Cleopatra the Great (7 page)

Clearly Arsinoe II found inspiration in her fifteenth-century
BC
pharaonic predecessor Hatshepsut, who had married her half-brother before taking power as pharaoh herself. Adopting Hatshepsut's titles, Arsinoe II was referred to as ‘Daughter of Ra', the female equivalent of the traditional pharaoh's title ‘Son of Ra', and also took her predecessor's title ‘Daughter of Geb', the earth god and father of Isis. Like Hatshepsut, she wore Geb's distinctive red crown embellished with the ram's horns of Amun and the double plumes, cow horns and sun disc of Hathor-Isis. Equally symbolic headgear was adopted for her Greek-style portraits. A huge cameo celebrating the marriage featured her brother in a Greek helmet, while Arsinoe II wore the diadem of Dionysus and the marriage veil of Zeus' sister-wife Hera draped over her fair hair styled in a bun. In addition to their shared blond hair, the siblings had the same long nose, plump cheeks and eyes sufficiently large to be taken as evidence for an exophthalmic goitre yet most likely an exaggerated physical trait that they shared with their putative uncle Alexander. It was certainly a family resemblance that Arsinoe II fully exploited for her own political ends and, vigorously promoting the image of a divinely inspired dynasty, the couple deified their deceased parents Ptolemy I Soter and Berenike I as twin ‘Saviour gods', worshipped with Alexander at the new Ptolemaia festival to showcase their dynastic power.

Celebrated every four years, the Ptolemaia was perhaps the most lavish public festival ever held in the ancient world, steeped in the outrageous opulence or ‘tryphe' which became the Ptolemies' trademark. Based on the ancient Greek Dionysia festival, it presented Dionysos as god of the Ptolemaic house, returning from India just like Alexander and accompanied by the same unimaginable wealth in a day-long procession. Eyewitness accounts describe eighty thousand soldiers in shining armour followed by great crowds in sumptuous costumes and troops of elephants and camels bearing exotic goods from Africa, Arabia and India. Never-before-seen giraffes and rhinoceroses caused the same consternation as the huge automata figures that magically rose up to receive libations amid rivers of wine. Gold statues of the gods were followed by god-sized suits of golden armour and crowns; a 120-foot-wide gem-encrusted myrtle wreath, ancient slang for female genitals, was accompanied by an 80-foot-long gold penis tipped by a star to emphasise none too subtly the mechanics of royal succession.

Following their parents' deification their children too became divine: Arsinoe IFs Greek title ‘Philadelphus', ‘sibling lover', extended to her brother-husband Ptolemy II to create twin gods likened to married siblings Zeus and Hera. The same comparison with Egypt's Isis and Osiris was even closer to the mark, for the goddess Isis was the active partner in that relationship too. In much the same way that Arsinoe II had steam-rollered her way to the top, Isis had taken over the roles of all the other female deities, including Hathor, goddess of love, whom the Greeks called Aphrodite. Born from the sea, Aphrodite was the perfect goddess for the new coastal capital: her whose earthly incarnation was described as ‘rising from the flashing sea and laughing, striking lightning from her lovely face'.

Yet all-nurturing, all-powerful Arsinoe herself seems to have had little genuine regard for her subjects and beneath a carefully crafted public image was prone to sneering at them, commenting of one festival gathering, ‘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.' She, by contrast, lived in the greatest luxury and was fabulously wealthy in her own right at a time when most women in the ancient world had no financial independence whatsoever. Wielding financial and political power akin to her pharaonic female predecessors, Arsinoe IFs tremendous talent for government resulted in great improvements at home and abroad.

Able to create a Domesday-style inventory of Egypt's assets, aided by an efficient royal postal system and meticulous records, tremendous wealth was created and collected on behalf of a monarchy whose strict revenue laws established royal monopolies on everything from linen and papyrus to perfume and vegetable oil. The royal finance minister undertook regular inspection tours up and down the Nile, and local agents oversaw day-to-day business ranging from the training of Greek gymnasts to dealing with local entrepreneurs. They also procured slaves from Palestine, Syria and Nubia, for in contrast to the lower levels of slavery in ancient Egypt, the Greeks relied on this form of labour for their households, farms and factories. And, of course, they had to pay taxes and import duty on them. Foreign trade was further boosted by reopening the old Saite canal connecting the Nile to the Red Sea, whose main port, Berenike, formed the gateway for trade with Arabia, India and the Orient. The Ptolemies also traded with Arab merchants such as Zayd'il bin Zayd, an importer of ‘myrrh and calamus for the temple of the gods of Egypt' who worked around Memphis.

