Cleopatra the Great Page 7

  Sharing the new king’s sumptuous lifestyle, Agathoklea and her brother Agathokles were a malevolent influence, for despite an unusually stable childhood and superb education Ptolemy IV was ‘aloose, voluptuous, and effeminate prince, under the power of his pleasures and his women and his wine . . . while the great affairs of state were managed by Agathoklea, the king’s mistress, [and] her mother and pimp Oinanthe’. Even the Spartan king Kleomenes, living in exile at court and a royal counsellor under the last regime, became ‘an eyewitness of the sickness of the realm’. He was killed, and his flayed body displayed in public.

  In 217 BC the Ptolemies faced crisis point when the Seleucid king Antiochos III took back Syria and marched towards Egypt with seventy thousand troops and 102 Indian elephants. In order to field an army of equal strength, large numbers of Egyptians were quickly trained in Macedonian tactics and seventy-three somewhat jumpy African elephants transported up the Red Sea coast in huge ‘elephantagoi’ ships. After following her mother’s example by dedicating a lock of hair to invoke the gods, the slight figure of Arsinoe III addressed the troops — she is even shown wielding a spear in contemporary images — before the two forces clashed at Raphia on 22 June. Most surprisingly, the Egyptians won the day and, after taking back the whole of Syria, the victorious monarchs were welcomed home with great festivities. Yet as it began to dawn on the Egyptians just exactly where the power lay, serious bouts of internal unrest broke out in middle Egypt and spread to the Delta.

  Nor were things any easier for the Ptolemies’ allies in Rome. After the invasion by Hannibal of Carthage and his famous elephants they requested, and received, emergency supplies of Egyptian grain. In gratitude the Romans issued gold coins featuring their war god Mars and the Ptolemies’ royal eagle, then sent a delegation to Egypt, ‘taking presents to the king and queen to commemorate and renew their friendship’.

  Although the ambassadors’ gifts included a smart Roman toga for the king, this mode of dress is unlikely to have appealed to Ptolemy IV who, like his predecessors, preferred to emphasise his power through an ostentatious show of wealth. He paid regular homage to the god of the royal house, styled himself ‘Neos Dionysos’ (the new Dionysos) and had himself tattooed with the god’s sacred ivy leaves; wearing an ivy wreath, ‘carrying a timbrel and taking part in the show’, he participated in rites which involved large quantities of wine.

  Ptolemy IV modelled himself on Alexander — whose own involvement with the wine-fuelled cult was such that he has often been dubbed an alcoholic. It is therefore fitting that Ptolemy IV’s greatest achievement, possibly begun by his parents, was Alexander’s mausoleum. Built on the northern side of the Canopic Way, Ptolemy IV ‘built in the middle of the city a memorial building which is now called the Sema [‘tomb’] and he laid there all his forefathers together with his mother, and also Alexander the Macedonian’ after exhuming their remains from the original marble tomb in the city.

  It was also said that ‘the Soma also, as it is called, is part of the royal district. This was the walled enclosure which contained the burial places of the kings and that of Alexander’ (with Soma meaning ‘body’ and Sema meaning ‘tomb’). All trace of both the body and the tomb vanished centuries ago, although it was said that the tomb was ‘worthy of the glory of Alexander in size and construction’. Scattered evidence also suggests a tall, imposing structure, possibly circular and topped by a pyramid-shaped edifice; its subterranean burial chamber or inner sanctum would have housed the urns of Ptolemies I, II and III and their female counterparts Berenike I, Arsinoe II and Berenike II, interred beside Alexander’s mummy within his gold coffin and stone sarcophagus.

  The Sema drew down the ancestral powers of Alexander for the good of the Ptolemies in much the same way that the temple at Edfu brought together the powers of the royal ancestors for the good of Egypt. With work on the inner parts of the Edfu temple soon complete, a new temple to Horus further south in Nubia named Arsinoe III in its inscriptions. She was honoured for producing a son, the first Ptolemaic child to be born of a full brother-sister marriage. A rather pensive child who took after his mother, the boy, named Ptolemy, was made co-regent soon after his birth in October 210 BC. His status as an only child presumably reflected the fact that Arsinoe III is said to have regularly pleaded with her brother-husband to stop using the palace for his drinking parties. Yet ‘his shameful philanderings and incoherent and continuous bouts of drunkenness, not surprisingly found in a very short space of time both himself and his kingdom to be the object of a number of conspiracies’.

