The Warrior Queens

by Antonia Fraser

Yet for all Tomyris’ courage and a bloodthirstiness in a measure at least justified, it is evident that her reputation survives merely as a footnote to that of Cyrus. Boccaccio, for example, commending her for her courage – she did not look for a place to hide ‘like a fearful woman’ when faced with the spectacle of Cyrus’ army – gave a final verdict with which it is difficult to disagree: ‘she was famous in proportion to the power of Cyrus’.6 The Warrior Queen, whatever her qualities as a general or even as a human being, begins a long career of attachment to some male figure or figures of supreme reputation; she may challenge him successfully (as Tomyris to Cyrus) or she may fail gallantly in the attempt (as Boudica to the Romans) but she begins to be defined, unlike the war-goddess, by the connection: a refinement of the Appendage Syndrome, not in familial but in historical terms.

  Fifty years after the death of Cyrus the Great, another brave queen accompanied another Persian king, Xerxes, to war against the Greeks and, although defeated at his side in the battle of Salamis, emerged from the contest with her reputation enhanced. It is true that something of Herodotus’ partiality for Artemisia, Queen Regent of Halicarnassus, may be due to the fact that she was the local heroine, Herodotus himself springing from that same rocky promontory on the south Aegean shore (now the site of Bodrum in modern Turkey). Herodotus was born in 484 BC, that is to say he was only four years old at the time of the battle of Salamis; as a boy he listened to the tales of the men who had sailed with the famous Artemisia.7 As a result Herodotus’ anecdotal portrait of the Queen has a vividness and plausibility beyond mere local patriotism.

  He began by admitting that it was ‘a most strange and interesting thing’ that Artemisia – a woman – should have taken part in the campaign against Greece. But he then went on to emphasize that it was not a mere fluke of inheritance that brought Artemisia to command. Of Cretan blood from her mother, Artemisia assumed power on the death of her Hali-carnassan father Lygdamis: at first sight this is an example of Warrior Queen as Appendage, following the failure of the male line; but there was in fact a male heir available in the shape of Artemisia’s grown-up son. So Artemisia’s dashing expedition was due to her own force of character; or, as Herodotus put it, ‘her own sprit of adventure and her manly courage were her only incentives’.

  Furthermore Artemisia showed herself from the start of Xerxes’ fatal naval campaign against the Greeks prudent as well as adventurous. It was Artemisia, alone of Xerxes’ commanders, who suggested that the Persian King should learn the lesson of his recent defeat at the hands of the Greeks at Euboea, and not challenge the Greek naval power by putting to sea. Her advice was couched in apparently modest terms: ‘The Greeks are as far superior to us in naval matters as men are to women’, although she had begun by noting that it was her own courage and achievements at Euboea ‘surpassed by none’ which gave her the right to speak so boldly. She pointed out that if Xerxes rushed into another naval action, the ruin of his fleet might involve the ruin of his army as well.

  Artemisia’s intervention was heard with bated breath by the other members of Xerxes’ council: her friends feared she had ruined herself, the jealous hoped that her sway over Xerxes would now be diminished. In the event Xerxes disregarded Artemisia’s advice – he decided that the failure at Euboea had been due to his own absence, which had enabled his men to shirk their duty. But his high opinion of her perspicacity was at the same time confirmed.

  What was more, Artemisia’s conduct at Salamis, compared to that of Xerxes’ male commanders, called forth the celebrated lament, ‘My men have turned into women, my women into men.’ It is the cry, an essential part of the Shame Syndrome, which will be heard again and again in the history of the Warrior Queen, down to the twentieth century, when Mrs Gandhi was described as ‘the only man in the cabinet of old women’ during her first year in office and the Labour politician George Brown called Mrs Thatcher ‘the best man in the Tory Party’.8

  Artemisia’s escape from the scene of the naval engagement showed a special bravado. According to Herodotus, ‘it was Ameinias who gave chase to Artemisia, and if he had known that Artemisia was on board, he would never have abandoned the chase until he had either taken her or been taken himself; for the Athenians resented the fact that a woman should appear in arms against them, and the ships’ captains had received special orders about her, with the offer of a reward of 10,000 drachmae for anyone who captured her alive’.

