The Alexandrians may have been happy; Auletes and his Roman hosts were not. The influential Pompey offered his support to Auletes; a demonstrably weak king but one who had proved his loyalty to Rome and who, of course, owed such a large debt to Roman bankers that it seemed prudent to help him regain both his throne and his treasury. However, Auletes could not return to Alexandria without aid, and the Romans were hesitant, consulting oracles and failing to decide Egypt’s fate. Meanwhile, realising that she needed Roman approval if she was to retain her crown, Berenice dispatched a 100-strong delegation, headed by the brilliant academic and philosopher Dion of Alexandria, to plead her case. Auletes reacted with brutal efficiency, and a shameful combination of murder, coercion and bribery prevented the delegation from speaking. The resulting scandal, which threatened to involve the prominent bankers who were backing Auletes, was quickly brushed behind the official arras. Disgraced, Auletes borrowed yet more money and fled to the temple of Artemis at Ephesus.
Auletes’s exile continued until, early in 55, he managed to bribe Aulus Gabinius, governor of Syria, to give him military support. As Plutarch delicately puts it, ‘Gabinius himself felt a certain dread of the war, although he was completely captivated by the ten thousand talents’.19 Later that same year Gabinius’s mercenary army marched across Sinai and into the eastern Delta. Pelusium, Egypt’s easternmost city, fell and Archelaos was killed in battle; although a traitor, he was given an honourable burial by Gabinius’s cavalry officer, Marcus Antonius (Mark Antony). Auletes returned home in triumph to find Alexandria suffering under a fairly brutal foreign occupation. His vengeance was swift and uncompromising, tempered only by Mark Antony’s generous pleading on behalf of the ordinary citizens. Berenice and her most prominent supporters were executed and their confiscated property was used to repay some of Auletes’s ever-increasing debt to Rabirius, who, for one extortionate year, became Egypt’s finance minister.
Rabirius brought havoc to the bureaucracy and poverty to the countryside. Stripping the Egyptian civil servants from their hereditary positions, he introduced his own ruthless men. Soon there were civil disturbances in Alexandria, the Faiyum, Oxyrhynchus and Heracleopolis as the farmers threatened to withhold their labour unless they received protection from the avaricious tax collectors. Ousted from power, Rabirius returned to Rome, where he was tried, and acquitted, for financial improprieties. Pleading poverty, he agreed that Julius Caesar should take over the collection of his outstanding Egyptian debt. Gabinius, too, was to be tried in Rome for financial irregularities; less fortunate than Rabirius, he was sent into exile. However, long after the danger had passed the ‘Gabinians’, the major part of Gabinius’s army, which included many Germans and Gauls, remained in Egypt, ostensibly to support the restored Auletes. Gradually these soldiers married local women and fathered Egyptian children, adding yet another cultural and racial strand to an already well-mixed Egypt.
Auletes emerged from the bloodshed a poverty-stricken king whose family had been torn apart by treachery and whose country was suffering from erratic Nile floods and unacceptably high taxation. Egypt had stopped minting gold coins during the reign of Ptolemy VIII. Now, to make his money go further, Auletes debased the silver content of his coins to just 84 per cent. This sparked a dramatic rise in inflation but did little to improve the economy. To protect the succession, and pre-empt any further family squabbles, Auletes united his four surviving children within the royal cult as the rather optimistically named Theoi Neoi Philadelphoi, (New Sibling-Loving Gods). Traditionally, Egypt’s living kings had been semi-divine beings who acquired full divinity with death. The distinction between the gods, the semi-divine king and his mortal subjects had been theologically clear, but not always obvious to the masses, who, faced with a temple decorated with colossal images of their king, may well have been confused over who exactly was, and who was not, a god. Ptolemy II had swept away any confusion by establishing the royal cults. All Ptolemaic rulers now routinely became a part of the dynastic cult during their lifetime, their group divinity frequently being supplemented by a personal divinity either at death (during the earlier part of the Ptolemaic age) or during their own lifetime (during the later part of the Ptolemaic age).
