Cleopatra the Great

by Joann Fletcher

  Degenerate banquets aside, the first five years of Auletes’ reign were comparatively uneventful, although there seems to have been some distance between the king and his cousin, the high priest Petubastis II, who certainly had a claim to the throne himself. Yet, since Auletes’ claim was stronger, it seems that Petubastis II was content to observe the rightful order of succession, remaining the spiritual leader of the Egyptians from his power base at Memphis until his death in 76 BC. The accession of his fourteen-year-old son and successor Pasherenptah III seems to have brought about a reconciliation since he was invested as new high priest in a grand ceremony in Alexandria. ‘The king himself halted his war chariot. He arrayed my head for me with the glorious chaplet of gold and all the genuine precious stones, the royal effigy being in its midst. I was made his prophet.’

  Suitably empowered by his royal cousin Auletes, Pasherenptah III returned the favour with a belated coronation at Memphis at which Ptolemy XII Philopator Philadelphos Neos Dionysos was given the traditional Egyptian epithets ‘Heir of the Saviour God, Chosen One of Ptah, the Image of Truth’. As the teenage high priest proudly announced, ‘It is me who placed the uraeus [royal serpent on the crown] upon the king on the day of Uniting-the-Two-Lands for him and also carried out for him all the ceremonies in the Mansion of the Jubilee. It is me who conducted all the offices concealed from the public eye.’ The same obscure sources then state that the royal family undertook a progress of their country before returning to a state banquet in Memphis where the king, ‘with his courtiers, his wives, the royal children with his lordly possessions were sitting at meal and were spending a pleasant time while assisting at festivals of all gods and goddesses’.

  Although Auletes and Cleopatra V Tryphaena had produced a daughter, Berenike IV, some time between 80 and 75 BC, reference to ‘his wives’ and ‘the royal children’ reveal that there were other women whose children were formally recognised as legitimate by the Egyptians, despite Roman claims that Berenike IV was Auletes’ only ‘legitimate’ issue simply because she had been born to his first wife, Cleopatra V Tryphaena. Yet Tryphaena then fell from favour for some reason, since her name is omitted from official records after August 69 BC when a second daughter is known to have been born to a woman whose identity, age and even nationality are unknown.

  And it is a mystery made all the more frustrating because that child was Cleopatra the Great.

  PART TWO

  Chapter 3

  The Goddess Comes Forth: Cleopatra’s Early Life

  It has been suggested that Cleopatra’s mother, presumably one of Auletes’ minor wives mentioned in Egyptian sources, was a noblewoman of Memphis’ priestly dynasty. If so, it would certainly explain Cleopatra’s deep understanding of both the native culture and its language. Yet with no direct proof for such an attractive suggestion, others have estimated that Cleopatra was 32 parts Greek, 27 parts Macedonian and 5 parts Persian. And despite intermittent pairings of brothers and sisters throughout the Ptolemaic line, in which morbid obesity and mental instability did occur from time to time, Cleopatra herself seems to have exhibited no such traits.

  She shared her earliest years with her elder sister Berenike IV and three younger siblings — a sister called Arsinoe born some time between 69 and 65 BC, and two brothers, both named Ptolemy, who were born in 61 BC and around 59 BC respectively. The elder boy is known to have been placed in the care of a eunuch named Potheinos, who was his nurse (‘nutricius’). All born to a mother or mothers unknown, Auletes’ four youngest children were regarded as completely legitimate in Egyptian eyes and collectively hailed ‘Our lords and greatest gods’. So, addressed as a ‘goddess’ (‘thea’) from birth, Cleopatra would have been well aware of her divine status, particularly on royal visits to the Soma where her father, resplendent in his official regalia of gold crown and purple cloak as Alexander’s high priest, led the rites before the body of their fabled ancestor.

  The family’s status was also enhanced by blood ties with Pasherenptah III, high priest of Memphis, who acted as ‘the eyes of the king of Upper Egypt the ears of the king of Lower Egypt’. His status as royal confidant was shared by Horankh, high priest of Letopolis, whose family had long intermarried with the Memphis priesthood and who was sufficiently supportive of Auletes to be called the ‘god’s beloved and friend of the King’.