  Artemisia, faced with the problem of eluding Ameinias’ trireme, adopted a radical solution. Instead of trying to engage Ameinias, she boldly rammed the ship of one of her own allies. The ruse succeeded. The Greeks assumed Artemisia’s ship to be one of their own side and abandoned the chase. At the same time the ramming was noted from afar and brought to the attention of Xerxes himself with the words: ‘Do you see, my lord, how well Artemisia is fighting? She has sunk an enemy ship.’ For the Persians, like the Greeks, could not conceive of Artemisia ramming one of her own allies.

  Artemisia rounded off the campaign, successful at least from the point of view of her own prestige, by giving Xerxes another sage piece of advice. She suggested that the Persian King should now leave his general Mardonius behind in the country to complete the design, since that was Mardonius’ wish. ‘If his design prospers and success attends his arms, it will be your work, master – for your slaves performed it. And even if things go wrong with him, it will be no great matter so long as you yourself are safe.’ This time – since Artemisia’s advice exactly coincided with his own inclinations – Xerxes followed it. And his admiration for Artemisia was greater than ever.

  All in all, it is not difficult to sympathize with the verdict of John Aylmer in the sixteenth century. Put up to defending Queen Elizabeth I against the attacks of Calvin and Knox on female ‘regiment’ (government), he referred more than once to the story of Artemisia and Xerxes. Artemisia the woman, he pointed out, had shown more talent to rule than Xerxes the man.9

  The trouble with this perception of the Warrior Queen as one whose behaviour and indeed whose whole career served as an implicit chastisement of the opposite sex was that it existed entirely in the moral sphere of the narrator. As Thomas Heywood observed in his seventeenth-century Gynaekeion – although the sentiment was universal from the time of the Greeks onwards – ‘I know not better how to express the boldness of women, than by shewing you the fear of men, nor can I more plainly illustrate the valor of one sex than by putting you in mind the cowardice of another.’10

  Bearing this in mind, the story of Cleopatra’s treatment by the Romans in the century before Boudica and above all the story of her treatment as a would-be ‘Queen of War’ acts as a significant footnote to the history of pre-Boudican female warrior leaders. Where practical politics were concerned, no Warrior Queen could count on the kind of approval meted out by Herodotus to Artemisia in his character study of a woman at once sagacious and brave (beyond the capacity of all the surrounding contemporary males). Like other client rulers, or those designated as such by the Romans, she would be judged entirely by her usefulness to the advancement of the Roman cause (which, put simply, happened to be profitable overlordship of the known world). At the same time sexual licence attributed where possible to a Warrior Queen would be aimed as a barbed political arrow: where Cleopatra was concerned, it was convenient that Artemisia should be forgotten, Semiramis remembered.

  Cleopatra VII – as she would become – was born in late 70 or early 69 BC, one of the six children of Ptolemy XII Auletes (the word means the Piper). Of these six, there were two girls older than Cleopatra, Cleopatra VI Tryphaena and Berenice IV; after Cleopatra came a fourth daughter Arsinoe and then two sons by Auletes’ second wife, Ptolemy XIII and Ptolemy XIV, born in 61 and 59 BC respectively. There is some doubt about the identity of Cleopatra’s mother, but Auletes’ first wife Cleopatra V Tryphaena (mother of her two elder sisters) is the most likely choice.11

  It is of course important to realize that Cleopatra came from a line of Hellenistic queens, s
omething which should not be obscured by the exceptional fame with which literature has endowed her. Equally important is the truth about Cleopatra’s blood and upbringing. Shakespeare’s ‘serpent of the old Nile’ was in fact to all intents and purposes a Greek; she had Macedonian, Persian and Syrian blood as well as Greek, but her language was Greek. She had no Egyptian blood, although as an intelligent, well-educated woman she may possibly have spoken Egyptian. Cleopatra’s Greek upbringing meant that she had been raised up in the knowledge of the great Hellenistic monarchies which had existed in the past: but she was also aware that these were now mere insubstantial memories, as Egypt had passed under Roman tutelage during the previous century. Cleopatra’s father had been established as a kind of puppet monarch during the Roman dictatorship of Sulla; as a child Cleopatra might have known of the typically humiliating incident in which her own father was received by Cato as a course of laxatives were being administered to him.12

  It is possible that Cleopatra co-ruled with her father for a period of weeks or months before the end of his life; at all events she was pronounced co-ruler with her ten-year-old brother Ptolemy XIII on Auletes’ death in 51 BC. Such a union with her brother was a crucial step. Firstly, these repeated Ptolemaic marriages of brother and sister, whatever their genetic consequences, were intended to play upon the Egyptian devotion to their gods Osiris and Isis: the first-born children of the god of the earth and the goddess of the sky who married each other. The Ptolemies, as they enacted the roles of brother– husband and sister–wife, appealed to the patriotism of the Egyptians and at the same time emphasized their own divine origins as lawgivers.

