Herself. With a snake. Which has been doubted since antiquity. Getting a big ass cobra past the guards is going to be problematic and it is not a reliable way to die.
Herself with a hairpin. Which both Strabo and Plutarch state was the more likely method.
Octavian. Either directly or by a “security lapse” (hence the curiously unpunished guards).
I would go for door number 3 myself, Octavian was not known for his clemancy, but he had earlier tried to stop her from starving herself.
Cute. My initial response “wasn’t it an asp?” is stifled by Wikipedia’s assurance that the correct rendering isn’t the European Asp but the Egyptian Cobra, which averages 1.4 meters – big-ass, indeed…
There are other possibilities, though, besides the ones you list.
Anyway, here’s an interesting medical opinion on Cleo’s death. The author believes that " the facts clearly point to murder rather than suicide- murder at the hands of Octavian and his men for political purposes."
I’m curious to know why Octavian should have killed Cleopatra.
She would surely have served a greater purpose by walking in chains preceding Octavian’s chariot at the subsequent Triumph celebrating his recent victories.
In that era it was considered unseemly for women to be paraded in Triumphs, when Pompey had one of Mithrandes wives paraded he was censured. Plus it wasn’t unknown for the crowd to show sympathy for the captive, that happened with Cleopatras sister Arisnoe, whose dignity and composure when she was displayed as Ceasers captive, forcing old Julius to keep her alive.
What Octavian intended to do has never been totally proved one way or the other.
That might be true, but that doesn’t mean having her executed would be something considered shameful that would need to be kept quiet.
Additionally given the fact he’d spend the last few years ensuring, in the eyes of romans, she was cast as an evil eastern temptress who was corrupting the good morals of upstanding manly Romans (and emphasizing the fact he was fighting this evil eastern Queen, not starting a civil war with Mark Anthony, despite appearances to the contrary), its quite possible the usual conventions about women in triumphs wouldn’t apply.
Cleopatra had gotten out of tight situations before. Octavian was smart enough and practical enough not to give her another chance, no matter how slim.
Might he have been worried about making her a martyr? If he kills her, then her followers might be motivated to more violence. If she kills herself, though, then they can’t be mad at him about that.
I think that’s a pretty anachronistic way of thinking. I can’t think of any contemporary examples of a dead leader being held up as a martyr for a political movement (the obvious example is a bit later, and not really comparable).
Plus of course, whatever Octavian’s propaganda may have said it was primarily Mark Anthony and his Roman troops he was fighting, and Cleopatra and her Egyptian forces were just an ally. He might have said differently to the folks back home, but he was under no illusions about it.
Cleopatra was a capable leader with a strong following but that strong following wasn’t going to give Octavian any sleepless nights militarily, and her followers were clearly going to see which way the wind was blowing after her death and get in the program with the Roman military juggernaut.
If Cleopatra could get herself in or out of the palace (rolled up in a carpet) then presumably she could get her asp in whenever she needed to.
The practice of eliminating claimants to a throne, trading a short bit of bad publicity and upset for decades of less threat, is a time honored tradition. (See Richard III) The bad publicity is lessened if the death is not proclaimed as an execution.
I’d argue that is just old-fashioned succession crisis to work out who would succeed him (and control his legions and piles of cash) with the complication of it happening in what was still officially a republic. Not a bunch of hard core Cesar lovers pushing on with his political movement after his martyrdom.
Yeah but this was absolutely not disposing a rival claimant to the throne (at least Octavian absolutely wanted everyone to believe it wasn’t.) It was (according to Octavian’s PR dept) disposing of a defeated much-hated evil eastern queen by a rugged hard-fighting republican Roman general. There is no reason at all for him to not announce her execution if he had her killed.
I was actually just thinking this is a similar case to the Richard III and the princes in the tower. Yes, we will never know for sure, but the obvious outcome is by far the most likely for me (though its somewhat reversed in both cases). If the princes were still alive at the end of Richard III’s reign, or they died of natural causes, there is absolutely no reason for Richard III not to shout it from the rooftops given how bad it would look in contemporary late medival society for him not to, so the fact he didn’t (combined with heaps of means motive and opportunity) means IMO he most likely killed them.
Conversely in the late (soon to be post) republic Octavian’s roman contemporaries would have been fine with him having Cleopatra executed, so that fact he didn’t announce that probably means it didn’t happen, and the suicide story is the one that makes most sense.
The point was always to dispose of the person with the most valid claim to be leader of Egypt, so as to limit the ability of her to escape and rally troops to fight the invader, or of someone else to rally troops on her behalf in her name. Regardless of who was emperor, she still had a claim to Egypt. Until she couldn’t.
A man whose position was very precarious and who fully intended to make Egypt his personal fiefdom, something which was not going to go down well with the Senate, more than half of which supported Antony .He had already gotten into plenty of bother over his habit of killing people wantonly.
If anything, he spent a lot of the time post 30BC shouting to all and sundry that he hadn’t killed Cleopatra.
So? He also had been an ally of Ciceros and had opposed Antony, who had accused him of being Ceasers well errr, bitch. Then when he needed to, he turned around, agreed to accept Antony as a brother, and acquiesced to Cicero’s killing.
Yeah none of which he wanted anyone to dwell on, he would much rather everyone forget all that (and that the war he just won, was actually against his former ally Mark Anthony and his roman supporters). That (and all the romans he had killed in the process) was absolutely something his contempararies would be upset about. Much better to focus on this foreign queen, and her foreign army, he had just victoriously fought a war against. And the romans did not get upset about their generals executing the defeated leaders of a vanquished foreign army, they considered it completely above board and par for the course.
