PROMETHEUS BOOKS, FEBRUARY 2013Three circumstances attend any death: the cause (specific disease or injury), the mechanism (type of physiological damage), and the manner (natural, accidental, suicide, or murder). Sometimes all three of these are obvious. Other times, we can determine none of them. Today, some 2,000 years after the famed Egyptian queen Cleopatra met her demise in Alexandria, there is no absolute proof of how or why she died. The circumstances surrounding her death are quite murky.
The closest thing we have to a firsthand account is the oft-repeated tale told by Greek historian Plutarch, who was not even alive during Cleopatra’s reign. So his story is just that—a story. He claims that while under guard in her tomb, tending to the body of Antony following the surrender of Egyptian forces to the Roman general Octavian, Cleopatra chose to end her life rather than be taken back to Rome and shown off as a spoil of war. Plutarch says she smuggled a snake into the tomb, where she and her two handmaidens used the serpent’s venomous bite to commit suicide. Yet there were no outward signs that venom had caused their deaths.
I systematically review the available evidence, and debunk this historical ...