  Rewarded by generous tax exemptions, Auletes’ priestly supporters maintained stability throughout the country. In a new wave of temple contraction, at Tanis, Medamud and Kom Ombo, a monumental pylon gateway at Edfu had been decorated with huge figures of Auletes smiting his enemies, together with companion figures of his sister-wife Cleopatra V Tryphaena, ‘daughter of the sun god’, later covered over after her apparent fall from favour.

  To fund such projects, a depleted royal treasury compounded by recent bad harvests was partly refilled when Auletes re-established direct trade with India. He appointed a ‘military overseer of the Red and Indian Seas’ to deal with attacks by the Nabatean Arabs (from the region of modern Jordan), who resented that they were no longer required as middle men, and resumed the export of textiles, wine, glass and slaves from the Horn of Africa. Traded for spices, resins, precious stones, ebony, ivory and silk, and processed in the factories of Alexandria, such commodities were re-exported to the rest of the world for huge profits.

  Yet such wealth made Auletes’ kingdom even more attractive to the Romans, particularly since Sulla’s protege Ptolemy XI was said to have left Egypt to Rome in his will. When Sulla’s dictatorship ended in 78 BC power came to be shared by three ambitious generals, Gnaeus Pompeius (Pompey) Magnus, Gaius Julius Caesar and Marcus Licinius Crassus. Crassus demanded that Egypt should be taken.

  Forced to buy time and keep his kingdom safe from invasion with a series of well-placed bribes to various members of the Roman Senate, Auletes also helped fund Pompeius’ campaign against Mithridates VI of Pontus. Mithridates suicide allowed Rome to strip his kingdom of assets, including the former treasury of the Ptolemies which Mithridates had originally seized from Kos. Such was the booty Pompeius brought back to Rome that the Senate awarded him a Triumph, a Roman version of the Ptolemaia festival but dependent on at least five thousand of the enemy having been killed in the conflict. Mithridates’ widow and two daughters were paraded through the city as the climax of the triumphal procession, and the accompanying portrait head of Pompeius made entirely from looted pearls caused a public sensation. Conscious that he was being overshadowed in the popularity stakes, Caesar began to look for ways to compete with Pompeius who had not only assumed Alexander’s epithet ‘the Great’, but even his distinctive hairstyle with its raised lock of hair over the brow, a feature that Caesar’s famously receding locks could never hope to replicate.

  Rome then turned its attentions to the once mighty Seleucid empire, whose widowed monarch Selene had sent her two sons to Rome in 75 BC to claim the thrones of Syria and Egypt as their birthright. Yet Rome had no intention of supporting any such claim: Pompeius was sent east to take Judaea with Auletes’ financial support and Egypt was effectively surrounded, with Roman troops permanently stationed on its northeastern as well as its western borders after Physkon’s son Apion had handed over Cyrene in 96 BC.

  As the piecemeal conquest of Alexander’s former empire brought the Romans ever closer, the young Cleopatra would have grown up fully aware of the danger they posed to her family’s future. Yet, as her father continued to bankroll Pompeius, she would also have witnessed how their inexorable advance could be halted by financial means. The traditional Ptolemaic display of wealth, exemplified by the lavish banquets held in Pompeius’ honour, confirmed Auletes an easy source of cash, and as the handouts continued only fear of a Roman takeover prevented the Alexandrians from staging outright rebellion.

  They were forced instead to vent their frustrations in sporadic violence. One eyewitness reported that when ‘one of the Romans killed a cat and the multitude rushed in a crowd to his house, neither the officials sent by t
he king to beg the man off nor the fear of Rome which all the people felt were enough to save the man from punishment, even though his act had been an accident’. This event, usually interpreted as evidence that the Egyptians were a nation of animal lovers, takes a far more significant twist when set against the anti-Roman atmosphere of 60 BC.

  That same year Pompeius, Crassus and Caesar formed the first Triumvirate, a three-way power-sharing arrangement cemented by Pompeius’ marriage to Caesar’s daughter. As effective rulers of Rome’s Republic, they exploited Auletes’ position to the hilt and in a ‘cash-for-thrones’ scam offered him the all-important title ‘friend and ally of the Roman people’ in recognition of his help in conquering Seleucid territory.

