Despite the harshness of their regime, the Persians remained in Egypt for little more than a decade before Alexander himself arrived in Egypt in 332 BC to claim his fabled birthright. Welcomed as a saviour and the rightful heir of Nectanebo II by a populace desperate to be rid of the hated Persians, he initiated three centuries of Greek rule which would culminate in the extraordinary figure of Cleopatra herself.
Born in Egypt of Macedonian descent, Cleopatra had a traditional Macedonian name which, in its original Greek form, began with a ‘k’. And although the name is generally translated as ‘glory to her father’, its meaning may be more accurately understood as ‘renowned in her ancestry’. And it was quite an ancestry. At least thirty-three Cleopatras are known from ancient times, and with the origins of her famous name rooted in myth and the forces of nature, the first Cleopatra was daughter of the North Wind Boreas. The name’s mythological origins are also associated with a daughter of the legendary King Midas, and the first historical Cleopatra may have been a sister of the real Midas, King of Phrygia (central Turkey), who married Macedonia’s first historical king Perdikkas (670-652 BC). Considered to exist at the very edge of the civilized world, both geographically and culturally, the Macedonians originated in the northernmost part of Greece, close to the lands of Scythia and Thrace where tattooed warriors still collected severed heads. When not participating in warfare themselves, Macedonia’s elite indulged in hunting, feasting and drinking bouts that lasted days at a time.
Still ruled by Homeric-style kings when much of Greece had adopted democracy, Macedonia’s southern neighbours found their northern accent hard to understand and dismissed them as semi-barbarian, even though the Macedonians were Greek speakers, had Greek names and worshipped the traditional gods of Greece whose fabled home atop snowy Mount Olympus lay at the heart of Macedonia’s rugged landscape. From their mythical founder ‘Makedon’, believed to have been a son of Zeus, Macedonia’s earliest royal rulers traced back to the seventh century BC were both polygamous and apparently incestuous. The choice of royal heir, normally the king’s eldest son, was made by the Assembly made up of warrior elite, and the succession was typically affected by threats, bribes and murder. A king’s first task, therefore, was to remove all rivals and then to produce an heir.
After marriage to Macedonia’s first historical king, Perdikkas I, the first historical Cleopatra became the mother of the royal house, faithful vassals of Persia until Athens’ great victory in 480 BC allowed them to switch sides. Over the next century nine kings ruled over a volatile Macedonia until Archelaos (413-399 BC) brought a degree of stability and moved his capital from Aegae to Pella on the Aegean for much-needed access to the sea. As Pella became a cosmopolitan royal capital, its marble palace embellished with murals and mosaics created by Athenian craftsmen, Archelaos invited the greatest minds of the age to his court. Although the Athenian philosopher Socrates turned down the offer, those who did accept royal patronage included the poet Pindar, Hippocrates, known as the father of medicine, and the leading dramatist Euripides, whose great masterpiece the Bacchae was inspired by his new home and its bloody history.
Following Archelaos’ murder and intermittent civil war, Amyntas III (389-369 BC) strengthened Macedonia’s defences against Illyria to the west and married the Illyrian princess Eurydike, who bore him three sons. Amid the royal family’s constant feuding, the deaths of Amyntas and his eldest son were apparently caused by the ambitious Eurydike and her lover, and when her second son died from wounds sustained fighting the Illyrians, the third and youngest son Philip, then twenty-four, was elected king in 359 BC. After eliminating other rivals to the throne in time-honoured fashion, Philip II (359-336 BC) decisively crushed the Illyrians and embarked on years of campaigning which resulted in the loss of his right eye, a maimed arm and crippled leg. Yet it transformed Macedonia from a feuding, feudal kingdom into a world superpower.
