by Stacy Schiff
BEHIND EVERY GREAT fortune, it has been noted, is a crime; the Ptolemies were fabulously rich. They were descended not from the Egyptian pharaohs whose place they assumed but from the scrappy, hard-living Macedonians (tough terrain breeds tough men, Herodotus had already warned) who produced Alexander the Great. Within months of Alexander’s death, Ptolemy—the most enterprising of his generals, his official taster, a childhood intimate, and by some accounts a distant relative—had laid claim to Egypt. In an early display of the family gift for stagecraft, Ptolemy kidnapped Alexander the Great’s body. It had been headed for Macedonia. Would it not be far more useful, reasoned young Ptolemy, intercepting the funeral cortege, in Egypt, ultimately in Alexandria, a city the great man had founded only decades earlier? There it was rerouted, to be displayed in a gold sarcophagus at the center of the city, a relic, a talisman, a recruiting aid, an insurance policy. (By Cleopatra’s childhood, the sarcophagus was alabaster or glass. Strapped for funds, her great-uncle had traded the original for an army. He paid for the substitution with his life.)
The legitimacy of the Ptolemaic dynasty would rest on this tenuous connection to the most storied figure in the ancient world, the one against whom all aspirants measured themselves, in whose mantle Pompey had wrapped himself, whose feats were said to reduce Caesar to tears of inadequacy. The cult was universal. Alexander played as active a role in the Ptolemaic imagination as in the Roman one. Many Egyptian homes displayed statues of him. So strong was his romance—and so fungible was first-century history—that it would come to include a version in which Alexander descended from an Egyptian wizard. Soon enough he was said to have been related to the royal family; like all self-respecting arrivistes, the Ptolemies had a gift for reconfiguring history.* Without renouncing their Macedonian heritage, the dynasty’s founders bought themselves a legitimacy-conferring past, the ancient-world equivalent of the mail-order coat of arms. What was true was that Ptolemy descended from the Macedonian aristocracy, a synonym for high drama. As a consequence, no one in Egypt considered Cleopatra to be Egyptian. She hailed instead from a line of rancorous, meddlesome, shrewd, occasionally unhinged Macedonian queens, a line that included the fourth-century Olympias, whose greatest contribution to the world was her son, Alexander the Great. The rest were atrocities.
If outside Egypt the Ptolemies held to the Alexander the Great narrative, within the country their legitimacy derived from a fabricated link with the pharaohs. This justified the practice of sibling marriage, understood to be an Egyptian custom. Amid the Macedonian aristocracy there was ample precedent for murdering your sibling, none for marrying her. Nor was there a Greek word for “incest.” The Ptolemies carried the practice to an extreme. Of the fifteen or so family marriages, at least ten were full brother-sister unions. Two other Ptolemies married nieces or cousins. They may have done so for simplicity’s sake; intermarriage minimized both claimants to the throne and pesky in-laws. It eliminated the problem of finding an appropriate spouse in a foreign land. It also neatly reinforced the family cult, along with the Ptolemies’ exalted, exclusive status. If circumstances made intermarriage attractive, an appeal to the divine—another piece of invented pedigree—made it acceptable. Both Egyptian and Greek gods had married siblings, though it could be argued that Zeus and Hera were not the most sterling of role models.
The practice resulted in no physical deformities but did deliver an ungainly shrub of a family tree. If Cleopatra’s parents were full siblings, as they likely were, she had only one set of grandparents. That couple also happened to be uncle and niece. And if you married your uncle, as was the case with Cleopatra’s grandmother, your father was also your brother-in-law. While the inbreeding was meant to stabilize the family, it had a paradoxical effect. Succession became a perennial crisis for the Ptolemies, who exacerbated the matter with poisons and daggers. Intermarriage consolidated wealth and power but lent a new meaning to sibling rivalry, all the more remarkable among relatives who routinely appended benevolent-sounding epithets to their titles. (Officially speaking, Cleopatra and the brother from whom she was running for her life were the Theoi Neoi Philadelphoi, or “New Sibling-Loving Gods.”) It was rare to find a member of the family who did not liquidate a relative or two, Cleopatra VII included. Ptolemy I married his half sister, who conspired against him with her sons, two of whom he murdered. The first to be worshipped as a goddess in her lifetime, she went on to preside over a golden age in Ptolemaic history. Here too was an unintended consequence of sibling marriage: For better or worse, it put a premium on Ptolemaic princesses. In every respect the equals of their brothers and husbands, Cleopatra’s female predecessors knew their worth. They came increasingly to assert themselves. The Ptolemies did future historians no favors in terms of nomenclature; all the royal women were Arsinoes, Berenices, or Cleopatras. They are more easily identified by their grisly misdeeds than their names, although tradition proved immutable on both counts: various Cleopatras, Berenices, and Arsinoes poisoned husbands, murdered brothers, and outlawed all mention of their mothers—afterward offering up splendid monuments to those relatives’ memories.
