Cleopatra the Great (47 page)

Then in
AD
39 he was summoned by his cousin the emperor Caligula to Rome, perhaps in his capacity as grandson of the Living Isis, to celebrate the consecration of the new Isis temple on the Campus Martius. The ancient sources claim that Ptolemy's appearance in a resplendent purple cloak, perhaps worn over the star-studded toga picta he had been awarded by the Senate, ‘attracted universal admiration', and that, greatly disliking being upstaged in this way, Caligula had Ptolemy arrested and executed.

Since he was the only client king whom Caligula dispatched in this manner, there was probably more to it than Ptolemy's flashy dress sense: the story may perhaps conceal the fact that Ptolemy had been implicated in a major plot against the emperor led by one Gaetulicus, whose father had been an ally of Ptolemy's own father, Juba. Ptolemy may have hoped that, if the conspiracy was successful, he would regain territory including the emperor's personal domain of Egypt. Or maybe he had simply become too powerful and wealthy to be a mere client king and Caligula wanted to make Mauretania a Roman province.

When Caligula himself was assassinated in
AD
41 his successor, Claudius, did absorb Mauretania back into the Roman empire, but, sufficiently moved by the death of Ptolemy who had been his cousin through their common grandfather Antonius, ordered statues of both Ptolemy and Juba II to be set up in their capital, Caesarea. Both were dedicated to Venus in the goddess' temple in the city as Claudius' knowledge of history perpetuated a practice which kept faith with their shared predecessor Julius Caesar.

It seems quite ironic that the last known descendant of Cleopatra the Great, her grandson Ptolemy, should have been executed by the self-confessed Isis devotee Caligula, himself a great-grandson of Antonius. Yet Cleopatra VIFs influence was very much kept alive, both through her Isis persona and quite possibly through other royal descendants. Although details are sparse, with only seven Mauretanian royals known by name over a sixty-five-year period, Selene and Juba II are known to have had a daughter some time around 8
BC
since she is mentioned in an honorary inscription set up in Athens. Roman sources also refer to a granddaughter of Cleopatra and Antonius named Drusilla who married Tiberius Claudius Felix, a freedman of the emperor Claudius, who in the fifties
AD
became procurator (revenue official) of Judaea, the kingdom Cleopatra VII had so desired for herself.

Drusilla's husband was also an associate of Paul of Tarsus, the very place where Cleopatra had sailed to meet Antonius in the guise of Aphrodite, and, like Antioch and Ephesus, a cult centre of Isis. Following Paul's conversion to the new faith of Christianity, his zealous missionary work throughout Syria, Asia Minor and Greece brought him into close contact with Isis' many devotees who remained a dominant religious power in the ancient world; even the ship in which he sailed from Malta to Puteoli and Syracuse was an Alexandrian vessel named the
Dioskuri
, the divine twins Castor and Pollux who had been ‘made saviours' by Isis herself. And as her worship had spread way beyond Egypt, transcending ethnic and political barriers as far as Britain, the image of mother Isis with her divine son was adopted by the early Christians as they attempted to compete with her all-embracing appeal.

Although Drusilla herself seems to have died some time in the thirties
AD
, legend claims that the line carried on for several more centuries to emerge again in the third century
AD
as the forceful figure Zenobia of Palmyra. Known in Syrian inscriptions as Bat-Zabbai, ‘the one with beautiful long hair', the twenty-seven-year-old Zenobia had become regent for her son following the death of her husband in
AD
267. Famed for her intellect and beauty, she claimed descent from Cleopatra, and, emulating this great role model, is even said to have owned a collection of her predecessor's drinking cups, presumably obtained from their shared city of Antioch.

When the self-styled ‘New Cleopatra' challenged the power of Rome, adopting the royal diadem and taking imperial titles including the name ‘Augusta', the Roman Senate appealed to the emperor Claudius Augustus to ‘set us free from Zenobia' as she expanded her Syrian territories into Asia Minor. She then invaded Egypt. The fighting which accompanied her invasion of Alexandria in
AD
272 caused such destruction that ‘walls were torn down and it lost the greater part of the area known as the Brucheion', the Palace Quarter, when the Great Library itself may even have been destroyed.