Auletes was a pharaoh without a queen. This is extremely rare. The precise role of the traditional Egyptian queen consort is as yet ill-understood, but it seems that she offered the king a vital female element that would complement his maleness and make him a whole, perfect ruler. Egypt’s priest would have considered that Auletes needed a queen to be able to perform the religious rituals that pleased the gods and kept the ever-threatening chaos at bay. Kings whose consorts died – and this itself was unusual; in contrast to the situation in non-royal Egypt, where women often died as a result of pregnancy-induced illness, queens tended to outlive their husbands – acquired a replacement consort quickly. The 19th Dynasty monarch Ramesses II, blessed (or cursed) with an extremely long reign, outlived two Egyptian-born consorts and eventually promoted, and married, at least three of his daughters.20 The Ptolemies were inclined to emulate the Ramesside kings; it therefore would not have been unexpected if Auletes, given the shortage of Ptolemaic brides, had used his eldest surviving daughter as his consort and partner in religious rituals. Inscriptions in the crypts of the Dendera temple of Hathor add some support to this theory by linking the king’s name with the cartouche of a ‘Cleopatra’, and with an unnamed woman who is described as the ‘eldest daughter of the king’. As work on this temple did not start until 54, after the assumed death of Cleopatra V, it is likely that this is Cleopatra VII acting as her father’s consort. There is, however, no suggestion that Auletes married Cleopatra: father–daughter incest was not acceptable in the Hellenistic world, even at the louche court of Auletes.
When, in 51, Auletes died an apparently natural death (Strabo emphasises that he ‘died of disease’), the throne passed as he had planned to the eighteen-year-old Cleopatra and her eldest brother, the ten-year-old Ptolemy. Auletes’s will appointed the people of Rome guardians of Egypt’s new king and queen and protectors of the Ptolemaic dynasty. One copy of this will was lodged in the Library of Alexandria, a second was sent for safe-keeping to Pompey in Rome. (Auletes had intended that it be lodged in the public record office, but Rome was a city teetering on the brink of disaster and, for reasons of his own, Pompey chose to keep the will at his house.) Few Alexandrians grieved for Auletes, yet Cleopatra chose to highlight her unswerving loyalty to her dead father by immediately adopting the name Philopator (Father Loving). Her slightly later assumption of the epithet Thea (Goddess), and later still Nea Isis (the New Isis), signals her continuing devotion to the Neos Dionysos Theos Philopator Auletes, as does her determination to complete many of Auletes’s unfinished building projects.
It is easy for us to underestimate Auletes. Classical authors like Strabo, quoted earlier in this chapter, were happy to spread the propaganda of the last and most corrupt king of a decaying line; a king chosen by a mob, with a reign that was characterised by uncertainty, dissipation, economic hardship and civil unrest. We are left with the unpleasant image of the impotent Auletes frittering away his days throwing sumptuous banquets, drinking to excess and blowing his aulos with the palace dancing girls and, or so it was rumoured, boys. However, impotent or not, Auletes did manage to preserve his throne and, whatever the Romans and the Alexandrians thought about him, the Egyptian priesthood respected him as a pharaoh prepared to invest in traditional temple building schemes.21
So Cleopatra VII Philopator and her brother Ptolemy XIII came to the throne with the blessing of the people of Alexandria and the qualified support of the Romans. They inherited an insecure land suffering from high inflation and unreliable Nile floods, and their father’s extensive debts.
CHAPTER TWO
Queen of Egypt
Cleopatra was an Egyptian woman who became an object of gossip for the whole world … She came to rule through crime. She gained glory for almost nothing else than her bea
uty while on the other hand she became known throughout the world for her greed, cruelty and lustfulness …
Boccaccio, On the Lives of Famous Women1
For many hundreds of years the sacred Bakhu or Buchis bull had been worshipped as a living god in the Theban region. During his lifetime the bull was associated with the warrior god Montu and, to a lesser extent, with the fertility god Osiris and the sun god Re. He received offerings, delivered oracles and cured the sick (specialising in eye diseases), and he occasionally fought with other bulls in a dedicated bullring. In death he was mummified and buried, with all the pomp and ceremony due to a deceased god, in a vast bull cemetery known as the Bucheion, at Armant (ancient Iuni-Montu; Greek Hermonthis), on the west bank of the Nile to the south-west of Thebes. A funerary stela recovered from this cemetery details the enthronement of a Buchis bull on Phamenoth 19 (22 March 51):
… He reached Thebes, his place of installation, which came into existence aforetime, beside his father, Nun the Old. He was installed by the King himself in year 1, Phamenoth 19. The Queen, the Lady of the Two Lands, the Goddess Philopator, rowed him in the boat of Amen, together with the boats of the king, all the inhabitants of Thebes and Hermonthis and priests being with him. He reached Hermonthis, his dwelling place on Mechir 22 …2
The precise date of Auletes’s demise is unknown: all we can say for certain is that some time during 51 Auletes’s Year 30 became ‘Year 30 which is become Year I’ (i.e. the first year of the new regime), and by August of that same year news of his death had reached Rome. But the Bucheion stela tells us that the installation ceremony occurred at a time when Egypt was ruled by a king and a queen, the ‘Lady of the Two Lands, the Goddess Philopator’. The names within the text are left blank – something that frequently happens in later Ptolemaic inscriptions – and therefore both king and queen are unnamed. However, given the date of the stela, it seems that they are more than likely to be Ptolemy XIII and Cleopatra VII. The stela therefore offers a terminus ante quem for Auletes’s death, which is likely to have occurred in late February or early March 51. The only alternative is that the unnamed king is Auletes rather than Ptolemy XIII. If this is the case, it may be that Auletes did not die until as late as June or July 51, and the wording of the stela may be read as an indication that Cleopatra was indeed her father’s co-regent.
