Cleopatra the Great

by Joann Fletcher

  Following the removal of Rome’s own monarchy almost four centuries earlier, its Republican ideals were completely at odds with the Ptolemies’ opulent display, not to mention the make-up, perfume, wigs and jewellery which had long been favoured by Egyptians of both sexes. As the delegation reported back to the Senate, they had been ‘astonished at the number of inhabitants of Egypt and the natural advantages of the countryside’, adding that ‘a mighty power could be sustained — if this kingdom ever found capable leaders’.

  Yet for all his obvious flaws, Ptolemy Physkon realised that the future lay within Egypt. Whereas his brother had lived by Greek values, he promoted native culture by placing Egyptians in the highest offices and bringing the crown’s relationship with the priests of Memphis to its ultimate conclusion with a dynastic marriage between church and state. As an internal matter ignored in the classical sources, Physkon seems to have married one of his younger daughters, Berenike, presumably born to a minor wife, to the son of the high priest Petubastis I who had crowned him at Memphis in 145 BC. And when Physkon’s co-ruler Cleopatra II gave birth to a son, they named him Ptolemy ‘Memphites’ to strengthen the ties with Egypt’s spiritual capital. The lad then appears as their heir in wall scenes at Edfu temple, a place which was finally inaugurated on 9 September 142 BC in the presence of brother and sister monarchs ‘the Two Horus’.

  Yet co-rule with his older, more popular sister had never suited Physkon, and in a psychological masterstroke he replaced her not only with a younger model but with her own ambitious daughter Cleopatra III. When uncle and niece produced their first child on 18 February 142 BC, the same day that a new Apis bull was born, Cleopatra III began her blatant self-promotion as Living Isis to counteract any divine associations claimed by her mother.

  Although Physkon married his niece once she had delivered the goods, the couple’s attempts to neutralise Cleopatra II proved ineffective. She was determined to hold on to power which was hers by birth rather than marital status, and her popular support meant that uncle and niece were forced to accept their co-ruler in a three-way monarchy. Differentiated as ‘the sister’ and ‘the wife’ when appearing together, it was ‘the wife’, Cleopatra III, who proved the most productive for by 135 BC she had five children — the future Ptolemies IX and X and their three sisters Cleopatra Tryphaena, Cleopatra IV and Cleopatra Selene.

  Fearing for her one remaining son, Memphites, as he approached adulthood, the forty-something Cleopatra II sent him to Cyrene before launching her solo bid for the throne. Following pitched battles around the palace, her Jewish troops and the Alexandrians finally ousted Physkon and his brood in 132 BC. Stripped of his titles, his statues pulled down, Physkon fled to Cyprus as Kleopatra II declared herself sole ruler of Egypt under the deeply provocative title ‘Mother-Loving Saviour Goddess’. She had not only reverted to her former husband’s title ‘Mother Loving’, but the ‘Saviour’ part of her title derived from the first Ptolemy in order to reveal her dynastic ambitions, for, as Physkon rightly suspected, she was going to recall fourteen-year-old Memphites and make him her co-ruler. So Physkon acted first, summoning their son to Cyprus where he killed him. He then mutilated his body and sent the pieces back to his mother, who displayed them to the Alexandrians to show what their former king had done.

  Although Cleopatra II then reigned alone for a year, she fled to Antioch with the royal treasury when Physkon eventually retook Alexandria, killing her key supporters by burning them alive inside the Gymnasion arena. Yet, as widespread unrest once more broke out around Thebes, Physkon had little choice but to agree to a reconciliation and Cleopatra II resumed her official role as ‘the sister’ alongside her despised brother and daughter.

  As part of their attempts to regain control abroad Physkon and Cleopatra III sent their eldest son, Ptolemy IX, to govern Cyprus. In Seleucid Syria they continued their game of dynastic one-upmanship against Cleopatra II, whose eldest child, Thea, had ruled here following marriage to three Seleucid kings. Having proposed to one, killed another and even shot one of her sons with a bow and arrow, Thea had reluctantly accepted her teenage son Antiochus VIII Grypus, ‘hook-nose’, as her co-ruler until it was suggested that he should marry Physkon’s eldest daughter, Tryphaena, and make her queen. This time trying poison to kill her son and prevent the union, Grypus insisted that his mother drank it first, with fatal results.

