For some, surrender is worse than death. Two thousand years earlier, in 30 BC, the queen of Egypt barricaded herself inside a tomb as her archnemesis, the first future emperor of Rome, closed ranks with his mighty army. But Cleopatra wasn’t alone. In her arms, she held her lover, Mark Antony. Soon, they’d both be dead from self-inflicted wounds.
Antony and Cleopatra’s love story began more than a decade earlier, as if the gods themselves conspired to bring them together. He was a broad-shouldered, strapping soldier, said to be descended from Hercules—the Greek hero and son of Zeus, famed for his superhuman strength. She was the radiant, alluring, reputed daughter of Ra—the Egyptian sun god—and richer than most everyone in the Mediterranean. Before Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC, Cleopatra had been his (much younger) mistress, giving him a son, Caesarion. Antony, though a distant cousin of Caesar’s, was one of his closest allies.
After Caesar’s murder, Cleopatra returned to Ptolemy XIV, her husband, coruler, and brother, in Egypt while Rome plunged into civil war. The chaos paused briefly when the second triumvirate formed—an alliance as fragile as it was ambitious. One of its three members was Antony, who summoned Cleopatra to Tarsus in 41 BC, three years after Ptolemy XIV had died, likely poisoned by Cleopatra. But with Caesar gone, she had lost her most powerful protector. Antony’s army promised security and a path to assert the claim of Caesarion as Rome’s rightful heir. And what Cleopatra wanted, Cleopatra got—because no one alive could put on a show quite like her.
Stacy Schiff recounts the queen’s performance in her 2010 biography, Cleopatra: A Life. “She reclined beneath a gold-spangled canopy, dressed as Venus in a painting, while beautiful young boys, like painted Cupids, stood at her sides and fanned her. Her fairest maids were likewise dressed as sea nymphs and graces.” Just as she planned, Cleopatra’s theatrics worked. “The moment he saw her,” wrote the Greek historian Appian, “Antony lost his head to her like a young man.”
Though still married to his third wife, Fulvia, Antony followed Cleopatra to Egypt for an epic winter of debauchery. Together, the lovers formed the Society of Inimitable Livers: a secret, elite drinking club that was akin to an ancient fraternity with a bottomless budget. Their relationship had its ups and downs: In 40 BC, after Fulvia died, Antony left a pregnant Cleopatra and returned to Rome to marry the emperor Octavian’s sister, Octavia. But the pair always seemed to find their way back to each other. Antony separated from Octavia and returned to Egypt in 37 BC. According to the ancient philosopher Plutarch, the forbidden lovers then married—never mind that Roman law barred citizens from legally marrying foreigners, rendering any such ceremony technically meaningless. Though the wedding left no official paper trail, historians like Glanville Downey agree that a marriage likely occurred at this time, pointing to Antony’s decidedly bougie “wedding gift” to his beloved: vast territories in Palestine and Syria.
