Sanctuary at Ephesus
41 BC · Cleopatra, meeting Mark Antony at Tarsus while her sister Arsinoe lives in sanctuary at Ephesus
The Roman who now controls the east has come to her, and she has spent a great deal of money making sure he arrived impressed. It has worked. He will give her almost anything she asks for.
What she asks for is her sister.
Her sister was paraded through Rome in chains after the last war, spared by Caesar as a gesture, and has been living since then in the temple of Artemis at Ephesus. Not in prison. In sanctuary (which in the Greek world is not a legal technicality but the oldest protection there is, older than any king), and violating it is the kind of thing gods are understood to punish.
The sister has done nothing since. But she is legitimate, she is Ptolemaic, she is within reach of a Roman fleet, and there are people in Alexandria who have already called her queen once.
Egypt is the richest country in the Mediterranean and Rome has been deciding for a century whether to simply take it. A country with two possible queens is a country with an invitation attached.
Ask him to have her killed
Leave her in the templeOn your own? Play it first, then reveal.
Reveal what happened
What really happened
Arsinoe was killed on the steps of the temple of Artemis at Ephesus on Antony's orders, at Cleopatra's request. The violation of sanctuary shocked the Greek east and was still being talked about generations later. It was also entirely normal practice in her family: the Ptolemies had been killing their siblings for two hundred years, and Cleopatra's own surviving brother died at a convenient moment shortly after her return to power. She then kept Egypt independent for another eleven years, which no other client kingdom in the region managed, and lost it in the end anyway. Almost everything written about her afterwards was written by the Romans who beat her, for an audience that needed her to have been a seductress rather than a head of state.
The philosophers weigh in
End it"Cruelty is either done once and finished, or spread thin over twenty years and never finished. She did it once. Judge the state of Egypt in the eleven years afterwards, not your own stomach."
Leave her"A mob dragged me out of a carriage in a city that had stopped believing any place was protected. Whoever ends sanctuary always believes they are the last person who will need it."