Everybody knows that Cleopatra, queen of Egypt, lover of Julius Caesar, widow of Mark Antony, committed suicide at age 39 by holding an asp to her breast.
Well, not quite everybody.Robert Bianchi, an American art historian, says there may be a different reading of a headless statue in the Vatican's Egyptian collection.
The sculpture, which some experts believe represents the dying Cleopatra, depicts a woman with a serpent on her chest. Bianchi thinks the statue may not prove the prevailing notion of how the queen died but merely explain the story's popularity 2,000 years later.
"The reason we know so little about the real Cleopatra or her death is because the rulers of Rome wanted to get rid of her memory," said Bianchi, a Cleopatra scholar and the Brooklyn Museum's former curator. "There must have been records of what happened, but we don't have them."
For lack of death records, scholars refer to other sources that confuse the picture, and Bianchi said what really happened may never be known.
Conflicting versions of Cleopatra's suicide were in circulation almost immediately after her death, he said. Two of the most famous were provided by the Roman poet Horace and his Greek contemporary, Strabo, a historian and geographer.
Horace, who said Cleopatra died of a poisonous snakebite, never visited Egypt, and Bianchi said he had an ax to grind: "Roman poets thought Cleopatra was a degenerate."
On the other hand, Strabo came to Egypt on a fact-finding mission within six years of Cleopatra's passing.
Strabo said Cleopatra died of a self-administered dose of poison.
In 1989 Jean-Claude Grenier, Egyptian expert at the Vatican's Museo Chiaramonti, published details of the headless marble statue, preserved from neck to knee. A serpent lurks about the left breast.
Bianchi believes the statue might have been made in Alexandria about a century after Cleopatra's suicide and taken to Rome soon afterward.
It is interesting, Bianchi added, to consider whether historians and artists, influenced by the Vatican torso or others like it, "perpetuated the legend that she committed suicide by holding an asp to her breast."