Cleopatra's Poisons

I have long been fascinated by the ancient history of poison. From ancient Greece to the Renaissance, western history is haunted by rumors of poison. Alas, there is precious little actual information, so far as I can discover, about what poisons were available, how they might have been used, how effective they would have been, and so on.

Which is why I was delighted to read this news item about the death of Cleopatra. The story itself is hardly newsworthy. We have, from ancient sources, two pieces of information about Cleopatra's death. One is that she clasped an asp to her breast, and the other is that she died peacefully and without pain. Since an asp bite is a gruesome and very painful way to die, they cannot both be true. These latest researchers have decided to favor the painless death story and therefore to reject the asp, but really there is no reason to prefer one story over the other.

However, they lay out one way that one might commit painless suicide using drugs known to the ancients:

"The main problem with any snakebite are the unpredictable effects, because the venom of the snakes is highly variable. The amount they spent for the bite may be too low. Why taking a risk even to survive with such unpleasant symptoms?" Mebs said.

According to the researchers, who traveled to Alexandria where they consulted ancient medical texts,* a plant poison mixture which is easily dosed and whose effects are very predictable could have worked much better.

"Ancient papyri show that the Egyptians knew about poisons, and one papyrus says Cleopatra actually tested them," Schaefer said.

Schaefer and Mebs believe that Cleopatra chose a drug cocktail made of opium, aconitum (also known as wolfsbane) and hemlock, a highly poisonous plant from the parsley family that is believed to have been used to poison Socrates.

The drug cocktail, Schäfer claims, was known at the time to cause a rather painless death within a few hours.

"Cleopatra reportedly carried out many toxicological experiments, an imitation of Mithradates VI. In her quest for the most peaceful and painless way to die, she would have observed the deaths of many condemned prisoners by many different poisons and combinations, including snakebite," Adrienne Mayor, author of the Mithridates biography "The Poison King," told Discovery News.

"In my opinion, Cleopatra would have taken a high dose of opium as a sedative and then succumb to a cobra bite within a half hour," Mayor said. "She would be sedated and calm, feeling no pain, as the cobra venom slows her respiration, and she breathes her last and dies."

According to Alain Touwaide, an international authority on medicinal plants of antiquity at the Smithsonian Institution and the Institute for the Preservation of Medical Traditions in Washington , D.C., the drug cocktail would have technically worked well.

"A mixture of opium, aconitum and hemlock would have been a very intelligent combination. Opium and hemlock would have contributed to a painless death, easing the action of aconite, believed in antiquity to have deadly effects on the gastro-intestinal system. However, it wasn't common at all to mix vegetable poisons at Cleopatra's time," Touwaide told Discovery News.

Here we have, at last, one verifiable fact about poison in the ancient world: they knew about a mixture of opium, wolfsbane, and hemlock that would actually kill you. But I have so many more questions: what did it taste like? Could you put in someone's food or drink without their knowing? What was the fatal dose?

*This is your clue that these "researchers" were really about making a cool television documentary, since they could have found a much better collection of ancient medical texts in Berlin or Paris.