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Inside the Mausoleum: Cleopatra's Final Hours and the Choice She Made
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Cleopatra is sealed inside her mausoleum, Antony is dead, and Octavian's forces control Alexandria — but she is still negotiating. This chapter examines the last days of history's most iconic queen and the question historians have debated for two millennia: was her death defeat or defiance?
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The door is sealed. Heavy stone.
To understand the death, you need to understand what the weeks before it looked like. We covered the Battle of Actium in the last episode.
There's a moment in the final weeks that historians find genuinely difficult to interpret. Cleopatra sent Antony a message.
Octavian moved carefully. He wanted her alive, at least for a while.
It's worth being precise about what a Roman triumph meant for the defeated. Cleopatra would have been led through the streets of Rome in chains.
The exact date is believed to be around the twelfth of August, thirty BCE. Cleopatra had been eating.
Octavian had been denied his triumph centerpiece. He'd been outmaneuvered, in the end, not by an army or a fleet, but by a woman in a locked room with a clear mind and enough time to make her arrangements.
Her children by Antony, the twins Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene, and the younger Ptolemy Philadelphus, were taken to Rome. They were displayed in Octavian's triumph, then handed to Octavia, Antony's Roman wife, who raised them.
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