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Ancient Autopsy Season 1 Episode 1
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00:01Cleopatra, the last queen of Egypt, lover of two famed Roman generals,
00:07renowned for her beauty and killed by an asp. Or was she?
00:14If you delve into the historical sources, the deaths of many an ancient figure
00:19are shrouded in wild theories, myth and intrigue.
00:23It's an incredible game of imperial Cluedo going on.
00:27I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and I've spent my career investigating the mysteries of the past.
00:33But now I'm travelling thousands of years back in time to investigate how some of the greatest figures of the ancient world met their end.
00:42From Tutankhamun to Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan to Cleopatra,
00:46I'll be searching for clues in the archaeology, in artefacts and in ancient texts.
00:52This is the first time we see a story of his death where he is castrated.
00:58Helping me to unpick fact from fiction is world leading forensic pathologist, Dr Richard Shepard.
01:05Using a cutting edge digital autopsy table, he will shed light on the impact of disease, injury and possible foul play on our famous figures.
01:14It causes shock, the blood pressure falls, the heart rate goes up.
01:20This was not the clean death that are so often described in the history books.
01:26I'll be meeting experts at my investigation hub and getting truly hands on out in the field.
01:32That's great.
01:33That's great.
01:34Look at that.
01:35These barricains are violent.
01:37I'll unearth the latest revelations about these titans of antiquity.
01:42This is a perfect surface to smear some poison.
01:47Leading me closer to revealing just how they died.
01:51Cleopatra is probably ancient Egypt's most famous female ruler.
02:05Centuries of portrayal in art, theatre and film mean that she looms large in the public imagination.
02:11From the doomed lover of Roman general Mark Antony in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra.
02:21To the iconic beauty of Elizabeth Taylor on film in 1963.
02:28This Egyptian queen feels familiar to most of us.
02:32But these stories have hidden the real woman from view.
02:36The historical Cleopatra was the last of the Ptolemies.
02:39The Macedonian Greek royal family who ruled ancient Egypt for nearly 300 years.
02:46Her father, Ptolemy XII, was a pharaoh who found it hard to maintain power.
02:54And he basically bought his throne from the Romans.
03:00It brought Egypt squarely into the orbit of Rome.
03:04So really all of the problems that Cleopatra had to face in her lifetime.
03:10We can put down their origin to her father's relationship with Rome.
03:16For 21 years from 51 to 30 BCE, she ruled over Egypt.
03:22One of the richest and most powerful states in the ancient world.
03:26It was a valuable and strategically important territory that the leaders of Rome wanted for their own.
03:34Leaving the queen in a precarious political position.
03:38Cleopatra's last days when she was just 39 years old were full of despair and danger.
03:44Her corpse was found in her grand mausoleum.
03:49But her end remains something of an enigma.
03:53So how did Cleopatra die?
03:54Possibly the most enduring image we have of Cleopatra is her dramatic death as the tragic lover of Roman general Mark Antony.
04:11It originates with the account of Greek historian Plutarch writing a hundred years after Cleopatra's death.
04:17In the final year of Cleopatra's reign, she has firmly allied herself with Mark Antony, who is at the time engaged in a civil war with Caesar's heir apparent Octavian.
04:31Which sets the stage for numerous battles and the eventual conquest of Egypt by the Romans and the supposed suicide of both Mark Antony and Cleopatra.
04:40She chooses to poison herself using a venomous snake, an asp.
04:51This theory has continued to remain present in the public consciousness through a particular sculpture called The Sleeping Ariadne.
05:00With a curled snake bracelet around her.
05:02It's a wildly dramatic way to die, but could a bite from an asp, an Egyptian cobra, be powerful enough to have killed the last queen of ancient Egypt?
05:17Cleopatra's tomb remains a historical mystery.
05:21Its location has never been discovered, and neither has the body of the queen.
05:24So to explore theories about her death, we're turning to medical expert Dr. Richard Shepherd.
05:33He's a world-leading forensic pathologist who has carried out over 23,000 postmortems.
05:41Using a digital anatomy table, he can dissect virtual human bodies, peeling back layers of tissue, muscle and bone to examine how someone has died.
05:52So how might a snake bite have affected Cleopatra?
06:00Today, on average, 100,000 people a year die as a result of snake bites.
06:07How they kill depends very much on the type of chemical that's injected into the body by the snake.
06:13Some snake bites affect the nervous system.
