I have been buried in this story for months, and the more I read the more convinced I am that the version we were told bears no resemblance to what actually happened. This article comes out of that, and so does my new book: Antony and Cleopatra — Sex · Blood · Love · Death, the great love that set an empire ablaze. The cover you can see here beside the text is my favourite, with its wink at Hollywood and at Elizabeth Taylor's violet eyes; but the last word is not mine, it is yours. At the end of the article I explain how.
We all have the scene burned into our minds: the two lovers dead, locked in an embrace inside her mausoleum in Alexandria, the snake slithering nearby, the shared poison, the weeping handmaids and the great love that reaches beyond death. Curtain.
Well, no. It did not happen like that. And the real truth, the minute-by-minute one, is infinitely better than the Hollywood fiction.
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 days in which she was still alive, negotiating, calculating, a prisoner of the man who had just destroyed them both. Nine days that Hollywood has cut from the script because they ruined the romantic ending, and which are, by a long way, the most extraordinary part of the whole story.
And it is not the first time cinema compresses time until it warps. Four years passed between the storming of the Bastille and the guillotining of Louis XVI, not one afternoon. Vercingetorix surrendered at Alesia and then spent six years rotting in a pit beneath the Capitol before they strangled him. A film runs two hours: events have to be bundled together and made to look consecutive. And they were not.
Let us reconstruct them together. And along the way, let us bring down three more lies about Antony and Cleopatra that have been standing for two thousand years.
Nine days: what really happened
1 August of the year 30 before Christ. Alexandria has fallen. Cleopatra shuts herself inside her mausoleum with her treasure and with the only two people she trusts —her handmaids Iras and Charmion— and puts about the rumour that she is dead. It is not clear whether out of tactics, out of despair, or both.
The news reaches Antony and he does the one thing a Roman of his rank must do in defeat: he throws himself on his own sword. And misses. He only punctures his guts. A general with thirty years of campaigning botches the one blow he should never have missed: he opens his belly, bleeds enormously and does not die.
Here I am going to allow myself a liberty. The sources tell us in detail what Antony did that day, but none records what he thought. So I shall imagine it, with a touch of macabre humour:
«But, but… what did those sons of dogs just say? That she is alive? Damn every god of these Egyptian eunuchs. What a mess they have made me do by bringing me a false report, a piece of fake news. I have opened up my belly and I am bleeding out like a pig in a slaughterhouse. And all for nothing. She, meanwhile, is surely having an aperitif with Charmion and Iras, with that sweet little Sicilian wine she likes so much.»
And if he did not think exactly this, it was surely something very close to it.
What comes next is not the scene Hollywood has painted. They cannot open the doors of the mausoleum —Cleopatra has barred them from inside and will not risk Octavian's soldiers walking in behind the stretcher— so the only way is the window. They throw down ropes. And three small women, alone, haul on them: the queen, Iras and Charmion.
Below hangs, turning slowly in the air, a fifty-three-year-old Roman general, heavy as an ox, soaked in his own blood and already unable to string a sentence together. Cleopatra hauls with her hands raw and the rope biting into her fingers; the three of them hang on it with all their body weight, slip, and haul again. Plutarch records the verdict of those watching from below: there was in all the world no sight more deserving of pity. The man who believed himself a descendant of Hercules ended up hoisted through a window like a bale of goods.
He dies up there, in her arms, a few minutes later.
And then begins what nobody 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 charming as well —after Julius Caesar and Mark Antony— this third Roman who is the young Octavian, the queen decides to stay alive and negotiate.
Octavian sends her an officer, Proculeius. She refuses to open: she speaks to him through the door, asking for the throne of Egypt for her children. It is a trap. The next day, while another envoy keeps her talking below, Proculeius props a rope ladder against the façade and climbs in through the very window through which the dying Antony had been hoisted. When a handmaid cries out «wretched Cleopatra, you are taken alive!», the queen reaches for her dagger. He throws himself on her, disarms her and shakes out her clothes in case she is carrying hidden poison.
Let this be clear, because it changes the meaning of everything that follows: Cleopatra did not walk out of the mausoleum, she was dragged out. 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 hand. She buries Antony. She receives Octavian in person and hands over the inventories of her treasure; and when her own steward contradicts her in front of the Roman, she flies at him with slaps, a detail that tastes of life and not of legend. She pleads for her children. Until she understands the one thing she cannot bear: that Octavian is keeping her alive to display her in chains in his triumph through Rome.
That day she decides to die. Not for love: for sovereignty. It is the last political act of a queen who robs the victor of the jewel of his triumph. Nine days after Antony, and not one minute before she had played out every card.
