The princess, inherent; daughter of Geb, the first, the daughter of the bull, the great generosity, the daughter of the king, sister and spouse, woman of Upper and Lower Egypt, image of Isis, beloved of Hathor, Mistress of the Two Lands, Arsinoë, who is beloved to her brother, beloved of Atum, Mistress of the Two Lands.15
Arsinoë’s image, both Greek- and Egyptian-style, living and posthumous, spread throughout the Ptolemaic empire on coins, cult vases, statues and reliefs, while back home her name was celebrated in the growing number of towns named, or renamed, Arsinoë. By 256 the reclaimed land of the Faiyum had been renamed the Arsinoite nome, and Arsinoë, assisted by the crocodile god Souchos, had become its patron deity. An early death, in c. 270, had merely enhanced Arsinoë’s status. She was posthumously deified as an individual in her own right, with her personal cult based at Alexandria, where she was served by a priestess known as the basket-bearer (kanephoros). As temples were raised with shrines to both the deified Arsinoë and Arsinoë as half of the Theoi Adelphoi, the canny Ptolemy taxed Egypt’s vineyards to pay for his sister’s new cult. Arsinoë was now one of the Sunnaoi Theoi (‘Temple-Sharing Gods’), and her statue was officially placed beside that of the main deity in all of Egypt’s Greek and Egyptian temples. The Mendes Stela, recovered near Cairo in 1871, shows a scene of Ptolemy II, accompanied by his second wife and son, offering to a ram, to the gods of Mendes and to the deified Arsinoë. The text beneath details the dead queen’s metamorphosis into a goddess:
His Majesty [Ptolemy II] decreed that her image be erected in all the temples. This pleased the priests, for they were aware of her noble attitude towards the gods, and of her excellent deeds to the benefit of all the people … Her name was proclaimed as the beloved of the Ram, the goddess Philadelphos, Arsinoë.16
Arsinoë’s association with sacred rams (an association with the god Amen and the divine Alexander the Great rather than a specific ram cult) is confirmed by coins which show her with a ram’s horn discreetly curling around her ear. Our best preserved images of the deified queen come from the Philae temple. Here just one scene, in Room V, shows Arsinoë standing alone to receive an offering from her husband. In other scenes she appears as the companion of Isis. Arsinoë wears a sheath dress, a full wig, a vulture headdress and her own red crown. She carries a sceptre and the ankh sign of life. She is entirely Egyptian in appearance and virtually identical to Isis. Two and a half centuries after Arsinoë’s death, Cleopatra VII would occasionally don Arsinoë’s personal crown and display the double cornucopia, the Greek horn of plenty, on the reverse of her coins and on at least one of her (assumed) statues. As the double cornucopia was already strongly identified with Arsinoë II, being found on her coins, statues and vase images, Cleopatra’s choice of symbols suggests that she was deliberately identifying herself not only with Isis, but also with the politically powerful and still-popular Arsinoë II, who was herself identified with Isis.
Arsinoë II clearly had an enormous influence on the developing political and religious role of the Ptolemaic queen. Cleopatra I expanded the role further, drawing on the traditional Egyptian theology which allowed a mother to serve as regent for her infant son by establishing the tradition of the queen regent. Born a Syrian princess, Cleopatra outlived her husband Ptolemy V (died 180), and ruled alongside her son Ptolemy VI. She became a goddess in her own lifetime, taking the title Thea, and was the first queen to mint her own coins. Her reign marks another substantial increase in the power of the Ptolemaic women, and a corresponding decrease in the power of the Ptolemaic men.
In 168 the goddess Isis spoke in a dream to Hor of Sebennytos, who recorded his dream on an ostracon. This was discovered in modern times in the ruins of the Sakkara Serapeum, where Hor had lived and worked in the ibis shrine of Thoth:
I was told in a dream: Isis, the great goddess of Egypt and the land of Syria, walks upon the face of the waters of the Syrian sea. Thoth stands before her and takes her hand. She has reached the harbour at Alexandria. She says ‘Alexandria is safe against the enemy. Pharaoh resides within it with his brethren. His eldest son wears the crown. This son’s son wears the crown after him. The son of the son of the son of this son wears the crown after him, for a great length of days. The proof of this is that the queen bears a male child.’17
The Egyptians were famed throughout the ancient world for their oracles and their dream interpretations. Hor’s dream, however, needs little in-depth analysis. It illustrates the general acceptance of a strong link between the goddess Isis and the mortal queen who is destined to become the mother of the next Horus king. In this case the queen in question is Cleopatra II, daughter of Cleopatra I and, at the time of the dream, sister-wife of Ptolemy VI. Isis was only half correct in her prophecy. The Ptolemaic dynasty would indeed continue, but the sons born to Cleopatra II would all die untimely deaths and it would be Cleopatra’s daughter, Cleopatra III, who maintained her line.
