We believe it because we want to. What we don't do is pass the story through a filter of modern, proof-seeking inquiry in which questions have to be matched with answers. Is it likely — is it even possible — that the testimony of Plutarch, written more than 100 years after the event, could be true? Yet thanks to him, this is the version handed down through history:
Cleopatra, from her chamber (possibly in her mausoleum, possibly in her palace, where she is under house arrest) sends her conqueror, Octavian — the future Emperor Augustus — a sealed tablet, which he opens immediately. He reads her plea, begging to be buried with Antony, correctly interprets this as a suicide note and sends his guards sprinting the short distance to the chamber. What they find there will be etched into the collective memory as indelibly as the crucifixion of Christ. The great queen, seductress of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, lies in her royal robes, dead on a golden couch. One of her two maidservants, Eiras, lies dying at her feet. The other, Charmion, fighting unconsciousness, struggles to straighten the diadem on the royal head before herself falling lifeless. All three women have applied to themselves the poisonous fangs of an asp, which has been smuggled to them in a basket of figs.
Whose word do we have for this? Possibly that of Cleopatra's physician, Olympos, and almost certainly that of Octavian/Augustus himself, whose memoirs — unseen by any modern historian — were a likely source for the historical account written by Plutarch, on whose word we are compelled to rely. But Plutarch was not born until 75 years after Cleopatra's death. In any modern court of justice his evidence would be inadmissible. Even if allowed, it would be ripped apart by lawyers. Inconsistency is piled upon inaccuracy; unlikelihood upon frank impossibility. Cleopatra is as likely to have killed herself as she is to have been reincarnated as Margaret Beckett.
Even the great queen's beauty is a myth — her attraction to Caesar and Antony lay more in the political union of Rome and Egypt than in the sweaty coupling of soldier and sex kitten. Certainly Octavian, who had no political need of her after victory at Actium, seems to have found it easy enough to repel her advances (though apparently he had the greatest difficulty in keeping his toga on elsewhere). Ideas of beauty, of course, evolve over time. It may be that a 5ft-tall, dumpy woman with rolls of neck fat, a huge beaky nose and brown, eroded teeth somehow embodied a pre-Christian physical ideal, and that crocodile-dung contraception was every hero's pre-Viagra turn-on. Or it may not. You could argue that what Cleopatra looked like was the least important thing about her; yet it plants the first red flag, a crucial early warning of the dislocation between reality and myth.
Other red flags follow thick and fast, many of them planted in the body of the "asp". By common consent, Cleopatra's ticket to oblivion would have been the Egyptian cobra, Naja haje. This was the species represented in the Egyptian symbol of royalty, the uraeus, and is the one still employed by snake charmers throughout North Africa. It is a big animal, thick in the body and typically 2½ metres long. Cleopatra would have had to feign an unusual appetite for figs in order to justify to Octavian's guards a basket big enough to conceal it. Let us assume, however, that this habitual manipulator of emperors, with all her cunning, could have found a way covertly to take delivery of an 8ft snake. What then?
She writes and sends her suicide note to Octavian, then straight away seizes the cobra and encourages it to bite her. Before she falls, she passes the snake to Eiras, who quickly receives a bite of her own before passing it on to Charmion, who does the same. By the time the guards run in, minutes later, they are all either dead or on the brink of death. The snake, meanwhile, has vanished without trace.
Wherever you look, there are problems — problems with the behaviour of the women, problems with the snake, problems with the guards, problems with Octavian. No single aspect of the story is impossible, but the degree of improbability mounts as each new factor is tossed onto the pile, until the resulting accumulator carries the kind of odds that would attach to a donkey in a steeplechase. For a 21st-century criminal investigator, the signals are as plain as bullet holes. This was no suicide pact. This was a plain case of murder.
Pat Brown is that most modern of legal professionals, an investigative criminal profiler. Based in Minneapolis, she specialises in unsolved, "cold" murder cases and sells her analytical skills to prosecutors, defence attorneys and police forces throughout the US and Canada. In the modern way, too, she is something of a media star and not shy of an eye-catching challenge. Prominent among her advertised services are "Equivocal Death Analyses on Undetermined or Questioned Manners of Death". Her very coldest of cold cases, the supposed suicide of Cleopatra, is the subject of a film by the award-winning London-based documentary makers Atlantic Productions, shortly to be shown on Five. Of all the witnesses she examines (and she examines plenty), Plutarch turns out to be the least satisfactory.
Let us leave aside for a moment the issue of whether or not Cleopatra was a believable candidate for self-harm. Let us assume that she was suicidal and examine her behaviour. In particular, let us look at the inscribed tablet, the "suicide note" she sent to Octavian before she picked up the cobra. Is this the way suicides behave? Pat Brown, who has seen a few, is adamant that it is not. When notes are written, she says, they are usually left on or near the body, to be found after the person has died. What a determined suicide does not do is deliver an advance warning to someone who is likely to run and save them. Where is the logic in that?
Then we come to the snake itself. Certainly, Cleopatra would have known all about the potency of its venom. Plutarch even claims (though we may not believe him) that Cleopatra conducted experiments on prisoners, seeking the perfect poison: one that would waft the victim on a billow of slowly deepening torpor, like an overdose of anaesthetic. The Greek physician Galen, a couple of centuries later, reported seeing criminals in Alexandria being executed in just this way, by a cobra bite to the chest. By the standards of the time, such a death might be regarded as humane. This is one reason why Cleopatra might have chosen snake venom from the broad range of lethal poisons then available. Another, more poetic, is the symbolic power of the cobra as an emblem of pharaonic divinity — an apt metaphor for her death in the coils of international politics. Either way, the snake would have been well up to the job.
Professor David Warrell, professor of tropical medicine and infectious diseases at Oxford University, explains how it works: "The venom is principally neurotoxic, which means that it paralyses the nervous system and prevents the conduction of nerve impulses from the nerve to the muscle." First it paralyses the eyelids and eyeballs; then the facial muscles, tongue and throat; then the chest and stomach, with death following quickly through suffocation. Not quite the pain- and anxiety-free exit of poetic imagination, but effective nevertheless. Better still, from Plutarch's perspective, little evidence may be left on the body. When Professor Warrell examined a recently dead victim, he found "absolutely no signs on the body except for punctures at the site of the bite". This sits well with the description of Cleopatra's unblemished corpse, and with rumours (they were little more) of two tiny punctures in her arm. Beyond this, however, Plutarch's yarn begins to crumble. The first snag is the timing.
There are reported cases of death occurring within 15 or 20 minutes of a cobra's bite, but it usually takes much longer. In Professor Warrell's experience, the quickest death took fully two hours. In the case of Cleopatra, when Octavian's guards came on the scene in a matter of minutes, we are asked to believe not only that the queen died in record time but that her two maidservants did likewise. You couldn't say it was impossible, but the likelihood is remote. It becomes remoter still when you consider the delivery of the venom. It's not that a single cobra would not have had enough. "There's a misconception," says Professor Warrell, "that snakes can exhaust the supply of venom with one strike. All the evidence now suggests that repeated strikes, even up to 10 in a row, can deliver lethal doses."
