Cleopatra the Great Read online

  Yet all-nurturing, all-powerful Arsinoe herself seems to have had little genuine regard for her subjects and beneath a carefully crafted public image was prone to sneering at them, commenting of one festival gathering, ‘that must be a very dirty get-together. For the assembly can only be that of a miscellaneous mob who have themselves served with a stale and utterly unseemly feast.’ She, by contrast, lived in the greatest luxury and was fabulously wealthy in her own right at a time when most women in the ancient world had no financial independence whatsoever. Wielding financial and political power akin to her pharaonic female predecessors, Arsinoe IFs tremendous talent for government resulted in great improvements at home and abroad.

  Able to create a Domesday-style inventory of Egypt’s assets, aided by an efficient royal postal system and meticulous records, tremendous wealth was created and collected on behalf of a monarchy whose strict revenue laws established royal monopolies on everything from linen and papyrus to perfume and vegetable oil. The royal finance minister undertook regular inspection tours up and down the Nile, and local agents oversaw day-to-day business ranging from the training of Greek gymnasts to dealing with local entrepreneurs. They also procured slaves from Palestine, Syria and Nubia, for in contrast to the lower levels of slavery in ancient Egypt, the Greeks relied on this form of labour for their households, farms and factories. And, of course, they had to pay taxes and import duty on them. Foreign trade was further boosted by reopening the old Saite canal connecting the Nile to the Red Sea, whose main port, Berenike, formed the gateway for trade with Arabia, India and the Orient. The Ptolemies also traded with Arab merchants such as Zayd’il bin Zayd, an importer of ‘myrrh and calamus for the temple of the gods of Egypt’ who worked around Memphis.

  Yet the Ptolemies’ vast wealth was ‘not heaped up to lie useless, as if the wealth of ever-industrious ants; much is lavished on the shrines of the gods’ to enhance their status as benefactors, and to guarantee the loyalty of priests and people to whom they appeared as traditional rulers making offerings and performing ancient rites. The burials of sacred animals were a further costly undertaking for the crown, with a staggering 100 talents’ worth of myrrh (the equivalent of 2,600 kg of silver) requested for the burial of a single sacred cow. Large sums were also expended on the armed forces to keep Ptolemaic territory intact, and to foil invasion from Cyrene to the west by the couples’ older half-brother Magas, a son of Berenike I by an earlier marriage. The couple also put down an incursion by Nubians to the south, quelled a rebellion of Celtic mercenaries in northern Egypt and defended the eastern Delta against Seleucid invasion before the two sides finally made peace in 271 BC.

  The Ptolemies’ reach across the Mediterranean was reflected in a huge marble statue of Isis on the Acropolis in Athens, along with buildings on Delos and a temple to Ptolemy II at his birthplace on Kos. On Samothrace Arsinoe II erected a monument in gratitude for her earlier period of sanctuary here, commemorating the place where Alexander’s parents first met with an enormous rotunda temple of Doric columns and carved bulls’ heads.

  At the other end of the Mediterranean the couple also expanded trade links with Italy, whose Greek colonies were gradually being taken over by Rome. Although this small Italian city is said to have sent a delegation to Alexander himself, Arsinoe II and her husband were the first of the Successors to make official contact, sending an embassy to Rome in 273 BC. In response, ‘the Romans, pleased that one [sic] so far away should have thought so highly of them’, sent ambassadors to Alexandria. The resulting treaty was commemorated with Rome’s first silver coins, so similar to those of Arsinoe II that the Ptolemies must have supplied the necessary expertise. They could never have guessed that their new allies were nothing less than a ticking time bomb which would push its way to the heart of Egypt’s affairs with fatal results.

  Yet for now the Ptolemies ruled supreme, their pole position in the Mediterranean marked by the completion of their great Pharos lighthouse which was immediately regarded as one of the wonders of the world. At 135m, almost as tall as that other wonder, the Great Pyramid of Giza, its blazing beacon reflected by polished metal mirrors for almost 50 miles in every direction was regarded as a man-made star through which Isis illuminated the world. Her presence on Pharos was also marked by a colossus beside the lighthouse, the Nile’s static goddess transformed into a lively windswept figure appropriate to her new coastal setting. Striding forward as a kind of ‘action version’ of the Statue of Liberty, great Isis Pharia held out her billowing mantle (‘pharos’) to catch the breeze, emphasising her invention of navigation and her role as ‘Mistress of Winds’ inherited from Hathor and Aphrodite.

