Cleopatra the Great (8 page)

Throughout the country Ptolemy II decreed ‘that her statue be set up in all the temples. This pleased their priests for they were aware of her noble attitude toward the gods and of her excellent deeds to the benefit of all people'. Named as ‘Beloved of the Ram', she was worshipped at Mendes, the place ‘where bitch-mounting goats go mating with the women'. This aspect of ritual behaviour was described by the historian Herodotus, who reported with some understatement that ‘a goat tupped a woman, in full view of everyone — a most surprising event'.

Arsinoe II was shown with the same ram's horns as Alexander, and like him called ‘child of Amun'; the god Amun himself informed Arsinoe II that ‘I will make you a god [sic] at the head of the gods on earth'. She was indeed worshipped throughout Egypt as the female counterpart of Osiris, Ra, Ptah, Min, Montu and Sobek, the ancient crocodile god of the Fayum. The capital of the Fayum was renamed Arsinoe and the whole of this fertile lakeside region south-west of the Delta reclassified as the Arsinoite nome (province). A port on the Red Sea was also named Arsinoe, and her worship extended as far afield as Cyprus, Delos and Thera, reflecting Ptolemaic influence across the eastern Mediterranean.

Although Ptolemy II clearly missed his sister-wife's capable government, her physical presence seems never to have been a prerequisite since the king, like his father, had always maintained relationships with large numbers of women, including the exceptionally beautiful Bilis-tiche of Argos. Usually termed ‘mistresses', they followed the Egyptian tradition of minor wives and, provided with their own palaces, resembled the large female households of pharaohs of the past.

Recognised as ‘a man of wit and taste, partial to the ladies', Ptolemy II loved the good life and it eventually took its toll. Perhaps as overweight as his obese half-brother Magas, he certainly suffered from drink-induced gout in his final years. He was able to do little more than sit by his palace window and observe his subjects enjoying picnics on the sands below, gloomily declaring, ‘Unlucky devil that I am! To think I cannot even be one of those fellows.' The second Ptolemy died at the age of sixty-two in January 246
BC
and, after cremation in accordance with Macedonian tradition, his ashes were buried in Alexandria in ceremonies led by his son and successor, the thirty-eight-year-old Ptolemy III.

The new king was crowned by the high priest Anemho II in 246
BC,
the same year that he married his cousin Berenike of Cyrene, only child and successor of the portly Magas. The acquisition of Cyrene's fleet proved crucial in the Ptolemies' renewed war with the Seleucids. Berenike II ruled Egypt in her husband's absence, and was even said to have gone into battle beside him on at least one occasion. The campaign was lengthy but successful, extending Egypt's reach as far east as Babylonia, from where Ptolemy III retrieved Egyptian treasures looted long ago by the Persians.

Awarded the Greek title Euergetes, ‘Benefactor', the couple were worshipped as ‘Benefactor Gods' and Berenike II identified with Isis and Aphrodite. She was an attractive woman with ‘deep-set long eyes, a nose wide at the nostrils, a ball-chin — a face slightly reminiscent of Nefertiti ... it looks as though the Hellenistic Greeks, like the moderns, admired the Nefertiti profile' which Berenike II further emphasised by drawing back her blonde hair in a bun. She also wore long corkscrew ringlets characteristic of her homeland Cyrene, and her hair even achieved its own immortality after a lock which she dedicated in the temple of Arsinoe Zephritis mysteriously disappeared, presumably blown away in the continuous sea breeze, until identified in the night sky by the court astonomer as the constellation Coma Berenikes (‘the curl of Berenike').

Using her striking appearance for political purposes, she adopted an unusual ship's prow crown to commemorate naval victories and also wore an anchor-shaped brooch; a connoisseur of perfumes, she wore them to great effect in the manner of her pharaonic predecessors. Far more than a decorative queen, however, Berenike was the first female Ptolemy to hold full kingly titles during her lifetime; named ‘ta per-aat Bereniga', ‘the pharaoh Berenike', and hailed as ‘female Horus', she was clearly ‘perceived as the equivalent of an Egyptian king. There could be nothing clearer than the idea of a female Horus.'

During her twenty-five-year reign she also produced six children, her two daughters receiving the same privileges and education as their male siblings. Following the death of one princess in childhood, the native priests decreed that ‘a sacred statue for her, of gold and set with precious stones' should be set up in every temple, their classical equivalents featuring the veiled Berenike II mourning the child who leans against her knee, looking up in an Alexander-like pose of deification.