  Although this was the closest thing to a guarantee that Egypt would not be invaded, the title came at a cost of 6000 talents which was most of Egypt’s annual revenue. Given the series of low Nile floods leading to bad harvests, famine and strikes, the money could not be met through trade alone, and tax increases would have caused outright rebellion. Left with little choice, Auletes was forced to borrow vast sums from the wealthy Roman banker Gaius Rabirius Postumus in order to pay Caesar for the long-coveted title. Then when the Romans seized Cyprus from Auletes’ brother Ptolemy in 58 BC, claiming that he had helped pirates disrupt Roman shipping, the proud ruler declined the alternative post of high priest and, preferring to die a king, took poison.

  Having been unwilling to jeopardise his new and costly title ‘friend of Rome’, Auletes had refused to help his brother, and as the Romans seized Cyprus’ treasury the Alexandrians finally rebelled. Exercising their ancient right to implement a change of monarch, they replaced Auletes with his eldest child, Berenike IV, and as co-ruler recalled Cleopatra V Tryphaena from 10 years’ exile from court. Although later historians assumed she must have been another of Auletes’ daughters and numbered her ‘Cleopatra VI’, it seems she was simply the fifth one returning to replace her brother and former husband Auletes.

  Deposed in late summer 58 BC and fearing for his life, Auletes had fled both his palace and his kingdom, although he was not completely alone. For one Greek source reveals he had been accompanied by ‘one of his daughters’, and since his eldest, Berenike IV, was monarch and the youngest, Arsinoe, little more than a toddler, it is generally assumed that this must have been his middle daughter and favourite child, eleven-year-old Cleopatra.

  Leaving Alexandria by ship, father and daughter sailed north and within a week arrived in Rhodes to a warm reception. The inhabitants were long-term allies of the Ptolemies and devotees of Isis. Their celebrated Colossus of Rhodes, a 120-foot bronze sculpture of the Greek sun god Helios with the unmistakeable features of Alexander, had been felled by an earthquake but ‘even lying on the ground it is a marvel’, which must have made a huge impression on the young princess.

  Yet Auletes’ main reason for visiting Rhodes was to meet with the Roman statesman Marcus Porcius Cato, on Rhodes en route to oversee the annexation and asset-stripping of Cyprus. Having summoned the Roman into the royal presence, Auletes was told that on the contrary he must go to Cato, who was then undergoing a laxative treatment of ‘purging medicine’ and seems to have received him on the latrine. For ‘Cato neither went forward to meet him, nor so much as rose up to him, but saluting him as an ordinary person, bade him sit down. This at once threw Ptolemy into some confusion’ as the living god of Egypt was reduced to holding audience in the toilet.

  With little achieved, father and daughter travelled on to a suitably reverential welcome in Athens, a centre of culture and learning second only to Alexandria. Here the Ptolemies had long been worshipped as gods and their statues adorned the Acropolis. The royal visit of Auletes and his daughter was commemorated by an official inscription, and then they set out for Rome. By this time Rome had taken every other part of Alexander’s western empire — Macedonia, Greece, Cyrene, Asia Minor, Syria and most recently Cyprus. Only Egypt remained, which Auletes was determined to get back at any price.

  On arrival in Italy the royals were formally received by Pompeius, who reciprocated their support by offering them one of his sumptuous villas some 30 miles south-east of Rome among the wooded slopes of the Alban Hills. Presumably they would have paid at least one visit to the new temple of Isis on nearby Monte Ginestro near Praeneste (modern Palestrina) — the worship of Isis had already spread as far as Rome, where her temple, destroyed in nationalist riots in the second century BC, had soon been rebuilt on top of the Capitoline Hill, the city’s most prestigious location. And even though foreign gods had been banned only six months before the royal visit, the people had restored them ‘by force’, since Egypt’s deities clearly had a special place in many a Roman heart.

  Although the city’s brick buildings must have proved quite underwhelming to an Alexandrian, Rome’s military power meant that the members of its Senate were now the world’s ultimate power-brokers. They were lobbied and bribed by Auletes until his money ran out and he was forced to borrow more in his attempts to regain his throne. Cleopatra V Tryphaena and Berenike IV were just as determined to prevent his return and sent a delegation of one hundred leading citizens to put their own case to the Senate; but they were either bribed, threatened or some even killed on Auletes’ orders before they ever got the chance. Then came a challenge from Pompeius’ colourful rival Julius Caesar, who tried to have himself elected Governor-General of Egypt by popular vote. Failing to do so, he then headed west with a five-year command of Gaul, leaving Pompeius to dictate the pace in Rome.

