Scholar Questions Cleopatra’s Snakebite Death

CAIRO —  Everybody knows that Cleopatra, queen of Egypt, lover of Julius Caesar, widow of Mark Antony, committed suicide at age 39 by holding an asp to her breast.

Well, not quite everybody.

Robert Bianchi, an American art historian, says there may be a different reading of a headless statue in the Vatican’s Egyptian collection.

The sculpture, which some experts believe represents the dying Cleopatra, depicts a woman with a serpent on her chest. Bianchi thinks the statue may not prove the prevailing notion of how the queen died, but merely explain its popularity 2,000 years later.

“The reason we know so little about the real Cleopatra or her death is because the rulers of Rome wanted to get rid of her memory,” said Bianchi, a Cleopatra scholar and a former Brooklyn Museum curator. “There must have been records of what happened, but we don’t have them.”

Cleopatra was linked with two of the era’s great men--Caesar and Antony--but failed to impress the powerful King Herod of Judea or, finally, Octavian, who defeated her fleet in the Battle of Actium, off Greece, in 31 BC.

From that moment little is known, Bianchi said, because a prudish Roman populace and its rulers hated Cleopatra for luring Antony away from his wife, Octavian’s sister Octavia.

The suicides of Antony, then Cleopatra, became part of a patchwork of politics and personal vendetta.

Octavian savored the moment that he would parade the defeated Cleopatra and her children through Rome, Bianchi said. Instead, when his men arrived at her retreat, they found the queen dead on a bed of gold, decked out in royal finery.

She and Mark Antony were buried together in Alexandria’s large cemetery for royalty of the Ptolemaic period of ancient Egypt. The burial ground has disappeared.

Despite losing his most prized captive, Octavian, who would become Emperor Augustus four years later, held a victory parade back home. It included a pageant of the Egyptian events, “but we have no way to know if it was accurate,” Bianchi said.

Roman rulers tried to erase the memory of the Egyptian queen, but it wasn’t easy. The body of one of her high priests was left unburied for two years as politicians dickered over what to do about the Cleopatra legacy.

Bianchi, who has researched Egypt’s Greco-Roman period for 20 years from the Egyptian viewpoint, said it is hard to know whether the cover-up of how Cleopatra died was deliberate or accidental.

For lack of death records, scholars refer to other sources that confuse the picture, and Bianchi said what really happened may never be known.

Conflicting versions of Cleopatra’s suicide were in circulation almost immediately after her death, he said. Two of the most famous were provided by the Roman poet Horace and his Greek contemporary, Strabo, a historian and geographer.

Horace, who said Cleopatra died of a poisonous snakebite, never visited Egypt, and Bianchi said he had an ax to grind: “Roman poets thought Cleopatra was a degenerate.”

On the other hand, Strabo came to Egypt on a fact-finding mission within six years of Cleopatra’s passing.

“The body was still warm, so to speak,” said Bianchi, now affiliated with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. “Presumably he asked what had happened, but of course, he could have been misinformed.”

Strabo said Cleopatra died of a self-administered dose of poison.

Over the centuries, poets, artists and playwrights, including William Shakespeare, have preferred to believe Cleopatra held a poisonous snake to her breast. The asp, a symbol of Egyptian monarchy, conjured a fascinating image.

In 1989 Jean-Claude Grenier, Egyptian expert at the Vatican’s Museo Chiaramonti, published details of the headless marble statue, preserved from neck to knee. A serpent lurks about the left breast.

Bianchi believes the statue might have been made in Alexandria about a century after Cleopatra’s suicide and taken to Rome soon afterward by the Emperor Hadrian, an avid art collector. Bianchi said it reminds him of much later depictions of Cleopatra in sculpture and on canvas.

It is interesting, Bianchi added, to consider whether historians and artists, influenced by the Vatican torso or others like it, “perpetuated the legend that she committed suicide by holding an asp to her breast.”

“If I had to choose one version now,” he said, “I’d go with Strabo, who said she took poison. He had no reason to lie, no personal interest in the case.”