The late second century BC saw the royal house plagued by near-disastrous inter-family strife as brother kings Ptolemy VI and Ptolemy VIII competed for the throne. This dynastic uncertainty had the effect of strengthening rather than weakening the role of their queens, with Ptolemy VIII in particular realising that an association with a powerful divine consort could only enhance his own position. As consort to Ptolemy VI, Cleopatra II earned the respect of the Alexandrians and achieved a status approaching political equality with her brother. As consort to Ptolemy VIII she was challenged by her daughter Cleopatra III, who was also married to Ptolemy VIII. Ptolemy favoured the younger Cleopatra, yet was unable to strip his sister of her power, and his simultaneous queens became known as Cleopatra the Sister and Cleopatra the Wife. As an abandoned wife, Cleopatra II claimed sole rulership of Egypt as Clepatra Thea Philometor Soteira (Cleopatra the Mother-Loving Goddess, the Saviour).
Cleopatra III was, even by Ptolemaic standards, a particularly ruthless woman. On 18 February 142 she gave birth to her stepfather’s son, a rival to her half-brother born to Cleopatra II. The day was considered a particularly auspicious one, as it was also the birth date of the new Apis bull. Cleopatra was rewarded with a string of religious promotions and, in 140, marriage. Even before she became queen, Cleopatra was given a personal divinity. Following her marriage she became the living embodiment of Isis. The earlier Ptolemaic queens Arsinoë II, Berenice II, Arsinoë III and Cleopatra I had each, to a greater or lesser extent, been associated with Isis as the mother of Horus. This, however, was very different. Cleopatra III was totally identified with the goddess in all her aspects: queen and goddess essentially became one. The new cult was served by a male priest known as the ‘Holy Colt of Isis Great Mother of the Gods’; this was a significant development, as earlier queens’ cults had been served by priestesses. Cleopatra was by now the most divine of the Ptolemaic queens. Yet her role as Isis incarnate was apparently not enough. Following the death of Ptolemy VIII she awarded herself three further cults intended to reflect specific aspects of her divine persona. Records now make reference to priestesses known as the ‘crown-bearer’ (stephanophoros), the ‘torch-bearer’ (phosphoros) and the priestess of ‘Queen Cleopatra, the Mother-Loving Goddess, the Saviour, Mistress of Justice, Bringer of Victory’. To modern eyes this is incomprehensible: why would the all-powerful Isis wish to add to her already boundless divinity? No explanation is offered, but it seems that Cleopatra may simply have wished to ensure that her priestesses outranked the individual Alexandrian cult priestesses of her predecessors: the ‘basket-bearer’ of Arsinoë II, the ‘victory-bearer’ (athlophoros) of Berenice II and the priestess of Arsinoë III.
A century after the death of Cleopatra III, Cleopatra VII used a combination of ancient Egyptian and recent Ptolemaic tradition to develop her own powerful divinity. Slowly but steadily, she rewarded herself with religious titles. In 36 she became the Thea Neotera (Younger Goddess, a title which suggested an association with Cleopatra Thea, daughter of Ptolemy VI and highly successful queen of Syria. Two years later she was form
ally proclaimed the Nea Isis (New Isis), a title that distinguished her from the earlier Ptolemaic incarnation of Isis, Cleopatra III, while linking her to her father, the New Dionysos. The cult of Cleopatra-Isis was to prove popular throughout Egypt, and long after the introduction of Christianity a statue of the goddess queen was still being maintained on Philae Island. A graffito scribbled by Petesenufe, Scribe of the Book of Isis, in AD 373 tells us, ‘I overlaid the [wooden] figure of Cleopatra with gold.’
CHAPTER SIX
Cleopatra and Mark Antony
…The princesses of the house of the Ptolemies had always apparently been very much averse to taking casual lovers, especially from outside the royal house. They were not, like later Roman imperial ladies, both murderous and adulterous. They were murderous and chaste.