  Visible to all who approached by sea, great Isis was flanked by colossal companion figures of the royal couple, who used pharaonic statues to give ancient kudos to their modern city. With its wide boulevards and marble colonnades shaded by green awnings it anticipated many of Europe’s later cities; comparisons have also been drawn with New York, based on a shared grid pattern of high-rise buildings, financial houses, passenger terminals, fast-food outlets, theatres, libraries and parks adorned with ancient Egyptian obelisks. Alexandria even had automatic doors and steam power courtesy of leading scholar Heron, who invented the steam turbine simply as a means of opening and closing temple doors. It was just one of many inventions that the monarchs funded within their Mouseion (Museum), with its lecture halls, laboratories, observatories, gardens and zoo, although its best-known feature was the Great Library. Designed to hold all the world’s knowledge under the Ptolemies’ sole control, rival Successors to Alexander decided to set up their own library at Pergamom in western Anatolia (modern Turkey) until the Ptolemies’ immediate ban on papyrus exports forced their rivals to invent parchment (‘pergamenon’) as a means of sustaining the race for knowledge.

  Anxious to obtain Greek translations of all known texts in the ancient world, Ptolemy II set his scholars to work on everything from a complete translation of the Hebrew scriptures to the fabled knowledge of ancient Egypt. He commissioned his father’s Egyptian adviser, Manetho, to compile a complete history of every known pharaoh since records began, and also wrote to him on matters of religion; one of Manetho’s replies to the king, comparing the gods of Egypt and Greece, explained that Thoth, represented by the ibis and the ape, was the same as the Greek Hermes.

  Yet Ptolemy II also made staff changes, sacking the head librarian, Demetrios, who had supported a rival claimant to the throne, and replacing him with the Homeric expert Zenodotus, whose assistant, Callimachus of Cyrene, composed the first library catalogue. It listed 120,000 scrolls of poetry, history, rhetoric, philosophy, law and medicine, copies of many of which were housed in a second, ‘daughter’ library within the Serapeum temple. The Serapeum’s medical centre was staffed by ‘pastophor’ physician priests who were able to consult ancient Egyptian medical texts and the works of Hippocrates and Aristotle. The latter’s grandson, Erasistratus, and a fellow medical student, Herophilus, carried out human vivisection. With royal permission they ‘cut open criminals received out of the kings’ prisons, and they studied whilst the breath of life remained in them’, working out the function of arteries and discovering that the brain, not the heart, was the centre of the nervous system. With Ptolemy II himself regarded as ‘the most august of all princes and devoted, if any one was, to culture and learning’, the Mouseion and Library soon became the stuff of legend, ‘and concerning the number of books, the establishing of libraries, and the collection in the Hall of the Muses, why need I even speak, since they are in all men’s memories’.

  The legendary buildings formed part of the royal palace which extended along the Lochias promontory, each monarch extending the complex with his or her own personal quarters and following Macedonian tradition by building in imported marble. Interior water features and mosaics were also de rigueur, and further adorned with sumptuous furnishings; even the tentlike royal dining pavilion housed ‘marble figures, a hundred in all, the work of foremost
artists, and paintings by artists of the Sicyonian school alternating with a great variety of selected portraits’. At the apex of its scarlet ceiling perched a pair of great gold eagles, the symbol of the Ptolemaic house, now duplicated to represent the twin monarchs; below, gold and silver tables paired with a hundred golden couches were laden with jewelled tableware.

  Such opulence was certainly to Arsinoe IFs taste, and Ptolemy II seems to have been as content to let her make decisions about interior design as in every other area of his life. Her tremendous eye for detail was certainly appreciated by those who passed through public parts of the palace at festival time. One housewife told her friend, ‘Come on! Get your cloak. Let’s go to the house of the king, rich Ptolemy. I hear the queen has done a beautiful job of decorating it . . . And when you’ve seen it, what won’t you be able to say to someone who hasn’t!’ Yet some were clearly less impressed, claiming that ‘everything in Egypt was playacting and painted scenery’, a comment which cut to the heart of this melodramatic monarchy for whom image was everything.

  Having transformed the Ptolemaic house into a dazzling bastion of conspicuous consumption in only five years, Arsinoe II died at the age of forty-six just before the full moon on 9 July 270 BC. Following her lavish Macedonian-style cremation, the Greeks imagined that their sun god Apollo had sent down his golden chariot to raise her to heaven, whereas the Egyptians preferred to imagine her heavenward soul as Isis’ star Sothis, which appeared annually between 17 and 19 July. Worshipped in a city where streets were named after her, the deified woman was now commemorated at the annual Arsinoeia festival, when her clergy led the crowds through the city, and people drank from wine jugs adorned with her image.

