August 12, 30 BC: Cleopatra VII commits suicide.
One year after the decisive Battle of Actium, in which Octavian (the future Roman emperor Augustus) soundly defeated Mark Antony at sea, Alexandria fell to the land forces of this same man. Faced with an entirely hopeless situation, Mark Antony committed suicide via his own sword. Cleopatra VII Philopator, the last of the Ptolemies to rule Egypt and effectively the last pharaoh of Egypt, followed suit soon after.
She had aligned herself with Mark Antony following Julius Caesar’s assassination in 44 B.C., and she had subsequently given birth to three of his children, though it was her son by Caesar, Caesarion, who succeeded his mother as pharaoh of Egypt. According to most accounts, and most depictions in popular culture and art, Cleopatra committed suicide by having a poisonous snake (usually an asp) bite her. Modern historians and toxicologists have theorized that, rather than carrying out her suicide in a dramatic and potentially painful, drawn-out way, she simply consumed a deadly mixture of various drugs and poisons. Seventeen-year-old Caesarion was temporarily, and in name only, pharaoh for ten days before being killed on Octavian’s orders - supposedly strangled to death. His kingdom, his mother’s kingdom, and the kingdom of nearly three hundred years worth of Macedonian Greek kings, became the Roman province of Aegyptus.