  Secondly, from the point of view of Cleopatra, as with her other female relatives, some kind of male ruler was essential, de jure if not de facto (the notion that these Hellenistic queens were ever considered de jure sole rulers cannot be upheld, even if their renown to say nothing of their strength of character far outstripped that of their fainéant brothers).13 Cleopatra VII was exceptional in that, as effective ruler in her own right, her head did actually appear alone on bronze coins inside Egypt. Her female predecessors’ heads had only appeared occasionally on gold and silver coins – and even then in the guise of Isis.

  The picture we do have is of a Cleopatra who was not only strong-minded but ambitious enough to have her own conception of empire, involving the restoration of the glorious Ptolemaic dominion which had once extended as far as Syria and Palestine. As in the case of another celebrated femme fatale of history, Mary Queen of Scots, a close inspection of Cleopatra’s career reveals far more concentration on power politics and far less self-indulgent dalliance than wistful popular imagination cares to admit. Whether beautiful or not (she has a heavy if sultry look to the modern eye), Cleopatra certainly understood how to make the best use of her fascinating femininity. After a series of intrigues led to her disposition in 49 BC, Cleopatra set her sights upon the strong man of Rome, Julius Caesar, appreciating that he had the power to restore her.

  Plutarch tells the celebrated story of her arrival at Caesar’s palace in a sleeping bag rolled up: ‘This little trick of Cleopatra’s, which showed her provocative impudence, is said to have been the first thing about her which captivated Caesar, and, as he grew to know her better, he was overcome by her charm and arranged that she and her brother should be reconciled and share the throne of Egypt together.’14 (But Ptolemy XIII was in fact subsequently defeated with Caesar’s help, and put to death, leaving Cleopatra to share the throne officially with her younger brother Ptolemy XIV.

  The birth of a boy known as Caesarion in 47 BC, after Caesar had left Egypt, further strengthened Cleopatra’s hand in view of her theoretical need for a male co-ruler, and her practical need for a submissive one. Julius Caesar was generally thought to be the father of the child, as his name indeed indicates, but later, by officially ascribing paternity to her brother Ptolemy XIV, Cleopatra brought the boy within the necessary network of the Ptolemaic royal family. After Ptolemy XIV had been disposed of, like Ptolemy XIII (and at another date Cleopatra’s sister Arsinoe), Cleopatra was able in time to establish herself as co-sovereign with her own son as Ptolemy xv Caesar. This other ‘little trick’ of Cleopatra’s, whatever its ‘impudence’, has nothing particularly languorous about it.

  Meanwhile as Caesar’s mistress, Cleopatra journeyed to Rome, a visit either underplayed or excoriated by the Romans in later years. Cicero’s description of her sojourn in Rome belonged to the latter category: ‘I detest Cleopatra,’ he wrote, ‘and the insolence of the queen … when she was in her villa across the river [i.e. the Tiber] I cannot mention without great indignation.’15 It was a taste of what was to come. At the time Cleopatra was saluted by Caesar with a golden statue of herself in the temple of Venus Genetrix, the publicly proclaimed ancestress of Caesar’s own Julian family. She was still living there in 44 BC when Caesar’s assassination put an end to her political hopes – from that direction.

  The rise of Mark Antony after the defeat of Caesar’s assassins at Philippi in 42 BC, presented Cleopatra with another opportunity to exert her wiles in the interest of gratifying her territorial ambitions. She arrived to greet him in Tarsus in Asia Minor by barge up the River Cydnus, a scene originally described by Plutarch that lives forever at the pen of Shakespeare. Outwardly, Cleopatra appeared more as a goddess than as a potential mistress. Plutarch wrote: ‘the word spread on every side that Aphrodite had come to revel with Dionysus for the happiness of Asia’.

