The Search for Cleopatra Read online

  In the early years of his reign, Ptolemy I Soter saw that the impressive bureaucratic structure in Egypt had suffered under the maladministration of the Persians. The river system had been neglected and agriculture was in decline. Trade was in the hands of foreigners, mainly Greeks and Phoenicians. Industry was hardly maintained, except by the priests of the temples. Power was shifting away from the kingship into the temple complexes. Ptolemy I, and more particularly his son Ptolemy II Philadelphus, set out to re-establish and re-interpret the old autocratic system even more stringently than before, enforcing bureaucratic efficiency with military severity.

  The Ptolemaic king [a leading historian has written] has to be thought of as a landowner and a farmer on a huge scale, one whose estate was the whole land of Egypt. All the officials were his personal servants, the army an instrument of his will, raised from the men who had plots of land assigned to them out of his territory on the condition of rendering him military service.

  Ptolemy I was a soldier and his experience of men and affairs came from the campaign of Alexander; under the first Ptolemaic kings ‘there was no sharp distinction between the military and the civil career, and the staff of the king bore an almost purely military character’.

  The king was the ultimate beneficiary of all activity of whatever kind within the state. For the early Ptolemies, the boast of Louis XIV of France was nothing but the truth: ‘The State, it is me.’ The whole land was plotted and divided into highly regulated administrative districts, and administration was in the hands of a large centralized bureaucracy whose chief officers, usually eunuchs, were royal placeholders. The underlying principle of all government was the enrichment of the king. And though the ruler naturally delegated his authority, the people did not forget that the authority was his, nor did they hesitate to remind him that the ultimate responsibility was his also. A conscientious Ptolemy was a busy man. He was bombarded with petitions from even the meanest of his subjects. An historian, leafing through the evidence of the papyri, noted the following causes of complaint:

  The Ptolemies re-established the old Egyptian custom of royal brother and sister marriages and Arsinoe II, seen here depicted as a goddess, was married to her brother, Ptolemy II.

  Someone has killed the pigs of an allotment holder; a provision merchant has made a fraudulent delivery; joint tenants are squabbling about the partition of a field; a careless attendant has scalded a woman in a public bath house; a prostitute spat on a man when he turned her offer down.

  All this was presented to the king for adjudication, and a myriad of other things had to be looked into as well Quite typically, in 99 BC the chief embalmer of the divine bulls Apis and Mnevis finds the insolence of officialdom too much to bear. He writes to the king, demanding a royal command, to be pinned on his door, that he should be left alone. The command is duly prepared and signed and sent. No wonder a good king was a weary man. It was said that one of the Seleucid monarchs, who operated in Syria a similar but less grandiose system, cried out in distress. ‘If only the people knew’, he lamented, ‘what weary work it is to write and read so many letters, they would not even bother to pick up a diadem from the ground.’ But the efficient running of the Ptolemaic state, both in theory and practice, demanded the constant care of the king.

  If the king was overwhelmed by work, his subjects were, on the face of it, oppressed by taxes, regulations and lack of freedom. ‘No one’, declared a Ptolemaic decree, ‘has the right to do what he wishes, but everything is organized for the best’. The state had in its armoury a powerful battery of taxes, imposts, dues, duties and tolls that bore on all production, industry, commerce, international trade, and all contractual relations. The state also had judicial and coercive powers to enforce the multitudinous regulations. These officials collected taxes on professions and handicrafts, on manufacture and distribution, on sales, on building, on livestock and on slaves, on the use of bath houses, on the navigation of canals, and on the crossing of bridges. Many important commodities were royal monopolies, safeguarded by a heavy duty on imports. Oil, wool, figs, honey, beer and venison, among other things, were protected in this way. Banking and coinage were solely in the hands of the state. The economy became fully monetarized, in contrast to payment in kind under the pharaohs, though poor cultivators would still give up part of their produce in place of land tax.

