The Rise and Fall of Alexandria (25 page)

The rebellion soon spread to the delta, where a vicious twenty-one-year guerrilla war broke out; but if it was bad in the delta, it was far worse farther up the Nile. Around the old Egyptian city of Thebes, just across the river from the resting places of the greatest native Egyptian pharaohs in the Valley of the Kings, nationalism was rife. Upper Egypt, backed by the kings of Nubia, now effectively seceded from the north, and the rebels declared their leader, an Egyptian named Herwennefer, their pharaoh in 206 BC.

Though Ptolemy had retrieved his territories in Syria, he had almost simultaneously lost more than half of Egypt, and his lifeblood: her grain. The Nile Valley and the Fayyum were the great breadbaskets of Egypt, and with them in rebel hands the Ptolemies’, and Alexandria’s, revenues plummeted. So severe was the economic crisis that at one point Ptolemy had to abandon the use of silver coinage and introduce a worthless bronze currency instead. The need to retain a large standing army to oppose the rebels further increased the burden on the economy. Egypt could no longer pay her bills.

At the very center of the maelstrom stood the temples. The early Ptolemies had always been extremely careful to cultivate the temple priests, whose institutions not only nominally owned much of the land but also collected the taxes on behalf of the crown. Traditionally the temples had also been a way for these foreign pharaohs to demonstrate their credentials for ruling Egypt.

As the revolt gained momentum, many of these institutions fell into rebel hands, including the vast new complex begun under Ptolemy III at Edfu, the temple of Horus. This magnificent building, measuring 448 feet in length and 246 feet in breadth, would become a monument to Philopator’s increasingly unsustainable belief that he could live as a Greek basileus but rule Egypt as a divine pharaoh.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the temple is how this huge monument—the pylons at the entrance are nearly 130 feet tall—and all its architecture and decoration are executed entirely in the pharaonic tradition. Great bas-relief carvings depict the (Greek) pharaohs in battle, and specific mythological tales relating to the patron god, Horus, the falcon-headed son of Isis and Osiris, are all depicted in traditional fashion. The temple itself was said to be built on the site of the mythic battle between Horus and his deadly enemy Seth, god of chaos and murderer of Osiris. And it was doubtless to Philopator’s taste that the great temple was also the scene of a love match. Every year, at the Feast of the Beautiful Meeting, a statue of Horus’s wife, Hathor, traveled by river from her temple at Dendera to be brought together with her husband, arriving at the full moon and spending their nights in the
mamissi,
or birthing house. Reliefs at the entrance to the mamissi, some still retaining their colored paint, portray the ritual of the birth of Harsomtus, Horus and Hathor’s son, and symbolically represent the fertility of the gods, their royal descendants, and the nation as a whole.

Yet the inscriptions on the temple itself show that from the beginning of the troubles, no further work was carried out on the building, and therefore, we must assume, no revenues from the temple’s estates were returned to Alexandria until long after the king’s death.

 
It was ironic that after the outrageous success at Raphia, it would be his own Egyptians, those “ignorant rebels,” who would humble the all-conquering pharaoh and bring his most Egyptian work—the building of the temple of Horus at Edfu—to a halt. After his victory in Palestine, Ptolemy IV had chosen to return to Egypt on that god’s birthday, traveling like the new Horus downstream by ship from Memphis to Alexandria at the inception of the annual flooding (and symbolic rebirth) of the Nile. To honor him and his sister-wife it was decreed that statues of the king and queen be placed in the largest courts of all the major temples in Egypt; Ptolemy Horus, it was declared, was his father’s protector and his victory at Raphia was “beautiful.” In this way the polite fiction of the divinity of Ptolemy Philopator was at least maintained in his own mind. In truth the victory was not beautiful but hollow.

In 204 BC, still in the midst of the native rebellion and just forty years old, Philopator departed to join the gods. The circumstances surrounding his death are shrouded in mystery. There was no formal announcement of his death from Sosibius or Agathocles; he simply wasn’t seen for several months. Then, mysteriously, his wife-sister, Arsinoe, who would certainly have taken the role of regent, disappeared too. Finally, Sosibius summoned the court and announced that both king and queen were dead. He then proceeded to read out a forged royal will appointing himself and Agathocles guardians of the new king. There were few tears shed for the death of the king, but the people were immediately suspicious about Arsinoe’s death. How had she come to die simultaneously with her husband, and what, or who, had killed her? Polybius tells us that on receiving the news of her unhappy death “the people fell into such a state of distraction and affliction that the town was full of groans, tears and ceaseless lamentation, a testimony, in the opinion of those who judged correctly, not so much of affection for Arsinoe as of hatred for Agathocles” (Polybius,
The Histories,
book 15, chapter 25).

Sosibius escaped the backlash, dying a few months later, but Agathocles was determined to continue as sole guardian of the new king and proxy ruler of the nation. His first acts were to send away from Alexandria all the most able and influential people at court, on diplomatic missions, so that he gained absolute ascendancy there. Having secured his own position, he began to revel in it, living a life of constant drunkenness and debauchery, “sparing neither women in the flower of their age nor brides nor virgins, and all this he did with the most odious ostentation” (Polybius,
The Histories,
book 15, chapter 25).

Loathing of Agathocles had spread throughout the streets of Alexandria and among the Macedonian soldiers quartered there, and when Agathocles attempted to torture and execute some soldiers he thought were plotting against him, word spread around the garrison and among the townsfolk that revolt was imminent. At the same time, Agathocles was engrossed, as Polybius would have it, in his nightly banquet and orgy, after which he fell into a drunken sleep. He was aroused from this by a party of furious soldiers demanding that the king be surrendered to them. Realizing that he and his sister were trapped, Agathocles eventually surrendered the boy with his bodyguard to the soldiers, who took him on horseback to the stadium, where crowds of citizens and soldiers had assembled.