06:16It quite often starts down in the peripheries, the feet and in the hands, and then spreads up the limbs, involving the torso and finally the muscles of respiration, leading to breathlessness and death.
06:32Other venoms affect the cardiovascular system.
06:34If it's the cardiovascular system, it tends to be all over at once.
06:39It causes shock, the blood pressure falls, the heart rate goes up, and once again, breathing is affected.
06:46There is severe shortness of breath prior to death.
06:50Clearly, an injection of venom from a snake bite could be enough to kill Cleopatra.
06:55But crucially, it depends on the type of snake.
07:01Dr. Cassandra Modal is an expert in snake bite research at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine.
07:10Cassie, this is going to sound like a really basic question for you, but what is venom?
07:15So, venom is a mixture of different toxins, so you can have 50 to 100 different toxins in a venom, and that varies per species and even different geographical areas.
07:28So, a snake in Egypt, for instance, will have a different venom composition than the same species in the next country.
07:34So, we have to essentially break it down into all those components.
07:38And, presumably, before that, you've got to get the venom out of the snake?
07:41Exactly, yep, yeah.
07:42Yeah.
07:44Imagining Cleopatra allowing a snake to bite her is one thing.
07:49But here, I can see firsthand what that might be like.
07:55All right, you ready with that jitter?
07:56Yep.
07:58Cassie and her colleague, Ed, are about to perform a cobra venom extraction.
08:04Everyone happy?
08:05So, right now, that twist needs to get my fingers.
08:07And there, you can see those bits there.
08:09They're the fangs, the little peaks.
08:10He's very keen to bite.
08:15So, give him a little squeeze, but he's given us loads of venom there already.
08:21Right now, he's just clamped onto the dish.
08:24You see him biting again there.
08:26And that's fairly normal for cobras.
08:28They like to lock onto their prey.
08:30Just very happy to have a chance to bite something.
08:33So, this is an Egyptian cobra.
08:37The Egyptian cobra here can get to about two metres in total.
08:41Snakes in the past were definitely much bigger than they were nowadays.
08:43So, Cleopatra may have been operating with a snake that was considerably bigger.
08:49Potentially, yeah.
08:53The cobra and his deadly fangs are safely back out of harm's reach.
08:58But I could hardly come to a snake lab and pass up the opportunity to handle one for myself.
09:08Just be gentle and you let the snake kind of move through your hands.
09:12Seeing these snakes up close, how does this compare with what the historical sources tell us of Cleopatra's fatal encounter with an asp?
09:21We're told that Cleopatra has a snake smuggled into her in a basket of figs.
09:26But we're also told it kills three grown women, Cleopatra and her two maidservants.
09:31How would you make sense of that?
09:33I think smuggling in a cobra would be quite hard because they're large snakes.
09:37They're also very active, as you saw for the venom extraction, so they're not going to sit well.
09:41Would it have killed quickly?
09:43A cobra will have neurotoxins, but it still is probably going to take at least an hour or two.
09:50And how much venom do you need to kill three people?
09:52It depends on the species.
09:54Also, it is possible that a snake can deliver very little venom or no venom at all, which is called a dry bite.
10:00So could she have put a snake to her arm and got it to bite her at a given time?
10:07Potentially, but you still wouldn't know how much venom it would deliver.
10:10And also if it's biting repeated individuals like several of her handmaidens,
10:15I would say that would also be very difficult to kill several people in a row.
10:20Putting a snake to her arm could have ended up with her just being paralyzed for the rest of her life rather than actually dying.
10:27Yeah, or tissue destruction, I would say, would be more common, yeah.
10:31So just having life altering disability.
10:34And that is not something Cleopatra would have wanted to risk.
10:37So this is sounding more and more like it's an unlikely way for her to have died.
10:42So much she couldn't control.
10:43Exactly, yeah.
10:44Yeah, so if you want certain death, yeah, I wouldn't rely on a venomous snake.
10:48So it turns out that the idea that Cleopatra died by suicide with a snake doesn't really stack up.
11:01You can't be sure of having enough venom.
11:03You can't be sure that it's going to not cause paralysis rather than death.
11:07And it could take too long to die to fit in with what we know from the sources.
11:11Is it perhaps a misunderstanding?
11:14Or were they trying to say something more scurrilous about Cleopatra?
11:19The cobra motif is an interesting one to have developed because, of course, the cobra was a symbol of royalty.
