On learning that her sister was at Antioch, Tryphena urged her husband to attack the place.  He accordingly advanced with a strong detachment of the army, and besieged and took the city.  Cleopatra would, of course, have fallen into his hands as a captive; but, to escape this fate, she fled to a temple for refuge.  A temple was considered, in those days, an inviolable sanctuary.  The soldiers accordingly left her there.  Tryphena, however, made a request that her husband would deliver the unhappy fugitive into her hands.  She was determined, she said, to kill her.  Her husband remonstrated with her against this atrocious proposal.  “It would be a wholly useless act of cruelty,” said he, “to destroy her life.  She can do us no possible harm in the future progress of the war, while to murder her under these circumstances will only exasperate her husband and her friends, and nerve them with new strength for the remainder of the contest.  And then, besides, she has taken refuge in a temple; and if we violate that sanctuary, we shall incur, by such an act of sacrilege, the implacable displeasure of Heaven.  Consider, too, that she is your sister, and for you to kill her would be to commit an unnatural and wholly inexcusable crime.”

So saying, he commanded Tryphena to say no more upon the subject, for he would on no account consent that Cleopatra should suffer any injury whatever.

This refusal on the part of her husband to comply with her request only inflamed Tryphena’s insane resentment and anger the more.  In fact, the earnestness with which he espoused her sister’s cause, and the interest which he seemed to feel in her fate, aroused Tryphena’s jealousy.  She believed, or pretended to believe, that her husband was influenced by a sentiment of love in so warmly defending her.  The object of her hate, from being simply an enemy, became now, in her view, a rival, and she resolved that, at all hazards, she should be destroyed.  She accordingly ordered a body of desperate soldiers to break into the temple and seize her.  Cleopatra fled in terror to the altar, and clung to it with such convulsive force that the soldiers cut her hands off before they could tear her away, and then, maddened by her resistance and the sight of blood, they stabbed her again and again upon the floor of the temple, where she fell.  The appalling shrieks with which the wretched victim filled the air in the first moments of her flight and her terror, subsided, as her life ebbed away, into the most awful imprecations of the judgments of Heaven upon the head of the unnatural sister whose implacable hate had destroyed her.