  As debate about ‘the Egyptian question’ rumbled on, with little achieved except increasing amounts of cash changing hands, a frustrated and bankrupt Auletes decided to cut his losses and in 57 BC returned east to Ephesus. Once part of the Ptolemies’ empire and the wealthiest city in Asia Minor, Ephesus was an exciting, cosmopolitan place, home to the goddess Artemis whose original temple, burned down on the day Alexander the Great was born, was still being rebuilt when he passed through twenty-two years later en route to Egypt. Having taken a full 120 years to complete, her new marble temple dominated the approach from the sea. A sweep of marble steps led up to a multi-columned structure where Artemis’ smiling colossus looked down, hands of ivory outstretched beneath gold-studded robes to receive a constant stream of offerings, from necklaces of shining pearls and polished amber to the plump testicles of bulls slaughtered on her altar.

  In a temple populated by statues ranging from bronze Egyptian priests to marble Amazon warriors, a portrait of Alexander by his favourite painter Apelles, would have been admired by his Ptolemaic successors who wished to make their own offering. Auletes commissioned a pair of great ivory doors to embellish a temple considered one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. His daughter Cleopatra had seen four of these wonders by the age of twelve, from the Pharos lighthouse and pyramids in her own country to Rhodes’ colossal Alexander-Helios and now Artemis’ temple at Ephesus. Her personal connection with each confirmed both her own importance and that of her dynasty within the ancient world.

  Her father’s choice of temple embellishment may also have been a response to news that his sister-wife Cleopatra V Tryphaena and their daughter Berenike IV had completed his pylon at Edfu with 45-foot-high doors in Lebanese cedar encased in shining bronze. The inaugural ceremony was held on 5 December 57 BC. Yet this seems to have been Cleopatra V Tryphaena’s final state appearance. Her death soon afterwards left Berenike IV sole ruler, and the news came through to Ephesus that she was actively seeking a husband as co-regent.

  Disregarding her half-brothers, Auletes’ two sons who were little more than babies, Berenike IV turned to the last of her Seleucid relatives, to Selene’s youngest son who had unsuccessfully lobbied Rome for the thrones of Syria and Egypt some twenty years before. But his chance to rule Egypt at last was terminated by his mysterious death. Berenike IV’s subsequent attempts to join with the other branch of the Seleucid house by marrying the grandson of Grypus and Tryphaena was blocked by Syria�
��s new Roman governor, Aulus Gabinius, who declared it was ‘not in Rome’s interests’ nor those of Auletes, who was bribing him too.

  Becoming increasingly desperate, the Alexandrians tracked down a minor Seleucid royal whom they named Seleucus Kybiosaktes (‘Salt-fish Seller’), but he was not to Berenike IV’s taste and she had him strangled after a week. Not to be put off, they then produced a man named Archelaos who claimed to be a son of Mithridates VI of Pontus but was actually the son of one of his officers. Sufficiently adept to learn quickly from Auletes’ modus operandi, he bribed Gabinius, reached Egypt and married Berenike IV, who fortunately for him seems to have been happy with her new husband. Yet Gabinius’ superior Pompeius had other plans. Having defeated Pontus, and wanting Egypt’s wealth for himself, he finally decided in Auletes’ favour and ordered Gabinius to reinstate Auletes in return for 10,000 talents.

  And so, in the spring of 55 BC, a triumphant Auletes and his daughter Cleopatra were met at Ephesus by Gabinius and his troops, the Gabiniani cavalry led by their twenty-eight-year-old commander Marcus Antonius (Mark Antony), who fell in love with the fourteen-year-old princess ‘at first sight’, according to later romantics. Flanked by their Roman troops, Auletes and Cleopatra marched south into Egypt and after Antonius had captured Pelusium advanced on Alexandria where Archelaos was killed in battle. Disregarding Auletes’ orders, Antonius gave him an honourable burial, but ‘in his rage and spite against the Egyptians’ Auletes executed his own daughter, Berenike IV, and all her supporters. Total carnage was only prevented when Antonius intervened, for which ‘he left behind him a great name among the Alexandrians’ on his return to Rome. Most of the Gabiniani were posted permanently in Egypt to protect Auletes from the Alexandrians, if not vice versa; these tall, fierce warriors from Gaul and Germany adapted to life in the royal city and even married local women.