Cleopatra the Great Read online

  Since setting out from Macedonia in 336 BC, thirteen years of endless campaigning without a single defeat had gained him an empire covering 2 million square miles across three continents. His superhuman achievements had changed the face of the known world, and his reign had been a turning point in world history. Greek culture had been irrevocably transformed by the many others encountered during his ceaseless campaigning. It is all the more extraordinary that Alexander was only in the early part of his career when he died suddenly at the age of thirty-two before ever returning to Egypt and the city he created but never saw.

  Chapter 2

  In the Blood: the Ptolemies and Their Cleopatras

  On 10 June 323 BC, Alexander the Great was declared dead in the ancient palace of Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon. Set on the banks of the river Euphrates close to the Hanging Gardens built for Nebuchadnezzar’s queen, the city was also home to the temple ziggurat known as the Tower of Babel. Yet these fabled landmarks had been eclipsed by the 70-metre (230 feet) high-step pyramid that Alexander had commissioned as a lavish funerary pyre for his closest friend, Hephaistion, who had died from fever late in 324 BC, whose body had presumably been embalmed since he was not cremated until the pyre’s completion in May 323 BC.

  Following the funeral, Alexander had toured the Euphrates’ canals and marshlands, brushing aside a number of bad omens as he returned to Babylon to continue with plans for his forthcoming Arabian campaign. Yet, starting to feel feverish, he had slept in his palace bathroom to keep cool, drinking heavily as was his custom as his fever increased. When the army heard of his condition they demanded to see him, filing past his bed to greet him one last time. Then, bequeathing his personal possessions to Ptolemy and his official signet ring to the highest-ranking general, Perdikkas, he whispered that his empire should go ‘to the strongest’ and his body should go to Amun, signifying burial in Egypt whose ancient funerary rites would guarantee him eternal life. Throughout the night of 9 June, Ptolemy and Alexander’s closest friends held a vigil in the temple of Serapis, the Egyptian god whose cult Alexander had taken on campaign. Yet even Serapis was unable to save him, and, most likely suffering from cerebral malaria, he finally lost consciousness.

  As his death was announced, the shock reverberated around the ancient world. His courtiers stood around the deathbed, not quite knowing what to do for the best, until Perdikkas called an Assembly to debate the succession. Although he and the cavalry wanted to await the imminent birth of Alexander’s child by his Sogdian wife Roxane, the infantry demanded that Alexander’s half-brother Arrhidaios be made king at once; although mentally impaired, he was a Macedonian male of royal blood, whereas the unborn child would be half-barbarian and, even worse, might be female. With neither side willing to back down, fierce fighting broke out around Alexander’s body until the infantry ringleaders were permanently silenced.

  In the midst of this power struggle, the body had remained untouched for almost a week. Yet, despite the extreme summer heat, it was in pristine condition, its suspiciously lifelike complexion taken as evidence of Alexander’s divinity. Most likely, however, he had been in a terminal coma and had only just died — or was perhaps even still alive as the embalmers began their work. After removal of his brain and major organs to prevent putrefaction, the body was crowned with Macedonia’s royal diadem and placed within an Egyptian-style coffin ‘made of hammered gold, and the space about the body they filled with spices such as could make the body sweet-smelling and incorruptible’. The sealed coffin, draped in a rich pall of gold and purple, then took centre stage in the Assembly as his men debated their next move.

  Following the birth of the baby Alexander IV in autumn 323 BC he became joint king with Arrhidaios, although both were simply figureheads for the army. Yet with none of its officers capable of taking sole control of such a vast empire, they decided to divide it between them. With Perdikkas in control of the army, Antipatros would retain Macedonia while Lysimachos took Thrace, Antigonas Asia Minor, Seleucus Babylonia and Ptolemy, probably at his own suggestion, ‘was appointed to govern Egypt and Libya and those lands of the Arabs that were contiguous to Egypt; and Kleomenes who had been made governor by Alexander, was subordinated to Ptolemy’.