The crowds were elated to see the king freed but bayed for the blood of the tyrant Agathocles and his harlot sister. At that moment Sosibius’s son, who had remained in the background since his father’s death, saw an opportunity to betray his father’s old colleague and perhaps improve his own standing. Approaching the king, he asked his assent for the crowd to be given satisfaction. The pharaoh apparently nodded, and the crowd roared its approval as soldiers set off to the houses of Agathocles and his sister. In due course they, their attendants, and all their families were brought shackled to the stadium, the women naked, where they were stabbed, bitten, and mutilated until they were all dead. “For terrible is the cruelty of the Egyptians when their anger is aroused,” notes Polybius (
The Histories,
book 15, chapter 33). The younger Sosibius meanwhile slipped away with the young king, eager to protect him from the sight of the mob at work.

Polybius is equally merciless in his final assessment of Agathocles, damning his memory as formidably as the Alexandrians had damned the man:

 
The key phrase here, however, is not about Agathocles, it’s about Ptolemy IV: “Owing to Philopator’s incapacity as a ruler . . .” And there lies the rub. Ptolemy’s failings had sadly not died with him; indeed, his legacy was only just beginning to bear its bitter fruits. Yet from the inscriptions surviving from the early reign of his son, Ptolemy V, one could be forgiven for thinking that another renaissance was in the air.

From this date come a number of apparently upbeat reports. The uprising in the delta was finally brought under control by a ruse. Well protected in the same papyrus marshlands that had harbored the Egyptian resistance to the Persians, the leaders of the revolt had proved impossible to capture until an offer of a peace was made. When the leaders finally emerged to sign the peace declaration they were promptly arrested, harnessed to carts, and forced to drag them, like animals, through the streets. They were then publicly tortured to death. But Ptolemy V proved merciful, if we are to believe one famous, laudatory inscription that dates from this time—the Rosetta stone, whose fame as a key to translating hieroglyphics has rather overshadowed its actual contents. It deals with the aftermath of the delta rebellion, restoring lands and rights and making concessions, particularly to the temples. When it comes to the rebels themselves it also treads a cautious but clearly victorious line, saying the king had “ordained that those who return of the warrior class, and of others who were unfavourably disposed in the days of the disturbances, should, on their return, be allowed to occupy their old possessions.”

The news from Upper Egypt seemed positive as well, if we can rely on the inscriptions at Edfu that marked the restoration of the temple after the rebellion and spoke of the new Ptolemy as the king who “chased disorder out of the country.”

But in these inscriptions rests the lie. Ptolemy V was king in name only. He hadn’t chased anyone or anything out of the country, nor had he magnanimously pardoned the rebels; he was just a boy growing up in a court of murderous “favorites.” On his death, still young, there were no brothers to succeed him, no adult kings-in-waiting who might take the court in hand and reassert royal power. They had all been killed on Ptolemy V’s succession, and the only real achievement of his short life was the siring of a son of his own, another child pharaoh to take on the mantle of political impotence on his death and continue the cycle of manipulation and murder.

While court factions squabbled for control of the boy pharaoh, real political power was slipping away. Few rulers of the Near East believed any pharaoh would last long, and without a real leader in Egypt they grabbed every opportunity to erode his empire. The descendants of Alexander’s other generals—the Seleucids in Persia and Syria, and the kings of Macedonia—took back all of Egypt’s territories in the Aegean, Asia Minor, and Palestine. And there was little danger of revenge.

But while the court bewailed the loss of empire and the Alexandrian merchants the loss of trading influence, both would have done well to look across the Mediterranean to a far greater threat looming on the horizon.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE LAST PHARAOH

Mary R. Lefkowitz and Maureen B. Fant,
Women in Greece and Rome

 
 
T
hree things would bring down the Ptolemaic dynasty and bring to a close the three-millennia-old rule of the pharaohs. The first was the huge success of the early Ptolemies, whose radical re-invention of the Egyptian state made the nation once again a treasure worth fighting for. The second was the failure of their heirs to resist being seduced by the wealth and power they inherited. The third did not come from within Egypt but, in the summer of 48 BC, was already traveling across the sea toward Egypt and Alexandria. On the deck of that ship stood the leader of an aggressive Italian people who was writing himself into world history as the greatest general since Alexander. What and whom he found there would set the scene for perhaps the most famous series of romances in history, later immortalized by William Shakespeare. And their results would be no less deadly to all concerned than fate was to Shakespeare’s other star-crossed lovers, Romeo and Juliet.

Since Alexander’s death in 323 BC the eastern Mediterranean had been involved in an almost continuous struggle among the descendants of his heirs for control of an empire that had always been more myth than reality. But while Macedonians, Seleucids, and Ptolemies fought, another power had been growing in the west which would come to dominate them all—Rome.

The warning signs had been there since the First Punic War, when Rome decided to clip the wings of the rival trading empire of Carthage. Archimedes had actually seen it in the eyes of the Roman soldiers besieging his city of Syracuse and felt it in his last moments on the point of a Roman sword. Rome was not a state to countenance other empires when it had it in its power to bring them down. Carthage had come back for more, keen to stand up to the cold, unblinking expansionism of Rome, and had been defeated again. Finally, after the Third Punic War, Carthage was not only defeated but erased from the face of the earth. The Roman orator Cato had first found expression for what was clearly now Rome’s policy when he exhorted the senate with the words
“Carthago delenda est”
—Carthage must be destroyed. And it was. The city of Carthage itself was demolished, its inhabitants were massacred, and the fields around it were, according to legend, sown with salt so nothing and no one could live there. There could be no clearer statement of the Romans’ overall intent. They would never be content with being players in the game of ruling the Mediterranean world—they planned to be the victors.