He also found time for a most complicated bisexual love life, including a youthful fling with his second cousin Arsinoe and no fewer than seven wives. The most famous of these was Myrtale of Epirus (modern Albania), first encountered during nocturnal fertility rites on the windswept island of Samothrace and at marriage given the Macedonian name Olympias to reflect the divine landscape of her new home. Able to trace her own ancestry back to the sea goddess Thetis, mother of the Greek superhero Achilles, Olympias paid particular respect to Zeus and his son Dionysos, god of wine and embodiment of vitality. Dionysos’ female acolytes achieved states of complete possession, and Olympias undertook her own Dionysiac rites with tame snakes which ‘terrified the male spectators as they raised their heads from the wreaths of ivy ... or twined themselves around the wands and garlands of the women’.
Yet regardless of her power as queen, Olympias had to co-exist with her husband’s other families. These included a son, Philip Arrhidaios, born to his third wife, and a daughter, Cynane, who fought alongside her father, born to the second. Although Olympias produced an equally formidable daughter called Cleopatra, her crowning achievement was her son Alexander, known to history as ‘the Great’ and raised by his mother to believe himself the son of Zeus.
Born in July 356 BC on the same day that the great temple of Artemis at Ephesus burned down, since the goddess was apparently away assisting at his birth, Alexander was already in military training by the age of seven and had gained his first experience of battle at fourteen. An androgynous-looking youth, with long curling hair and a smooth complexion, ‘fair-skinned, with a ruddy tinge’, the young Alexander modelled himself on his ancestor Achilles, the lead character of the Iliad, in which the quote ‘ever to be best and stand far above all others’ became something of a personal mantra. As a bibliophile well versed in history, even as a child Alexander had an understanding of cultures far beyond the Greek world. Once, receiving a Persian delegation in his father’s absence, he had ‘talked freely with them and quite won them over, not only by the friendliness of his manner but also because he did not trouble them with any childish or trivial inquiries, but questioned them about the distances they had travelled by road, the nature of the journey into the interior of Persia, the character of the king, his experience in war, and the military strength and prowess of the Persians’, a precocious curiosity supplying vital intelligence for his future plans.
For his son’s higher education, Philip had selected a little-known Thracian philosopher called Aristotle who had studied under Plato in Athens and whose father had been doctor to Philip’s family. Moving to Macedonia, the new tutor was given a fine house and teaching facilities, and despite the discrepancy between his republican beliefs and the monarchy he served, Aristotle recommended that ‘a wise man should fall in love, take part in politics and live with a king’.
Aristotle’s political teachings provided Alexander with a solid background in statecraft, and the ideal of the highly principled ‘great-souled man’ provided the student with a model to emulate. Given Alexander’s obvious love of Homer, Aristotle’s well-thumbed and annotated copy of the Iliad became his student’s prized possession. A shared fascination with scientific exploration was reflected in the specimens of flora and fauna the prince sent back to his old tutor when on campaign.
Yet Aristotle’s advice to look after the Greeks ‘as if friends and relatives, and to deal with the barbarians as with beasts or plants’ reflected the Greek view of their superiority over other races. In much the same way that slaves were ‘animated tools’, Aristotle claimed that men were superior to women, whose high-pitched voices shared with eunuchs reflected an inherently deviant nature. Women were separated by the Greeks into three basic groups,: it was said that ‘courtesans we keep for pleasure, concubines for attending day-by-day to the body and wives for producing heirs, and for standing trusty guard on our household property’, which explained why in Greek society all ‘respectable’ women were largely confined to the home.
Although Aristotle maintained that a man’s most important relationships should be with other m
en, Alexander’s commitment to his lifelong companion and fellow student Hephaistion was equally likely to have been a reaction to his father Philip’s promiscuity and the problems caused by so many offspring from so many relationships. It was certainly believed that another fellow student, Ptolemy, was Alexander’s half-brother, since his mother Arsinoe, a princess of the royal house and Philip’s second cousin, had also been one of his many lovers until married off to a lowly squire named Lagus. The ancient sources admit that ‘the Macedonians consider Ptolemy to be the son of Philip, though putatively the son of Lagus, asserting that his mother was with child when she was married to Lagus by Philip’. It was claimed that ‘Ptolemy was a blood relative of Alexander and some believe he was Philip’s son’, and even ‘Olympias, too, had made it clear that Ptolemy had been fathered by Philip’, a paternity that Ptolemy himself kept low-key out of respect for his mother.
