Cleopatra, page 3
The Egyptian passion for constructing temples and monuments was carried on by the Macedonian Greeks, under whose rule the port of Alexandria, with a population from all over the known world that included not only Greeks and Egyptians but Jews, Ethiopians, and Libyans, became a city of broad avenues, fountains, and well-tended parks, with a famous museum and the great library that attracted scholars from distant lands. Led by a succession of librarians who were minor celebrities in Alexandrian society, it was said to have contained thousands of papyrus scrolls. Historians, ancient and modern, have attempted to calculate the extent of the library’s holdings. The early Ptolemies were apparently so obsessed with adding to it that they confiscated every book arriving in Alexandria, deposited it in the library, and created a copy to recompense its original owner. Early in the third century BCE, Zenodotus of Ephesus, its first librarian, organized the volumes in alphabetical order and produced new editions of the Iliad and Odyssey. Not only did the library contain the work of the most important Greek writers, but it also housed thousands of Greek translations of Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, Phoenician, and Hebrew texts.
Another of Alexandria’s famous attractions was its lighthouse, the Pharos, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The Greek historian and geographer Strabo, who visited Alexandria in the late first century BCE, described the lighthouse: multistoried (perhaps as much as four hundred feet tall), it was made of white stone, either marble or limestone. In the next century, the satirist Lucian of Samosata imagined being up in the sky looking down at the earth, and being unable to recognize the planet until he saw the Colossus of Rhodes and the Pharos lighthouse (Icaromenippus).
Strabo also left an account of beauties of Alexandria’s harbor, its great museum’s walkways, sitting areas, and communal eating spaces, the public and sacred buildings, among them the tomb of Alexander, the law courts and the stadium, the magnificent Gymnasium, a zoo housing a range of exotic animals, and a rocky mound, artificially created, that could be climbed for a panoramic view of the harbor.
The palace that Cleopatra would one day inhabit was renowned for its size and grandeur. An earthquake and tsunami eventually submerged the entire structure beneath the ocean, where it was discovered and excavated by French archaeologists beginning in 1998. In 2010, a team of divers led by the French underwater archaeologist Franck Goddio exhibited some of the findings that had been recovered, among them a colossal head believed to represent Cleopatra’s son Caesarion, as well as large and small statues of rulers and deities, coins, and everyday objects.
According to Strabo, a third of the city was given over to the area occupied by the palaces, whose occupants had a dedicated harbor for their personal use. History and poetry have given Cleopatra the ultimate symbol of luxury: the solid gold bejeweled pleasure boat in which she sailed to greet Mark Antony.
Perhaps because the idea of the great library still commands our respect, perhaps because of Strabo’s enchantment with her city, Cleopatra’s Alexandria can sound like a Ptolemaic paradise where scholars came to study and highly educated citizens mingled with expert editors come to work on new, improved texts of Homer. But it was also a rough-and-tumble port, crowded with an international cast of rich and poor men and women. It had a significant crime rate and a politically volatile mood that could start the population rioting, storming out from their neighborhoods and up to the gates of the palace. These problems would create yet another unstable element for Cleopatra to cope with as she tried to balance the conflicting pressures and demands of her city, her country, and the Roman Empire.
In the 1932 film Million Dollar Legs, set in the fictive country of Klopstokia, all the women are named Angela and all the men are named George. When the kingdom’s ruler, played by W. C. Fields, is asked why the Klopstokians do this, he replies, “Why not?”
Presumably, the Ptolemaic kings had a more cogent reason for naming all their male children Ptolemy and their daughters Cleopatra, Arsinoe, or Berenice. But the result has not made things easier for the historian, who must sort out the rare peaceful successions, the rivalries and blood feuds, the sibling marriages that led to conspiracy, civil war, and murder. Partly helpful is the fact that many of the rulers were given nicknames: Mother Lover, Father Lover, Sister Lover, Fatty, Chickpea, and the Bastard.
In the spring of 282 BCE, Ptolemy I died and was succeeded by his son Ptolemy II, who waged war against the rulers of Syria and Nubia and expanded the borders of the Egyptian Empire, colonizing the coast of the Red Sea and clearing a waterway between the Nile and the sea, a precursor of the Suez Canal. Under his leadership, Egypt became a significant naval power.