  Ptolemy and the others swiftly left Babylon for their new lands, having ordered a magnificent hearse to transport Alexander’s precious body back west. It consisted of a six-metre-high golden temple adorned with scenes showing him on the move as he had always appeared in life, travelling by chariot, with his cavalry and navy, and even depicting the Indian war elephants he had adopted. With gold statues of Nike, winged goddess of victory, standing over a tolling bell at each corner of the jewelled roof, a great purple banner flying high from the apex marked the progress of the glittering cortege as it finally left Babylon and slowly headed west, attracting great crowds.

  Yet disagreements over its final destination soon escalated into all-out war because, despite the fact that Alexander had wanted burial in Egypt, Perdikkas had plans of his own. Already regent for the joint kings and engaged to Antipatros’ daughter, he had also received a marriage proposal from Alexander’s widowed sister, Cleopatra. As he contemplated the throne for himself, he realised he would need Alexander’s body, not only to appease his prospective bride and mother-in-law Olympias but also to offset the belief that Macedon’s royal line would cease if its kings were not interred in the traditional burial ground at Aegae.

  Although the other Successors were all keen to halt Perdikkas’ ambition, it was Ptolemy who acted decisively by instigating a hijack at Damascus and substituting a fake mummy as ‘Alexander’s real body was sent ahead without fuss and formality by a secret and little used route. Perdikass found the imitation corpse with the elaborate carriage and halted his advance, thinking he had laid hands on the prize. Too late he realized he had been deceived.’ So began the first of the Successors’ many wars when Perdikkas invaded Egypt in 321 BC in an attempt to retrieve the body and terminate Ptolemy. Yet when two thousand men were lost trying to cross the Nile at Memphis, over half of them falling victim to crocodiles, the rest mutinied, killed Perdikkas and offered the regency to Ptolemy.

  Nevertheless he declined, preferring to keep hold of Egypt and the all-important body which he ‘proceeded to bury with Macedonian rites in Memphis’. Fulfilling Alexander’s last wish for burial with Amun, who had a temple here too, it seems highly likely that Ptolemy honoured Alexander’s desire to be seen as Nectanebo IPs successor by placing the gold coffin within Nectanebo’s unused stone sarcophagus in the Serapeum. The entrance was embellished with a new causeway terminating in a semi-circle of famous Greeks, statues which over time have been heavily sandblasted by the desert winds. They are most likely to have portrayed Alexander alongside the likes of Homer, Pindar, Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy and Dionysus himself, appropriate companions for Alexander’s temporary resting place while construction of a permanent tomb continued in Alexandria.

  Ptolemy certainly took his responsibilities to Alexander very seriously, not only writing his biography but also, alone of all the Successors, building and renovating temples in the names of the joint kings Arrhidaios and young Alexander IV. Although Egypt’s priests appreciated Ptolemy’s efforts, declaring that ‘this great governor searched for the best thing to do for the gods of Upper and Lower Egypt’, the joint monarchs never saw the work carried out in their names since both were kept hostage in Macedonia by the ageing regent Antipatros and his son Kassandros.

  With Arrhidaios married off to his able cousin Eurydike, daughter of Philip’s warrior daughter Cynane, the couple supported Kassandros’ plan to succeed his father until rumours that Kassandros had poisoned Alexander roused his mother Olympias to action. After defeating Eurydike’s army in 317 BC she forced her to commit suicide and ordered Arrhidaios’ execution, finally clearing the way for her six-year-old grandson Alexander IV to become sole king. Then in 315 BC Kassandros took Olympias captive and, having handed her over to her victims’ relatives for executi
on, he eventually poisoned the young king and his mother Roxane and took the throne of Macedonia for himself in 310 BC. Alexander’s forthright sister Cleopatra, imprisoned to prevent her bestowing power by marriage, was murdered by Antigonas when she accepted a proposal and sanctuary from Ptolemy in Egypt.

  Although Alexander’s immediate family had all been killed, Ptolemy himself managed to survive, still acting as governor for the murdered Alexander IV when his fellow Successors had declared themselves kings. Only in 305 BC, at the age of sixty, did he finally become king, but he always refused divine honours in his lifetime and accepted only the Greek title ‘Soter’, ‘Saviour’, which Rhodes awarded him for military support. To compete with the other Successors, his rivals, he also began to issue his own coinage, bearing an image that depicted his Alexander-like large eyes and tousled hair encircled by a diadem countered by his determined chin and prominent, eagle-like nose. The latter feature was the likely inspiration for his personal badge, the eagle, which became the Ptolemies’ emblem and is still the central motif of Egypt’s national flag.