  On Alexandria’s blustery Cape Zephyrion, a new temple dedicated to Arsinoe II as Aphrodite Zephritis, Lady of Winds, featured a giant drinking vessel in ‘the form of the Egyptian Bes the dancer, who trumpets forth a shrill note when the spout is opened for the flowing wine’, to emphasise the dynasty’s ritual use of alcohol. Close to the harbour lay a second lavish sanctuary, the Arsineion, its site marked by a great stone obelisk of Nectanebo II and inside it a six-foot-high statue of Arsinoe II covered in glittering sea-green peridots below an iron statue, said to have been suspended magically in space by the temple’s magnetic roof to capture the moment when Arsinoe rose to heaven.

  Throughout the country Ptolemy II decreed ‘that her statue be set up in all the temples. This pleased their priests for they were aware of her noble attitude toward the gods and of her excellent deeds to the benefit of all people’. Named as ‘Beloved of the Ram’, she was worshipped at Mendes, the place ‘where bitch-mounting goats go mating with the women’. This aspect of ritual behaviour was described by the historian Herodotus, who reported with some understatement that ‘a goat tupped a woman, in full view of everyone — a most surprising event’.

  Arsinoe II was shown with the same ram’s horns as Alexander, and like him called ‘child of Amun’; the god Amun himself informed Arsinoe II that ‘I will make you a god [sic] at the head of the gods on earth’. She was indeed worshipped throughout Egypt as the female counterpart of Osiris, Ra, Ptah, Min, Montu and Sobek, the ancient crocodile god of the Fayum. The capital of the Fayum was renamed Arsinoe and the whole of this fertile lakeside region south-west of the Delta reclassified as the Arsinoite nome (province). A port on the Red Sea was also named Arsinoe, and her worship extended as far afield as Cyprus, Delos and Thera, reflecting Ptolemaic influence across the eastern Mediterranean.

  Although Ptolemy II clearly missed his sister-wife’s capable government, her physical presence seems never to have been a prerequisite since the king, like his father, had always maintained relationships with large numbers of women, including the exceptionally beautiful Bilis-tiche of Argos. Usually termed ‘mistresses’, they followed the Egyptian tradition of minor wives and, provided with their own palaces, resembled the large female households of pharaohs of the past.

  Recognised as ‘a man of wit and taste, partial to the ladies’, Ptolemy II loved the good life and it eventually took its toll. Perhaps as overweight as his obese half-brother Magas, he certainly suffered from drink-induced gout in his final years. He was able to do little more than sit by his palace window and observe his subjects enjoying picnics on the sands below, gloomily declaring, ‘Unlucky devil that I am! To think I cannot even be one of those fellows.’ The second Ptolemy died at the age of sixty-two in January 246 BC and, after cremation in accordance with Macedonian tradition, his ashes were buried in Alexandria in ceremonies led by his son and successor, the thirty-eight-year-old Ptolemy III.

  The new king was crowned by the high priest Anemho II in 246 BC, the same year that he married his cousin Berenike of Cyrene, only child and successor of the portly Magas. The acquisition of Cyrene’s fleet proved crucial in the Ptolemies’ renewed war with the Seleucids. Berenike II ruled Egypt in her husband’s absence, and was even said to have gone into battle beside him on at least one occasion. The campaign was lengthy but successful, extending Egypt’s reach as far east as Babylonia, from where Ptolemy III retrieved Egyptian treasures looted long ago by the Persians.

  Awarded the Greek title Euergetes, ‘Benefactor’, the couple were worshipped as ‘Benefactor Gods’ and Berenike II identified with Isis and Aphrodite. She was an attractive woman with ‘deep-set long eyes, a nose wide at the nostrils, a ball-chin — a face slightly reminiscent of Nefertiti ... it looks as though the Hellenistic Greeks, like the moderns, admired the Nefertiti profile’ which Berenike II further emphasised by drawing back her blonde hair in a bun. She also wore long corkscrew ringlets characteristic of her homeland Cyrene, and her hair even achieved its own immortality after a lock which she dedicated in the temple of Arsinoe Zephritis mysteriously disappeared, presumably blown away in the continuous sea breeze, until identified in the night sky by the court astonomer as the constellation Coma Berenikes (‘the curl of Berenike’).