Her rebellion was eventually crushed in battles at Antioch and Palmyra by Claudius' successor Aurelian, and the jewel-bedecked Zenobia is said to have been brought to Rome, bound in golden chains, to walk in Aurelian's Triumph. She was then spared and allowed to live out the rest of her days on Aurelian's estate near Tivoli. Yet Arab tradition ignored the Romans and had Zenobia escape her enemy ‘King Amr' by committing suicide, consuming poison she had concealed in a hollow ring while declaring ‘bi-yadi la bi-yad Amr' — ‘I die by my own hand, not that of Amr', a widely used Arab proverb.

The conflation of Zenobia's fate with that of Cleopatra, even down to the concealment of fatal poison within a form of adornment, very much reflects the long-lasting influence of Cleopatra VII for centuries after her death. With her gold statue still standing in the temple of Venus in Rome's Forum as late as
AD
220, Cleopatra remained a figure of veneration in Egypt and was worshipped throughout the country, from Alexandria to Hermopolis and beyond. Egypt was said to praise and extol ‘her Cleopatra', whose statuary remained a focus of veneration in the furthest southern reaches as late as
AD
373, when a temple scribe could write ‘I overlaid the figure of Cleopatra with gold' within Isis' cult centre Philae.

As the last Egyptian temple to remain active in the face of Christianity well into the sixth century
AD,
Philae's monarch-goddess maintained a tremendous appeal. In
AD
453, when the people of the region concluded a treaty with Rome which allowed them to take the temple's cult statue across the Nile in celebration of the annual ‘Sailing of Isis' Ship', they were re-enacting the journeys of Egypt's greatest female pharaoh as she travelled the world in pursuit of her dream, the restoration of the empire of Alexander the Great.

As the last of his Successors, her suicide had proved to be a turning point for western civilisation. Having come so very close to achieving her goal, accommodating Rome in order to keep Egypt independent while using the Romans themselves to help her do so, Cleopatra had proved so terrifying to her enemies that their hostility still resonates to this day. Yet despite all attempts to erase her story, she had proved too memorable a figure to be so easily destroyed and, like Alexander himself, became a legend. Even her most venomous critics were forced to admire the sheer courage of this legendary descendant of so many kings, Cleopatra the Great, whose spirit, inherited from Alexander himself, had ultimately proved unbreakable.

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Introduction

1 ‘her celebrity seems to have been due primarily to the fact that she slept with both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony — the two most powerful men of her day — and that she was credited with being extremely ambitious'. Garland 2005, p.30.

2 ‘a blacked-out landscape illuminated by occasional flashes of lightning when Egypt impinges upon world events'. Skeat 1962, p.100.

2 ‘torn away the deceptive web which the hate of her enemies had spun around Cleopatra, and ascertained the truth'. Volkmann 1958, p.176.

2 For the 1988 exhibition
Cleopatra's Egypt: Age of the Ptolemies
see Brooklyn 1988 and more recent version, Walker and Higgs (eds.,) 2001. Although for some Cleopatra's story still depends ‘on a perilous series of deductions from fragmentary or flagrantly unreliable evidence' (Beard 2003), others claim that ‘for nearly half a century, the confrontation between literary testimonies and new documentary evidence . . . has continually revised the history of Queen Cleopatra VII. . . Every day we find . . . Cleopatra further upstream from her myth'. Bingen 2007, p.63. Hermonthis' Birth House demolished in 1861, Alexandria's royal quarters only recently located, see Empereur 1998 and 2002, Goddio (ed.) 1998 etc.

4 Debate over coin portraits created headline ‘Ugly? Our Cleopatra was a real beauty, not like your Queen: Egyptians hit back at slur'.
Sunday Express
15.4.01, p.44.

4 ‘Nefertiti is a face without a queen, Cleopatra is a queen without a face'. Malraux 1969 in Goudchaux 2001.b, p.210.

4 ‘a figure whose brilliance and charisma matched Alexander's own'. Green in Getty 1996, p.19.