  In 207 BC Herwennefer of Thebes declared himself pharaoh with the backing of the Karnak priests, who set themselves in direct opposition to the Ptolemies and their priestly allies in Memphis. The south broke away and Egypt slid towards anarchy. By the end of205 BC Ptolemy IV, not yet forty, was dead. His courtiers hushed up his death, murdered Arsinoe III and secretly cremated the couple, placing their matching silver urns close to Alexander in the tomb they had completed for him.

  Their six-year-old son was now declared Ptolemy V and Agathokles and his family became his guardians, holding on to their power through intimidation and violence until matters came to a head when the imperious Oinanthe ordered her bodyguard to attack fellow worshippers who had cold-shouldered her. As the violence escalated, the Alexandrians responded and stormed the palace, seizing Agathokles and taking him to the Gymnasion law courts for execution. His sister, mother and remaining female relatives were likewise taken to the Gymnasion and handed over to the mob, where ‘some bit them, some stabbed them, others cut out their eyes. Whenever one of them fell, they ripped their limbs apart, until they had in this way mutilated them all. For a terrible savagery accompanies the angry passions of the people who live in Egypt.’

  As a succession of Greek courtiers now vied for power in Alexandria royal authority in the rest of Egypt ebbed away, and by 200 BC the Seleucid king Antiochos III had reversed his defeat at Raphia and, allied to Macedonia, was preparing to invade Egypt. Faced with this threat, Ptolemy V’s ministers sent an emergency delegation to Rome asking for help. Having finally defeated their own great enemy, the Carthaginian Hannibal, the Romans were only too pleased to assist by attacking Macedonia, which initially fell to them in 197 BC.

  That same year the thirteen-year-old Ptolemy V celebrated his coming of age by moving the royal capital away from Alexandria to the relative security of Memphis, much to the delight of the native priesthood. After royal troops took back Thebes, rebellion in the Delta was ruthlessly put down and its ringleaders condemned by their fellow countrymen within the clergy. The king then ‘had them slain on the wood’ in public executions at Memphis — no doubt they were bludgeoned to death with a stone mace in time-honoured fashion. This graphic display formed the climax of the king’s traditional-style coronation which was finally held at Memphis on 26 March 196 BC some eight years after his actual accession. The high priest Harmakhis placed the red and white crown of a united Egypt on his head as Ptolemy V ‘Epiphanes’, ‘the One who manifests himself, was named a ‘god, the son of a god and goddess and being like Horus, son of Isis and Osiris’, in direct reference to his parentage.

  Then Egypt’s native clergy and the Greek priest of Alexander came together to issue a joint decree declaring that Ptolemy V had established order and spent large sums on the temples and the ‘sacred animals that are honoured in Egypt’. Written out in both Greek and Egyptian to be as widely understood as possible, copies of the decree were set up all around the country. The most famous version was set up in Neith’s temple at Sais and later reused as building stone at Rosetta, became the means by which hieroglyphs were finally translated some two thousand years later.

  The coronation was soon followed by a royal marriage after Antiochos III changed his plans. Instead of invading Egypt he requested an alliance, offering the teenage pharaoh his ten-year-old daughter Cleopatra and the whole of Coele-Syria (‘Hollow Syria’, between Lebanon’s mountain ranges from Cilicia down to Gaza)
as her dowry. When the couple were married in 194 BC at Raphia, Egypt gained Seleucid territory by marital rather than martial means.

  The couple took the titles ‘Manifest and Beneficent Gods’. Cleopatra I was named ‘Female Horus’ as her husband’s equal, and even Rome acknowledged ‘Ptolemy and Cleopatra, rulers of Egypt’. Known as ‘The Syrian’, the first Cleopatra to rule Egypt is said to have ‘brought the only important intrusion of foreign blood’ into the Ptolemaic house, being a descendant of the Persian Apama, wife of Macedonian Seleucus I, and having a mother from the royal family of Pontus in Asia Minor (modern Turkey). Yet inheriting neither her father’s sharp features nor the ‘ill-favoured looks and boxers’ noses’ of her mother’s side, Cleopatra I had an attractive profile which was further enhanced by her adoption of Berenike II’s Cyrene-inspired ringlets combined with the robes of Isis for the full goddess ensemble.