The image is a standard view of a king making an offering to the Buchis bull, and the text is a version of a standard Bucheion text found on three other late Ptolemaic stelae:
He was installed by the King himself. Going on the boat of Amen, together with the boats of the king, all the inhabitants of Thebes and Hermonthis, prophets and priests being with him. He reached Hermonthis, his dwelling place.
The fact that the priests felt the need to adapt a standard text to include the queen confirms Cleopatra’s political importance immediately after her father’s death. The Ptolemies observed the rites of the native religion, and developed a strong interest in the cult of the Apis bull (celebrated at Memphis, cult centre of the creator god Ptah, where the Apis was worshipped as the physical manifestation of Ptah) and the cult of the Mnevis bull (celebrated at Heliopolis, cult centre of the sun god Re, where the Mnevis was considered to be the physical manifestation of the sun god). However, given the Egyptian fondness for formulaic texts, and given that the Bucheion text was inscribed in 29, after Cleopatra’s death, the stela does not prove beyond all reasonable doubt that Cleopatra actually attended the ceremony in person.
Although Ptolemaic tradition suggests that Cleopatra is likely to have married her brother soon after their father’s death, their marriage is nowhere recorded. An inscription on the barque or boat shrine of the earth god Geb in the Koptos temple, dedicated by Cleopatra, shows the queen offering to the divine triad of Min, Isis and Horus, and describes her as ‘Mistress of the Two Lands, Cleopatra Philopator, Beloved of Min-Re of Koptos, King’s Wife, King’s Daughter’, but the husband-king is unnamed, and could be either Ptolemy XIII or Ptolemy XIV.3 If it did occur, and a marriage between his eldest surviving daughter and son may well have been a condition of Auletes’s will, it is likely to have been, in 51, a marriage in name only. The age gap between sister and brother was unfortunate. The eighteen-year-old Cleopatra was rather too old to remain unwed, while Ptolemy, at just ten years old, was a little too young to consummate a marriage. There are no known legal age limits for marriage in Ptolemaic Egypt, but archaeological evidence indicates that most women married in their mid- or late teens, acquiring husbands older rather than younger than themselves. Tayimhotep, wife of the high priest of Ptah Pasherenptah III, whom we last met at Auletes’s coronation, would not have been unusual in marrying, aged fourteen, a husband eighteen years older than herself.4 This left Cleopatra in an awkward position. As a queen of marriageable age she needed to start producing the children who would continue her dynastic line.
Husband or brother, Ptolemy, as king, should have been the dominant partner in the relationship. But he was a minor, ruling via a regency council, and for the first year and a half of their joint reign Cleopatra became the effective monarch, while her brother was pushed into the background. The earliest documents from this period suggest that Cleopatra ruled alone, although it is important to view documents dated to the first year of the solo queen ‘Cleopatra Philopator’ with a degree of caution, as Berenice III had also been a Cleopatra Philopator. The most intriguing of these documents is a unique limestone stela, of unknown provenance but probably from the Faiyum, which is now housed in the Louvre, Paris. The piece is a fusion of Egyptian and Greek traditions, with a conventional Egyptian religious image topping a text written in Greek. It shows a slightly damaged ‘Cleopatra’, dressed in the kilt and double crown of a traditional pharaoh, making an offering to the goddess Isis, who is sitting on a throne and suckling her infant son. The somewhat confusing inscription, which details the dedication of a ‘seat’ (topos) by the priest Omnophris, president of the association of the devotees of Isis, reads:
For Queen Cleopatra Thea Philopator [is dedicated] the seat of the association [of Isis] Snonais, the president of which is the chief priest Omnophris. July 2 51.