Michael Grant, Cleopatra1
Cleopatra now ruled Egypt for three difficult but essentially peaceful years. Seneca tells how, for ‘two years in succession, under Cleopatra’s administration, during her tenth and eleventh years [42 and 41] the Nile did not flood’.2 These worryingly low inundations resulted in failing crops, high inflation and, despite an extensive relief programme, hunger, plague and civil unrest. Persistent inflation would force Cleopatra to lower the silver content of her coins, making them compatible, in terms of silver content, with the Roman denarius. At the same time she increased the production of bronze coins at the Alexandria mint, while cutting their weight by as much as 75 per cent. To prevent traders simply weighing out the reduced-value coins, she had them inscribed with their official denominations (40 and 80 drachmas), a simple but highly effective move which forced acceptance of the coin’s nominal value.
On 12 April 41 a decree was issued to protect city-dwelling landowners from harassment by over-zealous tax collectors. Josephus tells us that Cleopatra was able to feed the people of Alexandria but ‘refused to distribute the necessary grain to the Jews’, presumably because they were not full citizens.3 This allegation is unconfirmed and, given the strong Jewish support for Cleopatra and Caesar during the Alexandrian Wars, seems unlikely, particularly as we find Cleopatra now renewing a grant of asylum originally made for a Jewish temple (possibly the temple in the Delta town of Leontopolis) by either Ptolemy III or Ptolemy VIII. Southern Egypt coped well under these trying conditions: a stela set up at Karnak some time between 44 and 39 mentions the heroic efforts of the epistratagos Callimachos, who apparently saved the city during the years of famine. His achievements were to be celebrated by public festivals held on his birthday.
On 14 July 41, in Cleopatra’s Year 11, the high priest of Ptah, Pasherenptah III, died. His funerary stela (known as the Harris Stela), recovered from his Sakkara tomb and now in the British Museum, tells a story of elite Egyptian life outside Alexandria. Pasherenptah came from a long line of hereditary priests who formed a parallel, supportive religious dynasty to the Ptolemies. Pasherenptah himself appears at the top of his stela, wearing the panther skin and the side-lock hairstyle (a ponytail worn on the side of an otherwise shaven head) that identify him as a priest of Ptah of Memphis. Below, in a beautifully carved hieroglyphic text, we read a series of offering formulae for the deceased, then an autobiography.4 This tells how, as a newly appointed priest just fourteen years old, Pasherenptah officiated at the coronation of Auletes, whom he, in his Egyptian text, describes as the ‘Young Osiris’ rather than the ‘New Dionysos’. Relationships between the king and his priest were cordial. Pasherenptah travelled to Alexandria, where he was crowned with a golden chaplet and made a priest of Auletes’s own cult, and Auletes paid frequent visits to Memphis, where he stayed at the Serapeum palace with ‘his chiefs, his women and royal children’.5 The king was happy to play his part in the regular religious festivals, maintaining an obvious royal presence in the traditional cults. There was just one sadness. Pasherenptah had several daughters, but no son to follow him as high priest of Ptah. Finally, when he was forty-three years old, the god Imhotep heard his prayers. A much-wanted son was born and named Imhotep in honour of the god; later Imhotep would be known as the high priest of Ptah Pedibastet III. The limestone stela (also in the British Museum) of Tayimhotep, wife of Pasherenptah III, tells us that she died at thirty years of age, a year before her husband. Her autobiography confirms the story of her son’s miraculous birth and ends with a poignant plea:
The west, it is a land of sleep,
Darkness weighs on the dwelling-place,
Those who are there sleep in their mummy-forms.
They wake not to see their brothers,
They see not their fathers, their mothers,
Their hearts forget their wives, their children …
Say to me ‘You are not far from water’.
Turn my face to the north wind at the edge of the water,
Perhaps my heart will then be cooled in its grief.6
In spite of her economic problems, Cleopatra found herself in a more secure position than ever before. With both her brothers dead, her sister in exile and their supporters removed, she had absolute power and no obvious rival to form a rallying point for dissidents. Her coruler was an infant who, although invaluable for propaganda purposes, posed no threat to her authority. Caesarion, Ptolemy Caesar Theos Philopator Philometor (‘the Father-Loving, Mother-Loving God’), was proclaimed king of Egypt in Alexandria in the summer of 44.