11:26So every pharaoh, including Cleopatra, would have had a uraeus, a cobra, on her brow.
11:32And this cobra was supposed to represent the sun god.
11:35And so it represented her power to rule.
11:38So what a fitting way to die by, you know, an Egyptian cobra.
11:42The Roman sources completely take all of this and spin it on their heads.
11:47Because as enemy number one in Rome, she's called the Oriental Virago.
11:53They worship gods with animal heads.
11:56It's an Orientalist spin on everything.
11:59The idea of Cleopatra dying by an exotic method like snake bite fed into the Roman view of her as a villainous, alien queen.
12:09And while Egyptian symbolism might have painted the cobra bite as a mythic and heroic way to die,
12:15the reality would have been far more grisly.
12:20It would have taken Cleopatra quite a long time to die, whatever the snake was, whatever venom was injected into her body.
12:27There would have been the pain from the injection side, the swelling.
12:32There would have been the spread of the toxins, whether it was neurological or cardiovascular, causing tingling, causing breathlessness, causing deterioration.
12:42Diarrhea and vomiting.
12:45This was not the clean death that are so often described in the history books.
12:51The theory that Cleopatra died tragically at her own hands from a snake bite is far from realistic.
13:03And it's perfectly designed to fit either a Roman or an Egyptian spin on her character.
13:10But this dramatic story seems just too neat.
13:13And Cassie has shown me the physical evidence that death by snake bite in this way was just not plausible.
13:20So the true cause of Cleopatra's death must be something else.
13:32Over 2,500 years ago, Cleopatra reigned as the pharaoh of Egypt, negotiating an international world of Egyptian and Roman diplomacy.
13:51She drew on a combination of political and romantic alliances, first with Rome's leader Julius Caesar, and later the Roman general Mark Antony.
14:02But by 30 BCE, Caesar's successor Octavian had defeated Cleopatra's army, and the queen was dead.
14:12The famous theory that Cleopatra died from a snake bite turns out not to be credible.
14:19I feel like I need to understand why the sources tell us that she died in that way and at that time, and what else might be a possibility.
14:32We do have one source, which is close to her time, and this is the writings of a Roman called Strabo.
14:41He was a kind of geographer.
14:43He was writing about 30 to 50 years after Cleopatra's death, and what he suggests was that when her body was examined by the Roman soldiers who went in and found her, they discovered that there were pinpricks in her arm.
15:04A lot of the writings that talk about her killing herself do suggest that it was poison in some form.
15:13The pinprick method is also quite interesting because Cleopatra is not the only figure in the classical world who is believed to have died by that method.
15:23Other ancient figures such as the famed military general Hannibal are said to have died by pricking themselves with poison.
15:35According to the closest literary source we have to the time of Cleopatra's death, she also died this way.
15:42But what circumstances could have led her to this?
15:48Author and classicist Anna Cargill Martin is an expert on the written evidence surrounding Cleopatra.
15:57So what do the sources tell us about her death?
15:59So Cleopatra's death is almost an early locked room mystery.
16:03Cleopatra has been captured by Octavian and she has decided that she has to kill herself
16:09because she knows that Octavian is going to take her back to Rome.
16:12He is going to parade her and humiliate her.
16:15She has decided she cannot let that happen.
16:17So she goes in to the mausoleum, she bathes, she dines.
16:21She sends away her guard and when the Romans return, the deed is done.
16:25But how?
16:26Well, because we know that it can't be a snake bite now.
16:30They can't find any evidence.
16:32Poison is perhaps the most invisible way to end your own life.
16:36And also there is a lot of evidence that Cleopatra would have known something about toxicology.
16:42In 44 BC, she had actually murdered her brother, husband and co-ruler using poison.
16:49And the Arabic texts actually say that she writes a treatise herself on toxicology.
16:55It's fascinating that she's written a treatise.
16:57So she really knows this stuff.
16:59So if we're thinking about poisons, what sort of poisons were around at the time?
17:03So some of the most effective poisons in the ancient world are things like hemlock,
17:07hellebores, wolfsbane, these kind of natural poisons.
17:11Every part of these plants is toxic to humans.
17:16In Cleopatra's time, the poison was likely prepared by grinding up stems, seeds and leaves into a powder or juice,
17:24which then could be consumed with wine or water.
17:31Using a digital 3D body to expose layers of muscle beneath the skin.
