Antony and Cleopatra

This relief depicts Cleopatra and Mark Antony. They are connected in a story from the Parallel Lives, written by the Greek biographer and essayist, Plutarch. Parallel Lives was a series of biographies of famous Greeks and Romans, arranged in pairs to illuminate their common moral virtues and vices. It tells the couple's story from the time of the Sicilian revolt to Cleopatra's suicide during the Final War of the Roman Republic. It was famously adapted by William Shakespear later.