Ptolemy II was the first of the Ptolemaic leaders to practice sibling marriage. Though initially regarded by the Greeks as a form of incest, marriage between siblings came to seem a convenient way to ensure the “purity” of the Macedonian line and preempt conflicting ambitions at court. In addition, it reconciled the relatively high status of Egyptian women with the relative servitude of women in Greece. In practice, marriages between brothers and sisters were often disastrous, the cause of brutal family murders in nearly every generation.
After repudiating his first wife, Arsinoe I, who had been accused of plotting against him, Ptolemy II, according to Chauveau, “managed a propaganda coup on behalf of his dynasty by marrying his own sister, Arsinoe II, and by treating her death as an opportune apotheosis. The cult of the new goddess Philadelphos made it possible to unite Greeks and Egyptians in a common loyalistic fervor, thus assuring the long-term attachment of his subjects to his line” (Egypt in the Age of Cleopatra). The cult dedicated to Arsinoe would become extremely popular. Ptolemy II also worked to intensify the religious devotion to Alexander the Great, who was honored with officially sponsored rites. And Ptolemy also deified his parents and numerous other relatives, established an elaborate annual festival in honor of his father, and ordered the construction and restoration of temples throughout Egypt.
In 246, Ptolemy II was succeeded by Ptolemy III, the son of his father’s first wife. He was the first of the Ptolemaic pharaohs to be threatened by—and to suppress—a revolt by Egyptians whose sufferings had been increased by a disastrous famine and the taxes levied to support the foreign wars that further expanded Egypt’s territory. In addition to ordering the construction of the Serapeum at Alexandria, Ptolemy III continued the tradition, begun by his father and grandfather, of building temples and encouraging scholarship and literature.
The reigns of Ptolemy II and Ptolemy III were arguably the dynasty’s most stable and successful periods. New irrigation projects were initiated, agricultural reforms put in place. An elaborate administrative system was established to oversee craft production, taxation, and the revenue generated by the profitable export of grain and papyrus. The end to the Persian occupation and the advent of (relative) peace and prosperity had nurtured a cultural renaissance and the flowering of the city of Alexandria at that culture’s center.
The years—nearly two centuries, in fact—of decline began with Ptolemy III’s son and successor, Ptolemy IV, who was notable partly for the violence of his regime, in particular the intrafamilial murderousness that blighted nearly every successive generation of the Ptolemaic dynasty and that would persist until (and include) the reign of Cleopatra.
The litany of Ptolemaic family horrors is so long, complex, and awful that historians and biographers have often adopted an almost comically neutral tone as they rattle off the crimes. Here is Stacy Schiff on the subject of Cleopatra’s heritage: “In the late third century, [Ptolemy IV] murdered his uncle, mother and brother. Courtiers saved him from poisoning his wife by doing so themselves, once she had produced an heir. Over and over mothers sent troops against sons. Sisters waged war against brothers. Cleopatra’s great-grandmother fought one civil war against her parents, a second against her children. . . . Berenice II’s mother borrowed Berenice’s foreign-born husband, for which double-duty Berenice supervised his murder. . . . Cleopatra III . . . was born the wife and niece of Ptolemy VIII. He raped her when she was an adolescent, at which time he was simultaneously married to her mother. The two quarreled. Ptolemy killed their fourteen-year-old son, chopped him up into pieces, and delivered a chest of mutilated limbs to the palace gates on her birthday.”
Of course, the custom of murdering close relatives was not exclusive to Ptolemaic Egypt. It persisted in Europe at least through the Elizabethan Age, and is still practiced in places where dictatorships and strong monarchies incite and reward homicidal transfers of power. It does make one rethink our notions of family and how we treat those close to us. It reminds us of how foolish it is to assume that we can fully understand the thoughts, emotions, and instincts of those who lived in a another era—human beings with such different worldviews that even such (one would think) basic institutions as the family have little in common from era to era except the facts of blood and birth.