  Without doubt, the hand of bureaucracy held the people in a hard, oppressive grip. But when the system worked well it not only enriched the king but also raised the general level of prosperity, extending down even to the lowest fellah in. There is evidence, too, that within the intricacy of the regulations there was leeway for small personal ventures, for private initiatives and individual enterprise. Nor was the system rigidly inhumane, for the king knew that his own security and wealth depended on the well-being of the whole country. The wiser Ptolemies were quite ready, in hard times, to lessen burdens, remit taxes, and cancel traditional obligations.

  Rostovtzeff, the great Russian historian to whom we owe so much of our knowledge of the period, thought that this excessively centralized state made a dreary picture, and led to no advance in the happiness of the people. But it has been pointed out that, in the economy, the Ptolemaic rule in Egypt was a great advance, if not in freedom and happiness (but what did any peasant or labourer in the ancient world know of those fine ideals?), then at least in the briskness of production and trade, and the corresponding accumulation of wealth, throughout the land.

  Together with a strong economy went, finally, a settled foreign and military policy. Naturally, there were still many wars. In the crumbling of Alexander’s empire, the detritus of war spread all over eastern lands as far as India. And the crises remained, for the princes of the time had not given up opportunism, jealousy, pride, greed or dynastic ambition. But in Egypt, just as the land rested crucially on the gifts of the Nile, so the early Ptolemies saw that the security of the realm depended on a compact and adequate defence of the great river valley. Campaigns beyond that, to influence trade routes through Arabia or to gain territory to the north and east of Syria, were a risk and an adventure.

  From the barrens of the south and the desert of the west there was no great danger. Upper Egypt, the southern third of the country known as the Thebaid, followed a sunny, traditional semi-autonomous way of life not much checked by the Greek officials of Alexandria. The Red Sea town of Berenice, far to the south, watched over the eastern sea-route and kept an eye on the valuable emerald mines nearby. Otherwise, the wilderness of sand and scrub and heat was protection enough against primitive tribes. But in the northeast and north there was much more danger. The usual path of invasion into Egypt lay to the north of the Red Sea, in the relatively short westward march from Palestine across the desert to the Nile delta. This was the area that all rulers of Egypt guarded closely, with the main garrison at Pelusium on the most easterly of the delta river-mouths. This historical danger from the north-east caused the Ptolemies to watch Syria anxiously. They would meddle there as far as they could, in particular trying to keep control, either by conquest or through a client-king, of Coele-Syria, the territory better known as Palestine.

  The other danger from the north was likely to come from naval attack in the eastern Mediterranean. To counteract this threat, the Ptolemies pushed into the North African coastal lands of Cyrene, to the west of Egypt, and took control of Cyprus, the dominating island at the east end of the inland sea. They also kept up the naval power of Egypt, which was traditionally strong, encouraging ship-building, maintaining a large fleet and protecting it in Alexandria with the best and most extensive harbour system in the Mediterranean. A foothold in Palestine and Cyprus also provided timber for the ship-builders, for Egypt, though it was lavish with many things, was very short of trees.

  In their plan for Egypt the early Ptolemies made a success of practical matters. They were helped by careful observation and good sense, and they had the good fortune to combine Greek intelligence with the hard-headed ruthles
sness of seasoned Macedonian campaigners. It was perhaps more surprising that they quickly saw, or intuited, the fundamental place of religion in the structure of Egyptian society. Of course, no man could miss the temples, the statues, the pyramids and the monuments of the past. But to understand Egyptian religious sensibility was a difficult task, yet the rulers of the house of Ptolemy managed to reconcile their lives and their government with the feeling and the forms of Egyptian religion.

  The religion they found was not new to the Greeks. Much about the Egyptian gods had been discovered already by traders and travellers, and on the whole the Greeks had been impressed by the antiquity, the solemnity and the splendour of the religion. Certain Greek gods became roughly identified with Egyptian gods, though Greeks, and more so Romans, found a crocodile-god or one with the head of a hawk puzzling and a little distasteful. This was despite such imaginings of hellenism as the goat-legged Pan, or the centaurs who were half horse and half man.

