by M. J. Trow
When Alexander was crowned pharaoh of Egypt on 14 November 332 he was described during the ceremony as ‘Horus, the strong ruler who takes the lands of the foreigners’ and ‘beloved of Amun and the chosen one of Ra’. In one sense, these gods were interchangeable, but whereas Ra was linked with the sun, Amun was associated with fertility and reproduction. In effigy, he was shown sometimes as a pharaoh with a crown on his head and a flail in his hand. Elsewhere he is carved as a ram with curling horns. It is intriguing that in various coins he had minted, Alexander is shown with ram’s horns in his hair or as part of his helmet. It is possible that, by a circuitous route over the centuries, the idea of the horned god and the devil came from this tradition. Often referred to as ‘his mother’s husband’, Amun represented the pharaonic tradition, continued by the Ptolemies, of incestuous relationships to keep the bloodline pure. Amun-Ra lit the day and even lent a glow to the night, since his light could never be completely extinguished. He also won victories over his enemies, so it was the perfect honorary title to give to Alexander.
As pharaoh, Alexander, like Cleopatra 300 years later, was Egypt’s highest priest and the role was vitally important. In January 331, he travelled west from the Nile delta into Cyrenia (today’s Libya) and got lost in a Saharan sandstorm. Two black ravens appeared and led the expedition to safety. Giving thanks at a temple of Amun, Alexander followed the shrine’s priest into subterranean passageways and emerged later firm in the belief that he was indeed the son of a god. The transition then from ancient Egypt with its animal deities to the Ptolemies with their Greek overlay of religion was assured from the start. It would continue right through to the reign of Cleopatra, after which the Romans dismissed the whole thing as superstition. It is difficult to say when beliefs of this sort disappeared. The arrival of Islam in the seventh century AD certainly drove them underground and eventually eclipsed them, but there is some evidence to believe that Alexander as a living god was still being worshipped 1,000 years after that.
The Ptolemies continued the linked Graeco-Egyptian cult tradition. Arsinoe II, whose sole rule was in some ways a blueprint for Cleopatra’s, was born as ‘Daughter of Ra’ and ‘Daughter of Geb’ (the father of Isis). The pharaonic regalia worn by all the Ptolemies, including Cleopatra, reflect those centuries-old traditions. The red crown was Geb’s. The ram’s horns were Amun’s; the double plumes, cow horns and sun disc belonged to Hathor-Isis. Hathor was Ra’s daughter, the golden one, known to the Greeks as Aphrodite. She is the great heavenly cow, but always shown with a human body and face. The sistrum, a rattle to frighten away evil, is always associated with her, and her shrine at Dendera along the Nile was built to resemble a series of giant rattles. She protected women especially and became linked with motherhood, beauty and love. She was the ‘lady of the sycamore’, hiding in those trees on the edge of the desert and welcoming the dead, who had just climbed her long ladder to heaven, with bread and water. At Dendera, her ‘day’ marked the beginning of the new year and was an excuse for parties, dancing, music and a great deal of drink!
It is with Isis that we most closely associate Cleopatra. The Greeks knew the goddess by a variety of names because she was so all-powerful. She is Selene, the moon; Demeter the corn-goddess; Aphrodite, the goddess of love and sex. In Egyptian belief, Isis was the wife of Osiris, god of the underworld, and their son was Horus, the musician, usually shown as a falcon. The fullest description we have of her story comes from Plutarch, the Romanized Greek who has left us most details on Cleopatra, too. Out of that emerges the notion of embalming, which a distraught Isis carried out on her murdered husband whose body had been dismembered by his brother Set. So clever was Isis that she became indispensible to Ra, enabling him to recover from a deadly snake bite and her future was assured.
She was still being worshipped along the Nile long after Christianity arrived in the fourth century AD and so important was her cult that shrines to her appear all over the Graeco-Roman world as far north as the Rhine in what is today Germany. Her festivals were held in spring and autumn and she is so all-embracing that she is linked with birth and with death and almost everything in between. She is the goddess of sailing and even the ‘wet nurse of the crocodile’.
Not for nothing did Cleopatra work very hard to make herself regarded as the living Isis.
BOOK TWO:DAUGHTER OF THE GENERAL
3
THE SUCCESSOR AND THE SAVIOUR
NEBUCHADNEZZAR’S PALACE, BABYLON, 323
On the first day, he drank and partied with Medius before bathing, sleeping and partying again far into the night. He ate a little, then went to sleep. The fever was already on him.
On the second day he was carried on a litter to perform out the usual sacrifices and he rested in the men’s apartments until dusk. He gave his officers orders about the coming expedition: the army would march on the fourth day; he would go by ship a day later. They carried him to his boat and he sailed across to a garden where he bathed and rested...
...On the eighth day, though very weak, he managed to make the sacrifices. He asked the generals to stay in the hall with the brigadiers and colonels in front of the doors. He was carried back from the garden to the Royal Apartments. He recognized the officers as they passed before him, but said nothing.