17:37Forensic pathologist Dr Shepherd can reveal more about how these botanical poisons may have affected her.
17:45If Cleopatra chose poison, hemlock is a likely candidate.
17:49It's a highly poisonous plant in the carrot family.
17:53The Greeks famously used it for executions.
17:57Hemlock acts by causing muscle paralysis.
18:01Arms and legs, they can't be moved.
18:04But what's crucial is the muscles that control respiration.
18:08The first one is the muscle called the diaphragm that sits below the chest on the top of the abdomen
18:17and it rises and lowers and it draws air through the lungs into the chest.
18:23The other set of muscles are called the intercostal muscles because they sit between the ribs.
18:29These are little sheets of muscles that simply contract and pull the ribs up and out.
18:35So when hemlock has its effect and those muscles cease to work, respiration gets less and less
18:43and the person very slowly asphyxiates.
18:48It's an awful, stressful, distressing way to die.
18:54Just 150 milligrams of hemlock, about the amount found in six to eight leaves, can be enough to kill.
19:09The written evidence implies that pinpricks discovered on Cleopatra's body
19:13may have been caused by her administering to herself the fatal dose.
19:19But what do they tell us about how she did it?
19:23A lot of the theories centre on her hairpin.
19:26We actually have an example of the kind of hairpin that she would have been using here.
19:32This is a Roman hairpin?
19:34This is an original Roman hairpin.
19:36It's a very classic type and it was the sort of thing that women like Cleopatra would have used.
19:40But how do you convey poison in something that's more?
19:44The first theory that emerges perhaps about a hundred years after Cleopatra's death comes down to us from Plutarch
19:51and he claims that Cleopatra had sort of hollowed out this section at the top of the hairpin and had put the poison in that.
19:59And the second theory comes from Dio who's writing a couple of hundred years after that.
20:05And he says that Cleopatra had somehow managed to make up this poison that was completely harmless unless it came into contact with the blood.
20:13She had coated the end part of the hairpin with this poison, used the hairpin to prick her skin, get to her blood and inject the poison that way.
20:22You're talking about a very small amount of poison and it's not just her, it's also her two serving maids who are dying as well.
20:29So I think that is a problem with the hairpin theory.
20:32And I think the other problem I would have with the hairpin theory is that it is so neat in terms of everything else that the Romans say about Cleopatra.
20:41Poison is seen so much as a kind of feminine form of death.
20:46And the hairpin is a really classic emblem of femininity.
20:50And particularly for someone like Cleopatra who is so often castigated for her feminine vanity by the Romans.
20:57To have her die by poison in a hairpin is just so perfect.
21:02It's perfect. It's too perfect.
21:04Far too perfect, I think.
21:05The Egyptians were quite at ease with a female ruler.
21:12Of course that could never have happened in Rome.
21:16Rome was the ultimate patriarchal society.
21:20And any Roman woman who even attempted to engage in politics found herself in some pretty desperate situations.
21:31Cleopatra is villainised to the core of her being by a huge propaganda machine, which is really set up by Octavian.
21:46And she is called Fatale Monstrum, you know, the ruinous femme fatale.
21:52It's hard to get away from the image that the Romans created of her.
21:56Perhaps the poisoned hairpin method of death is a step too far.
22:02Playing into even greater sexist Roman depictions of Cleopatra.
22:06A female ruler whose existence directly threatened Rome's patriarchal authority.
22:12Yet there is another more modern approach to viewing her suicide by poison.
22:21Do you see this as a representation of her agency?
22:28Well, she really has been obviously completely backed into a corner.
22:31This is her final way out.
22:33But I think what it does reflect is her pride.
22:36Cleopatra is at the last trying to ensure that she dies well and dies in her ancestral city of Alexandria.
22:44Do you think the Roman sources are hiding the fact that Octavian's actually rather scared by this intelligent, brilliant, dangerous queen?
22:54Cleopatra's personal abilities make her very threatening.
22:58Egypt is one of the greatest bases of power in the Mediterranean world.
23:04It is an incredibly wealthy country.
23:07She also has huge armies.
23:09This is a real threat if she continues to live.
23:12Cleopatra was clearly a ferociously intelligent woman.
23:19We know that she spoke nine or ten languages, including Egyptian,
23:23which was the first time any Ptolemaic ruler had ever bothered to learn the Egyptian language.
