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Case file s1388 · Heirlooms and treasure · 30 BCE
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30 BCE
The Banquet of Cleopatra title QS:P1476,en:"The Banquet of Cleopatra "label QS:Len,"The Banquet of Cleopatra "label QS:L: Cleopatra puts the pearl in the wine, family portrait feat
The Banquet of Cleopatra title QS:P1476,en:"The Banquet of Cleopatra "label QS:Len,"The Banquet of Cleopatra "label QS:L. Jan de Bray. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.
Died
30 BC (Cleopatra VII)
Place
Alexandria, Egypt; Rome, Italy
Field
pearls · Royalty and nobility on the timeline
Legal tradition
Ptolemaic royal treasure; Roman spoils of war · Roman law · Royal and church law
Historical event
Octavian's capture of Alexandria, 30 BC
Heirlooms and treasureAncient worldMiddle EastEuropeItaly

Pliny says Cleopatra drank one of the two greatest pearls she inherited from eastern kings, and Rome cut the other in half for a statue of Venus

Pliny the Elder, writing in the 70s AD, says Cleopatra owned the two largest pearls of all time, left to her by eastern kings. When Antony was giving lavish feasts, she claimed she could spend ten million sesterces on one dinner, and they made a bet. The next day she served an ordinary meal, then a dish of vinegar. She took one pearl from her ear, dissolved it in the vinegar and swallowed it. Lucius Munatius Plancus, the judge of the bet, put his hand on the second pearl as she prepared to dissolve it, and declared Antony the loser. After Cleopatra was captured, Pliny says, the second pearl was cut in two so that half could hang in each ear of the statue of Venus in the Pantheon at Rome. Macrobius repeated the story more than three centuries after Pliny. In 1957 the classicist B. L. Ullman tested pearls in acetic acid. Powdered pearl dissolved in cold acid in about ten minutes. Whole pearls lost 23 to 36 percent in 20 hours of cold acid. Ullman concluded that the story as told is not true. No trace of the half-pearls is known†.

What the law took from it

An heirloom spent to win an argument is gone, and the one that survives goes to the conqueror.

Sources
  1. University of Chicago, LacusCurtiusScholarship
  2. University of Chicago, LacusCurtiusScholarship
  3. Wikipedia (English)Encyclopedia

Cite as: celebrity.estate, “Pliny says Cleopatra drank one of the two greatest pearls she inherited from eastern kings, and Rome cut the other in half for a statue of Venus,” story s1388, https://www.celebrity.estate/cleopatras-pearls-30-bc, updated 30 October 2026.

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Where this case sits

Heirlooms and treasureAncient worldMiddle EastEuropeRoman lawRoyal and church lawItaly