Cleopatra (34 page)

Joseph Mankiewicz based his
Cleopatra
on Carlo Maria Franzero’s
The Life and Times of Cleopatra
, a book in which the author relied upon his ‘Latin instinct’ rather than simple scholarship to interpret Cleopatra’s life. A brief excerpt is enough to give the flavour of the book:

A better choice would have been the
Life and Times of Cleopatra Queen of Egypt
by Arthur Weigall. Weigall’s 1914 book, written for a popular audience, was the first to attempt to break away from Shakespeare and set the queen in her own context. Cleopatra was to be viewed as an Egyptian politician rather than a Roman mistress. Indeed, the introduction to the book specifically warns against seeing Cleopatra through purely Roman, or purely modern eyes, and Weigall advises his readers, as they pace the courts of the Ptolemies, against succumbing to ‘the anachronism of criticising our surroundings from the standard of twenty centuries after Christ’.
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He takes great pains to explain and excuse Cleopatra’s unconventional eastern lifestyle to his conventional middle-class western readers, who, he assumes, will be shocked by the queen’s antics, yet he cannot resist dedicating his first chapter to a consideration of the queen’s character and looks. As a quotation from Weigall started this book, it is perhaps appropriate that he should have the last word:

The Ptolemaic Royal Family:
from Alexander the Great to Ptolemy of Mauretania

B
y 69, the year of Cleopatra’s birth, her increasingly dysfunctional family had ruled Egypt for two and a half centuries. They had created and lost an empire whose influence was felt throughout the Mediterranean world and far beyond, ruling from a purpose-built city widely acknowledged as the world’s most advanced seat of learning and culture. And, in marked contrast to Egypt’s native kings, whose private affairs went unrecorded, they had lived recorded lives of extraordinary complexity and violence. Reviewing the personal histories of Cleopatra’s immediate forebears, a confusing mixture of Ptolemies, Arsinoës, Berenices and Cleopatras, it becomes increasingly difficult to regard the Ptolemies as real people with anything approaching real feelings. To be born a Ptolemy was to be born into a family
where survival of the ruthless was the cardinal rule and self-preservation a matter of overwhelming importance. Those Ptolemies who did survive had strong, larger-than-life personalities and, their deeds suggest, extremely thick skins. But repeated tales of murder, adultery, rebellion, lynchings, incest and uncontrollable ambition are the stuff of third-rate crime fiction and television soap operas; they fascinate and repel in equal measure, but do not necessarily inspire the sympathy that they should. Reading of so many untimely and unnatural deaths in so short a period somehow blunts our appreciation of the reality – one is tempted to say the horror – of Ptolemaic family life. Yet read these stories we must, albeit in abbreviated form, as they form the immediate background to Cleopatra’s own story. And, as the Ptolemies owed their throne to Alexander the Great, it seems appropriate to start with his brief reign as king of Egypt.
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Son of Philip II of Macedon and Olympias of Epiros

In the winter of 332/1 Egypt surrendered to Alexander the Great without a struggle, ending almost two centuries of intermittent Persian rule. History tells us that the Egyptians welcomed Alexander as a liberator and cheered him on his way to Memphis. This history, written by Greeks and therefore heavily pro-Greek, is hardly unbiased, but the number of recorded rebellions and harsh reprisals during the Persian periods does suggest that the Egyptians, who hated any form of foreign domination, had a particular dislike of the Persians.

Alexander had ambitious plans for his new land. Already Alexandria had been established, and there had been some bureaucratic reorganisation. But there was no need to hurry. Time was on Alexander’s side, and there were other battles yet to fight, other Persian territories to conquer. In May 331 Alexander marched northwards from Memphis to confront his old enemy, Darius III. He died in Babylon on 10 June
323, his unexpected death variously attributed to fever, to excessive drinking and to poison.

Son of Philip II of Macedon

With Alexander dead, his half-brother assumed nominal control of an empire stretching from Macedon to India, becoming uncrowned king of Egypt by default. Philip Arrhidaeos was the son of a Thessalian woman of humble birth; unkind rumour held that she was little better than a dancing girl, and everyone agreed that her son was, at best, half-witted. Half-witted or not, Arrhidaeos had managed to survive the violent family struggle which followed the assassination of his father, Philip, and which saw the elimination of all other potential rivals to the throne. Supported by his forceful wife, Adea, Arrhidaeos ruled his empire for just six years, his reign ending with an invasion of Macedon led by the dowager Olympias of Epiros. With Olympias triumphant, Arrhidaeos was executed and Adea, offered the choice of a dagger, a noose or poison, hanged herself.

Posthumous son of Alexander III the Great and Roxanne

Alexander the Great was just thirty-three years old and childless when he died. However, his Sogdian (Iranian) wife, Roxanne, was pregnant with a child who, if a boy, was destined to share the throne with Alexander’s half-brother, Philip Arrhidaeos. The child was indeed a boy, and at Arrhidaeos’s untimely death the throne passed unchallenged to his nephew, Alexander IV. The younger Alexander would never see Egypt; both he and Roxanne were murdered in Macedon in 310. The remains of a ‘young prince’, discovered in a silver funerary urn in the Macedonian royal cemetery of Vergina, may well be those of
Alexander IV. For the last six years of Alexander’s ‘reign’, as recorded in Egypt’s official lists, Ptolemy son of Lagos acted as uncrowned king.