23:29And in the political and cultural world of the day,
23:35which was an amalgamation of Egyptian, Greek and Roman politics.
23:42We see her coming over as a far more careful politician and diplomat using both soft power and hard politics.
23:54So a different woman is beginning to emerge.
23:57When looking for the cause of Cleopatra's death, it seems the written evidence behind the poison theory,
24:07all from non-Egyptian sources, is far from clear cut.
24:12The Roman sources are partial, sexist and ultimately inaccurate when it comes to Cleopatra.
24:20She was far more intelligent politician than they would have us believe.
24:24A woman operating with power in the suffocatingly male dominated world of antiquity.
24:29We should never judge someone on the basis of what their enemies have to say about them.
24:34Maybe she did decide to take the way out with dignity.
24:38But neither of the methods seem entirely feasible.
24:41We know it wasn't by snake bite.
24:43But then the alternative?
24:45That tiny hairpin?
24:46Enough poison to kill three women?
24:48Is there a more sinister explanation?
25:05Queen Cleopatra lived a short but full life.
25:09In her 21-year reign of Egypt, she captivated Roman leader Julius Caesar,
25:15famously assassinated in 44 BCE,
25:18and bore him an illegitimate son and heir.
25:22Later, she allied herself with Roman general Mark Antony.
25:27They had three children and went to war against Rome.
25:31But by 30 BCE, it was all over.
25:36At 39 years old, the last queen of Egypt was found,
25:39lined head, we're told, in her Muslim.
25:42Suicide has been the accepted narrative by snake or poison,
25:47but both theories present serious practical problems.
25:51And if something more suspicious was going on, then surely we need a suspect.
26:00Who might have wanted Cleopatra dead?
26:03By the final year of the Egyptian queen's life,
26:06Julius Caesar's nephew and heir Octavian was embroiled in a war against her.
26:11And he was winning.
26:13His alleged plan was to take her prisoner and assume rule of Egypt.
26:19But perhaps he had something else in mind.
26:22There is another suggestion that it wasn't suicide at all,
26:26but that Cleopatra was murdered.
26:28When Egypt became a Roman province, Octavian, as the Emperor Augustus,
26:38used that province as his own.
26:40Senators, Romans, were forbidden from going there.
26:44Why?
26:45Well, I think that he had things to hide.
26:48Maybe there was another story going on here where your emperor is more implicated
26:53than he would otherwise let on.
26:55It might be a wonderful cover-up.
26:58Written sources, mostly Roman and designed to paint their rulers in the best light,
27:04make no mention of any obvious signs of murder at the scene of Cleopatra's death.
27:09This poses a challenge when it comes to examining the pathology of this theory.
27:19Dr. Richard Shepherd has conducted thousands of autopsies to establish a cause of death.
27:26Can his experience shed any light in this case?
27:30I've been involved in quite a number of cases where politicians and other people have died suddenly and mysteriously.
27:39And the investigation of those deaths requires very, very careful consideration.
27:45The circumstances of death.
27:47What has happened to this person?
27:48When were they found dead?
27:50Then there's the scene of death.
27:52Is there any evidence of blood staining?
27:54Is there any evidence of damage to the furniture?
27:56Is there any evidence of bodies being moved?
27:59And the body itself, we look at all of the surfaces.
28:03And we're looking for bruises and injuries and marks.
28:08In the case of the last queen of ancient Egypt, we have little to work with,
28:13apart from the reported marks on Cleopatra's arm.
28:16Obviously we don't have the body and we do need to understand the circumstances
28:21to be able to form any conclusions about the death of Cleopatra.
28:25It would be foolish not to at least consider foul play.
28:29Without any more physical clues in the written evidence of Cleopatra's death,
28:34and no body to examine, we have to rely on circumstantial evidence.
28:39Is it possible to establish a motive for murder?
28:46Why would Octavian, future Roman emperor, have wanted Cleopatra dead?
28:53Classicist Dr Shishma Malik has studied his life in depth.
28:58We're in the Museum of Classical Archaeology, which is part of the University of Cambridge,
29:03and this is one of their cast galleries.
29:05And it's one that has a lot of busts, replica busts of Roman emperors,
29:09like this one, which is Augustus.
29:12So we know him in this period by the name Octavian?
29:15Yeah, that's right.
29:16It's great to look him in the eyes, almost.
29:19And he's dressed quite sort of spectacularly.