Yet the Ptolemies' vast wealth was ‘not heaped up to lie useless, as if the wealth of ever-industrious ants; much is lavished on the shrines of the gods' to enhance their status as benefactors, and to guarantee the loyalty of priests and people to whom they appeared as traditional rulers making offerings and performing ancient rites. The burials of sacred animals were a further costly undertaking for the crown, with a staggering 100 talents' worth of myrrh (the equivalent of 2,600 kg of silver) requested for the burial of a single sacred cow. Large sums were also expended on the armed forces to keep Ptolemaic territory intact, and to foil invasion from Cyrene to the west by the couples' older half-brother Magas, a son of Berenike I by an earlier marriage. The couple also put down an incursion by Nubians to the south, quelled a rebellion of Celtic mercenaries in northern Egypt and defended the eastern Delta against Seleucid invasion before the two sides finally made peace in 271
BC
.

The Ptolemies' reach across the Mediterranean was reflected in a huge marble statue of Isis on the Acropolis in Athens, along with buildings on Delos and a temple to Ptolemy II at his birthplace on Kos. On Samothrace Arsinoe II erected a monument in gratitude for her earlier period of sanctuary here, commemorating the place where Alexander's parents first met with an enormous rotunda temple of Doric columns and carved bulls' heads.

At the other end of the Mediterranean the couple also expanded trade links with Italy, whose Greek colonies were gradually being taken over by Rome. Although this small Italian city is said to have sent a delegation to Alexander himself, Arsinoe II and her husband were the first of the Successors to make official contact, sending an embassy to Rome in 273
BC
. In response, ‘the Romans, pleased that one [sic] so far away should have thought so highly of them', sent ambassadors to Alexandria. The resulting treaty was commemorated with Rome's first silver coins, so similar to those of Arsinoe II that the Ptolemies must have supplied the necessary expertise. They could never have guessed that their new allies were nothing less than a ticking time bomb which would push its way to the heart of Egypt's affairs with fatal results.

Yet for now the Ptolemies ruled supreme, their pole position in the Mediterranean marked by the completion of their great Pharos lighthouse which was immediately regarded as one of the wonders of the world. At 135m, almost as tall as that other wonder, the Great Pyramid of Giza, its blazing beacon reflected by polished metal mirrors for almost 50 miles in every direction was regarded as a man-made star through which Isis illuminated the world. Her presence on Pharos was also marked by a colossus beside the lighthouse, the Nile's static goddess transformed into a lively windswept figure appropriate to her new coastal setting. Striding forward as a kind of ‘action version' of the Statue of Liberty, great Isis Pharia held out her billowing mantle (‘pharos') to catch the breeze, emphasising her invention of navigation and her role as ‘Mistress of Winds' inherited from Hathor and Aphrodite.

Visible to all who approached by sea, great Isis was flanked by colossal companion figures of the royal couple, who used pharaonic statues to give ancient kudos to their modern city. With its wide boulevards and marble colonnades shaded by green awnings it anticipated many of Europe's later cities; comparisons have also been drawn with New York, based on a shared grid pattern of high-rise buildings, financial houses, passenger terminals, fast-food outlets, theatres, libraries and parks adorned with ancient Egyptian obelisks. Alexandria even had automatic doors and steam power courtesy of leading scholar Heron, who invented the steam turbine simply as a means of opening and closing temple doors. It was just one of many inventions that the monarchs funded within their Mouseion (Museum), with its lecture halls, laboratories, observatories, gardens and zoo, although its best-known feature was the Great Library. Designed to hold all the world's knowledge under the Ptolemies' sole control, rival Successors to Alexander decided to set up their own library at Pergamom in western Anatolia (modern Turkey) until the Ptolemies' immediate ban on papyrus exports forced their rivals to invent parchment (‘pergamenon') as a means of sustaining the race for knowledge.

