The Search for Cleopatra Read online

  The Ptolemaic rulers built, repaired or embellished many of the ancient Egyptian temples, including Karnak, the largest religious centre in Egypt.

  We have a picture, therefore, of Ptolemaic Egypt that shows an imposing, substantial edifice built on the foundations of some three thousand years of Egyptian history, newly enlivened and decorated by Greek political good sense and intellectual achievement. But a closer look reveals a worrying subsidence in the foundations, a lack of cohesion in the structure, evidence everywhere of cracks and weakness. For the Greeks, the grandeur of the conception was still attractive, and there were sufficient advantages to draw them and other foreigners to the country in great numbers. For adventurers and young men of spirit Ptolemaic Egypt was the place to be. They poured in, looking for excitement and good times, as the poet Herodas pictured them in one of his entertainments:

  The Kom el-Hisn stela depicts a display of regal worship by the early Ptolemies. Ptolemy II and his wife, Berenice II, are standing facing a procession of gods (right) while being followed by Thoth, Seschat and the deified kings Ptolemy II, Arsinoe II and Ptolemy I.

  Egypt! Everything that is, or can be anywhere, is in Egypt. Riches, power, comfort, glory, shows, games, gymnasiums, young men, gold, philosophers, the shrine of the Brother-and-Sister Gods, the king (a liberal sort of fellow), the Museum, wine – all the good things a young man’s heart can possibly desire. Yes, and women too, more numerous than the stars, and as beautiful as the goddesses that submitted themselves to the Judgment of Paris.

  On the evidence of the Greeks, the house of Ptolemy had good reason for satisfaction.

  But for the Egyptians, as they were fretted by the growing incompetence of a complicated, over-centralized administration, and as decadence weakened the king and the court, and corruption polluted the bureaucracy, a sullen dissatisfaction became more widespread. Small revolts broke out from time to time, particularly in the far south of Upper Egypt, many of them encouraged by the Egyptian priesthood of the temple of Amon-Ra at Thebes. And in the outside world Roman eyes began to calculate the weakness of the later Ptolemies, coveting the wealth of the land.

  The wealth was still there, for accumulation had become a habit like everything else. But by the turn of the first century BC fatigue had set in. There was a presentment of this weariness even in the successful reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus. It was said that as he, a plump man of sixty-three with gout, came close to the time of his death in 245 BC, he saw from the window of his palace in Alexandria a group of poor Egyptian labourers lying on the canal bank, at ease on the warm sand, eating with contentment the few scraps of their midday food. Then he cried out bitterly against the tedious effort of his royal lot and wished himself with no more burdens than those of his simplest subject.

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  PREPARATION OF A QUEEN

  THE GROSS MAN in the robes of diaphanous gauze, who was called Physkon (Fatty) by the caustic tongue of the Alexandrian mob, on the death of his brother in Syria at last secured the throne of Egypt in 145 BC. As a gesture of hope he took the title Ptolemy VIII Euergetes II, attempting to raise the memory of the first great Ptolemy Euergetes, when the flush of success was on Egypt. The attempt was useless. The house of Ptolemy was in decline, and the kings of the second century BC struggled to hold their state together. In his boyhood Ptolemy Physkon had seen Antiochus, the Seleucid king of Syria, acting the pharaoh in Memphis itself. Physkon’s brother, Ptolemy VI, another fat man, had reclaimed some of the reputation and power of Egypt, handsomely defeating the Syrians just before he died of a battle-wound. In fact, in the way of the ancient world, his doctors had killed him, making fatal a head-wound that he might well have survived. This Ptolemy VI, said the historian Polybius, was a competent man, brave and decisive in battle, but when there was no crisis he became slack, idle and pleasure-loving, all of which was ‘rather Egyptian’. That succinct judgement was an epitome of the Ptolemaic failure.

  Sandstone relief, c. 135 BC, from Kom Ombo temple showing Ptolemy VIII Euergetes II receiving a scimitar from Haroeris or Horns the Elder, the falcon god. Behind him are Ptolemy’s wives, Cleopatra II and Cleopatra III.