The asp that Octavian sold you
Second myth down, and this one hurts.
The physician Olympus was there and left a written account: he mentions no snake at all. Strabo, Plutarch and Cassius Dio speak of poison: an ointment, perhaps a hollow pin. And modern toxicology finishes the job. The Egyptian cobra measures between one and a half and two and a half metres, impossible to hide in a basket of figs; its bite is slow and unreliable, and it does not square with killing three women quickly, because the queen's two handmaids, Iras and Charmion, died with her, as we shall see in a moment.
Researchers point to a cocktail of hemlock, aconite and opium. And here is the key that closes the case: Cleopatra had studied poisons for years, testing them on condemned prisoners, looking for exactly which one killed without pain and without convulsions. She was even credited with a book of remedies and cosmetics that Galen was still quoting centuries later. Her death was not a romantic impulse: it was the last technical decision of one of the best-trained minds of her century.
So where does the asp come from? From Octavian. In his triumphal parade, unable to display the living queen, he displayed an effigy of Cleopatra with the snake coiled around her arm. That piece of propaganda has been working for two millennia. As one of her biographers wrote, the legend of the asp is too good to die.
Iras and Charmion: the two who could have saved themselves and would not
And here we must stop, because in this story there are two names almost nobody remembers and which have earned the right not to be forgotten: Iras and Charmion.
They were not anonymous slaves. They were the queen's two women of trust, her hairdressers and ladies of the bedchamber according to the sources, and their influence was so real that Roman propaganda used it as a weapon: Antony's enemies sneered that the empire of the East was governed by «Iras, Cleopatra's hairdresser, and Charmion». 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 in the world.
They were the only ones Cleopatra let into the mausoleum. They were the ones who, with their hands raw, hauled on the ropes to lift the huge, dying body of Mark Antony through the window. And they were the ones who stayed at her side throughout the nine days of negotiation with Octavian.
And now the part that forced me to write them a whole chapter. Neither of the two was condemned. Octavian did not want them dead: he wanted them alive, as witnesses, as servants, as the minor spoils of a triumph whose real trophy was the queen. They could have walked out of the mausoleum on their own two feet and gone on living. Their mistress told them so. They could have saved themselves.
They stayed.
When Octavian's envoy breaks down the door, he finds Cleopatra dead on her golden couch, dressed as a queen with her diadem in place; Iras already dead at her feet; and Charmion, swaying, dying, straightening with her last strength the crown on her queen's brow so that no Roman hand should find her badly groomed.
The Roman, furious, spits at her: «Is this a fine thing, Charmion?».
And she, before collapsing dead upon her queen, answers him:
«Fine indeed. And most fitting for a great queen, descended from so many kings.»
And she died.
Two thousand years later it is still, to my taste, the most perfect last line ever spoken by anyone. Not Antony, not Cleopatra, not Octavian: the best exit in this story is signed by a servant. That is why, in my book, Iras and Charmion are not extras. They have a name, they have a voice and they have a farewell.
The carpet that never existed
Third myth. Year 48 before Christ: Cleopatra needs to get into her own occupied palace without having her throat cut on the way.
Plutarch is very specific: her Sicilian friend Apollodorus put her inside a sack of bedding, a common mattress-maker's bag, and slung it over his shoulder like a man delivering the laundry. Out of it she came, dishevelled, at Caesar's feet: twenty-one years old to his fifty-two. The Persian carpet is an invention of the cinema.
Less glamour and more nerve. That is what her real story is like all the way through.
Her secret weapon was not beauty
Fourth myth, and the most uncomfortable. Plutarch, who was able to speak with people who had dealt with those who knew her, says it without anaesthetic: her beauty was not incomparable. The coins she herself had struck show a strong nose and a pronounced chin.
So how did she bring the two most powerful men in the world to their knees? With her brain and with her voice. Plutarch describes her as «an instrument of many strings»: she spoke so many languages that she dealt without an interpreter with Ethiopians, Arabs, Hebrews, Medes and Parthians, and she was the first queen of her dynasty in three hundred years who took the trouble to learn Egyptian, the language of her own people.
She was no film seductress. She was the most intelligent woman in the Mediterranean sitting on top of the richest country in the world. That, and not a neckline, is what made Rome tremble.
The salted fish from Pontus
And now, so that it is not all blood and poison, the scene no screenwriter has dared to film. Plutarch tells it.
Alexandria, in the golden years. Antony and Cleopatra go out fishing with the court. Antony cannot get a single bite, and a general cannot bear to lose even at that: he bribes some divers to hook live fish onto his line underwater. Miracle: he pulls out catch after catch. Cleopatra sees everything, says nothing… and the next day she organises another fishing trip. When Antony triumphantly hauls on his rod, dangling from the hook is a salted fish from Pontus: a pickled herring, bought at the market.