5 ‘far more significant was Hatshepsut, a female pharaoh who reigned for nearly twenty years in the 15th century
BC
'. Roehrig et al. 2006, front flap of dust jacket.

7 ‘great potentate'. Sandys 1615 p.99.

7 ‘a lass unparalleled'. Shakespeare 1988, Act V, Scene II, p.183

Chapter 1

11 Alexander's mummy and tomb in Saunders 2006 and Chugg 2004; the tomb ‘returned to the centre-stage of world history in the time of Cleopatra'. Chugg 2004, p.x.

13-14 Relationship between Greece and Egypt in Philips 1996, Wachsmann 1987 and Vasunia 2001; ‘Peoples of the Sea' in Sandars 1985; First millennium
BC
in Kitchen 1996 and Myliwiec 2000.

14 ‘the Sea of the Greeks'. Fourth-century
BC
stela, Lichtheim 1980, p.88.

14 ‘where the houses are furnished in the most sumptuous fashion'. Homer,
Odyssey
IV. 120-37, Bdeu trans., p.66-7, also Homer,
Iliad
IX.381, Bdeu trans., p.171.

16 ‘fond of his joke and his glass, and never inclined to serious pursuits', Herodotus
11
.174, de Selincourt trans., p.198.

17 Origins of ‘Nile' in Smith 1979, pp.163-4; Egypt as ‘gift of the river' in Griffiths 1966.

17 ‘the Egyptians themselves in their manners and customs seem to have reversed the ordinary practices of mankind'. Herodotus,
11
.33, de Selincourt trans., p. 142.

17 ‘are employed in trade while the men stay at home and do the weaving'. Herodotus,
11
.33, de Selincourt trans., p.142.

17 ‘women pass water standing up, men sitting down'. Herodotus
11
.33, de Selincourt trans., p.142; Greeks' descriptions in Wyke 2002, p.210, Vasunia 2001, Harrison 2003, p.148.

18 ‘the corpse had been embalmed and would not fall to pieces under the blows, Cambyses ordered it to be burnt'. Histories III.16, de Selincourt trans., p.210.

18 ‘Do you call that a god, you poor creatures?' Herodotus III.28-30, de Selincourt trans., p.215.

18 For camels see Bovil 1956 and Rowley-Conwy 1988.

18 Homeric style battle epics such as Story Cycle of Pedubastis in Lichtheim 1980, p.151-6.

19 ‘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'. Kuhlmann 1981, pp.267-79.

19 ‘a magic defence'. Arnold 1999, p.124.

20 ‘renowned in her ancestry'. Whitehorne 2001, p.l.

22 ‘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'. Plutarch,
Alexander 2
, trans. 1973, p.254.

22 ‘fair-skinned, with a ruddy tinge'. Plutarch,
Alexander 4
, trans. 1973, p.255.

22 ‘ever to be best and stand far above all others'. Homer,
Iliad
VI, in Lane Fox 1973, p.66, alternatively ‘Let your motto be I lead. Strive to be the best', Homer,
Iliad
VI, Bdeu trans., p.122.

22 ‘talked freely with them and quite won them over, not only by the friendliness ofhis 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'. Plutarch,
Alexander
5, trans. 1973, p.256.

23 ‘a wise man should fall in love, take part in politics and live with a king'. Diogenes,
Laertius
5.31, in Lane Fox, 1973, p.53.

23 ‘great souled man'. Aristotle,
Ethics
IV.3, in Howland 2002, p.27.

23 ‘as if friends and relatives, and to deal with the barbarians as with beasts or plants', Aristotle, in Green 1970, p.40; women's high voices in Aristotle in
Physiognomies
807a, in Llewellyn-Jones 2003, p.267.

23 ‘animated tools'. Aristotle,
Politics
I.iv.l253b23, trans. Sinclair, pp.63-4.

23 ‘courtesans we keep for pleasure, concubines for attending day-by-day to the body and wives for producing heirs, and for standing trusty guard on our household property'. Apollodorus, in Davidson 1997, p.77.

23 ‘the Macedonians consider Ptolemy to be the son of Philip, though putatively the son of Lagus, asserting that his mother was with child when she was married to Lagus by Philip'. Pausanias 1.6.2 in Chugg 2004, p.52.

