Many would say her death would have been a poetic suicide: The asp was an emblem of royalty to the Egyptians, while the cobra was correlated with Cleopatra’s beloved goddess, Isis.
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Factually, there are many issues with this theory, stemmed up by current Egyptologists. Cobras are commonly at least five feet long and could grow up to about eight feet; too large to smuggle into Cleopatra’s mausoleum in a basket of figs, as the story has been told.
Additionally, not all snake bites are fatal, and those that are, kill their sufferers gradually and bitterly, making it hard to believe a snake was able to kill Cleopatra and two of her maids in the short time it took for Octavian to get her note and send his guards.
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Mignard I, Pierre; The Death of Cleopatra; National Trust, Knole; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/the-death-of-cleopatra-219098
Also, if Cleopatra poisoned herself to death, as Schiff and others affirm, it’s more likely she drank a lethal herbal concoction, or applied a harmful or deadly ointment, as one ancient historian, Strabo, inferred.
Either of these would have killed her and her servants more shortly and sharply than the supposed snake bite. In the year 2010, Christoph Schaefer, a German historian suggested that Cleopatra may have ingested a fatal mix of hemlock, wolfsbane and opium, based on his research of ancient documents and his work with a toxicologist.