General roar of laughter. And then she makes him a gift of one of the most elegant lines ever spoken to a humiliated man:
«General, leave the rod to the petty kings of Pharos; your quarry is cities, kingdoms and continents.»
Turning mockery into the greatest of compliments: that was Cleopatra.
The inimitables: the secret society that really existed
Keep this anecdote in mind, because it will come back at the end of the article.
Antony and Cleopatra founded a club together. A real one, with a Greek name: the Amimetobioi, «those of the inimitable life». There was a single rule: every day, an excess worth telling. Banquets with eight wild boars roasting in sequence so that one would be exactly right at the unpredictable hour when the queen felt hungry. Nocturnal outings in disguise through Alexandria —he dressed as a slave, she as a maid— playing pranks in doorways, while the Alexandrians, who recognised them perfectly well, played along: for Rome, the mask of tragedy; for us, the mask of comedy.
And when ruin came knocking, they did not simply dissolve the club. They refounded it under another name, and that second name gives me gooseflesh every time I write it: 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 leave you the last one, the most human of all, the one almost nobody knows.
When it was all over —Antony dead, Cleopatra dead, Caesarion executed on Octavian's orders at seventeen because «two Caesars are one too many»— three orphaned children were left: the small 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?
Octavia. Antony's Roman wife. The woman he abandoned for Cleopatra.
She raised her rival's 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 hair of Cleopatra's daughter in a garden in Rome— I had to get up from my desk.
The book coming at Christmas
All of this, and much more —the pearl dissolved in vinegar, Cicero's tongue pierced by Fulvia's golden hairpin, the barge with purple sails coming up the river at 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 history of Rome told through its two finest chroniclers, Suetonius and Plutarch, with the rigour of the sources and the pulse of a novel.
I am writing it right now. It comes out at Christmas 2026, in six languages. And here comes the invitation.
Join the inimitables
Antony and Cleopatra had their secret club. This book has one too.
I am opening the Club of the Inimitables: a private group of readers who will not read this book once it is finished, but live it while it is being written, and get their hands into it. Private, because it needs a password; but open to anyone who wants to sign up.
Starting with the cover you saw above: the one with the wink at Elizabeth Taylor is my favourite, but there will be other candidates and we will decide between us. Members receive, straight to their inbox:
- Chapters in advance, free and before anyone else, as I finish them, with the chance to suggest corrections and changes as we go. Here the reader does not watch: he takes part.
- The password to the Club's members' area, a hidden page that appears in no menu and in no search engine.
- The release date before anyone else, and the special launch price if you want the paperback signed by hand.
- The book's kitchen: the candidate covers, so we can choose between us; the interior illustrations; and the soundtrack, with an artist and a song for every important scene. You get a say there too.
No spam, no sharing your data with anyone, and you can unsubscribe whenever you like with one click. All I ask for is your email: the door of the club opens from your inbox.
«Every day, an excess worth telling.» That was the rule of the inimitables. Mine is more modest: every chapter, a story nobody has told you.
See you inside.
Sources and references
- Plutarch, Life of Antony (1st–2nd centuries AD), the main source for the siege of Alexandria, the hoisting of Antony into the mausoleum, the salted fish episode, the sack of bedding and Charmion's final 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 account of the queen's death and of the two versions already in circulation.
- Olympus, Cleopatra's physician, quoted by Plutarch: an eyewitness account that mentions no snake at all.
- Suetonius, Life of Augustus, for the execution of Caesarion and Octavia's conduct towards the orphans.
- Modern scholarship on Cleopatra VII, her training in pharmacology and toxicology, and the critique of the asp episode as an image of Augustan propaganda.
This article contains NO fiction
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 climbed in through that same window with a ladder, and died nine days after Antony, on 10 August 30 BC, together with Iras and Charmion. The dates, the negotiation with Octavian, the plan to display her in the triumph, Apollodorus's sack of bedding, the salted fish from Pontus, the Amimetobioi and the Synapothanoumenoi, and Octavia's raising of the orphans are all in the sources listed above. As to the exact cause of death there is no witness: the ancient sources already doubted, and that is why this article reasons from what we do know —the silence of the physician Olympus, the incompatibility of the cobra with three swift deaths, and the queen's toxicological training— to conclude that poison is more likely than the snake. The only invented passage is flagged as such in the text itself: the inner 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 observations are part of the personal artistic and literary voice of the author David S. Matrecano.