Such figures were erected within the colonnades of Alexandria's new Serapeum, ‘adorned with great columned halls and statuary which seems almost alive'. The new temple contained royal quarters and subterranean chambers for the cult of Apis, the monarchs showing ‘constant concern, combined with heavy outlay and expense, for Apis and Mnevis and the other renowned sacred animals in the land'. Equally generous endowments to the Great Library included the original scripts of the great Athenian dramatists, taken out on loan for 15 talents' deposit so that they could be copied and returned (until it was decided to keep the priceless originals and return the copies). In 235
BC
, Berenike Ill's countryman Eratosthenes of Cyrene became head librarian and put forward the revolutionary suggestion that the earth was round. Calculating its circumference by measuring the distance between Alexandria and Aswan, he worked out its diameter to within 80 km (50 miles). He even calculated the length of the year, although his calendar of 365 1/4 days was dismissed by the Egyptian priests, who preferred their own 360-day year with five days left over as birthdays of the gods.

The relationship between crown and clergy gave the Ptolemies a direct line to their pharaonic past, and when the high priest Anemho II was appointed ‘priest of the Royal Ancestors' a huge temple was begun at Horus' cult centre, Edfu, under his guidance. Intended as a shrine to the kingship embodied by Horus, ‘the one who has his being before the ancestors', the new temple would allow the cumulative powers of the country's pharaonic ancestors to be drawn down into the hands of the Ptolemies. But only with the priests as intermediaries.

For in reaction to the Ptolemies' mass translation of Egypt's ancient wisdom into easily accessible Greek, six thousand new symbols had been added to the existing eight hundred to make the hieroglyphic script impenetrable to all but the initiated. Allowing the new temple to act as a huge ritual document, certain words were deliberately chosen for their alliterative effect when read aloud by the priests. So, the straightforward phrase ‘offerings shall be made in your shrine, O Falcon, O you of the dappled plumage!' was vocalised as the tongue-twisting ‘shespu er shespet ek shenbet sab-shuwt'. Warnings that the goddess ‘Nekhbet stabs him who violates your inviolable soil' or ‘shatat her shemy shash shaw ek shata' were accompanied by violent scenes of the pharaoh spearing Horus' enemies, declaring, ‘I hold my harpoon! I drive back the hidden ones, I stab their bodies, I cut them up, I deflect their attack against Horus of the dappled plumage.'

This obsession with spearing, stabbing and generally annihilating the powers of darkness presented the king as the defender of the gods who in turn defended Egypt. And the gods were certainly receptive, for the Ptolemies had gained territory encompassing Egypt, Libya, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Cyprus, Cilicia, Pamphylia, Lycia, Caria, parts of Ionia in modern Turkey, parts of Thrace and the Greek Peloponnese and Aegean.

Having lived up to his Egyptian epithet ‘strong protector of the gods and mighty wall for Egypt', sixty-two-year-old Ptolemy III died in the winter of 222
BC
. He was cremated in ceremonies led by his widow and successor, Berenike II, who took her twenty-year-old son, Ptolemy IV (221-205
BC
) as co-ruler. The new Ptolemy's title of Philopator, ‘father-loving', was nevertheless at odds with his feelings for a mother whose public popularity was an obstacle to the ambitions of her wayward son's powerful courtiers. In a terrifying purge, Berenike II and her remaining children were all killed except for fourteen-year-old Arsinoe, spared for marriage to her brother after which they became the ‘father-loving gods'. Although young Arsinoe III was also identified with Aphrodite and Isis, her portraits' permanently melancholy expression captured something of the trauma surrounding her accession and her brother-husband's long-term relationship with Agathoklea, daughter of Ptolemy Ill's ambitious mistress Oinanthe.

Sharing the new king's sumptuous lifestyle, Agathoklea and her brother Agathokles were a malevolent influence, for despite an unusually stable childhood and superb education Ptolemy IV was ‘aloose, voluptuous, and effeminate prince, under the power of his pleasures and his women and his wine . . . while the great affairs of state were managed by Agathoklea, the king's mistress, [and] her mother and pimp Oinanthe'. Even the Spartan king Kleomenes, living in exile at court and a royal counsellor under the last regime, became ‘an eyewitness of the sickness of the realm'. He was killed, and his flayed body displayed in public.

