![]() ![]() By providing for soldiers’ retirements, he ensured their personal loyalty to him. Citizens in towns across Italy and the western Mediterranean were compelled to swear their personal loyalty to Octavian. Throughout Roman territories, coins, statues and even silverware bore his image. He approved of all candidates standing for election, while the powerless Senate rubber-stamped his decisions. Having eliminated his rivals and seen the support given to Caesar by the masses, Octavian established absolute rule over the former republic and surpassed the power of his great-uncle. WATCH ' Rome: Rise and Fall of an Empire' on HISTORY Vault Augustus Establishes the Roman Empire after which Antony and Cleopatra each took their own lives. Octavian forced Lepidus into exile and took up arms against Antony, whose affair with Egyptian ruler Cleopatra VII damaged his reputation in Rome and humiliated his wife, who was Octavian’s sister. Octavian positioned himself as the sole defender of Rome from the eastern influence of Egypt, and his navy defeated the combined fleet of Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium in northern Greece in 31 B.C. The triumvirate eventually turned on each other. Tens of thousands died in the bloody battle, and the defeated Brutus and Cassius each committed suicide. After speaking ill of Antony, Cicero was killed by soldiers loyal to Caesar’s deputy, and his head and right hand were placed on display in the Roman Forum. Avenging Caesar’s murder, Octavian and Antony collaborated to defeat the forces of assassination plot leaders Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus in 42 B.C. The Arabic romance story of Queen Qaruba intertwines elements from the real life of Cleopatra with other fictional stories, similar to the Greek Alexander Romance, very popular in the Middle Ages.Mary Beard, author of SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, writes that the triumvirate’s main achievement was a “new round of mass murder.” Octavian and Antony brutally purged the republic’s leadership by killing their enemies and potential rivals. They attribute to her the authorship of treatises on drugs and cosmetics, medicine, mathematics and toxicology. In later medieval Arabic sources Cleopatra is described as an able ruler, a scientist and a great builder, though she is wrongly credited with the construction of the Lighthouse of Alexandria. This dialogue is known in Arabic as well. The text continues with Cleopatra’s instruction in the form of a dialogue of a group of philosophers, including, anachronistically, Ostanes, the Persian sage. ![]() She then puts these instructions into practice. The second work is a treatise in which a high priest and philosopher called Comarius teaches Cleopatra, who is referred as“Cleopatra the Wise,” the divine art of producing the stone of the philosophers. The page is titled “Cleopatra’s gold-making”, and the diagrams represent alchemical axioms, an ouroboros and different depictions of alchemical apparatus. The first is a single page with diagrams transmitted by means of the byzantine manuscript Marcianus graecus 299, dating to the 10th or 11th century CE. There are two known alchemical works in Greek that refer directly to Cleopatra. ![]() Historical alchemists, such as Zosimos of Panopolis, refer to these authors as sources of authority. In the early alchemical tradition, a Cleopatra that may be identified with the Ptolemaic queen is mentioned together with other historical and mythical figures - Isis, Hermes and Mary the Jewess - all ancient practitioners of alchemy.
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