  But both peoples thought about religion in much the same way. Neither had any notion of a transcendental theology. No one in the ancient world but the Israelites had come to terms with that idea. Egyptians as well as Greeks needed mythological stories to explain to themselves features of a universe that seemed almost wholly mysterious. Within these stories, the gods were figures-in-action who licensed the processes of the world, processes whose causative principles were in general unknown. The gods took on human form because mankind knew no higher or more noble form to copy And sometimes they took on the forms of beasts because certain animals were dangerous or beautiful or helpful, and danger, beauty and helpfulness were attributes worthy of a god. A large part of ancient religion was a placatory ritual, a form of good manners towards the unknown.

  But Egypt, autocratic by long history and bureaucratic by design, more than most other lands had made religion an integral part of state life. The temples and the priesthood had traditionally played an important role in the economy and the administration of large estates. The evidence of religion was always present in the eyes of the people. It was put to use in a thorough and practical way, and the gods were familiar beings. The great ones – Amon, Isis, Osiris, Horus, Hathor, Thoth -were honoured in great temples with all that money, labour and imagination could provide. But a small town on the edge of the Fayum, in the second century of Ptolemaic rule, had room for 13 little temples or shrines to gods both great and small. And temple precincts, besides being homes for the gods, were also social and economic centres of activity. The greater precincts might include factories for linen making, papyrus works, mills, breweries, brickworks and stone yards. Vendors, traders, hawkers and hustlers used the precinct as a marketplace. And a discreet brothel often helped to swell the temple coffers.

  In Egypt, since everything sensible to mankind was capable of being a part of divinity, there was nothing incongruous in divine kingship. The gods had no hierarchy, nor were they uniform throughout the country. Local enthusiasm championed local gods. So a god-king, in theory equally present and visible to all his people, gave unity to religion, just as the pharaoh’s absolute supremacy in civil society gave unity to the state. The pharaohs had been gods; Alexander had been proclaimed one by the oracle of Amon. When the early Ptolemies joined the inheritance of Alexander with the traditions of Egypt, they saw no reason why they should not be gods too; and there were many good practical reasons to encourage the people to accept them as such. Ptolemy I had been acclaimed, and perhaps worshipped, as Saviour. His son Ptolemy II took a step logical to Egyptians when he declared the divinity of his own parents (Theocritus said he was the first Greek ever to do so), and from this position his own divinity was only a few paces down the same road.

  In 278 BC the festival of the Ptolemaeia was instituted in Alexandria in honour of the deified Ptolemy Soter. Every four years the festival took place amid the games, processions and feasts that the Greek-speaking Alexandrians loved so much. For although this was a feast of the Egyptian religious calendar, it bore every mark of its Greek inspiration.

  The whole pomp has a non-Egyptian air [wrote an old authority]. If we except the curious products of Nubia and Ethiopia in ivory, giraffes, antelopes, hippopotami, etc., there is nothing Egyptian in the whole affair. We seem to see a Hellenistic king spending millions on a Hellenistic feast.

  But that was the way with much religion in the ancient world. It was inclusive and syncretic. A new god was not rejected for alien birth or unusual ways. Egyptians had a place in their devotions for a god who spoke and looked and acted like a Greek.

  This was just what the ruling house desired. The Ptolemies worked hard to ensure the acceptance of their deified kings throughout all their realm. In 238 BC, in the reign of Ptolemy III Euergetes, a proclamation from Canopus in the Nile delta was inscribed in hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek, to be promulgated in all temples down to those of the third rank:

  Let it be resolved by the priests in all the land to increase the honour and awe that already exist in the temples for King Ptolemy and Queen Berenice, the Benefactor Gods, and to their parents, the Brother-and-Sister Gods, and to their grandparents, the Saviour Gods; and let it be resolved that the priests in all the temples in all the land should be called in all documents priests of the Benefactor Gods, and that this should be engraved on the rings they wear.

