Cleopatra

by Stacy Schiff

(The counterarguments go something like this: Cleopatra had attempted both to starve and skewer herself. Why had Octavian foiled those attempts, to torture her with threats about her children? Nine days passed between Antony’s death and Cleopatra’s. Surely it would have been preferable to have eliminated her at once? She had already sworn to die with Antony after all. And she would have known of Octavian’s predicament; she was as aware as he of the sensation her sister had caused. She might have gambled that Octavian would not risk parading her and her half-Roman children through the streets of Rome. Octavian seems truly and uncharacteristically unnerved by the news of Cleopatra’s death. He did not make a great deal of the mercy he had shown her, as he might have been expected to have done and as he usually did. Instead he boasted in his memoirs that various kings—and nine children of kings—had marched, in the course of three triumphs, before his chariot. No future historian, even those antipathetic to Octavian, ventures an assertion of complicity, although it could be argued that by then the case was closed, the truth known only to a few in the first place. We are ultimately left chasing our tails. The best that can be said of her last act is that Cleopatra acted heroically in a great set piece that may be on several counts ahistorical and is certainly in some part her opponent’s invention. The sole consolation is a perverse one: The death of Alexander the Great is well d...