Over the generations the family indulged in what has been termed “an orgy of pillage and murder,” lurid even by colorful Macedonian standards. It was not an easy clan in which to distinguish oneself, but Ptolemy IV did, at the height of the empire. In the late third century he murdered his uncle, brother, and mother. Courtiers saved him from poisoning his wife by doing so themselves, once she had produced an heir. Over and over mothers sent troops against sons. Sisters waged war against brothers. Cleopatra’s great-grandmother fought one civil war against her parents, a second against her children. No one suffered as acutely as the inscribers of monuments, left to contend with near-simultaneous inaugurations and assassinations and with the vexed matter of dates, as the calendar started again with each new regime, at which time a ruler typically changed his title as well. Plenty of hieroglyph-cutting ground to a halt while dynastic feuds resolved themselves. Early on, Berenice II’s mother borrowed Berenice’s foreign-born husband, for which double duty Berenice supervised his murder. (She met the same end.) Equally notable among the women was Cleopatra’s great-great-aunt, Cleopatra III, the second-century queen. She was both the wife and niece of Ptolemy VIII. He raped her when she was an adolescent, at which time he was simultaneously married to her mother. The two quarreled; Ptolemy killed their fourteen-year-old son, chopped him into pieces, and delivered a chest of mutilated limbs to the palace gates on the eve of her birthday. She retaliated by publicly displaying the body parts. The Alexandrians went wild with rage. The greater astonishment was what came next. Just over a decade later, the couple reconciled. For eight years Ptolemy VIII ruled with two queens, a warring mother and daughter.*
After a while the butchery came to seem almost preordained. Cleopatra’s uncle murdered his wife, thereby eliminating his stepmother (and half sister) as well. Unfortunately he did so without grasping that she was the more popular of the pair. He was lynched by a mob after eighteen days on the throne. Which after a two-century-long rampage put an end to the legitimate Ptolemies, in 80 BC. Especially with an ascendant Rome on the horizon, a successor had to be found quickly. Cleopatra’s father, Ptolemy XII, was summoned from Syria, where he had been sent to safety twenty-three years earlier. It is unclear if he was raised to rule, very clear that he was the only viable option. To reinforce his divine status and the link with Alexander the Great, he took as his title “The New Dionysus.” To the Alexandrians—for whom legitimacy mattered, despite the crazy quilt of wholly fabricated pedigrees—he had one of two names. Cleopatra’s father was either “the bastard” or “Auletes,” the piper, after the oboe-like instrument he was fond of playing. For it he seemed to evince as much affection as he did statesmanship, unfortunate in that his musical proclivities were those shared by second-rate call girls. His much-loved musical competitions did not prevent him from continuing the bloodbath of the family history, though only, it should be said, b
ecause circumstances left him little choice. (He was relieved of the need to murder his mother, as she was not of royal birth. She was probably a Macedonian courtier.) In any event, Auletes was to have greater problems than interfering relatives.
The young woman holed up with Julius Caesar in the besieged palace of Alexandria was, then, neither Egyptian, nor, historically speaking, a pharaoh, nor necessarily related to Alexander the Great, nor even fully a Ptolemy, though she was as nearly as can be ascertained on all sides a Macedonian aristocrat. Her name, like her heritage, was entirely and proudly Macedonian; “Cleopatra” means “Glory of Her Fatherland” in Greek.* She was not even Cleopatra VII, as she would be remembered. Given the tortured family history, it made sense that someone, somewhere, simply lost count.
The strange and terrible Ptolemaic history should not obscure two things. If the Berenices and Arsinoes were as vicious as their husbands and brothers, they were so to a great extent because they were immensely powerful. (Traditionally they also took second place to those husbands and brothers, a tradition Cleopatra disregarded.) Even without a regnant mother, Cleopatra could look to any number of female forebears who built temples, raised fleets, waged military campaigns, and, with their consorts, governed Egypt. Arguably she had more powerful female role models than any other queen in history. Whether this resulted from a general exhaustion on the part of the men in the family, as has been asserted, is unclear. There would have been every reason for the women to have been exhausted as well. But the standouts in the generations immediately preceding Cleopatra’s were—for vision, ambition, intellect—universally female.