  Having lost four of her five children to her brother Physkon’s ambitions — two of her sons murdered by him, her daughter Thea now dead and her youngest child her deadly rival — Cleopatra II at least had the satisfaction of outliving her detested younger brother, who died in his bed on 28 June 116 BC. She would have been unsurprised to be left out of his will: Physkon left Cyrene to his eldest son, Ptolemy Apion, and Egypt and Cyprus to Cleopatra III ‘and whichever of her sons she would make co-regent’. In fact she preferred her younger, more pliable son, but her mother and the Alexandrians insisted that the elder became king. So, in a new three-way monarchy spanning three generations, the two Cleopatras, mother and daughter, were joined by twenty-six-year-old Ptolemy IX Soter nicknamed ‘Lathyrus’ or ‘Chickpea’, whose long curly hair was often topped by an eagle-skin headdress. But although the old lady had finally imposed her will on the succession, Cleopatra II died soon afterwards, having spent almost sixty eventful years on the throne.

  Finally free of the two monarchs who had dominated her life and most of the second century BC, Cleopatra III became pharaoh, ‘Female Horus’ and ‘daughter of Ra’, her name always written before that of a co-ruler she was planning to be rid of, and the ancient sources admitting that ‘we know of none of the kings so hated by his mother’. Yet Cleopatra III used all her children for political ends. With her eldest daughter Tryphaena finally married to Grypus of Syria, her middle daughter Cleopatra IV, who had been married to her brother Ptolemy Chickpea, was forced to divorce him when he became co-ruler, for their mother did not want her headstrong daughter as a rival. The furious Cleopatra IV then moved to Syria and married her cousin Antiochus IX, whose war with his half-brother Grypus and his wife Tryphaena soon had the sisters at war too. When Tryphaena ordered the murder of her younger sibling who was hiding out in a shrine of Apollo, her hands hacked off as she clung desperately to the god’s statue, Antiochus IX took his revenge by sacrificing Tryphaena to the spirit of her sister, his dead wife.

  Back in Egypt Cleopatra III still had one daughter left, the young Cleopatra Selene, whom she married off to Chickpea to create a triple monarchy of mother, son and daughter, with Cleopatra III always taking precedence. Chickpea and Selene produced several children. Chickpea concentrated on his religious duties as priest of Alexander and supporter of the sacred animal cults, and in 115 BC he travelled through his kingdom to celebrate the Festival of the Inundation at Elephantine. Seizing her chance to exchange Chickpea for her younger son, Cleopatra III claimed that Chickpea had tried to kill her. The mob went for him, and he only just managed to escape with his life. Forced to leave behind his sister-wife Selene and their children, two of whom seem to have been named Ptolemy, Cleopatra III was now free to rule with her obedient youngest son Ptolemy X, who emphasised his official title ‘Alexander F by borrowing his illustrious namesake’s distinctive helmet with white feathers. He also took over the role of Alexander’s priest from his deposed brother, at least until his mother fancied this previously male role for herself, even adopting Alexander’s elephant-skin headdress. Although her use of traditional male attire followed that of her pharaonic female predecessors, Cleopatra Ill’s presentation of herself on equal terms with a male king often resulted in overtly masculine portrayals, with some of her images so far from the feminine ideal as to appear decidedly grim.

  Also taking over traditional male roles within Egypt’s temples, it was she who stood alone before Horus at Edfu, while at the rock-cut temple of el-Kab she performed solo rituals under the extraordinary title ‘Female Horus, Lady of Upper and Lower Egypt, Mighty Bull’. So not only was she now
divine, she had defied gender ‘to become both king and queen, both god and goddess’, and was worshipped as the Living Isis Cleopatra-Aphrodite with no fewer than five personal cults. But her rampant megalomania was clearly too much for the Alexandrians who referred to her as ‘Kokke’, ‘the scarlet one’, a slang term for female genitals and surely the most unpleasant of all the Ptolemies’ unofficial epithets.

  Certainly her eldest son Chickpea had real cause to hate her. He had escaped to Cyprus with little more than his life but his mother had sent a hit squad after him, forcing him to flee to the Seleucid court of his brother-in-law Antiochus IX with whose backing he managed to retake Cyprus and plan his invasion of Egypt. Yet his relentless mother really knew how to twist the knife, gaining the support of the widowed Grypus by sending him her remaining daughter, Chickpea’s abandoned wife Selene. It seems she even took away their two sons, together with a son of Ptolemy X. They were packed off by ship with all that Cleopatra III really held dear — her will, a vast treasure of coins, works of art, precious stones and ‘women’s ornaments’ — to the safety of Asklepios’ shrine on Kos.

