Cleopatra the Great (3 page)

Like many of Hekataios' observations repeated by his fellow Greek Herodotus some fifty years later, both men visited the same sights where they were shown around by the native priests, the custodians of the ancient culture who were able to interpret the mysterious picture writing which curious Greeks dubbed ‘sacred carvings', or ‘hieroglyphs'. Both men had been shown the ‘Hall of Statues' at Karnak temple, where figures of each high priest had been set up in an unbroken lineage: the priests claimed there had been 341 generations since the first pharaoh, Menes. Stressing such antiquity to imply cultural superiority, the priests at Sais even told one Athenian politician that he and his countrymen were merely children since their own history was so short.

Although the Greeks continued to regard Egypt as the cradle of civilization whose priests held powers passed down from the gods themselves, they nevertheless found certain things completely unfathomable, for ‘the Egyptians themselves in their manners and customs seem to have reversed the ordinary practices of mankind'. This was particularly so in the case of women, for in contrast to the restrictions imposed on respectable Greek women who only went out of the house as a last resort and even then fully covered, their Egyptian sisters were not only allowed out, but attended market and ‘are employed in trade while the men stay at home and do the weaving'. Further unnatural practices meant that Egyptian ‘women pass water standing up, men sitting down', with similarly amusing overtones in the Greeks' descriptions of the Egyptians as ‘crocodiles' and ‘papyrus eaters'. The characteristic triangular tomb structure ‘mer' was dubbed ‘pyramis' after the small Greek cake, and the tall stone monolith ‘tekhen' became an ‘obelisk', or kebab skewer.

Yet as the massive Persian empire, successor to Assyria and Babylon, began its inexorable expansion west, the scattered peoples of southern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean suddenly became very aware of their ‘Greekness'. They assumed superiority over all non-Greek-speaking ‘barbarians', so that the Persians became denigrated as effeminate trouser-wearing cowards and the Trojan War wheeled out as proof of Greek superiority over their weaker eastern neighbours. On occasion these even included Egypt, whose mystique had been undermined by long-term familiarity, although there remained the need for mutual support against a common enemy.

When the Persian king Cambyses invaded Egypt in 525
BC
and executed the last Saite king, he exhumed the mummy of his predecessor Amasis to have it tortured and beaten, but since ‘the corpse had been embalmed and would not fall to pieces under the blows, Cambyses ordered it to be burnt' to deprive the pharaoh's soul of its physical home. He then ridiculed the sacred Apis bull, asking the priests, ‘Do you call that a god, you poor creatures?' before mortally wounding the beast and having the priests flogged.

Despite such Greek accounts, the Persians successfully ruled Egypt through an efficient civil service, leaving most officials in their posts and replacing the pharaoh by a governor ruling on the Persian king's behalf. Military garrisons were installed as far south as Elephantine, and with the Saite canal between the Nile and Red Sea reopened and camels used in increasing numbers, trade and communications were greatly enhanced.

Although Persia also took over Greek colonies in Asia Minor, the city-state of Athens pulled off an amazing victory at the battle of Marathon in 490
BC
and, despite their city being sacked in a revenge attack, struck back to defeat the Persians soundly by land and sea. The Greeks then assisted Egypt to throw out its Persian occupiers, as commemorated by the Egyptians in Homeric-style battle epics, but the Persians soon came back. With the Greeks embroiled in their own internal conflicts as Athens and Sparta slugged it out during the Peloponnesian War of 431-404
BC
, an isolated Egypt slipped back under Persian control and suffered serious cultural decline until renewed Greek help once this war was over gave the Delta courage to rise again.

The cities of Sais and Mendes declared independence, fighting off Persian attacks with assistance from Athenian forces headed by the Greek general Chabrias. In 380
BC
a real renaissance began when the Egyptian general Nakhtnebef — better known by his Greek name, Nectanebo — proclaimed himself pharaoh (380-362
BC
). From its base at the Delta town of Sebennytos this last native dynasty restored national pride, revived ancient art forms, built an astonishing number of temples and promoted the cults of the sacred animals headed by the Apis bull of Memphis. And although the Persians invaded again in 373
BC
, they were defeated once again.