In 340 BC Philip appointed the sixteen-year-old Alexander regent. After forces commanded by the teenager put down a Thracian rising, father and son fought together to unite the rest of Greece in preparation for a war against the traditional enemy, Persia. This long-held dream of a Pan-Hellenic crusade in revenge for the invasion of Greece had always ended in internal feuding, and with Athens and Sparta each considering itself the leader of any such plan they now opposed Macedonia’s attempts to lead them. An Anti-Macedonian League was set up, ironically financed by the old enemy, Persia. It was led by the Athenian orator Demosthenes, who, in his vitriolic Philippics, denounced Philip as not a true Greek nor even from a ‘respectable’ country. Yet Philip soon defeated the League and secured their support against Persia in return for the release of Athenian prisoners. The ashes of the fallen were also returned by Alexander on his only visit to Athens, where new statues of his father and himself were dedicated to ‘Philip and his heirs in perpetuity’.
With everything ready for the great crusade, Philip’s plans suddenly changed when his kingdom’s stability was threatened by internal feuding. His estranged relationship with Olympias had developed into open hostility after Philip had married a courtier’s young niece, Eurydike, and the bride’s uncle had announced the hope there would soon be an heir of pure Macedonian blood. This had so enraged Alexander he had started a fight, then left court with his mother for Epirus where her brother was king. As Philip and his new bride began producing a fresh batch of royal heirs, the Epirite king complained bitterly to his Macedonian brother-in-law that his family’s honour had been offended. Philip then played a masterstroke by offering him marriage to Princess Cleopatra, Alexander’s eighteen-year-old sister and the Epirite king’s own niece.
When the offer was accepted, things were sufficiently secure at home to allow Philip to send an advance force over to Asia Minor, and ask the Oracle at Delphi if he would conquer the Persian king. On receiving the ambiguous answer ‘Wreathed is the bull. All is done. The sacrificer awaits’, he misinterpreted this as confirmation of his imminent success. In fact the one to be sacrificed was Philip himself. As guests gathered at Aegae in the hot summer of336 BC to witness uncle marry niece Philip was cut down by the captain of his bodyguard, who in turn was speared through by his fellow guards. Although some believed he had acted alone to avenge a personal grudge, others felt that Olympias must have initiated the murder to free the throne for her son. Whatever her guilt, she left no doubt about her feelings by publicly crowning the killer’s corpse with a gold wreath and presenting it with offerings. Certainly it seems more than suspicious that the plot had been so widely known that the orator Demosthenes was able to announce the news in faraway Athens almost as it happened. As word of the assassination spread rapidly, it became imperative to elect a new king. So the army chose Olympias’ son, who was duly installed as Alexander III.
At his funeral, which according to Macedonian tradition was led by his son, the new king, Philip was cremated. His remains were then collected up and placed in a gold larnax chest decorated with the star of the Macedonian house, to be buried with lavish funerary goods in the royal necropolis at Aegae. His entourage were then put on trial before Alexander and the Assembly of warriors, and while the remaining guards were acquitted, the male relatives of Philip’s last wife, Eurydike, were found guilty and executed at his tomb. Although the Assembly spared Eurydike herself, she and her child were killed on the orders of Olympias — who had them roasted alive if later accounts are to be believed. She may also have had a hand in the fate of one of Philip’s older sons Arrhidaios, whose retarded nature ‘was neither hereditary nor was it produced by natural causes. On the contrary, it was said that as a boy he had shown an attractive disposition and displayed much promise, but Olympias was believed to have given him drugs which impaired the functions of his body and irreparably injured his brain.’
