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Cleopatra’s diadem sits straight because Charmion’s last act was to straighten it. Charmion was asked whether this was well done. She said it was fitting for the descendant of so many kings, and fell.

Alexandria has fallen, and the queen is locked in her own tomb. Cleopatra built the mausoleum by the sea to hold her treasure and her body. In the first days of August, 30 BC, it holds the treasure, the living queen, and two maids, Iras and Charmion, while Octavian's men hold the door. Antony is already gone. Told falsely that she was dead, he ran himself on his sword, then learned the report was wrong and was hauled up to her window on ropes to die in her arms. Octavian keeps his prisoner alive with care. He needs her breathing, because what Rome pays to see is a queen walking in chains behind a general's chariot, and Cleopatra is the most famous woman in the world. She knows the price of that parade better than anyone alive. Her own sister Arsinoe walked in Caesar's triumph 16 years earlier, and the crowd's pity was the only thing that saved her, for a while. Cleopatra had ruled for 21 years. She was the first of her Macedonian line, Plutarch says, who troubled to learn Egyptian, a queen who spoke 9 languages and financed Rome's civil wars from the richest treasury on earth. She tried starving herself. Octavian threatened her children, and she ate. What was left to control was the manner of the ending, and she managed it like state business: a bath, a banquet, a sealed note to Octavian asking to be buried beside Antony. It was the coldest-eyed ending of a career built on entrances. At 21, locked out of her own capital by her brother's faction, she had herself carried through the siege lines to Julius Caesar, rolled inside a bedding sack. She came out of it a queen again. Caesar left her a kingdom and a son. After the assassination she picked the winning side twice. Antony summoned her to answer charges and she arrived as Venus on a gilded barge. She then made him co-author of a decade of eastern empire, with their children named kings of territories Rome considered its own. Actium ended the arithmetic. When her squadron broke for Egypt and Antony followed her, the world's verdict was already in, and the last year in Alexandria was spent negotiating the terms of how it would be phrased. The guards at the door waved through a countryman with a basket of figs. Plutarch, telling it a century later, already could not swear to what the basket hid. A cobra under the leaves, said the version everyone repeated; poison in a hairpin, said another; two faint marks on her arm were the only evidence anyone reported. When the note reached Octavian, he sent men at a run. They found the queen dead on a golden couch in full royal dress, Iras dying at her feet, and Charmion, swaying, straightening the diadem on her mistress's brow. One of the soldiers snapped that this was a fine piece of work. Extremely fine, said Charmion, and fitting for the descendant of so many kings. It is the last sentence of pharaonic Egypt, and a servant said it. Octavian, cheated, sent for Psylli snake-charmers to suck the wound, which is how seriously Rome took its triumphs. In the end he marched an effigy of her through the city with a bronze asp on its arm. Caesarion, her son by Julius Caesar, 17 years old, was run down and killed on the advice that too many Caesars is not a good thing. Egypt, which had crowned kings for 3,000 years, became the personal estate of one Roman. Rixens painted the found scene in 1874 and showed it at the Paris Salon: the couch, the fallen maid, the crown set straight. The French state acquired it and sent it to Toulouse, where it hangs. The crown Narmer joined at the beginning went into a Roman inventory, one line among the spoils.