When Octavian's soldiers finally broke into her tomb, they found her already dead, seated upright on her throne. She had told him plainly: "I will not be led in a triumph." She kept that promise.

She was born in Alexandria in 69 BC, daughter of the Ptolemaic pharaoh Ptolemy the Twelfth, a dynasty of Macedonian Greeks who had ruled Egypt for two centuries without ever learning its language. Cleopatra did learn it, along with several others. She was the first of her line to speak to her own people in their tongue.

When her father died in 51 BC, she inherited his throne, his debts, and a co-ruler she had not chosen: her younger brother Ptolemy the Thirteenth, backed by powerful courtiers who wanted her gone. Within months, civil war had forced her into exile in Syria, where she raised an army and marched back to the Nile Delta to fight for her own kingdom.

The pivot came in 48 BC. The Roman general Pompey, fleeing a lost civil war, sought refuge in Egypt and was murdered on the beach at Pelousion before he could land. His rival Julius Caesar arrived in Alexandria and found a severed head. Cleopatra, camped outside the city with her army, smuggled herself into the palace to meet him. Caesar restored her to the throne. Their affair produced a son she named Caesarion, and she followed Caesar to Rome as a client queen, her golden statue placed by his hand inside the Temple of Venus Genetrix.

Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March, 44 BC. Cleopatra returned to Egypt. A few months later her brother and co-ruler died, almost certainly on her order, and she made Caesarion her co-ruler instead. When the Roman world fractured again, she chose the general Mark Antony, meeting him at Tarsos in 41 BC aboard her great royal barge. Their alliance lasted a decade and produced three children. Antony restored former Ptolemaic territories to her control and, in the Donations of Alexandria, declared their children rulers of vast eastern lands. Octavian, Caesar's heir, used every word of it as a weapon.

At the Battle of Actium on 2 September 31 BC, Octavian's fleet crushed theirs. Cleopatra withdrew her sixty ships through the fighting and headed for Egypt. Antony followed. The war was over.

Octavian invaded Egypt the following summer of 30 BC. On 1 August, Antony's fleet and cavalry surrendered. Cleopatra sent Antony a false message that she had already killed herself. He stabbed himself in the stomach. He was still dying when his men carried him to her tomb, and he died in her arms.

Octavian entered Alexandria that same day and seized her children. When Cleopatra met with him, she told him she would not be paraded through Rome. A spy warned her that he planned to ship her and her children there within three days. On 12 August 30 BC, at the age of thirty-nine, she took her own life. The most widely held account is that she used poison, administered through a small wound on her arm, though no snake was ever found. Octavian had her buried beside Antony in royal fashion, then commissioned a painting of her death to carry in his triumph instead.