with swiftly killing three women, because that day, along with the queen, her faithful handmaids Iras and Charmion died too.
Modern researchers therefore point to a lethal cocktail of hemlock, aconite and opium. And here is the key that closes it all: it is known for certain that Cleopatra had personally studied poisons for many years, testing them on men and women condemned to death, seeking exactly which formulation killed the condemned without pain or convulsions. She was even credited with a book of remedies and cosmetics that Galen still quoted several centuries later. The queen was a devotee of chemistry and physics without even knowing it. Her death was therefore no romantic outburst: it was the last decision of one of the best-trained minds of her century, whose world had collapsed around her forever.
Where, then, does the asp of legend come from? From Octavian. In his triumphal parade, unable to display the living queen, he displayed a wooden effigy of Cleopatra, a statue with the serpent coiled around its arm. That propaganda image has been working for two millennia. As someone wrote, «the legend of the asp is too good to let it die».
Iras and Charmion: the two who could have saved themselves and would not
And here we have to stop, because in this story there are two women's names that almost no one remembers and that have earned the right not to be forgotten: Iras and Charmion.
They were not anonymous slaves. They were the queen's two most trusted women and her close friends, her hairdressers and chamber attendants according to the sources. And their influence at court was so real and so potent that Rome's propaganda used it as a weapon: Antony's enemies mocked, saying that the empire of the East was governed by «Iras, the hairdresser, and Charmion, the chambermaid». They meant to humiliate him. What they achieved was to put on record that those two women had the ear of the most powerful queen of the ancient world.
It was they, and they alone, whom Cleopatra let into the mausoleum. It was they who, with their hands raw, pulled on the ropes to raise the enormous, dying body of Mark Antony through the window. And it was they who stood by her side throughout the nine days of negotiation with Octavian and who took the poison alongside their queen.
Be that as it may, neither of the two girls was condemned. Octavian did not want them dead: he wanted them alive as minor witnesses to a triumph whose true trophy had to be the queen. Both could have walked out of the mausoleum on their own feet and gone on living. Their mistress told them so: Save yourselves. But they stayed.
When Proculeius, Octavian's envoy, came running and broke down the door of the room, he found Cleopatra dead on her golden bed, dressed as a queen and with the royal diadem in place. Iras was already dead and lay sprawled at her feet; while Charmion, staggering and dying, was straightening with her last strength the crown on her queen's brow so that no Roman hand should find it badly set.
The Roman, furious at the explanations he will have to give Octavian for those most inconvenient deaths, shouts: «Fuck, what have you done? You proud of this, Charmion?».
And she, before collapsing dead over her queen, answered him: «Yes, Proculeius, a very fine thing. And very fitting for a great queen descended from so many kings.»
Her secret weapon was not beauty
Third myth about Cleopatra, the most uncomfortable of all. Plutarch, who was able to speak with people who had dealt with those who knew her in person, says it without anaesthetic: her beauty was not so incomparable as to take the breath away. The coins she herself had struck show a strong nose and a marked chin.
So then, how did she bring the two most powerful men in the world to their knees? With her brain, a sensuality that was surely overflowing, and her voice. Plutarch describes her voice as «an instrument of many strings»: she spoke so many languages that she negotiated without an interpreter with Ethiopian, Arab, Hebrew, Median and Parthian envoys, and she was the first queen of her dynasty, the Greek Ptolemaic dynasty, in three hundred years to bother learning and speaking Egyptian, the language of her own people.
She was not, apparently, a movie seductress of the Barbie-Girl sort, but this humble Italian author, who has known a fair few women in his long life, suspects that if a girl who is not in herself a great beauty draws men as honey draws flies, her most lethal and sophisticated weapon must be hidden somewhere dark, south of the navel.
Be that as it may, Queen Cleopatra VII Thea Philopator was the most intelligent woman in the Mediterranean and she sat upon the throne of the richest country in the world. That, and not a mere neckline, is what made Rome tremble.