Nectanebo I was distinctly pro-Greek and, having married a Greek woman named Ptolemais, a relative of Chabrias, produced a daughter sufficiently powerful to be sent as his representative heading an expedition south to Akhmim to obtain new sources of building stone. Although her name is lost, her official titles are preserved in a rock-cut chapel originally decorated by the fourteenth-century
BC
pharaoh Ay, father of the famous female pharaoh Nefertiti, whose inspirational titles were duplicated by Nectanebo Fs daughter: ‘hereditary princess, held in high esteem, favoured with sweet love, the mistress of Upper and Lower Egypt, of gracious countenance, beautiful with the double feather, great royal consort, Lady of the Two Lands'.

Nectanebo I was briefly succeeded by his son Djedhor, the first pharaoh to issue coins in Egypt's barter-based economy, but he was deposed by his cousin Nectanebo II (360-343
BC
). After beating back a vast Persian invasion force in 350
BC
with help from Athens and Sparta, Nectanebo II was worshipped throughout Egypt. His attempts to restore his country's glories by resurrecting the power of its past were part of a nationwide effort to create ‘a magic defence' against the Persian menace. Yet for all this ritual protection, the legendary Nectanebo II was finally defeated in 343
BC
and Egypt taken back into the Persian empire. Cities such as Heliopolis and Mendes were destroyed, along with the tombs of the kings who had rebelled against Persian rule, and many members of the ruling classes were deported to Persia. Nectanebo himself managed to flee south into Nubia, although it was rumoured that at some stage during his reign he had also sailed to northern Greece. Having predicted that the Macedonian queen Olympias would soon give birth to the son of Zeus, greatest of the gods of Greece, Nectanebo then donned the mask of the god and himself fathered her child, which was very much in the Egyptian tradition of divine conception legends. The myth also neatly claimed the child, whom she named Alexander, to be the successor of the last native pharaoh.

Despite the harshness of their regime, the Persians remained in Egypt for little more than a decade before Alexander himself arrived in Egypt in 332
BC
to claim his fabled birthright. Welcomed as a saviour and the rightful heir of Nectanebo II by a populace desperate to be rid of the hated Persians, he initiated three centuries of Greek rule which would culminate in the extraordinary figure of Cleopatra herself.

Born in Egypt of Macedonian descent, Cleopatra had a traditional Macedonian name which, in its original Greek form, began with a ‘k'. And although the name is generally translated as ‘glory to her father', its meaning may be more accurately understood as ‘renowned in her ancestry'. And it was quite an ancestry. At least thirty-three Cleopatras are known from ancient times, and with the origins of her famous name rooted in myth and the forces of nature, the first Cleopatra was daughter of the North Wind Boreas. The name's mythological origins are also associated with a daughter of the legendary King Midas, and the first historical Cleopatra may have been a sister of the real Midas, King of Phrygia (central Turkey), who married Macedonia's first historical king Perdikkas (670-652
BC
). Considered to exist at the very edge of the civilized world, both geographically and culturally, the Macedonians originated in the northernmost part of Greece, close to the lands of Scythia and Thrace where tattooed warriors still collected severed heads. When not participating in warfare themselves, Macedonia's elite indulged in hunting, feasting and drinking bouts that lasted days at a time.

Still ruled by Homeric-style kings when much of Greece had adopted democracy, Macedonia's southern neighbours found their northern accent hard to understand and dismissed them as semi-barbarian, even though the Macedonians were Greek speakers, had Greek names and worshipped the traditional gods of Greece whose fabled home atop snowy Mount Olympus lay at the heart of Macedonia's rugged landscape. From their mythical founder ‘Makedon', believed to have been a son of Zeus, Macedonia's earliest royal rulers traced back to the seventh century
BC
were both polygamous and apparently incestuous. The choice of royal heir, normally the king's eldest son, was made by the Assembly made up of warrior elite, and the succession was typically affected by threats, bribes and murder. A king's first task, therefore, was to remove all rivals and then to produce an heir.