  By November 311 BC Alexandria was sufficiently complete to become the new royal capital, its position on a coastline with few discernible features marked by plans for a huge lighthouse on Pharos Island. Connected to the mainland by a mile-long causeway, the city’s harbour would then be divided into an eastern and western side, while a third, smaller harbour linking the Mediterranean to Lake Mareotis and the Nile would give access to the rest of Egypt.

  The city’s Greek and Jewish citizens settled in various parts of the city, but the Egyptians preferred the western sector which they called Raqed, Greek Rhakotis, meaning ‘building site’. They also referred to their new Greek neighbours as the ‘girdlewearers’, although the distinct lack of ethnic tension was maintained through a unique system of Greek, Egyptian and Jewish laws rather than imposing Greek legislation on the native population. The same toleration was extended to religion when Ptolemy combined the Egyptian Serapis — the ancient combination of Osiris and Apis — with the Greek gods Zeus, Asklepios and Hades to create a Greek-looking deity of Egyptian origin acceptable to all as state god. Although Serapis’ cult centre became the most prominent of Alexandria’s many temples, Ptolemy I also planned a Macedonian-style Temple of the Muses or Mouseion (Museum) in which knowledge was elevated to a religion. This great research centre, funded by the crown, would house leading academics whose research would benefit the kingdom and enhance its status abroad. It would have its own library under the care of Aristotle’s former student Demetrios of Phaleron, whose failing eyesight, restored by entreaties to Serapis, was a glowing endorsement for his patron’s new state god.

  Ptolemy I also employed a team of Greek and Egyptian experts to advise on matters of culture and religion, and, as the new regime continued to build and renovate temples throughout Egypt, ancient land creation schemes were revived to increase productivity and provide land for veteran troops. With the settlers housed in new Greek towns, existing Egyptian settlements took new names based on the Greek divinity closest to the local cult. So, as places such as ancient Henen-nesut became ‘Herakleopolis’, city of Herakles, Shedet ‘Krokodilopolis’, city of the crocodile and Edfu ‘Apollonopolis’, ‘city of Apollo’, ancient Egypt slowly disappeared beneath the emerging kingdom of the Ptolemies.

  During a long and well-travelled career Ptolemy I had fathered large numbers of children. A short-lived marriage to a Persian noblewoman named Artakama and affairs with several courtesans were followed by marriage to Antipatros’ daughter Eurydike and then Antipatros’ grand-niece Berenike, who became ‘the most powerful of Ptolemy I’s wives and the one with the most virtues and intelligence’. Despite having at least nine children by other women, including six with Eurydike, those born to Berenike I would form the basis of the dynasty. When Eurydike and their eldest son Ptolemy Keraunos (‘Lightning’) were exiled in 287 BC the old king made his genial younger son Ptolemy II his co-regent, allowing him to spend his remaining years pottering about his palace. Finally dying in his bed at the age of eighty-four, the last of the great Successors, Ptolemy I had lived half a century longer than his beloved Alexander but was buried with him. Following his orders to be cremated according to Macedonian custom, Ptolemy I’s ashes were gathered up and placed in the newly completed alabaster tomb when Ptolemy II ‘brought down from Memphis the corpse of Alexander’ for joint interment.

  The late king had already arranged a wife for his twenty-eight-year-old successor, the daughter of his old ally Lysimachos of Thrace. She dutifully produced three children before their marriage was abruptly terminated by the unstoppable ambitions of the new king’s extraordinary sister, Arsinoe II. As the most capable of Ptolemy I’s children, she had been married off at sixteen to sixty-year-old Lysimachos, giving him three sons and in return being made queen of Thrace and Macedonia. But, wanting more power, she had used false allegations to remove her stepson, the heir apparent, whose followers fled to Seleucus for help. After Seleucus killed Lysimachos in battle he was assassinated by Keraunos, whose claims to Thrace, Macedonia and Egypt were strengthened by marrying his ambitious half-sister Arsinoe II, now Lysimachos’ widow. Yet even she baulked when her new husband’s elimination of rivals began with her own sons, and she fled to Samothrace until Keraunos’ death in battle left her free to marry for a third time.