The Persian carpet that never existed and the salt fish of Pontus
There are a great many anecdotes surrounding Cleopatra's life, and one of them, perhaps the juiciest, took place in the year 48 before Christ when, driven from the throne by her younger brother and kicked out of her own palace, she managed to slip into the quarters of Julius Caesar, guest of honour in that same palace which had been hers.
The story went like this: Cleopatra, stripped of the throne, exiled from Alexandria and in danger of death, needs at all costs to get into her own palace —at that moment occupied by her brother, the new pharaoh Ptolemy XIII— without the guards slitting her throat on the way. She wants a private, secret conversation with Julius Caesar to see whether she can win him over and ally with him against her brother. Egypt at that moment was a province of Rome and Caesar was its highest authority on the ground.
Plutarch here is very concrete and precise: it seems that her great Sicilian friend Apollodorus stuffed her inside a sack of bed-linen and slung it over his shoulder like a man delivering the freshly done laundry to Caesar himself. Out of that old sack she came, straight to Caesar's feet: young, cheerful, dishevelled, all flushed with excitement and laughing like a mischievous child; she twenty-one, he fifty-two. You can well imagine what happened that night in that room, who was proclaimed the new queen of Egypt the next morning, and who was murdered without mercy a few months later. (Spoiler: the little brother, Ptolemy XIII.)
The Persian carpet she was supposedly wrapped in is an invention of American cinema, but the glamour and the daring are hers. So is her whole real story.
And now I'll tell you another scene that no Hollywood screenwriter has ever dared to film. This one too is told to us by the great historian Plutarch.
We are in the royal court of Alexandria, in the most golden years of the most beautiful, unregulated, dissolute and glamorous couple in the world. Antony and Cleopatra go cruising down the Nile with the whole court and take advantage of the voyage to fish. For several days now not even a sardine has bitten Antony's hook, while she can't stop pulling fish out of the river. And a Roman general can't bear to lose even at that: so he bribes some local divers to hook live fish onto his line underwater the next day. Miracle: he lands one catch after another. Cleopatra sees it, understands everything and says nothing… The next day she organises another great day of fishing, and when Antony triumphantly hauls on his rod, sure of pulling up another live fish, from the hook there dangles a dried, salted cod-like fish: a salt cod, bought at the market.
General laughter. Great merriment. And then she gives him one of the most elegant lines ever spoken to a humiliated man:
«General, leave the fishing rod to us, the petty kinglets of Pharos and Alexandria; your catch is cities, kingdoms and continents, not fish.»
To turn mockery into the greatest of compliments: that was Cleopatra.
The inimitables: the secret society that really existed
Antony and Cleopatra founded a club together. A real one, with a Greek name: the Amimetobioi, «those of the inimitable life». The rule was a single one: every day, an excess worth recounting. Banquets with eight boars roasting in staggered succession so that one would be at its point at the unpredictable hour when the queen felt hungry. Night-time outings incognito through Alexandria —he disguised as a slave, she as a servant— drunk and playing pranks at every doorway in the city, while the Alexandrians, who recognised them perfectly, played along. For Rome that was the mask of tragedy, the mask of how one of its best generals had sunk so low; for us it is the mask of joy, of comedy and of love.
And when ruin knocked at the door, they didn't simply dissolve the club. They refounded it under another name, and that second name sends a shiver down your spine: the Synapothanoumenoi. «Those who will die together.»
From the inimitable life to the shared death. Not even Shakespeare improves on that.
The scene that broke me while I was writing
And I'll leave you the last one, the most human of all, the one almost no one knows.
When it was all over —Antony dead, Cleopatra dead, Caesarion executed on Octavian's orders at seventeen because «two Caesars in Rome is one too many»— three orphaned children were left: the younger children of Antony and Cleopatra. Do you know who took them in, raised them in her house in Rome and brought them up as her own? It was Octavia the Younger, the official wife of Mark Antony and the only sister of the emperor Octavian. The very woman he had abandoned to be with Cleopatra.