Son of Lagos of Eordaea and Arsinoë

Ptolemy I was born in Macedon in 367. His father, Lagos, was a man of respectable but unexceptional Macedonian descent who had made a good marriage; his mother, Arsinoë, was second cousin to Philip II. Like many of Egypt’s commoner-born kings, Ptolemy was not overproud of his humble origins. Soon after the death of Alexander III he would spread the rumour that his mother had been one of Philip’s many mistresses and that he himself was half-brother to the late, great king.

As a Macedonian general, Ptolemy witnessed Alexander defeat Darius III of Persia at the battle of Issus in November 333. A year later he was present when Alexander took Egypt, and he was almost certainly present when Alexander marched to the Siwa Oasis. Other military successes followed. In 329 he captured Bessus, satrap of Bactria and assassin of Darius III, and in 327 he campaigned in India, commanding a third of Alexander’s army.

In 323 Ptolemy took control of Egypt, governing first on behalf of Philip Arrhidaeos, then on behalf of Alexander IV. It was Ptolemy who, in Philip’s name, supervised the temple improvements at Karnak and Hermopolis Magna, and in Alexander’s name built at the Elephantine temple of Khnum. He extended Egypt’s territories to create a buffer zone around his land and masterminded the kidnapping and subsequent display of Alexander’s body in Alexandria. In 304 the situation was regularised. In a coronation ceremony held at Alexandria, General Ptolemy was transformed into King Ptolemy I Soter I. As Ptolemy’s Greek profile – hook-nosed, sharp-chinned, sunken-eyed
and topped with a mop of unruly curls – started to appear on her coins, Egypt became an independent realm with Alexandria as her capital.

Alexander’s enormous empire was by now irretrievably fragmented and his own dynastic line had ended. The Wars of the Successors (321–285) left the Mediterranean world dominated by three rival Macedonian-based kingdoms: the Antigonid empire of Macedon and mainland Greece, ruled by the descendants of Antigonos ‘the One-Eyed’; the Seleucid empire of Syria and Mesopotamia, ruled by Seleucos I; and the Lagid or Ptolemaic empire of Egypt and Libya, whose territories included Cyprus and much of Palestine (including much of the modern states of Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and southern Syria; a region known as Coele-Syria, or ‘Hollow Syria’). There would be frequent small-scale skirmishes – borders would expand and contract, alliances form and break, loyalties wax and wane – but the situation would remain more or less constant until a new superpower emerged to challenge the status quo.

Ptolemy was an imaginative economist and a competent scholar. Keen to promote Alexandria as an international centre of learning, he established the Museion and its world famous library. Outside Alexandria new temples were raised to ancient gods at Terenuthis (Hathor), Naukratis (Amen), Kom el-Ahmar (Osiris) and Tebtynis (Soknebtynis). The vast and highly efficient Egyptian bureaucracy was left more or less untouched, but the new city of Ptolemais Hormou was founded to counteract the influence of the ever-rebellious ancient southern capital, Thebes.

His personal life was less well organised. Already divorced from his first wife, the Persian princess Artakama, he had married Eurydice of Macedon some time between 322 and 319. Eurydice bore her husband four or five children: two sons (Ptolemy Ceraunos and Meleager; both destined to rule Macedon), two daughters (Lysandra and Ptolemais) and a third possible daughter (Theoxena). A simultaneous relationship
with Berenice I yielded three children. Eventually Eurydice was divorced and Ptolemy married his long-term mistress.

Daughter of Magas (?) and Antigone, wife of Ptolemy I

Berenice, widow of Philip II of Macedon, already had a son, Magus, who was to become king of Cyrenaica. Initially the mistress of Ptolemy I, she displaced Eurydice, married Ptolemy and became queen of Egypt. She bore Ptolemy two daughters (Arsinoë II and Philotera) and a son (Ptolemy II).

Son of Ptolemy I and Berenice I

Ptolemy II had ruled alongside Ptolemy I as co-regent for three years; it was obvious that he was his father’s chosen successor. Nevertheless, his accession did not go unchallenged. There were those who felt, with some justification, that Berenice’s children should not have precedence over Eurydice’s offspring. Having secured his throne, Ptolemy’s reign developed into one of internal peace and sporadic foreign campaigns which initially saw an expansion, followed by a setback, of Egypt’s territories.

Back home, Ptolemy made significant improvements to the state bureaucracy and the banking system, refining the taxation structure until it became one of the most sophisticated, and punitive, in the world. Some of the revenue raised was used to complete his father’s unfinished building projects, including the Museion of Alexandria and the Pharos lighthouse. His own building works included the naos (inner sacred area) of the Philae temple of Isis, improvements to the Karnak temple complex (the temple of the goddess Mut and the Opet
temple), and an extension to the birth house at the Dendera temple of Hathor. He restored the canal, silted up since Persian days, which linked the eastern Delta to the Gulf of Suez, and founded the city of Arsinoë – just one of many cities that he founded or renamed Arsinoë – at its southern end. Land reclamation and improvements to irrigation in the Faiyum led to a significantly increased agricultural yield, and the papyrus and grain industries flourished.