After marriage to Macedonia's first historical king, Perdikkas I, the first historical Cleopatra became the mother of the royal house, faithful vassals of Persia until Athens' great victory in 480
BC
allowed them to switch sides. Over the next century nine kings ruled over a volatile Macedonia until Archelaos (413-399
BC
) brought a degree of stability and moved his capital from Aegae to Pella on the Aegean for much-needed access to the sea. As Pella became a cosmopolitan royal capital, its marble palace embellished with murals and mosaics created by Athenian craftsmen, Archelaos invited the greatest minds of the age to his court. Although the Athenian philosopher Socrates turned down the offer, those who did accept royal patronage included the poet Pindar, Hippocrates, known as the father of medicine, and the leading dramatist Euripides, whose great masterpiece the
Bacchae
was inspired by his new home and its bloody history.

Following Archelaos' murder and intermittent civil war, Amyntas III (389-369
BC
) strengthened Macedonia's defences against Illyria to the west and married the Illyrian princess Eurydike, who bore him three sons. Amid the royal family's constant feuding, the deaths of Amyntas and his eldest son were apparently caused by the ambitious Eurydike and her lover, and when her second son died from wounds sustained fighting the Illyrians, the third and youngest son Philip, then twenty-four, was elected king in 359
BC
. After eliminating other rivals to the throne in time-honoured fashion, Philip II (359-336
BC
) decisively crushed the Illyrians and embarked on years of campaigning which resulted in the loss of his right eye, a maimed arm and crippled leg. Yet it transformed Macedonia from a feuding, feudal kingdom into a world superpower.

He also found time for a most complicated bisexual love life, including a youthful fling with his second cousin Arsinoe and no fewer than seven wives. The most famous of these was Myrtale of Epirus (modern Albania), first encountered during nocturnal fertility rites on the windswept island of Samothrace and at marriage given the Macedonian name Olympias to reflect the divine landscape of her new home. Able to trace her own ancestry back to the sea goddess Thetis, mother of the Greek superhero Achilles, Olympias paid particular respect to Zeus and his son Dionysos, god of wine and embodiment of vitality. Dionysos' female acolytes achieved states of complete possession, and Olympias undertook her own Dionysiac rites with tame snakes which ‘terrified the male spectators as they raised their heads from the wreaths of ivy ... or twined themselves around the wands and garlands of the women'.

Yet regardless of her power as queen, Olympias had to co-exist with her husband's other families. These included a son, Philip Arrhidaios, born to his third wife, and a daughter, Cynane, who fought alongside her father, born to the second. Although Olympias produced an equally formidable daughter called Cleopatra, her crowning achievement was her son Alexander, known to history as ‘the Great' and raised by his mother to believe himself the son of Zeus.

Born in July 356
BC
on the same day that the great temple of Artemis at Ephesus burned down, since the goddess was apparently away assisting at his birth, Alexander was already in military training by the age of seven and had gained his first experience of battle at fourteen. An androgynous-looking youth, with long curling hair and a smooth complexion, ‘fair-skinned, with a ruddy tinge', the young Alexander modelled himself on his ancestor Achilles, the lead character of the
Iliad
, in which the quote ‘ever to be best and stand far above all others' became something of a personal mantra. As a bibliophile well versed in history, even as a child Alexander had an understanding of cultures far beyond the Greek world. Once, receiving a Persian delegation in his father's absence, he had ‘talked freely with them and quite won them over, not only by the friendliness of his manner but also because he did not trouble them with any childish or trivial inquiries, but questioned them about the distances they had travelled by road, the nature of the journey into the interior of Persia, the character of the king, his experience in war, and the military strength and prowess of the Persians', a precocious curiosity supplying vital intelligence for his future plans.

For his son's higher education, Philip had selected a little-known Thracian philosopher called Aristotle who had studied under Plato in Athens and whose father had been doctor to Philip's family. Moving to Macedonia, the new tutor was given a fine house and teaching facilities, and despite the discrepancy between his republican beliefs and the monarchy he served, Aristotle recommended that ‘a wise man should fall in love, take part in politics and live with a king'.