What happens in Antony and Cleopatra

Mark Antony lounges in Alexandria, one of the three men who rule the Roman world, ignoring the dispatches piling up from home. His soldiers grumble that the great general has gone soft, enslaved to Cleopatra, queen of Egypt. The two of them tease, quarrel, and adore each other in equal measure. Then word comes that Antony’s wife Fulvia has died and that Pompey is rising at sea. Duty wins for the moment, and Antony sails for Rome, leaving Cleopatra restless and imagining him at every hour.

In Rome the cool young Octavius Caesar resents Antony’s neglect. To patch the alliance, Antony agrees to marry Caesar’s sister Octavia, a political match nobody quite believes will hold. Caesar’s friend Enobarbus knows better, and he remembers Cleopatra on her golden barge — a woman that age cannot wither nor custom stale. The triumvirs buy off Pompey with Sicily and Sardinia and drink late on his galley, where Pompey refuses to murder his guests for honor’s sake. When the news of the marriage reaches Egypt, Cleopatra beats the messenger who brings it, then demands every detail about her rival.

The truce frays fast. Caesar makes war on Pompey again, shoves Lepidus aside, and reads Antony’s offenses aloud in public. Antony returns to Cleopatra, crowns her and their children rulers of the East, and the two empires lurch toward war. Against all advice, Antony chooses to fight Caesar by sea at Actium, where his strength is weakest. In the middle of the battle Cleopatra’s fleet turns and flees, and Antony, to his lasting shame, abandons the fight and chases after her. His commanders surrender. He arrives broken, raging at her, then softening, unable to stay angry.

Antony scrapes together one more day of fighting and wins it, embracing his soldiers and calling Cleopatra the light of the world. But the loyal Enobarbus, sick at heart, has already deserted to Caesar. When Antony sends his treasure after him with a gracious note, the shame is more than Enobarbus can bear, and he dies of a broken heart in a ditch outside the camp. The next morning Antony’s fleet surrenders without striking a blow. Certain Cleopatra has betrayed him, he turns on her as a sorceress. She flees to her monument and sends word that she is dead, hoping to soften him.

The lie destroys them both. Believing her gone, Antony asks his servant Eros to kill him; Eros kills himself instead, and Antony falls on his own sword. The wound is not quick. As he bleeds, Diomedes arrives to say the queen lives, and the dying man is carried to her monument. Cleopatra and her women haul him up to her, and he dies in her arms, telling her that Caesar never beat him — he conquered himself.

Caesar receives Antony’s sword and weeps for the rival whose death he wanted, admitting the world is smaller without him. He sends gentle messengers to Cleopatra, but she sees the trap. He means to march her through Rome as a trophy, paraded for the crowds. She will not allow it. Dressing in her royal robes and crown, she has a countryman smuggle in a basket of figs hiding asps. She presses the snakes to her breast and arm and dies as a queen, beside the memory of Antony. Her servants Iras and Charmian follow her into death. Caesar, finding them, orders the lovers buried together and grants them a famous grave.