With his position established at home, Alexander turned his attentions to securing the rest of Greece, where many cities refused to acknowledge him until he arrived at their gates with the Macedonian army. Despite Demosthenes’ attempts to spread false rumours that he had been killed subduing Celtic lands by the Adriatic, Alexander returned to reimpose control and, with Athens in no position to argue, was finally recognised as Supreme Commander of Greek Forces by all but Sparta, who still insisted that it should have the military leadership. Alexander then consulted the Delphic Oracle. Despite arriving on an inauspicious day when the Oracle could not be approached, he took the priestess by the arm and propelled her toward the shrine, taking her exasperated comment, ‘You are invincible, my son!’ as confirmation of his future success.
Having installed the capable general Antipatros as regent of Macedonia, Alexander finally set out against Persia in early 334 BC with a combined allied force of forty thousand infantry and six thousand cavalry. Marching them east to the Hellespont where they were transported across the narrow waters from Europe into Asia, he sacrificed a bull to the sea god Poseidon, poured wine for the Nereid sea nymphs and was first to leap from the ships on to the beach. Hurling his spear into the sand, he declared all Asia ‘spear-won land’ before making a detour to Troy, fabled city of Homer’s Iliad, where he exchanged his own armour for an ancient set used in the Trojan War. He then made a pilgrimage to the tomb of Achilles, laying a wreath on his grave as he prayed for some of his ancestor’s legendary powers in the battles to come.
With sight-seeing cut short by news that the Persians were already massing on the banks of the river Granicus east of Troy with the sole aim to take him dead or alive, Alexander led the charge on his famous horse Bucephalus (meaning ‘Bull’s Head’). After fierce fighting, the Persians were routed, and Alexander sent three hundred of their abandoned shields to Athens as an offering to the goddess Athena with the inscription ‘Alexander, the son of Philip, and all the Greeks with the exception of the Spartans won these spoils of war from the barbarians who dwell in Asia’. The rest of the lavish plunder was sent back to his mother in Pella, and instantly reversed the 500 talents of debt which Philip had left. (1 talent = 26 kg silver)
As he marched south through the Greek colonies of Asia Minor Alexander was welcomed as a liberator, and at Ephesus he transferred all the taxes formerly paid to Persia to the cult of Artemis, whose great temple was still being rebuilt after burning down on the day of his birth. The only significant opposition was encountered at Miletus, whose faith in the Persian fleet proved misplaced once Alexander had blockaded and stormed the city.
With most of the coast now his and the enemy fleet virtually impotent, he reinstated Queen Ada as ruler of Halicarnassus after her brother had deposed her. He also honoured her with the official title ‘Mother’, while his own mother Olympias continued to wield power in an unofficial capacity back in Macedonia, much to the annoyance of its male regent Antipatros.
Having marched south across Anatolia to the Cilician plain, Alexander was sufficiently recovered from fever and a Persian-backed attempt to poison him to be ready to face the Persian king himself. For Darius III had decided that this Greek upstart had penetrated fa
r enough into his empire, and, with an army of six hundred thousand under his personal control, outnumbered Alexander by an astonishing ten to one.
As the two armies faced each other at Issus near Tarsus on a November morning in 333 BC, Alexander once more led the cavalry charge into the Persian lines, fighting his way toward Darius who stood tall in his golden war chariot surrounded by his elite bodyguard. Yet ‘in military matters the feeblest and most incompetent of men’, Darius soon lost his nerve and, as he ‘led the race for safety’, his troops fell into confused disarray. The battle was lost, and the death toll of 110,000 Persians in that one day’s conflict remained unequalled until the beginning of the twentieth century. Darius had also abandoned the amazing sum of 3000 talents, loose change to the king of Persia but more money than Alexander had ever seen. Darius’ royal tent was still ‘full of many treasures, luxurious furniture and lavishly dressed servants’. With ‘the whole room marvellously fragrant with spices and perfumes’, a battle-weary Alexander took full advantage of its huge gold bath before having dinner, reclining with his companions on magnificent dining couches.
Cleopatra the Great Page 3