29:23So this is Augustus as an emperor.
29:25He's in a pose, sort of addressing the troops.
29:28Octavian became one of three rulers of Rome after the assassination of Julius Caesar.
29:34He shared power with military generals Mark Antony and Marcus Lepidus.
29:39All had an eye on expanding Roman rule to include the wealthy state of Egypt.
29:45But Cleopatra's personal history with Caesar complicated matters.
29:51Shishma, can you paint a picture for me of the political relations between Egypt with Cleopatra as Pharaoh and Rome?
30:00So Egypt at this point is not a part of the Roman Empire,
30:04but it is a place that the Romans have had a lot of interactions with through the dynasty that Cleopatra is a part of.
30:11And it was quite a difficult period in dynastic terms.
30:15She and her brother don't quite see eye to eye as to who should be in charge.
30:19And Julius Caesar is someone who gets involved in that conflict
30:23and then tries to broker a sort of diplomatic deal between them.
30:27So Caesar and Cleopatra become lovers,
30:30have a child who is named Ptolemy Caesar Caesar,
30:33who will become heir to her throne?
30:36Yes, absolutely.
30:39The birth of Cleopatra and Caesar's son meant that Octavian,
30:43as Julius Caesar's nephew and heir, now had a potential rival.
30:48On top of this, Mark Antony, one of the joint leaders of Rome alongside Octavian after Caesar's death,
30:55started a relationship with the queen that resulted in three more children.
31:00Egypt is strategically important to Rome.
31:04Antony is trying to make war and basically use Egypt as a base in the east for military activity.
31:10He sees the value in getting her on side.
31:13They hit it off, I think we might say, both in a diplomatic sense
31:17but also clearly in a sense of a relationship that's longer lasting.
31:21That sort of plays out back in Rome.
31:23Antony, he's, you know, under the thumb of Cleopatra, essentially.
31:28Mark Antony had a very strained relationship with Octavian.
31:33They split up the Roman Empire to kind of rule different sections of it
31:36and Antony got the Eastern Empire.
31:39However, Mark Antony overstepped the mark
31:44when Mark Antony made this public proclamation
31:48that he was going to share out the Eastern Empire of Rome
31:52to Cleopatra and all of her children.
31:54He was giving away Roman provinces which were not his to give.
31:59The historical evidence does suggest political factors
32:04that could have motivated Octavian as the Roman Emperor-in-waiting
32:08to remove Cleopatra.
32:10But did he have it in him to order her death?
32:16What do we know about Octavian and his political strategy?
32:20I mean, is he murderous?
32:22So Octavian's political strategy in Rome, I think,
32:25could definitely be described as murderous.
32:28After the assassination of Julius Caesar,
32:30where we get these very powerful political figures
32:33sort of trying to decide what happens next.
32:36Octavian and Antony and Lepidus,
32:39they write up these names of leading figures in Rome
32:43that they think are problematic and they are then killed.
32:46So he has form when it comes to the political assassination of his enemies?
32:50Yes, he does. Yeah, absolutely.
32:52So far, the circumstantial evidence surrounding Cleopatra's death
32:59isn't looking good for Octavian.
33:02But surely it's too speculative to accuse him of her murder?
33:07Although Octavian might have wanted Cleopatra dead for ease, for simplicity,
33:13how easy this would have been to achieve or to orchestrate in practice is difficult to say.
33:22I'm not sure how convinced I am by that theory,
33:25because I think having Cleopatra killed before she could be used as a symbol of Roman subjugation of Egypt
33:32would seem counter to what Octavian at least professes to have wanted.
33:36He wanted to take her to Rome as a symbol of his triumph.
33:39Her dying immediately causes a problem with that.
33:42And certainly a couple of accounts of the time record that Octavian was quite angry
33:46that this had been taken away from him.
33:51Do you feel that there's a way in which Octavian is maneuvering in order to eradicate this rival for power?
34:01Our sources clearly don't think so.
34:03We have quite a few sources that explicitly sort of shy away from that interpretation.
34:08Certainly one of the things you could say is he puts her in a situation
34:12where it's not possible for her to keep any sort of agency.
34:16So in those terms, enacted by a man who has a long history of removing political enemies,
34:24could we see her death as murder?
34:27I think murder is a strong word, but we could certainly see it as a forced act.
34:33He was not unaccustomed to using murder as a political tool,
34:37but there would also be advantages for him politically to keeping her alive.