Anxious to obtain Greek translations of all known texts in the ancient world, Ptolemy II set his scholars to work on everything from a complete translation of the Hebrew scriptures to the fabled knowledge of ancient Egypt. He commissioned his father's Egyptian adviser, Manetho, to compile a complete history of every known pharaoh since records began, and also wrote to him on matters of religion; one of Manetho's replies to the king, comparing the gods of Egypt and Greece, explained that Thoth, represented by the ibis and the ape, was the same as the Greek Hermes.

Yet Ptolemy II also made staff changes, sacking the head librarian, Demetrios, who had supported a rival claimant to the throne, and replacing him with the Homeric expert Zenodotus, whose assistant, Callimachus of Cyrene, composed the first library catalogue. It listed 120,000 scrolls of poetry, history, rhetoric, philosophy, law and medicine, copies of many of which were housed in a second, ‘daughter' library within the Serapeum temple. The Serapeum's medical centre was staffed by ‘pastophor' physician priests who were able to consult ancient Egyptian medical texts and the works of Hippocrates and Aristotle. The latter's grandson, Erasistratus, and a fellow medical student, Herophilus, carried out human vivisection. With royal permission they ‘cut open criminals received out of the kings' prisons, and they studied whilst the breath of life remained in them', working out the function of arteries and discovering that the brain, not the heart, was the centre of the nervous system. With Ptolemy II himself regarded as ‘the most august of all princes and devoted, if any one was, to culture and learning', the Mouseion and Library soon became the stuff of legend, ‘and concerning the number of books, the establishing of libraries, and the collection in the Hall of the Muses, why need I even speak, since they are in all men's memories'.

The legendary buildings formed part of the royal palace which extended along the Lochias promontory, each monarch extending the complex with his or her own personal quarters and following Macedonian tradition by building in imported marble. Interior water features and mosaics were also de rigueur, and further adorned with sumptuous furnishings; even the tentlike royal dining pavilion housed ‘marble figures, a hundred in all, the work of foremost artists, and paintings by artists of the Sicyonian school alternating with a great variety of selected portraits'. At the apex of its scarlet ceiling perched a pair of great gold eagles, the symbol of the Ptolemaic house, now duplicated to represent the twin monarchs; below, gold and silver tables paired with a hundred golden couches were laden with jewelled tableware.

Such opulence was certainly to Arsinoe IFs taste, and Ptolemy II seems to have been as content to let her make decisions about interior design as in every other area of his life. Her tremendous eye for detail was certainly appreciated by those who passed through public parts of the palace at festival time. One housewife told her friend, ‘Come on! Get your cloak. Let's go to the house of the king, rich Ptolemy. I hear the queen has done a beautiful job of decorating it . . . And when you've seen it, what won't you be able to say to someone who hasn't!' Yet some were clearly less impressed, claiming that ‘everything in Egypt was playacting and painted scenery', a comment which cut to the heart of this melodramatic monarchy for whom image was everything.

Having transformed the Ptolemaic house into a dazzling bastion of conspicuous consumption in only five years, Arsinoe II died at the age of forty-six just before the full moon on 9 July 270
BC
. Following her lavish Macedonian-style cremation, the Greeks imagined that their sun god Apollo had sent down his golden chariot to raise her to heaven, whereas the Egyptians preferred to imagine her heavenward soul as Isis' star Sothis, which appeared annually between 17 and 19 July. Worshipped in a city where streets were named after her, the deified woman was now commemorated at the annual Arsinoeia festival, when her clergy led the crowds through the city, and people drank from wine jugs adorned with her image.

On Alexandria's blustery Cape Zephyrion, a new temple dedicated to Arsinoe II as Aphrodite Zephritis, Lady of Winds, featured a giant drinking vessel in ‘the form of the Egyptian Bes the dancer, who trumpets forth a shrill note when the spout is opened for the flowing wine', to emphasise the dynasty's ritual use of alcohol. Close to the harbour lay a second lavish sanctuary, the Arsineion, its site marked by a great stone obelisk of Nectanebo II and inside it a six-foot-high statue of Arsinoe II covered in glittering sea-green peridots below an iron statue, said to have been suspended magically in space by the temple's magnetic roof to capture the moment when Arsinoe rose to heaven.