The truth about Cleopatra's lethal drugs cocktail

Cleopatra expires languidly in the painting Cleopatra's Last Moments (1892) by the little-known artist D Pauvert

Cleopatra did not kill herself in 30BC by letting an asp sink its poison-laced fangs into her delicate flesh, as everyone thought. Instead she swallowed alethal of drugs — opium, hemlock and aconitum. At least, that is what Professor Christoph Schaefer of the university of Trier says. He tells a German television programme, “Back then this was a well-known mixture that led to a painless death within just a few hours, whereas the snake death could have taken days and been agonising.”
Mind you, of those three poisons, I am not sure that either aconitum or hemlock would be bring about an easeful death. Opium just sends you to sleep — into the arms of Morpheus — and in high doses shuts down respiration; that’s how you die. The other two, though, could feel extremely nasty.
Aconitum, aka wolfsbane, stimulates the heart and can kill as a result. You’d feel terrible, with palpitations, fever probably, terrible nausea and angor animi — that’s the feeling of acute anxiety and fear of death that presages actual death. Aconitum is a flower from the ranunculales (buttercup) family, and an ancient medicine. Medea used it when she attempted to murder Theseus. She mixed it in a bowl of wine. It appealed to the Romantics, or the idea of it did anyway.  Keats refers to it in his Ode on Melancholy:

No, no! go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss’d
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

It’s a common misconception, which the Romantics may have encouraged inadvertently, that all these toxins kill you by sending you into a nice sleep. They don’t, usually. Most poisons that kill you do not cause you to doze pleasantly as you expire. You are likely to be wide awake, and suffering. People make this mistake today, I’m afraid to say. They take paracetamol thinking it’ll put them to sleep and instead three days later they find themselves lying in hospital in agony, dying of liver damage.
As for hemlock, this is Conium maculatum, a leafy shrub containing the neurotoxin coniine. It works similarly to curare. When Socrates took it after being condemned to death, he slowly lost sensation in his body as he died, with numbness starting in his feet and moving upwards through his legs. So Plato describes it in the Phaedo. It doesn’t sound quite as bad as aconitum, but still hardly instantaneous: plenty of time to work oneself up into a state of high anxiety.
Any one of those drugs on its would be enough to kill, in the right doses. So perhaps the Queen of the Nile was applying a “belt and braces” principle. In the same way executioners in the USA employ a barbiturate to knock out the victim, then follow up with other drugs such as potassium to stop the heart dead, even though the barbiturate would be enough to kill the patient on its own.
It’s certainly no surprise that Cleopatra was familiar with mind-bending substances. The Egyptians were keen on altering their moods with chemicals. Many cultures used chemicals extracted from plants, which I wouldn’t recommend because they’re nearly all horribly toxic and produce little discernible benefit.
Egypt, however, was in the early wave of alcohol producers, perhaps 4,000 years or more before Christ. It may have been that grapes stored in jars started fermenting by accident, someone decided to drink the juice and found themselves feeling unaccountably more cheerful than before. The ancient Egyptians also developed techniques of brewing beer by malting barley, making a mush with it, boiling it and then fermenting it. They also had a goddess of beer called Menquet, and Hathor the bull, god of wine, had his own day of devotion, a Day of Intoxication.

Posted in: Legends and tales of the Pharaohs