  Mother and son then faced each other in the so-called ‘War of the Sceptres’. Cleopatra Ill’s Egyptian land forces, led by the Jewish generals Chelkias and Ananias and supported by Ptolemy X in command of the navy, managed to defeat Chickpea and won back much of Syria. Yet within a few months of her greatest victory Cleopatra III was dead, just short of her sixtieth birthday, and said to have been murdered by Ptolemy X, her younger son. Ptolemy X now married his niece Berenike III, who took the dynastic name ‘Cleopatra’ on marriage to an uncle who very much resembled his notorious father Physkon. Although the tenth Ptolemy was so fat that he needed at least two people to support him, ‘when it came to the rounds of dancing at a drinking party he would jump from a high couch barefoot as he was and perform the figures in a livelier fashion than those who had practiced them’. Much preferring his elder brother Chickpea, the Alexandrian Greeks dismissed him as ‘Kokke’s child’.

  His relations with the Egyptians were very different, however, particularly since the royals and the Memphis priests were now related after ‘the younger sister of the King Ptolemy men called Alexander’ had married the high priest Pasherenptah. When their teenage son and ‘half-Ptolemy’ Petubastis II succeeded his father he was anointed high priest by his uncle Ptolemy X in Alexandria, and ‘drank in the presence of the king. He [the king] handed out unto him the golden crook, mace, robe of linen from the southern house and the leather garment according to the ritual of Ptah’s festivals and solemn processions. He [the king] placed his golden ornaments on his head according to the custom of his forefathers in the 17th year of his age.’

  Clearly revealing the intimate relationship between the country’s secular and religious leaders, Ptolemy X and Cleopatra-Berenike III paid regular visits to Memphis and granted increased privileges to many native temples, particularly Horus’ temple at Athribis which the king himself described as ‘a first-class and remarkable temple, one of the most ancient and most famous’. Yet the regular turnover of monarchs had caused such problems for the stonemasons that they began to leave the royal cartouches blank, and when rebellion broke out in Thebes yet again they abandoned work altogether.

  The huge territory of Cyrene was lost in 96 BC after Ptolemy Apion had bequeathed it to Rome, and with the Romans right up against its western border Egypt’s fortunes looked so bleak that Ptolemy X was deposed by his Greek troops in 89 BC and fled to the court of his powerful sister Selene. After her husband Grypus had been assassinated in 96 BC she had proposed to his half-brother Antiochus IX, and at his death made her twenty-year-old stepson and nephew Antiochus X husband number four. Then aged forty, she gave her young husband two sons, the last Seleucid kings, and now helped her brother Ptolemy X assemble a mercenary army and march back into Egypt.

  Yet, unable to pay his troops, he had turned in desperation to his namesake, entering the Soma’s subterranean burial chamber in Alexandria and approaching the mummy of Alexander. He then committed the most terrible act of sacrilege, for ‘Ptolemy X Alexander I removed the gold sarcophagus of Alexander the Great and substituted one of glass’. When they found out that the precious gold coffin of their beloved Alexander had been melted down to pay those who had fought against them, the Alexandrians were so incensed that they drove Ptolemy X from Egypt, pursued him north to Cyprus and killed him in a sea battle.

  With his younger brother killed literally on his doorstep, a jubilant Chickpea immediately set out to Egypt to become pharaoh for a second time. Celebrating a second coronation at Memphis, led by his nephew Petubastis II, he retained his daughter Cleopatra-Berenike III as co-ruler since she was, as even the Romans knew, ‘extremely popular with the Alexandrians’. Then he turned his attentions to the ongoing rebellion in the south. Those still loyal to the crown were reassured that ‘the greatest god, Soter the king, has reached Memphis, and that Hierax has been despatched with considerable forces to bring Thebes under control. We wanted to inform you so that you, knowing this, take courage. Farewell.’

  Although the ‘considerable forces’ proved effective and Thebes was thoroughly sacked, the threat from abroad suddenly became very real when the Romans claimed that Ptolemy X had made a will leaving Egypt to them. Yet, immersed in their own problems, many Romans felt that anyone sent to Egypt as governor might prove a serious threat to the stability of their already shaky Republic. So, under the leadership of Cornelius Sulla acting as official Dictator, it was decided to let Chickpea carry on as king for now.