  With her sights still fixed on the throne of Egypt, Arsinoe moved to Alexandria and, after engineering the exile of her brother Ptolemy IPs first wife, married him herself in 275 BC and became his co-regent, the first of a long line of Ptolemaic royal women to hold exactly the same status as their male counterparts. Although some Greeks were shocked by the marriage, if not the co-regency, Arsinoe II had already been married to her half-brother Keraunos. Marriage between close relatives was a tradition of the Thracian, Epirite and Macedonian rulers, and indeed brother-sister marriage was regular practice amongst Persian royalty and certainly for some of ancient Egypt’s previous monarchs.

  Clearly Arsinoe II found inspiration in her fifteenth-century BC pharaonic predecessor Hatshepsut, who had married her half-brother before taking power as pharaoh herself. Adopting Hatshepsut’s titles, Arsinoe II was referred to as ‘Daughter of Ra’, the female equivalent of the traditional pharaoh’s title ‘Son of Ra’, and also took her predecessor’s title ‘Daughter of Geb’, the earth god and father of Isis. Like Hatshepsut, she wore Geb’s distinctive red crown embellished with the ram’s horns of Amun and the double plumes, cow horns and sun disc of Hathor-Isis. Equally symbolic headgear was adopted for her Greek-style portraits. A huge cameo celebrating the marriage featured her brother in a Greek helmet, while Arsinoe II wore the diadem of Dionysus and the marriage veil of Zeus’ sister-wife Hera draped over her fair hair styled in a bun. In addition to their shared blond hair, the siblings had the same long nose, plump cheeks and eyes sufficiently large to be taken as evidence for an exophthalmic goitre yet most likely an exaggerated physical trait that they shared with their putative uncle Alexander. It was certainly a family resemblance that Arsinoe II fully exploited for her own political ends and, vigorously promoting the image of a divinely inspired dynasty, the couple deified their deceased parents Ptolemy I Soter and Berenike I as twin ‘Saviour gods’, worshipped with Alexander at the new Ptolemaia festival to showcase their dynastic power.

  Celebrated every four years, the Ptolemaia was perhaps the most lavish public festival ever held in the ancient world, steeped in the outrageous opulence or ‘tryphe’ which became the Ptolemies’ trademark. Based on the ancient Greek Dionysia festival, it presented Dionysos as god of the Ptolemaic house, returning from India just like Alexander and accompanied by the same unimaginable wealth in a day-long procession. Eyewitness accounts describe eighty thousand soldiers in shining armour followed by great crowds in sumptuous costumes and troops of elephants and camels bearing exotic goods from Africa, Arabia and India. Never-before-seen giraffes and rhinoceroses caused the same consternation as the huge automata
figures that magically rose up to receive libations amid rivers of wine. Gold statues of the gods were followed by god-sized suits of golden armour and crowns; a 120-foot-wide gem-encrusted myrtle wreath, ancient slang for female genitals, was accompanied by an 80-foot-long gold penis tipped by a star to emphasise none too subtly the mechanics of royal succession.

  Following their parents’ deification their children too became divine: Arsinoe IFs Greek title ‘Philadelphus’, ‘sibling lover’, extended to her brother-husband Ptolemy II to create twin gods likened to married siblings Zeus and Hera. The same comparison with Egypt’s Isis and Osiris was even closer to the mark, for the goddess Isis was the active partner in that relationship too. In much the same way that Arsinoe II had steam-rollered her way to the top, Isis had taken over the roles of all the other female deities, including Hathor, goddess of love, whom the Greeks called Aphrodite. Born from the sea, Aphrodite was the perfect goddess for the new coastal capital: her whose earthly incarnation was described as ‘rising from the flashing sea and laughing, striking lightning from her lovely face’.