  Following a daughter named Cleopatra, the couple’s son Ptolemy was born as the royal forces ended twenty years of anarchy by retaking Thebes. Its priests fled to Nubia and the rebel pharaoh was taken prisoner but, on the advice of the Memphis priests, was pardoned to initiate reconciliation. As part of the same PR campaign the royal couple embarked on a state progress up the Nile, making personal appearances before their reconquered subjects before finally reaching Philae in the far south, where the priests formally congratulated them for their success against the Theban rebels and the birth of their son.

  Remaining on good terms with the Romans, the royal couple also renewed their alliance with the Greek city states. At the formal banquet renewing the treaty, the main topic of conversation was the pharaoh’s physical prowess and his ability to hit a bull with a javelin from horseback. Yet in his last years Ptolemy V became increasingly unpopular with his subjects, taking back financial concessions made to the Egyptians and seeking hefty donations from his Greek courtiers to fund a campaign against Syria. In the spring of 180 BC, still only twenty-nine, he was poisoned by his generals. The first of his dynasty to be mummified, and presumably interred within the mausoleum of Alexander and the Ptolemies, he was succeeded by his widow, the twenty-four-year-old Cleopatra I, who maintained the male-female dual monarchy by taking her eldest son, six-year-old Ptolemy VI, as her co-regent. Formally acknowledged as ‘the Pharaohs Cleopatra the mother the manifest goddess and Ptolemy son of Ptolemy the manifest god’, he took the Greek title ‘Philometor’, ‘Mother Loving’, and the pair were equated with Isis and her son Horus.

  Terminating all plans for a campaign against her Seleucid relatives in Syria, Cleopatra I pursued a peaceful domestic policy and became a greatly loved figure. Her Macedonian name became a popular choice for children around the country: one proud new grandmother wrote to her daughter, ‘Don’t hesistate to name the little one “Cleopatra”, your little daughter.’ When she died suddenly in April 176 BC, aged only twenty-eight, Cleopatra I was honoured with her own clergy based at Thebes in contrast to the Alexandrian-based cults of her predecessors, suggesting that some in the royal city had not supported her pro-Syrian stance.

  Courtiers swiftly married off the ten-year-old king Ptolemy VI to his slightly older sister Cleopatra II so as to prevent marriage to any foreigner with designs on Egypt. The young monarchs’ advisers then recommended war on Syria where Antiochos IV, brother of the late Cleopatra I, was preparing to use his position as the monarchs’ uncle to seize their throne. Then, to prevent him using the youngest Ptolemy as a pawn, the child was made co-ruler with his two older siblings in a three-way rule presenting a united front.

  After invading Egypt in 169 BC, Antiochos IV swiftly took Memphis, placed his teenage nephew Ptolemy VI under the ‘protection’ of his Seleucid family, and had himself crowned co-regent ‘following Egyptian custom’. Yet the Syrian pharaoh had a very short reign and would be mainly remembered for his outrageous parties at which he ‘was brought in by the mime performers entirely wrapped up . . . when the symphony sounded, he would leap up and dance naked and act with the clowns.’

  Following his coronation, this colourful monarch then marched on Alexandria where Cleopatra II and her younger brother had set up a rival monarchy, backed by the citizens who were able to repel Antiochos’ attack. Needing Egypt and Syria to remain neutral while they reconquered Macedonia, a Roman delegation then arrived in Alexandria and, ordering Antiochos IV to leave Egypt at once, drew a circle around him in the sand and demanded that he agreed before stepping out. Left with little choice, he pulled out of Egypt on 30 July 168 BC, leaving the country a virtual protectorate of Rome. The Roman ambassadors told the young monarchs somewhat ominously that they ‘should always consider the trust and good will of the Roman people the supreme defence of their kingdom’.

  Under the theatrical-sounding epithet the three ‘Theoi Philome-tores’ (Mother-loving Gods), the trio of young monarchs Ptolemy VI, Cleopatra II and Ptolemy VIII worked together until famine started to cause widespread unrest and Thebes again declared independence. Marching south to deal with the rebels, Ptolemy VI was overthrown in a coup led by his younger brother Ptolemy VIII and the Alexandrians. Although ex-king Ptolemy travelled to Rome to put his case for unfair dismissal before their governing body, the Senate, it proved unnecessary since the Alexandrians soon deposed the power-mad Ptolemy VIII and begged their former king to return. Yet, having seen for themselves how weak Egypt had become, the Romans ensured the kingdom remained divided by insisting that Ptolemy VIII should receive Cyrene while Ptolemy VI and Cleopatra II kept Egypt.