Cleopatra moreover came of age in a country that entertained a singular definition of women’s roles. Well before her and centuries before the arrival of the Ptolemies, Egyptian women enjoyed the right to make their own marriages. Over time their liberties had increased, to levels unprecedented in the ancient world. They inherited equally and held property independently. Married women did not submit to their husbands’ control. They enjoyed the right to divorce and to be supported after a divorce. Until the time an ex-wife’s dowry was returned, she was entitled to be lodged in the house of her choice. Her property remained hers; it was not to be squandered by a wastrel husband. The law sided with the wife and children if a husband acted against their interests. Romans marveled that in Egypt female children were not left to die; a Roman was obligated to raise only his first-born daughter. Egyptian women married later than did their neighbors as well, only about half of them by Cleopatra’s age. They loaned money and operated barges. They served as priests in the native temples. They initiated lawsuits and hired flute players. As wives, widows, or divorcées, they owned vineyards, wineries, papyrus marshes, ships, perfume businesses, milling equipment, slaves, homes, camels. As much as one third of Ptolemaic Egypt may have been in female hands.
So much did these practices reverse the natural order of things that they astounded the foreigner. At the same time they seemed wholly in keeping with a country whose magnificent, life-giving river flowed backward, from south to north, establishing Upper Egypt in the south and Lower Egypt in the north. The Nile further reversed the laws of nature by swelling in summer and subsiding in winter; the Egyptians harvested their fields in April and sowed them in November. Even planting was inverted: the Egyptian first sowed, then plowed, to cover the seed in loose earth. This made perfect sense in the kind of aberrant kingdom where one kneaded dough with one’s feet and wrote from right to left. It was no wonder that Herodotus should have asserted, in an account Cleopatra would have known well, that Egyptian women ventured into the markets while the men sat at home tending their looms. We have ample testimony to her sense of humor; Cleopatra was a wit and a prankster. There is no cause to question how she read Herodotus’s further assertion that Egypt was a country in which “the women urinate standing up, the men sitting down.”
On another count Herodotus was entirely correct. “There is no country that possesses so many wonders, nor any that has such a number of works that defy description,” he marveled. Well before the Ptolemies, Egypt exercised its spell on the world. It boasted an ancient civilization, any number of natural oddities, monuments of baffling immensity, two of the seven wonders of the ancient world. (The capacity for wonder may have been greater in Cleopatra’s day but the pyramids were taller too, by thirty-one feet.) And in the intermissions between bloodlettings, largely in the third century and before the dynasty began to wobble under its own depravity late in the second, the Ptolemies had made good on Alexander the Great’s plans, establishing on the Nile delta a miracle of a city, one that was as sleekly sophisticated as its founding people had been unpolished. From a distance Alexandria blinded, a sumptuous suffusion of gleaming marble, over which presided its towering lighthouse. Its celebrated skyline was reproduced on lamps, mosaics, tiles. The city’s architecture announced its magpie ethos, forged of a frantic accretion of cultures. In this greatest of Mediterranean ports, papyrus fronds topped Ionic columns. Oversize sphinxes and falcons lined the paths to Greek temples. Crocodile gods in Roman dress decorated Doric tombs. “Built in the finest situation in the world,” Alexandria stood sentry over a land of fabled riches and fantastic creatures, a favorite enigma to the Roman world. To a man like Julius Caesar, who for all his travels had never before set foot in Egypt, few of its astonishments would have been as great as the quick-witted young woman who had emerged from the traveler’s sack.
SHE WAS BORN in 69 BC, the second of three daughters. Two brothers followed, to each of which Cleopatra would, in succession, be briefly joined in marriage. While there was never a particularly safe time to be born a Ptolemy, the first century may have been among the worst. All five siblings met violent ends. Among them Cleopatra distinguishes herself for having alone dictated the circumstances of her demise, no small accomplishment and, in Roman terms, a distinction of some weight. The very fact that she was still alive at the time of Caesar’s arrival was testimony to her character. She had clearly been conspiring for a year or more, energetically for months, nearly around the clock over the late summer weeks. Equally significant was the fact that she would outlive her siblings by decades. Neither brother survived adolescence.