  For Cleopatra herself, although Aphrodite was held in certain circles to be a mother goddess (which was useful), it was Isis who proved throughout her reign the most convenient point of identification. In the East, the cult of Isis stretched back for at least two thousand years: here was the national divinity of Egypt, the Great Mother of all the gods and of nature itself, the equivalent of Dionysus: except that the cult of Isis, which could be followed by both men and women, presupposed the equality of the female sex. Only one Ptolemaic creed connected with the cult has come down to us but it is a remarkable one from the point of view of a putative Warrior Queen: ‘I am Isis, the Mistress of every land … I gave and ordained Laws for men, which no one is able to change … I am she that rises in the Dogstar, she who is called Goddess by women … I made man strong … I am the queen of war. I am the queen of the thunderbolt. I stir up the sea and calm it. I am the rays of the Sun.’16 At one point, not only did Cleopatra project herself as the New Isis, but she projected her lover Antony as the New Osiris: not an agreeable concept to Antony’s political enemies at Rome.

  Even more threatening from the point of view of those hostile to the renewal of the Ptolemaic empire were such words as these, taken from the so-called Sibylline books, a corpus of prophetic literature, probably written at the height of Cleopatra’s power:

  But when the Tenth Generation goes down to Hades

  There comes a Woman’s great power …

  And then the whole wide world under a woman’s hand …

  Soon Rome, the ‘delicate gilded voluptuous maiden’, would be at ‘a mistress’ stern command’.17

  Cleopatra’s territorial fortunes certainly prospered with Antony under her sway. Not only were lands handed over to her far into Asia Minor but her personal wealth was increased with the gift of the Nabatean Arab kingdom, enabling her to exploit its bitumen resources. It has been suggested that new coins issued jointly with Ptolemy xv Caesar (her son) commemorated this fortunate new development.18 At the same time, the name of Cleopatra’s son by Antony, born in 40 BC, Alexander Helios, pointed to the cult of the sun; his twin sister Cleopatra Selene being similarly linked to the moon goddess.

  At the Donations of Alexandria of 34 BC, by which little Alexander Helios was to rule Armenia, his two-year-old brother Ptolemy Philadelphus the lands to the west, and his sister Cleopatra Selene Cyrene, all the children were dressed in suitable national garb – Alexander in the traditional high royal cap of the ancient Persian monarchs. When Antony visited Athens, it was the st
atue of Cleopatra, dressed in the robes of Isis, which the Greeks erected on the Acropolis.

  The Roman attitude to the New Isis (and the new Osiris) was very different. As political opposition to Antony on the part of his brother-in-law Octavian hardened, Cleopatra was increasingly depicted as an unpleasant Eastern siren who had seduced the Roman Antony, in order to play out a life of debauchery with him far from his Roman duties (and his wife Octavia). Octavian proclaimed to the Roman people, on the basis of Antony’s will, which he seized from the temple of the Vestal Virgins, not only that Antony had given away Roman possessions to Cleopatra, but also that he intended to found a new dynasty with her, based on Alexandria, not Rome. It was thus the destiny of Octavian (the future Caesar Augustus) to contain her: ‘as swiftly as the hawk follows the feeble dove’, wrote Roman Horace with an air of satisfaction not lacking in vindictiveness for all the trouble Cleopatra had caused. ‘So he sailed forth to bind this fatal prodigy in chains.’19

  How different, how very different, at least in the popular imagination, was the sensuous and commanding Cleopatra from modest Octavia at home, Antony’s lawful Roman wife! Octavia’s admirable disposition encouraged her to plead for mercy where possible; ultimately she would bring up the children of Antony and Cleopatra (the surest test not only of an admirable but of a charitable nature). As for Fulvia, that vigorous Roman matron, Antony’s previous wife, this was how Plutarch described her: not content to rule a husband who had no ambition for public life, her desire was ‘to govern those who governed or to command a commander-in-chief’.20 But Fulvia’s ambitions were also alien to Cleopatra, who was herself ‘the Queen of War’.

  The winter of 33/32 BC was spent by Antony and Cleopatra together at Ephesus. In this period of gathering storm, the perpetual presence of Cleopatra not only at banquets but at military conferences was criticized by the Roman Ahenobarbus (another character gruffly familiar to us from Shakespeare). While Ahenobarbus wished in vain for Antony to send Cleopatra away, it was left to another Roman, Canidius Crassus, to point out another aspect to the situation. Not only had Cleopatra contributed a great deal from her own treasury to the expenses of the war (of the five hundred warships under Antony’s command, Cleopatra had provided two hundred) but she had also ruled a great kingdom without effective aid for many years – and was by no means inferior in intelligence to the other kings Antony counted as his allies.