How did Mark Antony die?

The road from Actium

Antony’s end began at sea a year earlier. At Actium, off western Greece, on September 2, 31 BC, Cleopatra’s squadron broke out of the battle and ran for Egypt, and Antony followed her. Plutarch, our main source, is merciless about it:

No sooner did he see her ship sailing off than he forgot everything else, betrayed and ran away from those who were fighting and dying in his cause, got into a five-oared galley … and hastened after the woman who had already ruined him and would make his ruin still more complete.

His abandoned fleet surrendered and his army went over to Octavian. Allies changed sides one by one. By the summer of 30 BC Octavian was closing on Alexandria. Antony won a small cavalry fight outside the city, then planned a last battle by land and sea. On the night before it, Plutarch says, the quiet city heard music and the shouts of revelers passing out through the gates toward the enemy, and people took it as Dionysus, the god Antony liked to play, abandoning him.

Why he thought Cleopatra was dead

At daybreak his ships rowed out, saluted Octavian’s crews with their oars and joined them. His cavalry deserted. His infantry was beaten. Antony rode back into the city shouting that Cleopatra had betrayed him to the very men he was fighting for her sake. She fled into the tall tomb she had built near the temple of Isis, dropped its bolted doors and sent word that she was dead.

The sources disagree about why. Plutarch says she was afraid of his rage. Cassius Dio, writing a century later, is darker: she had already made her own approaches to Octavian, had the fleet desert, and hoped that if Antony believed her dead he would not want to live.

A slow death

Antony believed it. Years before, he had made a slave named Eros promise to kill him if the time came. Now Eros drew his sword, turned it on himself and fell dead at his master’s feet. Antony praised him for showing the way and drove his own sword into his belly. The wound did not kill him quickly. He lay begging the bystanders to finish him, until Cleopatra’s secretary arrived with orders to bring him to her: she was alive.

She would not open the doors. His servants carried him to the foot of the tomb, and Cleopatra and her two women hauled him up with ropes through a high window, straining to hold him as he hung in the air. Inside, she smeared his blood on her face and called him master, husband and imperator. He asked for wine, told her to trust Proculeius among Octavian’s friends, and said he was not ignobly beaten, a Roman by a Roman. Plutarch gives his age as fifty-three or fifty-six.

After his death

Octavian, says Plutarch, wept when a guard brought him Antony’s bloody sword, then read out their letters to friends to show how reasonable he himself had been. He let Cleopatra bury Antony with royal honors. Within days she was dead too. Antony’s statues were pulled down and his eldest son, Antyllus, was executed. His other children, among them his daughter by Cleopatra, Cleopatra Selene, later a queen in North Africa, were raised by Octavian’s sister Octavia, the wife he had divorced. Shakespeare gave him the farewell everyone remembers: “I am dying, Egypt, dying.” The victor went on to become the first emperor.