  Using her striking appearance for political purposes, she adopted an unusual ship’s prow crown to commemorate naval victories and also wore an anchor-shaped brooch; a connoisseur of perfumes, she wore them to great effect in the manner of her pharaonic predecessors. Far more than a decorative queen, however, Berenike was the first female Ptolemy to hold full kingly titles during her lifetime; named ‘ta per-aat Bereniga’, ‘the pharaoh Berenike’, and hailed as ‘female Horus’, she was clearly ‘perceived as the equivalent of an Egyptian king. There could be nothing clearer than the idea of a female Horus.’

  During her twenty-five-year reign she also produced six children, her two daughters receiving the same privileges and education as their male siblings. Following the death of one princess in childhood, the native priests decreed that ‘a sacred statue for her, of gold and set with precious stones’ should be set up in every temple, their classical equivalents featuring the veiled Berenike II mourning the child who leans against her knee, looking up in an Alexander-like pose of deification.

  Such figures were erected within the colonnades of Alexandria’s new Serapeum, ‘adorned with great columned halls and statuary which seems almost alive’. The new temple contained royal quarters and subterranean chambers for the cult of Apis, the monarchs showing ‘constant concern, combined with heavy outlay and expense, for Apis and Mnevis and the other renowned sacred animals in the land’. Equally generous endowments to the Great Library included the original scripts of the great Athenian dramatists, taken out on loan for 15 talents’ deposit so that they could be copied and returned (until it was decided to keep the priceless originals and return the copies). In 235 BC, Berenike Ill’s countryman Eratosthenes of Cyrene became head librarian and put forward the revolutionary suggestion that the earth was round. Calculating its circumference by measuring the distance between Alexandria and Aswan, he worked out its diameter to within 80 km (50 miles). He even calculated the length of the year, although his calendar of 365 1/4 days was dismissed by the Egyptian priests, who preferred their own 360-day year with five
days left over as birthdays of the gods.

  The relationship between crown and clergy gave the Ptolemies a direct line to their pharaonic past, and when the high priest Anemho II was appointed ‘priest of the Royal Ancestors’ a huge temple was begun at Horus’ cult centre, Edfu, under his guidance. Intended as a shrine to the kingship embodied by Horus, ‘the one who has his being before the ancestors’, the new temple would allow the cumulative powers of the country’s pharaonic ancestors to be drawn down into the hands of the Ptolemies. But only with the priests as intermediaries.

  For in reaction to the Ptolemies’ mass translation of Egypt’s ancient wisdom into easily accessible Greek, six thousand new symbols had been added to the existing eight hundred to make the hieroglyphic script impenetrable to all but the initiated. Allowing the new temple to act as a huge ritual document, certain words were deliberately chosen for their alliterative effect when read aloud by the priests. So, the straightforward phrase ‘offerings shall be made in your shrine, O Falcon, O you of the dappled plumage!’ was vocalised as the tongue-twisting ‘shespu er shespet ek shenbet sab-shuwt’. Warnings that the goddess ‘Nekhbet stabs him who violates your inviolable soil’ or ‘shatat her shemy shash shaw ek shata’ were accompanied by violent scenes of the pharaoh spearing Horus’ enemies, declaring, ‘I hold my harpoon! I drive back the hidden ones, I stab their bodies, I cut them up, I deflect their attack against Horus of the dappled plumage.’

  This obsession with spearing, stabbing and generally annihilating the powers of darkness presented the king as the defender of the gods who in turn defended Egypt. And the gods were certainly receptive, for the Ptolemies had gained territory encompassing Egypt, Libya, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Cyprus, Cilicia, Pamphylia, Lycia, Caria, parts of Ionia in modern Turkey, parts of Thrace and the Greek Peloponnese and Aegean.

  Having lived up to his Egyptian epithet ‘strong protector of the gods and mighty wall for Egypt’, sixty-two-year-old Ptolemy III died in the winter of 222 BC. He was cremated in ceremonies led by his widow and successor, Berenike II, who took her twenty-year-old son, Ptolemy IV (221-205 BC) as co-ruler. The new Ptolemy’s title of Philopator, ‘father-loving’, was nevertheless at odds with his feelings for a mother whose public popularity was an obstacle to the ambitions of her wayward son’s powerful courtiers. In a terrifying purge, Berenike II and her remaining children were all killed except for fourteen-year-old Arsinoe, spared for marriage to her brother after which they became the ‘father-loving gods’. Although young Arsinoe III was also identified with Aphrodite and Isis, her portraits’ permanently melancholy expression captured something of the trauma surrounding her accession and her brother-husband’s long-term relationship with Agathoklea, daughter of Ptolemy Ill’s ambitious mistress Oinanthe.