Octavian arranged for Cleopatra to be buried “with royal splendor and magnificence.” To do otherwise was to risk inciting the Alexandrians, who no doubt mourned their queen publicly, despite the Roman presence. According to Plutarch, Octavian honored also her request to be laid to rest at Antony’s side. Iras and the eloquent Charmion received similarly fine burials, with their queen. It is unclear if the three were mummified. Their splendid joint monument would have been lavishly and colorfully decorated, as were the royal tombs of Cleopatra’s ancestors, with Roman twists in the iconography. By one account, statues of Iras and Charmion stood sentry outside. Plutarch implies that the burial place was in the center of Alexandria, along with those of previous Ptolemies. Octavian ordered the mausoleum to be finished as well, work presumably completed in a subdued city, numb with uncertainty; the Alexandrians were now Roman subjects. That Cleopatra’s monument was adjacent to a temple of Isis essentially means it could have been anywhere. The most recent theory is that Antony and Cleopatra’s final resting place is twenty miles west of Alexandria, on a sun-bleached hillside in Taposiris Magna, overlooking the Mediterranean. Neither the tomb nor the mausoleum (they were almost certainly separate structures) has been found.
Cleopatra was thirty-nine years old and had ruled for nearly twenty-two years, about a decade longer than had Alexander the Great, from whom she had inherited the baton that she inadvertently passed on to the Roman Empire. With her death, the Ptolemaic dynasty came to an end. Octavian formally annexed Egypt on August 31. His first year was Cleopatra’s last; he started the clock again with August 1, the date on which he had entered Alexandria. Cleopatra is said to have brought down the curtain on an age, although of course from the Egyptian perspective Antony too could be said to have done so. It is easy to forget he was Cleopatra’s undoing every bit as much as she was his.
TO THE END Ptolemaic tutors proved fickle. Caesarion got as far as a port on the Red Sea when Rhodon convinced him to return to Alexandria, possibly to negotiate with Octavian in his mother’s stead. The ancient world was at times an uncomfortably small place; Octavian could afford neither to let his cousin live nor to exhibit a son of the divine Caesar in a triumph. The name “Caesarion” alone posed a problem. The much publicized coming-of-age ceremony did not help. Octavian’s men returned the seventeen-year-old to Alexandria, where they murdered him, possibly having tortured him first. As they posed no real danger, Alexander Helios, Cleopatra Selene, and Ptolemy Philadelphus returned to Rome with Octavian, to be raised by his always amenable sister. They grew up in her large, comfortable household, with Antony and Octavia’s daughters, and with Antony’s surviving children by his previous marriages. (Iotape, Alexander Helios’s intended, returned to her family in Media.) A year after the death of their mother, Cleopatra’s surviving children walked in Octavian’s triumph, surely an awkward event for three youngsters said to be raised as attentively as if they were his own. He later married Cleopatra Selene off to Juba II, who at the age of five had walked in Caesar’s African triumph and was thereafter educated in Rome, where he developed a passion for history. Husband and wife had known similar formations and similar humiliations; the Roman civil wars made orphans of them both. A man of culture, something of a poet, a favorite of Octavian’s, Juba was sent with his bride to rule Mauretania. (It is today Algeria.) Cleopatra’s daughter was probably fifteen at the time, Juba twenty-two. As a favor to the young royals, Octavian spared Cleopatra Selene’s brothers, who may have traveled to western Africa as well. After the triumph we lose sight of the two boys forever.
On the Mauretanian throne Cleopatra Selene continued her mother’s legacy; her coins bear her likeness and are inscribed in Greek. (Juba’s are in Latin.) Together the couple transformed their capital into a cultural and artistic center, complete with a splendid library. Plenty of Egyptian sculpture—including a piece from July 31, 30, the day before Octavian entered Alexandria—has turned up in the area, where Cleopatra Selene evidently assembled a gallery of Ptolemaic busts. She continued the Isis association, and named her son Ptolemy. She kept sacred crocodiles. Cleopatra’s only known grandson, Ptolemy of Mauretania, succeeded Juba in AD 23. Seventeen years into his reign he visited Rome at the invitation of Caligula. Both men descended from Mark Antony; they were half cousins. The Roman emperor greeted the African king with honors, until Ptolemy one day swept into a gladiatorial show in a particularly splendid purple cloak. Heads turned, to Caligula’s displeasure. He ordered Ptolemy’s murder, an appropriate end to dynasty steeped, from the start, in blazing, supersaturated color.*
Octavian obliterated all traces of Antony in both Rome and Alexandria. January 14, his birthday, was deemed an unlucky day, on which no public business could be transacted. By Senate decree, the names “Mark” and “Antony” were never again to be conjoined. Otherwise he was discarded, a historical inconvenience. Octavian would mention neither Antony nor Cleopatra by name in his account of Actium. He sentenced several of Antony’s close associates to death, Canidius and the Roman senator who supervised Cleopatra’s textile mills chief among them. Those who had sworn to perish with Antony and Cleopatra were presumably relieved of the need to see to the job themselves. Other partisans disappeared. The influential high priest at Memphis—who was born the same year as Caesarion, and who had remained personally bound to Cleopatra—died mysteriously several days before her. It was imperative that no one survive who might exercise authority, rally the people, reassemble Cleopatra’s kingdom. Octavian’s men collected the pile of Ptolemaic treasure from the palace and exacted fines throughout the city, inventing misdemeanors as they went. Where imagination failed, they simply confiscated two thirds of a victims’ property. It was a polite kind of plunder; the Romans made out handsomely. Octavian removed from Alexandria the fine statuary and precious art that Antony and Cleopatra had pillaged throughout Asia, restoring it, for the most part, to the cities to which it belonged. A few of the finest pieces wound up in Rome, where the best art had long come from the second-century sack of Corinth. Seventeen years after Cleopatra’s death, Octavian finished the Caesareum, that pharaonic and Greek marvel, in his honor.
Cleopatra had plenty of partisans, as faithful as had been her ladies-in-waiting, whose devotion was the talk of Alexandria. A servant did not normally die for her mistress. Those who had offered to rise up for their queen remained loyal. Cleopatra had her country’s favor; there had been no revolts under her reign. Alexandria must have given itself over to mourning. There were processions and hymns and offerings, the city would have been loud with keening and wails as the women of Alexandria shredded their garments and beat their breasts. On behalf of the native priests, a cleric offered Octavian 2,000 talents to preserve Cleopatra’s many statues. She might remain noble, but she was also dead; the offer was too attractive to refuse. It saved Octavian as well from the thorny business of tangling with Isis, who continued to be worshipped for some time. Cleopatra was often indistinguishable from that goddess; Octavian could not very well go around volatile Alexandria toppling religious statuary. Cleopatra’s statues, and her cult, lived on actively for hundreds of years, no doubt reinforced by her steely last stand against the Romans.