Did Deadly Drugs, Not a Snake, Kill Cleopatra?

(June 30) -- A snake bite is not what killed Cleopatra, queen of the Nile, according to German scientists.

A team led by Christoph Schaefer, a historian and professor at the University of Trier, has concluded that she died after taking a drug cocktail that included opium and hemlock.

After traveling with other experts to Alexandria, Egypt, where Cleopatra ended her life in 30 B.C., Schaefer and the team looked at ancient medical texts and consulted snake experts. History tells us that she induced an asp, now known as the Egyptian cobra, to bite her to death.

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Did Cleopatra commit suicide by inducing a snake to bite her, or did she take a deadly mix of drugs, as a German scientist says?

But the professor said on a science show on the German television channel ZDF, "Queen Cleopatra was famous for her beauty and was unlikely to have subjected herself to a long and disfiguring death."

He added, according to London's Daily Telegraph, that "Cleopatra wanted to remain beautiful in her death to maintain her myth. She probably took a cocktail of opium, hemlock and aconitum. Back then, this was a well-known mixture that led to a painless death within just a few hours, whereas the snake death could have taken days and been agonizing."

According to a medical writer for the Telegraph, however, it is a misconception that taking such "extremely nasty" toxins resulted in a nice, painless sleep.

"Most poisons that kill you do not cause you to doze pleasantly as you expire," says Andrew M. Brown. "You are likely to be wide awake, and suffering. People make this mistake today, I'm afraid to say."

Cleopatra, who reigned from 51 B.C., was an ally and lover of Julius Caesar, with whom she had a son. She also gave birth to three children with Caesar's onetime right-hand man, Mark Antony.

After Caesar was assassinated, she and Antony opposed the man who took his place, Octavian, but the two of them committed suicide after losing a key battle with Octavian's forces. Ancient accounts differ on which one died first.

Cleopatra was the last pharaoh of Egypt, which after her death became a Roman province.