Of the asps, the one called spitter stretches out its neck and measures out the length of the gap and, as if it had at that moment become capable of reason, accurately spits its poison at the body.

They say that it was with one of these sorts of beast (for there are three sorts of asp, this one and the one called the land snake and the one called the swallow snake) that Queen Cleopatra, wanting to escape the notice of her guards, died quickly and in a way which avoided suspicion. For when Augustus had beaten Antony and wanted to take her alive and to guard her carefully, as you would expect, so as to display such a famous woman to the Romans in a triumph. But, they say, she realised this and chose to leave the world of the living while still a queen rather than appear at Rome as a nobody, and so contrived her own death by the agency of one of these creatures. And they say she called her two most trusted women whose job was to tend to the attire of her body so as to display her beauty, called Naeira and Charmione. Naeira did her hair in a fitting manner and Charmione cut her fingernails and she then ordered the snake to be brought in, hidden in some grapes and figs so that, as I have said, it would escape the notice of the guards. She then tried out the snake on these women to see if it could kill swiftly, and after it did she killed herself with the rest and they say that Augustus was completely amazed at this, both that they loved her to the extent of dying with her and that she was unwilling to live like a slave and chose rather to die nobly. And they say she was found with her right hand on her head grasping the diadem, as is likely, so that even up to that point it should be obvious to onlookers that she was the queen. Similarly the tragedian tells us about Polyxena that she also “when she died gave much forethought to falling in a noble manner”. And those who want to demonstrate by this story both the cleverness of the woman in evading attention, and the speed of the asp in killing, say that she bit her own arm wide and deep, and after doing this got the asp poison brought to her in some vessel and poured it into the wound, and so after it had been given to her without the guards noticing, she peacefully died.

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