  To the four existing tribes of the Egyptian priesthood, a fifth tribe was added devoted to the service of the Benefactor Gods. Their feast was to be celebrated each year ‘on the day when the star of Isis rises, which is the day of the new year in the holy records’.

  Egyptian gods had been identified with Greek opposites – Hathor and Aphrodite, for example, or Amon and Zeus – and Ptolemaic god-kings had been added to the Egyptian pantheon. But nothing indicated the cheerful invention of ancient religious sensibility better than the cult of Sarapis, a hugely popular synthesis that combined the reverence given to the dead and mummified bulls of Apis, entombed at Memphis, with the traditional worship of Osiris, god of the dead. In Alexandria, and particularly at the Serapeum in Memphis, the new cult, a Greek inspiration despite its Egyptian dressing, received numberless petitions and prayers from its devotees. The oldest surviving papyrus in Greek records the curses of a certain Artemisia, a Greek woman, who calls on ‘Lord Oserapis’ to avenge her against the brute who made her pregnant.

  Formally, in the marrying together of old and new institutions and in their interpretation of society, the Ptolemies had adapted excellently to the traditions and practices of Egypt. From the lofty view of the court at Alexandria, taken over a period of almost three hundred years, the Ptolemaic kings had preserved the integrity, stability and prosperity of the country. The best efforts of their administration had been industrious and conscientious, in touch with everyday needs and popular psychology.

  During your tour of inspection [ran a typical official instruction from the middle Ptolemaic period] as you go about try to encourage everyone and make them feel happier, and not by word only. If there are complaints against the scribes or the village chieftains, about the fields or the harvests, look into the matter and try to put it right immediately.

  But down on the ground, where the Egyptian fellahin rubbed against the Greek official, townsman or settler, the limited evidence seems to show that there was little meeting of minds and little common interest. To the native Egyptians, the Greeks were the masters who imposed upon their lives. These impositions were perhaps no more burdensome than before, under their own pharaohs, but the ordinary people noted that the traffic of respect, privilege and authority tended to go one way only, in a direction favourable to the Greeks.

  Greeks preferred to live in their towns – Ptolemais or their resplendent capital of Alexandria – or on the rich lands of the north, in the estates of the delta or the Fayum. The further one went from Lower Egypt towards the baked lands of the Thebaid, the more tenuous was the Greek presence and the more stubborn the survival of ancient practices. There was a suspicion between the old stock and the new
comers with their attendant flock of aliens, mercenaries and adventurers. It grated on the Egyptians that they were the ones who were expected to change, to learn Greek, to take Greek names, to ape the ways of foreigners. ‘They have treated me with contempt’, a native camel owner complained, ‘because they think Fm a barbarian. I do not know how to behave like a Greek’. The Egyptians could not help but notice how strongly the Greeks clung to their superior status and their privileges, specially in the law-courts.

  Yet the Greeks for their part were often shocked by the unshifting conservatism of the Egyptians, their plodding refusal to leave the well-worn ancestral tracks, and their indifference to the fresh adventure (as the Greeks saw it) of hellenistic culture and thought. ‘Some of them had stones and sticks in their hands’, wrote a functionary of the Serapeum at Memphis, complaining of an attack on him by the temple cleaners, ‘and wanted to put me to death because I am a Greek.’

  The two peoples met together in the press of daily life, and they inter-married often enough. They made small accommodations in their lives, and put up with each other for pragmatic reasons, not because they were in sympathy, even after many generations of living side by side. A mutual understanding was hard to achieve. The kings, as a matter of policy, built, repaired or embellished many temples, at Karnak, Philae, Edfu, Denderah, Kom Ombo and on several lesser sites. But when the two peoples prayed to a god vaguely identified as Amon Zeus, the Egyptian idea of Amon was very different from the Greek conception of Zeus. What the Egyptians saw in their religion was the history of their imagination; what the Greeks liked it in was the age-old appeal to superstition, to oracles, spells, curses, horoscopes, talismans, amulets and mysterious occult practices. When a Greek wanted a dream interpreted, or a potion to help him in love or against illness, he was likely to go to an Egyptian.