In the wider Mediterranean world things were far from peaceful. The second triumvirate of Caesar’s friend Mark Antony, his great-nephew and heir Octavian and his supporter Marcus Aemilius Lepidus had united in their determination to capture Caesar’s principal assassins, Brutus and Cassius. They were intent on public revenge and Egypt – still, in spite of her suffering, the richest land in the eastern Mediterranean – was expected to provide practical help. Meanwhile, Brutus and Cassius, having realised that they had few friends in Rome, were looking to the eastern provinces for support and they, too, expected Egypt to help. When Cassius occupied Syria and formed an alliance with the powerful king of Parthia (whose extensive territories covered much of modern Iran and Iraq), Cleopatra was forced to take sides. She hesitated as long as she could, then committed herself by returning the four Roman legions, stationed in Egypt by Caesar in 48, to the triumvirs’ general, Publius Cornelius Dolabella, who was now in Syria. As an acknowledgement of her support, or as payment for services rendered, the triumvirs officially recognised Caesarion as coruler of Egypt. This decision would, it was hoped, persuade Cleopatra, mother of Caesar’s natural son, to continue to support Octavian, Caesar’s legal heir.
Cassius had been able to intercept and subvert Cleopatra’s Roman troops. They had changed sides without putting up a fight and were now stationed with his own legions along Egypt’s north-eastern border. When Cassius appealed directly to Cleopatra for aid – surely a prelude to invasion – she pleaded famine, plague and a manpower shortage that would prevent her from taking any direct part in the war. Meanwhile, Serapion, strategos or governor of Cyprus, had unilaterally declared his support for Cassius and had supplied him with ships. It seems that Serapion was planning to depose Cleopatra in favour of Arsinoë IV, who, currently living in the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, had maintained close contact with Cyprus. When, in 42, Brutus summoned Cassius and his troops to Smyrna, the threat of invasion lifted and Cleopatra breathed a huge sigh of relief.
Now openly on the side of the triumvirs, Cleopatra raised a fleet and set sail to join Octavian and Antony in Greece. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), a mighty Mediterranean storm blew up, her ships sustained serious damage and Cleopatra herself fell ill, possibly with seasickness. As Egyptian wreckage washed up on the Greek shore, the badly battered fleet limped home to Alexandria. It is impossible not to suspect that this may have been another delaying tactic. If so, it was successful. While Cleopatra waited for a second fleet to be made ready, news came that Brutus and Cassius had committed suicide following a heavy defeat at the two battles of Philippi in Macedon in October 42. Two men now effectively held power in R
ome: Octavian, Caesar’s twenty-one-year-old great-nephew and legal heir, controlled the bulk of Rome’s western empire; while Antony, Caesar’s forty-year-old friend and general, controlled Gaul and the eastern provinces of Achaea (Greece), Asia, Bithynia-Pontus and Cilicia. Lepidus, who was eventually to be given control of Africa, remained a triumvir but was a political nonentity. There remained just one problematic region. Sextus Pompey, the younger son of Pompey the Great, had occupied part of Sicily and could not be dislodged. His ships – pirate ships – were threatening the vital Mediterranean trade networks.
Octavian left the battlefield of Philippi ill – it was widely believed that he was dying – and returned to Rome, leaving Antony to establish control over his eastern territories. Cleopatra and Caesarion were extremely vulnerable in Egypt. They needed a protector and Antony was their natural ally. Not only was he the controller of the east, he was the dominant triumvir: older, more popular and demonstrably healthier than the sickly Octavian. Antony, in turn, needed money. He had promised each of his veterans a reward of 500 drachmas, which he had no means of paying, and he had vowed to resurrect the campaign against the Parthian empire that Julius Caesar had been planning at the time of his death. Success against Parthia would finally avenge Crassus, and would demonstrate to the whole world that Antony was Caesar’s natural, if not his legal, heir. Antony spent the winter of 42/1 raising funds in Greece, then moved on to Ephesus. Here the priestesses of the Artemis temple were persuaded to greet him as the living incarnation of Dionysos the Gracious, ‘Giver of Joy’. He was welcomed into a celebrating city filled with ivy, thyrsos wands, harps, pipes and flutes, dishevelled women dressed as maenads and men and boys dressed like satyrs and Pans. The political implications of this religious honour would not have been lost on Octavian. While he was confined to Rome, the eastern territories were starting to identify Antony as the successor of all the former earthly Dionysoi, including Alexander the Great, the Ptolemies of Egypt and Pompey the Great. As Caesar had been granted posthumous divine honours in 42, his adopted heir Octavian could legitimately claim to be the ‘Son of the Divine Julius’, but this must have seemed poor compensation. Octavian fought back the only way he could: by circulating rumours of his own familial relationship with the Olympian Apollo, who, as an Italian god of light, might reasonably be considered the theological opposite of the dark, eastern Dionysos. Soon everyone knew the story of his mother, Atia, who had fallen asleep in the temple of Apollo and been ravished by a snake. Nine months later, Octavian was born, and Atia was left with an indelible snake mark on her stomach.
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