  In the deadly intrigues of the family Physkon had schemed hard for the crown, and he did not intend to let go of his advantage. His brother, the late king, had left a little son already associated, in the way of the ruling house, with the kingship of his father. Physkon settled that small matter by having his nephew – Ptolemy VII – murdered ‘in the arms of his mother’, as the hostile rumours reported. Again according to custom, Physkon then married that same mother, Cleopatra II, who was his own sister and also the widow of his dead brother. This Cleopatra, in the previous reign, had been Physkon’s grim enemy and in this she had been supported by the Jews of Alexandria. One of the first acts of the new king had been to turn his elephants loose in the Jewish quarter, hoping to trample the inhabitants to death. The Jews, wrote Josephus, were saved by the natural delicacy of the elephants and by the intervention of the king’s concubine Irene.

  After a year of consolidation against his many enemies, Ptolemy Physkon was crowned and at about the same time Cleopatra II gave birth to his child. The feast in honour of this baby prince was marred by the slaughter of some citizens from Cyrene who had made rude remarks about the mistress Irene. Within a short time of this birth, Physkon lost patience with his sister-wife and transferred his sexual attention to his niece, the teenage daughter of his queen by her dead husband-brother. It was said that Physkon raped this girl; then he married her biga-mously under the tide Cleopatra III. From this time, about the year 140 BC, there were three sovereigns in Egypt. The official documents referred to the elder queen as ‘Cleopatra the Sister’ and to the younger one as ‘Cleopatra the Wife’.

  The older woman could not be put away because she was, as so often with the queens of the Ptolemies, a forceful, astute politician with a strong following in the country. The rift in the royal family symbolized the breaks and disintegration within society, particularly in Alexandria. Cabals formed, armed partisans took sides, the fickle mob bayed out its passion. In 130 BC, after 10 years of bitterness, the mob burned down the king’s palace in Alexandria, and Physkon fled to Cyprus with his children and his young queen Cleopatra III.

  Cruelty, selfishness, rebellion, sexual confusion – Alexandria was the cockpit where these humours bred and multiplied. Visitors agreed that the city was a place apart from the kingdom. It was the Ptolemaic capital, but it was not Egypt. And as long as the kings were tempted to plot and play and parade in Alexandria, they withdrew from responsibility and endangered the government of their Egyptian lands.

  Bronze drachma piece with a representation of the great Pharos lighthouse which was designed by the architect Sostratus in the reign of Ptolemy II.

  There was no city like it in the West or in all the kingdoms as far as India. Founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BC, it bore his illustrious name, and its fame matched his own. It began with a small Egyptian village called Rhakotis, on a slight elevation of good land between a lake and the sea. Here, the architect Dinocrates of Rhodes was given a free hand to plan a city that would marry Greek rationality with Greek magnificence. To the south, the site was guarded by the wide waters of Lake Mareotis. The Mediterranean shore-line was protected by the long offshore island of Pharos and a reef. A short distance to the east the Canopic mouth of the Nile emptied into the sea; and in the west the desert edged in towards the city limit. In this favourable place there rose in time an orderly oblong grid of streets and buildings, 6 kilometres on its longer side, which fully realized the inspiration of the architects. The geographer Strabo, who visited the city shortly after the death of Cleopatra, admired what he saw:

  The whole city is crossed by streets wide enough for horses and carriages, and intersecting at right angles are two very wide streets, being more than 30 metres in breadth. The city has magnificent public places and buildings and royal palaces that cover a quarter, even a third, of the total city are
a. Each king, just as he adds ornaments to public buildings, also builds a palace of his own to join those already there. And all are connected to the harbour, even those beyond the harbour walls. Also forming part of the palace quarter is the Sema, the enclosure containing the tomb of Alexander and those of the kings ... In a word, the city is full of dedications and sanctuaries. The gymnasium is the most beautiful building, with a colonnade about 175 metres in length. In the middle of the city are the law courts and open groves. There is also the Paneum, an artificial conical hill with spiral steps going round it. From the top, the whole wonderful city spreads out below.