Of Cleopatra’s mother we have neither glimpse nor echo; she disappears from the scene early in Cleopatra’s childhood and was dead by the time Cleopatra was twelve. It is unclear if her daughter knew her any better than do we. She seems to have been one of the rare Ptolemaic women to have opted out of the family melodrama.* Cleopatra V Tryphaena was in any event several decades younger than Auletes, her brother or half brother; the two had married shortly after Auletes ascended to the throne. The fact that his aunt contested his right to the kingship—she went so far as to travel to Rome to press the case against him—is not particularly meaningful, given the family dynamic. It may, however, speak to her political instincts. To many minds Auletes appeared more interested in the arts than in statecraft. Despite a rule that lasted twenty-two years, with one interruption, he would be remembered as the pharaoh who piped while Egypt collapsed.
Of Caesar’s early years virtually nothing is recorded and Cleopatra goes him one better: we have no clues at all. Were her childhood home not today twenty feet underwater or were the climate of Alexandria more forgiving toward ancient papyri, it is unlikely that we would be further enlightened. Childhood was not a big seller in the ancient world, where fate and pedigree were the formative influences. The ancient players tended to emerge fully formed. We can safely assume that Cleopatra was born in the palace of Alexandria; that a wet nurse cared for her; that a household retainer chewed her first foods before placing them in her gummy mouth; that nothing passed her childhood lips that had not first been tasted for poison; that she counted among her playmates a gaggle of noble-born children, known as “foster siblings” and destined to become the royal entourage. Even as she scampered down the colonnaded walkways of the palace, past its fountains and fishponds, or through its lush groves and zoological
garden—earlier Ptolemies had kept giraffes, rhinoceroses, bears, a forty-five-foot python—she was surrounded by a retinue. From an early age she was comfortable among politicians, ambassadors, scholars, at ease amid a flock of purple-cloaked court officials. She played with terra-cotta dolls and dollhouses and tea sets and miniature furniture, with dice and rocking horses and knucklebones and pet mice, though we will never know what she did with her dolls and whether, like Indira Gandhi, she engaged them in insurrections and battles.
Along with her older sister, Cleopatra was groomed for the throne; a Ptolemy planned for all eventualities. She made regular trips up the Nile, to the family’s harborfront palace in Memphis, to participate in traditional Egyptian cult festivals, carefully stage-managed, opulent processions of family, advisers, and staff. Two hundred miles upriver, Memphis was a sacred city, managed by a hierarchy of priests; death has been said to have been its greatest business. Vast animal catacombs stretched under its center, a magnet for the pilgrims who came to worship and to stock up on miniature mummified hawks and crocodiles at its souvenir stands. At home, these were objects of veneration. On such occasions Cleopatra would have been outfitted in ceremonial dress, though not yet in the traditional Egyptian crown of plumes, sun disk, and cow’s horns. And from an early age she enjoyed the best education available in the Hellenistic world, at the hands of the most gifted scholars, in what was incontestably the greatest center of learning in existence: The library of Alexandria and its attached museum were literally in her backyard. The most prestigious of its scholars were her tutors, its men of science her doctors. She did not have to venture far for a prescription, a eulogy, a mechanical toy, a map.
That education may well have exceeded her father’s—raised abroad, in northeastern Asia Minor—but would have been a traditional Greek education in every respect, nearly identical to that of Caesar, whose tutor had studied in Alexandria. It was preeminently literary. Letters mattered in the Greek world, where they served additionally as numbers and musical notes. Cleopatra learned to read first by chanting the Greek alphabet, then by tracing letters incised by her teacher on a narrow wooden tablet. The successful student went on to practice them in continuous horizontal rows, later in columns, eventually in reverse order, ultimately in pairs from either end of the alphabet, in capitals and again in cursive. When Cleopatra graduated to syllables it was to a body of abstruse, unpronounceable words, the more outlandish the better. The lines of doggerel that followed were equally esoteric; the theory appears to have been that the student who could decode these could decode anything. Maxims and verse came next, based on fables and myths. A student might be called upon to render a tale of Aesop’s in his own words, in simplest form, a second time with grandiloquence. More complex impersonations came later. She might write as Achilles, on the verge of being killed, or be called upon to restate a plot of Euripides. The lessons were neither easy nor meant to be. Learning was a serious business, involving endless drills, infinite rules, long hours. There was no such thing as a weekend; one studied on all save for festival days, which came with merciful regularity in Alexandria. Twice a month all ground to a halt on Apollo’s account. Discipline was severe. “The ears of a youth are on his back; he listens when he is beaten,” reads an early papyrus. Into that adage the playwright Menander injected cause and effect: “He who is not thrashed cannot be educated.” Generations of schoolchildren dutifully inscribed that line on the red wax centers of wooden slates with their ivory styluses.