34:42While it's tempting to believe that her political rival Octavian might have had Cleopatra killed,
34:48it just cannot be substantiated.
34:56He certainly had a potential motive to want Cleopatra dead,
34:59but alive she would have been the ultimate trophy of his victory.
35:03It seems that the political context is everything when it comes to the cause of Cleopatra's death.
35:12But there is one other, much more personal theory that is worth considering.
35:17Since her death, Cleopatra has been seriously underrated.
35:39She was a consummate politician.
35:42But by August 30 BCE, her position was checkmate.
35:47What I think we're losing sight of, what we can't really see through the murky witness of the sources,
35:52is Cleopatra herself as a woman.
35:55What animated her? What moved her? What was really at stake?
36:00I think it's only by understanding that, that her death will come into focus.
36:05In her 21-year rule of Egypt, Cleopatra forged alliances through relationships with two generals of Rome,
36:16Julius Caesar and Mark Antony.
36:20Most written sources on her life are not Egyptian, but Roman,
36:25and focus on these so-called romances.
36:28But they overlook her role as a mother.
36:31Caesarian, her firstborn son with Caesar, was positioned as heir to both Egypt and Rome.
36:40Accounts state that after Cleopatra died, Roman leader Octavian had Caesarian killed.
36:47They also suggest the queen feared for her son's life.
36:51So could the cause of her death be linked to Caesarian's fate?
36:56I think if people had asked Cleopatra, what's the most important thing in your life,
37:01she wouldn't necessarily have said to be queen.
37:03She would have said, for my son to be king.
37:06Cleopatra's children are taken into custody by Octavian.
37:11And I think then she just thinks, well, there's nothing in this for me anymore.
37:15It's an intriguing option that Cleopatra died of grief and a broken heart,
37:26of seeing her family, her history, her lineage end before her very eyes.
37:31Yes, she is considered a living god and an emperor,
37:34but she's a human who's just seen her family torn apart.
37:42It sounds like something from a fairy tale,
37:45that Cleopatra might have died of a broken heart.
37:48But does this idea have any basis in reality?
37:53Can the pathological evidence tell us whether stress and grief could in fact be fatal?
38:03The experience of grief is unique to each individual.
38:07And the symptoms, whether emotional or mental,
38:11are always associated with physical effects too.
38:15Those physical effects are caused by the release of adrenaline.
38:18When we're thinking about the effects of adrenaline, we look at the heart.
38:25A surge of excess adrenaline and other stress hormones like cortisol
38:30can trigger an acute heart failure condition known as Takotsubo,
38:35or broken heart syndrome.
38:38In rare cases, it can be life-threatening.
38:41Because excess adrenaline damages the muscle of the heart,
38:46can cause the heart to change shape,
38:49and certainly can cause the heart to beat irregularly and inefficiently,
38:54and may cause the person to collapse and die suddenly.
38:59So did Cleopatra die from a heart attack?
39:03If the queen had been overwhelmed by emotional distress, causing heart failure,
39:10it's possible she could have died as a result.
39:17It's a beguiling idea.
39:20But to understand what could have pushed her to this point,
39:23I need to see beyond the Roman accounts of Cleopatra.
39:27I want to know what was at stake for her as pharaoh and the last of her dynasty.
39:33Could the archaeology reveal this?
39:36Egyptologist Dr Chris Naunton is an expert on the physical evidence from Cleopatra's reign.
39:43What kind of material evidence do we have of her life and her death?
39:49How Cleopatra appears in the Egyptian evidence in temple iconography or in papyri,
39:55it's a very different story from the one that most of us are familiar with.
39:59So we have images of her shown absolutely in the typical pharaonic Egyptian style.
40:05She depicts herself in the guise of Isis.
40:08That's very suitable for an Egyptian pharaoh, but she seems to have really played that up, perhaps.
40:13Again, emphasising her role as a mother.
40:16Isis is the sort of mother goddess par excellence.
40:19And that probably is all a part of promoting her son, Caesareon, her chosen son,
40:25and heir who is shown in the iconography.
40:32She wanted to present herself as her being Isis and Caesarean being Horus.
40:37So according to the Egyptian myth, Isis's husband, Osiris, had been assassinated, been killed.
40:45So Cleopatra was the new Isis, her son as the new Horus,
40:49and of course the murdered god was Julius Caesar.