  Joining the island of Pharos to the mainland was a causeway of more than a thousand pieces, called the Heptastadion. This divided the inshore waters into two harbours. To the east was the Great Harbour into which ships were guided by the gigantic Pharos lighthouse, one of the wonders of the world. The palace complex, the Brucheion, a city within a city, adjoined this harbour and had its own protected anchorage. To the west was the larger and more open Eunostos, the Harbour of Happy Return.

  The hallmarks of the city were clarity, order, practicality and magnificence. Spaciously laid out, tightly regulated, decorated with taste and expense, Alexandria expressed the logical and artistic possibilities of the Greek mind. For the citizens, it was intended to be the setting for fulfilled lives that took into account the needs of the whole person, spirit, body and mind. The majesty of power and the awe of kingship were represented in the palaces and the public architecture. Religious sensibility found a home in the many temples, in the tombs of the Sema where Alexander and the god-kings of the dynasty rested, and particularly in the Serapeum, the shrine of Sarapis, the favourite god of Alexandria. The body was fed, clothed and entertained by the wealth that flowed from the vast trade of the capital, which was also the largest port of the Mediterranean. The mind was nurtured within the gymnasium (a place for both bodily exercise and mental instruction), and by the learning and artistic creativity that poured out of the Museum, to which was attached the great Library.

  The Museum – the house dedicated to the Muses – was based on the ancient practice of the philosophical schools in Athens. In time, under the sympathetic patronage of the Ptolemies, it became the powerhouse of western learning and the glory of the city. It was housed in stately buildings within the royal quarter of Brucheion, with its director appointed by and responsible to the king. The poets Callimachus, Apollonius of Rhodes and Theocritus worked for the Museum. It produced good literature and better scholarship. In the Library that formed part of the Museum there was a collection of some half a million rolls and parchments and papyri. Here was the greater part of the thought and the writing of the Greek world, including most of the Homeric works, gathered, lovingly edited and annotated and, most important of all, preserved for future ages. All this was a credit to the Ptolemaic kings, men with many human faults but with sound artistic impulses.

  Literature and scholarship were well-served, but the most valuable work to come out of the Museum was that done in science. Without Callimachus or even Theorcritus, the world would have suffered a slight loss. Without the invention and discoveries of Euclid and others in mathematics, of Archimedes and later Hero in theoretical and applied physics, of Eratosthenes and Claudius Ptolemy in geography, of Eratosthenes again and Aristarchus in astronomy and calendar reform, and finally of Erasistratus in medicine, what would have become of our world? It is no exaggeration to say that Alexandrian science laid all future western science under a debt, and forms the basis of the scientific world-view of the West to this day.

  View of the city of Alexandria from a sixteenth-century book of engravings, the Liber Chronicarum by H Schedel. Founded by Alexander the Great, the city became one of the most magnificent in the eastern Mediterranean during the Ptolemaic dynasty and was renowned for its culture.

  But the city embraced very much more than its planning, its building and the history of its intellectual success. Alexandria grew into the largest city of the Mediterranean world, with a population somewhere between half a million and a million. It became a bewildering and bruising collection of peoples, in which (according to Polybius) there were three main elements: the native Egyptians, ‘sharp-witted and well suited to civil life’; the mercenary soldiers, the adventurers and the place-hunters who were often riotous and a constant threat to good order; and lastly the ‘Alexandrines’ who were at least Greek by origin and ‘had not forgotten the general Greek way of life’. There were also several ethnic enclaves, roughly homogeneous, and a influential community of Jews in the quarter known as Delta, close to the royal palaces. Besides these more or less permanent communities, there was a shifting population from almost every country of the known world with an interest in trade, advancement, pleasure or the fruits of the mind.

