Morte Prima di Disonore
In the ancient world, an individual’s honor was held in greater regard than life itself in some cases. For example, warriors and generals often viewed surrender or other failure in battle as a greater disgrace than fighting to the death in a losing effort. In Ancient Rome, Catiline was a Roman politician who urged followers to adopt this concept in an effort to overthrow the Roman Republic of the era to help establish a Roman Empire instead.
Known in Latin as Morte Prima di Disonore, Death Before Dishonor is has evolved over the years in countless other cultures. For example, the Samurai warrior class of feudal Japan had their own form of death before dishonor known as Bushido. Rather than live with the perceived stain of dishonor on their name, Samurai warriors would take their own lives to restore a sense of valor and reputation.
The Hellenistic Age begins with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and ends in 30 BC, with the death of Cleopatra.
It is worth mentioning that Antony and Cleopatra were finally reunited in death. Their bodies were either embalmed according to traditional Egyptian customs, inhumed, or cremated, but they were interred together. Octavian had allowed Cleopatra to care for the body of Antony and to give it a proper burial first. Then he made sure the Egyptian monarch was laid to rest next to him when she too took her own life.
Cleopatra VII ruled Egypt for twenty-two years.
She lost a kingdom once, regained it, nearly lost it again, amassed an empire, lost it all. A goddess as a child, a queen at eighteen, a celebrity soon thereafter, she was an object of speculation and veneration, gossip and legend, even in her own time. At the height of her power she controlled virtually the entire eastern Mediterranean coast, the last great kingdom of any Egyptian ruler. For a fleeting moment she held the fate of the Western world in her hands. She had a child with a married man, three more with another. She died at thirty nine, a generation before the birth of Christ.
Caesar reminded his officers that if they did not make war, if they did not obtain riches and rule others, they were not Romans. An Eastern sovereign who waged an epic battle of his own against Rome articulated what would become Cleopatra’s predicament differently: The Romans had the temperament of wolves. They hated the great kings. Everything they possessed they had plundered. They intended to seize all, and would “either destroy everything or perish in the attempt.”
We have, perhaps and at most, one written word of Cleopatra’s. (In 33 BC either she or a scribe signed off on a royal decree with the Greek word ginesthoi, meaning, “Let it be done.”)
The man who vanquished and deposed her, prompted her suicide, and largely packaged her for posterity was born Gaius Octavius. By the time he entered Cleopatra’s life in a meaningful way he called himself Gaius Julius Caesar, after his illustrious great uncle, her lover, who adopted him in his will. We know him today as Augustus, a title he assumed only three years after Cleopatra’s death.
Caesar’s rival appears as Pompey rather than Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, Caesar’s deputy as Mark Antony rather than Marcus Antonius. In many respects geography has changed, shorelines have sunk, marshes dried, hills crumbled. Alexandria is flatter today than it was in Cleopatra’s lifetime. It is oblivious to its ancient street plan; it no longer gleams white. The Nile is nearly two miles farther east. The dust, the sultry sea air, Alexandria’s melting purple sunsets, are unchanged. Human nature remains remarkably consistent, the physics of history immutable.
Cleopatra had a son with Caesar and—after his murder—three more with his protégé. Already she was the wealthiest ruler in the Mediterranean; the relationship with Antony confirmed her status as the most influential woman of the age. The two would together attempt to forge a new empire, in an alliance that spelled their ends. Cleopatra has lodged herself in our imaginations ever since.
Stacy Schiff
Dio remarks that Antony immediately wished for his own death: "He first asked one of the bystanders to slay him; but when the man drew his sword and slew himself, Antony wished to imitate his courage and so gave himself a wound and fell upon his face, causing the bystanders to believe that he was dead."Plutarch instead notes that he rammed the sword into his stomach, but still did not immediately die of his wound. In reality, the wound had not killed him and he was hoisted into the mausoleum, where he later allegedly died at Cleopatra's bosom, likely on the night of August 1.
And what of Cleopatra's own suicide? on August 10 or 12 of 30 BCE, Cleopatra took her own life. Dio notes (51.14): "No one knows clearly in what way she perished, for the only marks on her body were slight pricks on the arm." Many Roman historians alleged that she died via the bite of an asp, though this was a later edition to the story.
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