Cleopatra, on this stela, appears entirely male; the inscription, which makes it clear that she is in fact a woman, implies that she is the sole ruler of Egypt. This, the only surviving image of Cleopatra as a female king, recalls the Theban artwork of the early New Kingdom female pharaoh Hatshepsut. Hatshepsut (reigned 1473–1458) struggled with the convention decreeing that a king of Egypt should be a young and healthy male. Soon after her coronation she abandoned the customary woman’s sheath dress and queen’s crowns, and started to appear in the traditional king’s regalia of short kilt, bare chest, crown or head-cloth, broad collar and false beard. Very occasionally, towards the beginning of her reign, Hatshepsut was depicted as a woman dressed in this male clothing, but more usually she was shown performing male actions with a man’s body.5 It would be easy to suggest that Cleopatra is here deliberately emulating Egypt’s most successful female monarch, as in many ways Hatshepsut, who effectively usurped the throne from a weaker and much younger male co-regent, makes an appropriate role model for Cleopatra.6 But Hatshepsut was forced to battle against a system which could not cope with the idea of female rule, while Cleopatra, living in an age which had already experienced the vigorous rule of Cleopatras I, II and III, encountered no such problem. Indeed, it seems unlikely that Cleopatra would have known much about Hatshepsut’s history, art or propaganda, as the majority of Hatshepsut’s images were defaced within thirty years of her death, and her name was omitted from Egypt’s official King List. Today Hatshepsut’s Red Chapel, decorated with multiple images of the female king performing traditionally male actions, is the highlight of any tour of Karnak temple, but the chapel is a modern reconstruction, painstakingly compiled from the demolished remains of the original building, which would have been invisible to Cleopatra.
A re-reading of the text on Cleopatra’s stela indicate
s that, although it features Cleopatra, she did not commission it. The image of the female king cannot therefore be taken as official propaganda. The text is not all it seems. The Greek letters are uncomfortably squashed into the space available, and it seems likely that it is a later addition, cut over an earlier text. This suggests that the stela was first cut for Cleopatra’s father and then changed, rather ineptly, when he died. Nevertheless, the important fact remains that Cleopatra is featured as a sole ruler, while Ptolemy’s name is excluded from the stela.
When, over two centuries earlier, the intelligent and experienced Arsinoë II married her younger, weaker brother Ptolemy II, she determined to work with him. In so doing, she strengthened the Ptolemaic hold on the Egyptian throne. Cleopatra, intelligent and ambitious and not one to suffer fools gladly, would have done well to heed this precedent. Her sidelining of her brother was to prove a tactical mistake, as it left Ptolemy vulnerable to a group of manipulative and ambitious Alexandrian courtiers, including his tutor Theodotos, the soldier Achillas and the eunuch Pothinos, who was soon to become Egypt’s chief minister. All three were to use the young king to further their own political ambitions. By the time Ptolemy was old enough to embark on a full married life, his relationship with his sister had irretrievably broken down and Egypt was teetering on the brink of civil war.
On 27 October 50 we find the first decree to be issued with Ptolemy’s name preceding Cleopatra’s. Egypt, usually so fertile, was suffering the effects of years of unreliable Nile floods. The decree, issued after a second disappointing inundation, directed that all surplus grain and legumes grown in Upper and Middle Egypt should be sent straight to Alexandria – and nowhere else. The penalty for contravening the decree ‘by order of the king and queen’ was death, those who informed on rogue traders were to receive a specified reward dependent on their social status.7 The crisis was severe enough to unite the royal couple, who recognised that, at a time of national shortage, the volatile citizens of Alexandria must be their primary concern. But, as the Alexandrians ate their grain supplies, the people outside Alexandria suffered from shortages, high inflation and high taxation. And, as the Nile continued to under-perform, the workers began to desert their hamlets, taxes went unpaid and the cities started to fill with hungry peasants. As wheat prices reached an all-time high, the priests of the Faiyum village of Hiera Nesos grew worried; their hungry villagers had mysteriously vanished, leaving them unable to complete the temple rituals.8
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