Thursday, July 1, 2010

Cleopatra and me

Hardly could I control my laughter today when I switched on my PC at 8.00AM to see some news website which read: ‘Cleopatra died of drug-filled cocktail and not of snake-bite’. Was thinking how easy it is to attract the general public with so-discovered news, of hundred thousand years back. If thought on, it is quite impractical for a layman, who have tensions of office, household and family, to be bothered of such news which happened hundreds of years ago. But I decided to go ahead and know more on Cleopatra.

I was in awe to know that it was her own two brothers whom she married. But her unions with her brothers produced no children. She aligned later with Mark Antony and bore twins. Few of the many stories on cause of Cleopatra's death floating on net are: that she applied a toxic ointment, that she was bitten by a venomous snake, that it was from bite of 2 vipers, that Augustus (Gaius Julius Caesar Octavian) might have had possibly killed her, that the queen had actually been poisoned, that she died due to opium-overdose, even that she succumbed to an Egyptian custom similar to 'Sati' of killing herself after her husband Antony committed suicide. Historic references also state that Cleopatra chose to get bitten by the venomous reptile to have a quiet and pain-free death as the venom of asp she chose could paralyze the parts of her body, thereby causing a slow and unpainful death. The truth behind all this will always remain a mystery to mankind, unless we manage to invent a time-machine, to audit on the cause of death.