After Antony died in her arms, Cleopatra was cornered.

Picture her in those final hours, Alexandria fallen, Roman soldiers patrolling corridors that once echoed with her laughter. Octavian's plans for her are no secret — chains, a triumph through Roman streets, the foreign queen displayed like hunting spoils for cheering crowds.

She refuses to be anyone's trophy.

Watch her in her private chamber as evening falls. The bath is drawn, oils warmed, royal robes laid across marble benches like costumes for a final performance. Her attendants move in hushed reverence — they understand what's coming, even if the details remain unspoken.

The basket arrives as the sun disappears. Figs, fresh from palace gardens, innocent enough to pass Roman inspection. But beneath the fruit? History splinters into whispers.

Some say an asp coiled among the figs — the sacred serpent of the Nile, symbol of the uraeus that crowned pharaohs for millennia. The bite to her breast, quick and clean, venom coursing through veins that once carried divine blood.

Plutarch insists it was poison in a comb, worked through hair still damp from her final bath. Cassius Dio favours a hidden hairpin, sharp enough to pierce skin, deadly enough to free a soul. Strabo believes in ointment, rubbed into wrists like perfume. Galen, ever the skeptic, refuses to believe any asp would dare strike a queen.

Others whisper of a draught, mixed in secret by loyal hands, bitter herbs disguised in sweet wine. The truth wraps itself in linen and legend, impossible to untangle after two millennia of storytelling.

But this much remains certain: her death was no accident of despair. It was theatre. Defiance. The final act of sovereignty from someone who'd spent a lifetime turning necessity into spectacle.

Rome could take her city, her lover.

But it would never take her body.