Family violence seems to have been prevalent not only in the royal palace. When Diodorus Siculus, the Greek historian who lived around the time of Julius Caesar and died the same year as Cleopatra, writes about the laws of the Egyptians, it is not entirely clear which legal system he means, since laws varied from city to country, region to region. Still striking is this passage suggesting that familial violence was not restricted to kings and queens, though pharaohs were exempt from the harsh and peculiar laws he describes:
In the case of parents who had slain their children . . . the offenders had to hold the dead body in their arms for three successive days and nights, under the surveillance of a state guard; for it was not considered just to deprive of life those who had given life to their children. . . . But for children who had killed their parents they reserved an extraordinary punishment; for it was required that those found guilty of this crime should have pieces of flesh about the size of a finger cut out of their bodies with sharp reeds and then be put on a bed of thorns and burned alive; for they held that to take by violence the life of those who had given them life was the greatest crime possible to man. (Book 1.)
But in addition to arranging to have his brother scalded in his bath and his mother poisoned, Ptolemy IV was obliged to contend with another rebellion.
Once more, the burdensome taxation system and the inequalities of power and land ownership had inspired opposition to the pharaoh, and the army that had been raised to fight against Syria turned against the Ptolemies. The indigenous rebels won the support of the priestly class. The pharaoh lost control of Upper Egypt, so much so that at his death the south of the country seceded from the rest.
The country remained divided until Ptolemy V ascended the throne in 205 BCE, and reconquered Thebes and the Nile Delta. During these years, Egypt lost a large amount of territory to its near neighbors. The expenses and distractions of waging foreign wars and putting down internal revolts prevented the pharaoh from continuing the ambitious construction projects that the earlier Ptolemies had initiated, and it has been said that the empire’s decline and the resultant weaknesses that would create political difficulties—vis à vis Rome—for Cleopatra began during this period. Eventually, Ptolemy V was able to broker a peace with Syria by marrying the daughter of Antiochus III, Syria’s Macedonian ruler, the descendant of another of Alexander’s generals.
This daughter would be crowned Cleopatra I, named after Alexander’s sister. When she inherited the throne in 180, after the death of her husband, she was, in theory, serving as regent for her young son, but in fact she was the sole ruler of the country, and she established the rights and privileges that so affected the lives of Egyptian women, who frequently were well educated, could marry, divorce, and travel at will, and were empowered to inherit property in their own name and participate in legal proceedings.
Age six at the time of his father’s death, Ptolemy VI ruled under his mother’s regency and in consort with his sister and his brother Ptolemy VII, whom he later expelled from the country. The wars with Syria resumed; Ptolemy VI was exiled by another brother, Ptolemy VIII, and sent to live in Cyprus, from which he eventually returned to retake the kingdom.
After Ptolemy VI died while fighting in Syria, Ptolemy VIII, nicknamed Physcon, or “Fatty,” assumed control of the country and cemented a stronger relationship with Rome than his predecessors had enjoyed, eventually being declared a “friend and ally of the Roman people”—and thus endangering Egypt’s sovereignty. Ptolemy launched a purge of those who had supported his younger brother and, allegedly, a massacre in which innocent Alexandrians were killed apparently at random. Among the murdered were a number of intellectuals. Other scholars and literary figures were sent into exile, and the stewardship of the great library was entrusted to one of the pharaoh’s military cronies—thus contributing to the decline of Alexandrian culture.
When Fatty died in 116, his son, Ptolemy IX—“Chickpea”—ruled the country together with his mother and grandmother. After his mother claimed that he had tried to have her assassinated and had his younger brother Ptolemy X installed as ruler, Ptolemy IX retreated to Cyprus, from which he eventually returned and reclaimed the Egyptian throne.
During his reign, Ptolemy X had become deeply indebted to Roman financiers. In his will, as collateral against a loan that had enabled him to defeat a rebel army, he bequeathed his country to Rome in the event that he died without a male heir. This foolish gesture was to have lasting consequences. Though Rome never directly attempted to enforce the provisions of the will, the document highlighted Egypt’s vulnerability and its financial dependence on Rome. The Roman view of Egypt as a source of extractable wealth would grow more pervasive, its requests for tributes more demanding. This situation would be greatly exacerbated during the reign of Cleopatra’s father, Ptolemy XII.