  Resuming their co-rule, ‘Pharaohs Ptolemy and Cleopatra, manifest gods’ were keen to maintain relations with their Egyptian subjects: they took up residence in the royal palace at Memphis, received petitions at the ‘window of appearances’ and dined with the local elite. During a progress south in 156 BC they attended ceremonials for the Buchis bull in Thebes, carried out work at Edfu, Esna and Philae, and founded a new temple at Ombos (Kom Ombo). It was dedicated jointly to the crocodile god Sobek and Horus the Elder (‘Haroeris’), and its sanctuary was partly paid for by the local garrison, demonstrating their loyalty to the popular royal couple.

  Similar feelings were displayed by their Jewish troops after the couple gave sanctuary to the Jewish high priest Onias IV following the sacking of Jerusalem’s Temple by their mutual adversary Antiochos IV. Ptolemy and Cleopatra gave him the ancient Delta site of Leontopolis (modern Tell el-Yahudiya, ‘Mound of the Jews’) and permission to replace an ancient temple of the cat goddess Bastet with a scaled-down version of the Jerusalem Temple. This clever move brought Jewish settlers into the vulnerable border region and harnessed their military prowess to guard the route to Memphis.

  With military bases around the Aegean, the couple were held in high regard throughout the Greek world, although over in Cyrene their younger brother Ptolemy VIII continued to gain Roman support by leaving his possessions to Rome in his will; he even proposed marriage to a hugely wealthy Roman matron, but she turned him down. Becoming a father when his partner Eirene gave birth to his eldest son, Ptolemy Apion, the eighth Ptolemy was nevertheless written out of the Egyptian succession when his elder siblings produced children of their own, appointing their eldest son Ptolemy Eupator (‘of distinguished lineage’) as their heir and then, on his early death, his younger brother Ptolemy VII. Yet it would be the couple’s two daughters who produced the future monarchs of the Ptolemaic and Seleucid houses in a family tree so complex that it is best described as a ‘genealogical cobweb’.

  After a determined Ptolemy VI finally took Syria he married his eldest child, Cleopatra Thea, to the Seleucid king Balas — who proved so ineffectual that Ptolemy VI annulled the marriage and accepted the throne for himself. Crowned at a great ceremony in Antioch, he then gave his daughter away for a second time to Balas’ rival; Balas himself was soundly defeated by Ptolemy VI and his new son-in-law. But at the moment of his greatest triumph the forty-one-year-old Ptolemy VI, king of Ptolemaic Egypt and Seleucid Syria, was thrown from his horse and fell into a coma, onl
y gaining consciousness to see Balas’ severed head just before he died.

  Although Cleopatra II immediately made her seventeen-year-old son Ptolemy VII co-regent, news soon reached Cyrene. So Ptolemy VIII invaded Egypt, his promise to spare the new king if Cleopatra II married him ending at the wedding feast when the young king was murdered ‘in his mother’s arms’. Then, in a mass purge of all those who had supported the previous regime, Ptolemy VIII ‘murdered many of the Alexandrians; not a few he sent into exile, and filled the islands and towns with men who had grown up with his brother’. Inevitably Ptolemy VIII has been portrayed as a monster of epic proportions. His official title of ‘Euergetes’ or ‘Benefactor’ became ‘Kakergertes’, ‘Malefactor’, and although the Alexandrians also knew him as ‘Tryphon’, meaning ‘the Opulent’ or ‘the Decadent’, they usually called him ‘Physkon’, ‘Fatty’.

  Spectacularly obese and very short of stature, Physkon’s unfortunate physique was on full display when receiving a Roman delegation in 139 BC. Having magnanimously refused his usual carrying chair, he had personally met his visitors at the harbourside to accompany them the short distance to the palace. Yet, far from being humbled in the presence of the pharaoh, the Romans were highly amused, declaring that ‘already the Alexandrians have derived some fun from our visit. Thanks to us they’re finally seen their king walking!’ And instead of admiring the quality of royal robes made of the finest gauzy linen, his guests recoiled at the sight of a body ‘utterly corrupted with fat and with a belly of such size that it would have been hard to measure it with one’s arms’.