23 ‘Ptolemy was a blood relative of Alexander and some believe he was Philip's son'. Curtius 9.8.22 in Chugg 2004, p.52. ‘Olympias, too, had made it clear that Ptolemy had been fathered by Philip'. Alexander
Romance
, in Chugg, 2004 p.52; Bingen 2007 p. 18 suggests Ptolemy started the rumour himself.

24 ‘Wreathed is the bull. All is done. The sacrificer awaits'. Pausanias 8.7.6 in Green 1970, p.65.

25 ‘was neither hereditary nor was it produced by natural causes. On the contrary, it was said that as a boy he had shown an attractive disposition and displayed much promise, but Olympias was believed to have given him drugs which impaired the functions of his body and irreparably injured his brain'. Plutarch,
Alexander
77, trans. 1973, p.334.

26 ‘You are invincible my son!'. Plutarch Alexander 14, trans., 1973, p.266.

26 ‘Alexander, the son of Philip, and all the Greeks with the exception of the Spartans won these spoils of war from the barbarians who dwell in Asia'. Plutarch,
Alexander
16, trans. 1973, p.270.

27 ‘in military matters the feeblest and most incompetent of men'. Arrian III. 22, de Selincourt trans., p.185.

27 ‘led the race for safety'. Arrian 11.11, in de Selincourt trans., p.120. 27 Persian casualties ‘remained unequalled until the first day of the Somme'. Levi 1980, p.179.

27 ‘full of many treasures, luxurious furniture and lavishly dressed servants' and ‘the whole room marvellously fragrant with spices and perfumes'. Plutarch,
Alexander
20, trans. 1973, p.274.

29 ‘to match the greatest of the pyramids of Egypt'. Hypomnemata in
Andronkos
1988, p.229.

29 ‘in Egypt, it is not possible for a king to rule without the help of the priests'. Plato,
Politics
290.d Vasunia 2001, p.266.

30 ‘in the Throne Chamber of the Temple of Ptah'. Pseudo-Kallisthenes, Witt 1971, p.290, note 5.

31 ‘By order of Peukestas: no-one is to pass. The chamber is that of a priest'. Bowman 1986, p.57.

31 ‘there is an island called Pharos in the rolling seas off the mouth of the Nile, a day's sail out for a well-found vessel with a roaring wind astern. In this island is a sheltered cove where sailors come to draw their water from a well and can launch their boats on an even keel into the deep sea'. Homer,
Odyssey
IV, 354-60, Bdeu trans., p.73.

32 ‘the top of a bull's head with two straight peninsular horns jutting out into the open sea just beyond the two ends of the island'. MacLeod, (ed.) 2002, p.36

32 ‘at once struck by the excellence of the site, and convinced that if a city were built upon it, it would prosper. Such was his enthusiasm that he could not wait to begin the work; he himself designed the general layout of the new town, indicating the position of the market square, the number of temples to be built and which gods they should serve — the gods of Greece and the Egyptian Isis — and the precise limits of its outer defences'. Arrian III.2, de Selincourt trans., p.149.

32 ‘generally sunny, but sometimes rather cold and rainy in winter, and not intolerably hot in summer, there being an almost continuous northern breeze from the sea'. Weigall 1928, pp.123-4.

34 ‘Oh, son of god'. Plutarch,
Alexander
27, trans. 1973, pp.283-4.

34 ‘phallic-looking mummy . . . draped in cloths and jewels'. Levi 1980, p.178.

34 ‘the answer which his heart desired'. Arrian 4, de Selincourt trans., p.153.

34 ‘the high priest commanded him to speak more guardedly, since his father was not a mortal'. Plutarch, Alexander 27, trans. 1973, p.283.

Chapter 2

38 Alexander ‘had probably entered a deep, terminal coma due to the onset of cerebral malaria'. Chugg 2004, p.34.

38 ‘made of hammered gold, and the space about the body they filled with spices such as could make the body sweet-smelling and incorruptible'. Diodorus XVIII.26, Geer trans., p.89.