In 80 BCE, the Roman dictator Lucius Cornelius Sulla installed Ptolemy XI on the Egyptian throne after insisting that the new ruler marry his much older stepmother. When the Egyptian king agreed, then promptly murdered his new bride, he was killed by the people of Alexandria, who had preferred the wife he had executed.
Next in the line of succession was the pharaoh’s brother, Ptolemy of Cyprus, who committed suicide rather than surrender Cyprus to Rome, as he knew he would be asked to do. This death would assume a mythic significance for the remaining Ptolemies, and when Antony later included Cyprus among his gifts to Cleopatra, it would have been considered a restitution of land that was rightfully hers—as well as a correction of a wrong that had been done to her family.
After the death of Ptolemy of Cyprus, Cleopatra’s father, Ptolemy XII, was recalled to Egypt. Though he was illegitimate, the son of Ptolemy IX and a concubine, he was the only remotely suitable dynastic heir and therefore the sole hope of keeping Rome at bay. He was soon appointed king. This was done partly with the idea of thwarting Sulla, who had designs on Egypt. That threat came even closer to being implemented after Sulla died and was replaced by Pompey, the Roman general who had annexed Judea, bringing the empire’s border right up to that of Egypt.
Ptolemy XII was nicknamed the Bastard (a reference to his illegitimacy) and Auletes, the Flute Player, a derisive title derived from the widespread joke about his leadership qualities: it was said that he would rather play his flute than rule Egypt. The New Dionysus was the name that Ptolemy XII chose for himself: the name of a Greek god, a lover of pleasure and wine. Auletes was said to have presided over orgiastic celebrations in the royal palace, feasts that involved music, wild drunkenness, and dancing.
The cult of Dionysus had long been popular in Rome, and a statue of the god decorated Julius Caesar’s villa on the west bank of the Tiber—a house where Cleopatra would later stay as Caesar’s guest. In Egypt, Dionysus had increasingly become identified with Osiris, the god of fertility, of the dead, and of resurrection. Dionysus is also what people would later call Mark Antony. When Cleopatra arrived in her golden barge for their fateful meeting, Plutarch writes, “A rumor spread everywhere that Aphrodite had come to revel with Dionysus for the good of Asia.” But Antony’s profligate ways also reminded Plutarch of the god’s two faces: “Dionysus, the Giver of Joy, and the Gentle. And so indeed he was to some, but to far more the Raw-Eater and the Savage.” One wonders which Dionysus Auletes intended by taking the name, the happy god or the ferocious deity—or whether he meant both.
During Auletes’ reign, he essentially mortgaged the Egyptian economy in return for the influence and support he secured from Rome. At the time of his death, he was in debt for 17.5 million drachmas: the cost of the lavish banquets he had hosted in pursuit of Roman support and the absurdly generous gifts he had given his allies, among them the golden crown he presented to Pompey. At one of Auletes’ feasts, a thousand guests were each given a new gold cup for each course and encouraged to take them home.
In 59, Pompey, Caesar, and Crassus—who together had formed the First Triumvirate—agreed to support the Egyptian king in return for a fee to be paid by Ptolemy XII, a price that the historian Michael Grant has estimated as being worth half the entire revenue of Egypt for six months, or possibly a year.
Despite the extraordinary expense, the bargain represented something of a rescue and a reprieve, since Pompey and Caesar had been eyeing the annexation of Egypt with increasing eagerness. Even so, the Egyptians were predictably unhappy about the debt and the taxes imposed to pay it.
Taxes have always been a heated subject for the people who pay them, and in Ptolemaic Egypt periods of unrest often began as an expression of rage at the excessive rates. The idea of being exorbitantly taxed to pay for the golden cups that their pharaoh had given his Roman guests was finally too much. The unfair tax burden, the financial instability, and the perceived inattentiveness of Auletes’ leadership inspired a new outbreak of rioting. Ptolemy fled the unrest in Alexandria and found refuge in Rome. It has been suggested that Cleopatra, age nine or ten, accompanied her father on this journey, which would have been her first trip to Rome.