She raised her rival's three children alongside her own, without distinction. The ancient sources, which give nothing away for free, call her «a marvel of a woman». When I wrote that scene —Octavia braiding the tresses of Cleopatra's daughter in a garden in Rome and advising her on her future marriage to King Juba II of Numidia— I had to get up from the desk and, with a lump in my throat, think aloud: Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.
The book coming this Christmas
All this and much more —like the pearl dissolved in vinegar, the murder and the tongue of Cicero pierced by Fulvia's golden pin, the barge with purple sails going up the river of Tarsus, Antony's three days of silence in the prow of a ship— is Antony and Cleopatra — Sex · Blood · Love · Death, the first volume of my new series Roma Stupor Mundi: the story of Rome told through its two finest chroniclers, Suetonius and Plutarch, with the rigour of the sources and the pulse of a novel.
I'm writing it right now. It comes out at Christmas 2026, or perhaps a little later, in six languages. And here comes the invitation.
Join the inimitables
Antony and Cleopatra had their secret club. This book has one too.
I'm opening the Club of the Inimitables: a reserved group of readers who are not going to read this book once it's finished, but to live it live as it's being written, and who will be able to have a hand in it. The Club is private because you need a password to get in; but it's open to anyone who wants to sign up.
Starting with the cover you saw above: the one with the nod to Elizabeth Taylor is my favourite, but there will be other candidates and we'll decide the winning cover all together.
Members receive, straight to their inbox:
- The password to the Club's reserved area, a hidden page that appears in no menu and in no search engine.
- Chapters in first release, free and before anyone else, as I finish them, with the chance to suggest corrections and changes to me on the fly. Here the reader doesn't watch: they take part.
- The release date before anyone else, and the special launch price if you want the hand-signed paperback edition.
- The kitchen of the book: the candidate covers; the interior illustrations; and the soundtrack, with artist and song for each important scene. There too you'll be able to have your say.
No spam, no handing your data to anyone, and you unsubscribe whenever you like with one click. All I ask is your email: the door of the club opens from your inbox.
«Every day, an excess worth recounting.» That was the rule of the inimitables. Mine is more modest: every chapter, a story you haven't been told.
See you inside.
Sources and references
- Plutarch, Life of Antony (1st–2nd centuries AD), the principal source for the siege of Alexandria, the hoisting of Antony into the mausoleum, the salt-fish episode, the sack of bed-linen and Charmion's last retort.
- Cassius Dio, Roman History, books L–LI, for the capture of Cleopatra by Proculeius and Octavian's triumphal parade in Rome.
- Strabo, Geography, XVII, an almost contemporary testimony on the queen's death and the two versions already in circulation.
- Olympos, Cleopatra's physician, quoted by Plutarch: the account of an eyewitness who mentions no serpent.
- Suetonius, Life of Augustus, for the execution of Caesarion and Octavia's conduct with the orphans.
- Modern historiography on Cleopatra VII, her training in pharmacology and toxicology, and the critique of the asp episode as an image of Augustan propaganda.
There is NO fiction in this article
The facts are the documented ones. Mark Antony wounded himself with his own sword after the false rumour of Cleopatra's death, and was hoisted with ropes up to the window of the mausoleum, where he died: Plutarch tells it. Cleopatra was captured alive by Proculeius, who entered through that same window with a ladder, and died nine days after Antony, on 10 August of 30 BC, together with Iras and Charmion. The dates, the negotiation with Octavian, the plan to exhibit her in the triumph, Apollodorus's sack of bed-linen, the salt fish of Pontus, the Amimetobioi and the Synapothanoumenoi, and the raising of the orphans by Octavia are all in the sources cited above. On the exact cause of death there is no witness: the ancient sources already had their doubts, and that is why this article reasons from what we do know —the silence of the physician Olympos, the incompatibility of the cobra with three swift deaths, and the queen's toxicological training— to conclude that poison is more likely than the serpent. The only invented passage is flagged as such in the text itself: the interior monologue of the wounded Antony, which no source records and which is offered here openly as the author's licence. The narrator's comments and remarks are part of the personal artistic and literary voice of the author David S. Matrecano.