40:55At the rear of Dendera Temple in Middle Egypt,
40:58we see 30-foot-high images of Cleopatra with her son in front of her,
41:04taking the primary position.
41:06And there's an incredible scene that is sadly now lost,
41:10but we have 19th century drawings of it from a temple in Medamud.
41:16And it shows Cleopatra giving birth to Caesarean.
41:20She's surrounded by goddesses.
41:22She's squatting.
41:23The goddesses hold up her arms and she pushes out the child.
41:26The birth of Caesarean was the ultimate moment in her life.
41:31It was a defining moment.
41:33The archaeological evidence from Cleopatra's reign makes it clear that she viewed herself as a goddess mother to Caesarean.
41:41This was integral to her position as pharaoh.
41:45To lose him meant the destruction of all she had worked for.
41:49Knowing this, could it put a different spin on her psychological state in the final days of her life?
41:57We know that she had essentially fled Octavian, who eventually defeats the armies of Cleopatra and Marc Antony, arrives himself in Alexandria to take control.
42:07And taking all of the account, it seems as though there came a point where she decided her defeat was sort of complete.
42:15Some of the rhetoric around this talks about her dying of grief, of a broken heart.
42:22What do you make of that?
42:24It's a very persuasive story.
42:26It's a very compelling narrative.
42:28I have to fall back on the evidence and the stories of those last days that play up the drama and the emotion of those final moments are not backed up.
42:38It is not impossible.
42:40She was grief-stricken.
42:42I mean, she must have been in a very difficult place psychologically.
42:46We, I think, get misled when we think that Cleopatra's grief at the end of her life was all for Antony.
42:56Cleopatra put everything into her relationship with her son, Caesarian.
43:03As a mother, all of her ambitions, her visions for an independent Egypt, for the security of her people, for the longevity of her family,
43:13all that went with his death.
43:16There was no future.
43:17It wasn't about her ruling Egypt.
43:19It was about her son ruling Egypt, and that was taken away from her.
43:26This theory is certainly a tempting one.
43:29We know that her role as Caesarian's divine mother was essential to how she portrayed herself as pharaoh.
43:37The pathology has shown that extreme stress can kill.
43:40But the Roman accounts of her death are awash with stereotypes and inconsistencies.
43:49It seems to me that the Roman poets and historians contradict each other.
43:53On the one hand, they're suggesting that she is incapable of genuine emotion.
43:59On the other, it's stressing her nature as a woman that she would feel all these things.
44:05Do you think that, in some ways, we're still caught on that divide?
44:10Yeah, and I think maybe that's true.
44:12And again, in the absence of any really good, hard evidence, we bring with us all these sort of preconceptions,
44:24and subconsciously, those are working away in our minds as we try and spin a story.
44:30It's my duty to point out that this is the evidence we have, and that doesn't really allow us to be absolutely clear that what's in the narrative accounts is right.
44:40On the other hand, though, you know, there's something in there, there's probably a nugget of truth in there.
44:47What we know of Cleopatra's life and her death is engulfed by hearsay.
44:54If there are kernels of truth, they are buried in stories told by people who all had something to gain by depicting her one way or another.
45:03As I wrap up my exploration into the death of the last queen of ancient Egypt, having examined all the available evidence, what can we conclude about its cause?
45:18Cleopatra's death remains shrouded in mystery.
45:21The truth is unverifiable because the two eyewitnesses, her serving ways, did not outlive her long enough to tell the tale. Very convenient.
45:31And it doesn't help that the Roman sources are determined to serve her up as an example of debauched, exotic womanhood.
45:40When it comes to Cleopatra, it feels like the line between suicide and murder is wafer thin.
45:47What do we know? We know that she died at her own hands and we don't know much else. But here's my best guess.
45:54It's her grief as a mother and, of course, her grief as a leader that there's no future for her dynasty that I think makes her choose death on her own terms.
46:07Wrestling control back from Octavian.
46:10It seems likely that the last and most famous queen of ancient Egypt chose to die.
46:16The exact method still something of a mystery, but a choice made not as a tragic woman, but as a ruler, ending her life as she had lived, with dignity and by her own rules.
46:29And the last one is of his friends.
46:31For the sake of the years, it was huge.
46:44And the fuck?
46:45The world's so glad to be with her.
46:46At the end of the year, it was like, oh, my God, you know.
46:50Transcription by CastingWords
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