  To keep a close eye on events, Sulla’s general Lucullus arrived in Alexandria in 86 BC and was warmly received by Chickpea, who presented him with an emerald carved with the royal likeness. Housed in the palace guest quarters, Lucullus was so impressed by his rich and cultured surroundings that he began to acquire books for his own house in Rome and incurred ‘great expenses in collecting Greek art’, copying his master, Sulla, who had stripped out the Greek sites of Olympia, Delphi, Epidaurus and Athens to bring some much-needed, albeit borrowed, culture to Rome. Yet as the Republic disappeared beneath piles of eastern wealth, many Romans blamed its inevitable decline on ‘loose foreign morals’ and the ‘filthy lucre’ brought in from abroad.

  This same foreign wealth had also come from Rome’s war against Mithridates VI of Pontus, who had seized the island of Kos in 88 BC and taken the treasure of Cleopatra III back to his court along with her three grandsons. When Sulla came to Pontus for peace negotiations, one of these princes, the son of Ptolemy X, managed to reach Sulla’s camp and, returning with him to Rome, became a most useful informant on all matters Ptolemaic.

  Chickpea died at the age of sixty-one in 81 BC, leaving Cleopatra-Berenike III his sole heir, and Rome seized its chance to intervene. Exploiting the Ptolemaic tradition of co-rule between a male and female monarch, Sulla sent over his young protege Prince Ptolemy to take the throne alongside his popular, albeit elderly, stepmother and cousin. Although the Alexandrians dubbed him ‘Pareisactus’, ‘the Usurper’, Ptolemy XI was fully entitled to the position of co-regent. But, clearly unwilling to be junior partner to a woman after so many years away from court, he murdered her after eighteen days’ co-rule. As any adviser could have told him, this was not a wise move: in time-honoured fashion the Alexandrians stormed the palace, dragged the king to the Gymnasion and tore him to pieces with a violence not seen since they avenged the deaths of Berenike II and Arsinoe III back in 203 BC.

  Then, despite the dubious claim that young Ptolemy XI had left everything to Rome in his will, the Alexandrians exercised their Macedonian rights in selecting the next king and sent a delegation to Pontus to offer the crowns of Egypt and Cyprus to the two remaining prince Ptolemies, the ‘heir and the spare’. They were most likely the sons of Chickpea and Selene, but the Romans, wishing to bolster their own claims to Egypt, declared them illegitimate. Even if they had been born to one of Chickpea’s minor wives, usually termed ‘mistresses’ or �
��concubines’ by a monogamous culture like Rome, such accusations were a nonsense in Egypt or indeed Macedonia, where the modern interpretation of legitimacy was not a prerequisite to royal office.

  Regardless of Rome’s opinion the newly appointed King Ptolemy of Egypt, a rather gaunt, hook-nosed individual in his mid-twenties, arrived at the end of 80 BC in Alexandria, a city he had not seen since infancy. In January 79 BC he married Cleopatra V Tryphaena, most likely a daughter of Chickpea and perhaps Selene, for the new couple were named ‘the Father-Loving Gods’ and ‘the Brother-and-Sister-Loving Gods’. They clearly took this divinity very seriously, for whereas previous kings were addressed ‘our lord the king’, petitions to Ptolemy XII were headed ‘our god and lord the king’. He also took the title ‘Neos Dionysos’, first used by Ptolemy IV whose Dionysiac skills were now displayed by the new king who played the pipes with such skill he was ‘not a man but a piper [auletes] and magician [magos]’, and was known as ‘Auletes’ (Piper), an honorific title in Dionysos’ cult. Such musical abilities were greatly admired among even the military-minded Spartans, and music suffused Greek culture in much the same way as drama, which had also begun as a rite of Dionysos. Dramas were regularly staged by Auletes, dressed in flowing mantle, ivy wreath and small horns, and he expected those attending court to join in with him to pay homage to the god of the Ptolemaic house. Yet the Romans found such practices offensive, and, believing men should never dance or get drunk in public and should never wear anything less than proper male attire, the writer Livy voiced the opinions of many Romans who felt the Macedonians in Egypt ‘degenerarunt’ — ‘have degenerated’.