In 217
BC
the Ptolemies faced crisis point when the Seleucid king Antiochos III took back Syria and marched towards Egypt with seventy thousand troops and 102 Indian elephants. In order to field an army of equal strength, large numbers of Egyptians were quickly trained in Macedonian tactics and seventy-three somewhat jumpy African elephants transported up the Red Sea coast in huge ‘elephantagoi' ships. After following her mother's example by dedicating a lock of hair to invoke the gods, the slight figure of Arsinoe III addressed the troops — she is even shown wielding a spear in contemporary images — before the two forces clashed at Raphia on 22 June. Most surprisingly, the Egyptians won the day and, after taking back the whole of Syria, the victorious monarchs were welcomed home with great festivities. Yet as it began to dawn on the Egyptians just exactly where the power lay, serious bouts of internal unrest broke out in middle Egypt and spread to the Delta.

Nor were things any easier for the Ptolemies' allies in Rome. After the invasion by Hannibal of Carthage and his famous elephants they requested, and received, emergency supplies of Egyptian grain. In gratitude the Romans issued gold coins featuring their war god Mars and the Ptolemies' royal eagle, then sent a delegation to Egypt, ‘taking presents to the king and queen to commemorate and renew their friendship'.

Although the ambassadors' gifts included a smart Roman toga for the king, this mode of dress is unlikely to have appealed to Ptolemy IV who, like his predecessors, preferred to emphasise his power through an ostentatious show of wealth. He paid regular homage to the god of the royal house, styled himself ‘Neos Dionysos' (the new Dionysos) and had himself tattooed with the god's sacred ivy leaves; wearing an ivy wreath, ‘carrying a timbrel and taking part in the show', he participated in rites which involved large quantities of wine.

Ptolemy IV modelled himself on Alexander — whose own involvement with the wine-fuelled cult was such that he has often been dubbed an alcoholic. It is therefore fitting that Ptolemy IV's greatest achievement, possibly begun by his parents, was Alexander's mausoleum. Built on the northern side of the Canopic Way, Ptolemy IV ‘built in the middle of the city a memorial building which is now called the Sema [‘tomb'] and he laid there all his forefathers together with his mother, and also Alexander the Macedonian' after exhuming their remains from the original marble tomb in the city.

It was also said that ‘the Soma also, as it is called, is part of the royal district. This was the walled enclosure which contained the burial places of the kings and that of Alexander' (with Soma meaning ‘body' and Sema meaning ‘tomb'). All trace of both the body and the tomb vanished centuries ago, although it was said that the tomb was ‘worthy of the glory of Alexander in size and construction'. Scattered evidence also suggests a tall, imposing structure, possibly circular and topped by a pyramid-shaped edifice; its subterranean burial chamber or inner sanctum would have housed the urns of Ptolemies I, II and III and their female counterparts Berenike I, Arsinoe II and Berenike II, interred beside Alexander's mummy within his gold coffin and stone sarcophagus.

The Sema drew down the ancestral powers of Alexander for the good of the Ptolemies in much the same way that the temple at Edfu brought together the powers of the royal ancestors for the good of Egypt. With work on the inner parts of the Edfu temple soon complete, a new temple to Horus further south in Nubia named Arsinoe III in its inscriptions. She was honoured for producing a son, the first Ptolemaic child to be born of a full brother-sister marriage. A rather pensive child who took after his mother, the boy, named Ptolemy, was made co-regent soon after his birth in October 210
BC
. His status as an only child presumably reflected the fact that Arsinoe III is said to have regularly pleaded with her brother-husband to stop using the palace for his drinking parties. Yet ‘his shameful philanderings and incoherent and continuous bouts of drunkenness, not surprisingly found in a very short space of time both himself and his kingdom to be the object of a number of conspiracies'.

In 207
BC
Herwennefer of Thebes declared himself pharaoh with the backing of the Karnak priests, who set themselves in direct opposition to the Ptolemies and their priestly allies in Memphis. The south broke away and Egypt slid towards anarchy. By the end of205
BC
Ptolemy IV, not yet forty, was dead. His courtiers hushed up his death, murdered Arsinoe III and secretly cremated the couple, placing their matching silver urns close to Alexander in the tomb they had completed for him.