  Too often, this became an incendiary mixture of peoples and cultures. The settled Greekness of the place, which might have been a force for stability in the early days of the Ptolemies, was later fractured by sudden movements, by influx and exits pushed or pulled by the magnetic force of the city itself. Nor was the ‘Greek way of life’ that had the approval of Polybius always an influence for good. There was a frivolous and dangerous side to Greek social life that showed itself in luxury, spectacle, games, feasts, and a love of fashionable thrills. Greeks were also adept at plotting and scheming, fickle in their affections, and no strangers to violence. Theocritus in one of his idylls celebrated the peaceful order of Alexandria in the time of Ptolemy II: ‘Nowadays we are safe in the streets from Egyptian rogues. The tricks those rascals used to play!’ He spoke much too soon* The pleasure-loving kings used spectacle and public entertainment as a part of state policy. But every concession to this public hunger for thrills only sharpened the riotous and brutal appetite of the mob.

  Ptolemy II, after a triumphant march deep into the lands of the Seleucid empire, had identified himself with Dionysus, the Thracian god of drunken revelry who had also conducted a giddy and mysterious progress throughout the East. The identification stuck, and Dionysian revels became an essential part in the success of the Ptolemaeia, the festival of the god-kings held every four years. In the festival, the figure of Dionysus was mounted on an elephant, garlanded and with the ivy-clad wand of the thyrsus in his hand, while a rabble of satyrs and maenads followed in his wake. In a famous account of the third Ptolemaeia, when a procession of 75,000 people took two days to cross the city, we see a 3-metre-high statue of the god, clad in purple, ladling wine from a golden bowl that held nearly 400 litres. Three hundred men pulled another float bearing a wine press trampled by 60 satyrs, treading in time to music.

  All this was potent propaganda for the ruling house, but in time it became more a drug for the people. Public orgy became part of public expectation, and violence and sudden death inevitably followed. Pandered to by drink and lavish spectacle, the Alexandrian mob developed a taste for blood. In 59 BC the historian Diodorus Siculus saw a Roman torn apart in the street because he had accidentally killed a cat, one of the sacred animals of Egypt. More and more, mob violence entered into the intrigues of the Ptolemies. Incitement towards assassination was part of routine policy. Ptolemy VI barely escaped from the plots of a certain Dionysus Petosarapis. In 80 BC, when Ptolemy XI murdered his co-ruler, who was his wife and his cousin, after reigning for only 19 days, the mob hauled him from the palace to the gymnasium and killed him also.

  The victory of mob rule showed the extent of the social and political sickness in Egypt and in the capital. It put a stamp of defeat on the long, declining era of the Ptolemies. For the ordinary Egyptian life was becoming poorer and harder, and the road through the maze of the bureaucracy was a woeful pilgrimage. The account of one Apollonius, attempting in 157 BC to secure a military post for which he was eligible, was a painful reminder of official futility. Round and round he went among offices and office-holders, writing, petitioning, cajoling, fetching, begging. His letters needed wings, so far was the distance they were forced to trav
el:

  They were delivered for the dioiketes to read, and I received back the prostagma from Ptolemy, and the letter from Epimenides. And I took them to Isidorus the autoteles, and from him I carried them to Philoxenus, and from him to Artemon, and from him to Lycus, who made a rough draft, which I took to Sarapion in the office of the epistolographus, and from him to Eubius, and from him to Dorion, and he made another draft, and then back again to Sarapion, and all handed back to be read by the dioiketes.

  Nor was that the end of the matter. The little piece of business drifted through another list of idle hands until it disappeared from the record, still unresolved.

  By 118 BC the ferocious rivalries of the royal house and the slipshod incompetence of the administration had produced such a wretched state in society, so much violence and confusion, that Ptolemy VIII Physkon and his warring queen Cleopatra II were forced to try to wipe out the wrongs of the past by a decree that promised a widespread amnesty for criminals and wrongdoers, a remission of taxes and relief from various duties and dues, a confirmation of doubtful landtitles, a right to rebuild destroyed properties, a new freedom from the exactions of officials, severe new penalties for law-breakers, and in general the promise of quiet enjoyment for all decent citizens in the lawful conduct of their affairs.

  But these large promises could not be met. The complaints continued.