38 ‘was appointed to govern Egypt and Libya and those lands of the Arabs that were contiguous to Egypt; and Kleomenes who had been made governor by Alexander, was subordinated to Ptolemy'. Arrian,
History of Events after Alexander
156.Fl,5, in Walbank 1981, p.100.

39 ‘Alexander's real body was sent ahead without fuss and formality by a secret and little used route. Perdikass found the imitation corpse with the elaborate carriage and halted his advance, thinking he had laid hands on the prize. Too late he realized he had been deceived'. Aelian,
Varia Historia
, in Chugg 2004, p.43.

39 ‘proceeded to bury with Macedonian rites in Memphis'. Pausanias 1.6.3, in Saunders 2006, p.40; ‘Alexander was interred in Memphis'. FGrH.239 in Saunders 2006, p.40; philosophers' statues in Ridgway 1990, pp.132-3; Nectanebo II sarcophagus in Chugg 2004, pp.55-65.

40 ‘this great governor searched for the best thing to do for the gods of Upper and Lower Egypt'. ‘Stela of the Satrap', Cairo CG.22181 in Dunand and Zivie-Coche 2004, p.200.

41 ‘girdlewearers'. Romer and Romer 1995, p.75.

42 ‘was the most powerful of Ptolemy I's wives and the one with the most virtues and intelligence'. Plutarch,
Pyrrhus
4.4 in Rowlandson (ed.) 1998, p.26; Dryden trans., p.315.

42 ‘brought down from Memphis the corpse of Alexander'. Pausanias in Chugg 200, p.76; for alabaster tomb see Empereur 1998, p.144-53.

43 Ptolemaic royal women ‘played the same role as kings' and ‘eliminated gender hierarchy for a brief period in Classical antiquity'. Pomeroy 1984, pp.xviii-xix; they ‘much more closely resembled their pharaonic predecessors than they did Greek women of any class'. Springborg 1990, p.198.

43 Reaction to marriage in Athenaeus XIV.621, Gulick trans., p.345; Cimon of Athens married his half-sister, see Pomeroy 1975, p.241; the ‘Egyptians also made a law. . . contrary to the general custom of mankind, permitting men to marry their sisters, this being due to the success attained by Isis in this respect'. Diodorus 1.27.1-2 in Oldfather trans., p.85.

43 ‘Daughter of Ra'. Troy 1986, p.178.

43 Cameo (Vienna Kunsthistoriches Museum) in Holbl 2001, fig.2.1; blond hair in Theocritus XVII. 103 in Grant 1972, p.5; features in Thompson 1973, p.82; goitre in Hinks 1928, p.242.

44 Myrtle wreath as slang for genitals in Whitehorne 2001, p.l.

44 ‘rising from the flashing sea and laughing, striking lightning from her lovely face'. Collecteana Alexandrina, after Thompson 1973, p.84.

44 ‘that must be a very dirty get-together. For the assembly can only be that of a miscellaneous mob who have themselves served with a stale and utterly unseemly feast'. Athenaeus,
Deipnosophists
, in Wilkins and Hill 2006, p.104.

44 Ptolemy II ‘probably owed a good deal of his efficiency in war and in administrative ideas to his sister-wife Arsinoe IF. Thompson 1973, p.3.

45 ‘myrrh and calamus for the temple of the gods of Egypt'. Simpson (ed.) 2002, p.91.

45 ‘not heaped up to lie useless, as if the wealth of ever-industrious ants; much is lavished on the shrines of the gods'. Theocritus, Idyll 17, in Dunand and Zivie-Coche 2004, p.204; 100 talents for sacred cow burial in P.Zen.Pestman 50, in Rowlandson (ed.) 1998, p.49.

46 ‘the Romans, pleased that one [sic] so far away should have thought so highly of them'. Cassius Dio 10.41 in Walker and Higgs 2001, p.14 and trans., Cary, pp.367-9.

46 Alexandria as ‘New York of the ancient world' in Ray in Walker and Higgs (eds.,) 2001 p.36; inventors' role to ‘beautify cities, serve the army and mystify worshippers'. Hodges 1973, pp.182-3.