[The death of Cleopatra].

The image of a queen bitten by a snake is controversial and the facts, such as the swiftness of her death and her servants, and scientific experiments are in favour of a deadly poisoning. The author reminds that in the ancient texts the snake had sacred virtues and it was a symbolic image to embellish the suicide of the one who was sentenced to death by the Romans. Octaves set up the myth of a fatal bite which became an iconographic image for the cinema.