And on the tenth day, he died. He was Alexander of Macedon, known as ‘the Great’ and perhaps the greatest general in history. He was thirty-two. In eleven years he had destroyed the mighty Persian Empire and his territory extended from the Danube in the north-west to the Indus in the east. Such military brilliance would never be seen again,12 but the problem with power based on one man is that when that man is gone, a vast hole is left behind. In an age when rulers passed on their power to members of their families, Alexander’s son was still unborn and his brother, Philip Arrhidaios, was a halfwit.
In the last days of his life, Alexander urged his generals to divide the empire among themselves. The problem was that he was dying from what was probably cerebral malaria; his speech was rambling and his intentions unclear. Did he expect one man to succeed him? Or was he orchestrating a bloodbath on Darwinian lines of survival of the fittest? One modern historian refers to the decision as Alexander’s funeral games. The generals who had been prepared to follow Alexander to the ends of the earth would not do that for each other and conflict was inevitable.
The symbolic farewells that Alexander made on 9 June 323 only added to the divisiveness. Perdiccas, his highest-ranking lieutenant, was given his signet ring but it was to Ptolemy that Alexander gave his personal possessions and it was Ptolemy who mounted a vigil in the temple of Serapis, the Graeco-Egyptian god whose carved image Alexander carried with him on campaign. Fighting broke out almost immediately, literally around Alexander’s corpse before the embalmers had gone to work. On the one side were officers under Perdiccas who wanted to govern the empire in the name of Alexander’s unborn son; on the other were those who backed the adult but highly biddable Arrhidaios. It was a no-win situation in terms of stability, but at the birth of Alexander IV in the autumn, he and his uncle were declared joint rulers.
The real power, of course, was the army, a huge fighting force then unrivalled in the world. Perdiccas was in overall control but under him Antigonas ruled Asia Minor, Lysimachos held Thrace (modern Bulgaria), Seleucus had Babylonia, Antipatros claimed Macedonia and the Greek city states. Ptolemy was, according to the Roman chronicler Arrian, ‘appointed to govern Egypt and Libya and those lands of the Arabs that were contiguous to Egypt; and Cleomenes who had been made governor by Alexander was subordinated to Ptolemy’.13
If this was Ptolemy’s idea, it was a shrewd move; if it wasn’t, he made the most of it. Egypt was the most southerly of Alexander’s territories. On the map it looks like a geographical afterthought almost separated from the rest by a narrow land strip at Gaza. Given the speed of communications in the ancient world, Ptolemy might have known he could hold this land for ever, even without his former leader’s affection for i
t.
As we have seen, Alexander had marched unopposed into Egypt in October 332 and, backed by the fleet sailing south from the Nile delta and along the river itself, he came to Memphis, the ancient Egyptian capital, in triumph.
For years, Egypt had lain under the yoke of Persian domination. In fact, some of the towns Alexander marched through were rubble as a result. Unlike the Persians, the Greeks acknowledged, respected and honoured the lands they conquered. True, they equated the Egyptian pantheon of gods with their own and the Greek culture that they imposed never assimilated with the native one, but Alexander and all his Egyptian successors for 300 years understood the importance of working with the priesthood and nobility, not against them. It was a master-class in empire-building.
The Egyptians, recognizing divinity in Alexander or perhaps realizing he could not be defeated, declared him the successor of Nectanebo, the last native king of Egypt. He was now pharaoh of Upper and Lower Egypt, ‘beloved of Amun and the chosen one of Ra’, and on his deathbed the conqueror whispered that he wanted his body to lie with Amun, hedging his bets perhaps on the existence of an afterlife.
He planned a great city on the Mediterranean coast south of the tiny island of Pharos and in this respect, Alexandrine Egypt would be very different from the ancient country along the Nile, based on Memphis, Thebes and Luxor. Here, at the city named after him, would be built the biggest library in the world and it would be a home to the finest scholars. It would grow and flourish as Alexandria ad Aegyptu to the Romans – Alexandria next to Egypt – an apt metaphor for the cultures that never quite meshed.
So Ptolemy’s choice of Egypt was a good one and, as if to underline the fact and his own closeness to Alexander, he took his master’s embalmed body, in its glittering Egyptian-style sarcophagus, back to the Nile. Perdiccas saw this as an act of treachery. He was anxious to preserve his own position as Alexander’s successor and needed to have the body to prove it.14 Claiming that the body should be interred in Macedonian soil, at Aegae, Perdiccas pursued Ptolemy with a huge force. At Damascus, Ptolemy cleverly switched corpses and continued into Egypt with the real body, leaving Perdiccas to find that the great hearse hung with battle trophies was empty.
This marked the first of many wars among the successors of Alexander, which may, of course, have been what he intended, but Perdiccas’ invasion of Egypt in 321 was a disaster. He lost 2,000 men crossing the Nile at Memphis, their blood mingling with the water as the crocodiles had a field day and Perdiccas himself, facing a mutiny, was murdered.
With peace at home in Egypt and no immediate rivals on the horizon, Ptolemy began a settled regime. He didn’t take the title of king until 305 and like the other successors to Alexander, could claim that he was still acting as regent on behalf of the infant Alexander IV. He had the conqueror’s body buried with Graeco-Egyptian solemnity in Nectanebo’s tomb in the Serapeum at Memphis until the final resting place could be made ready in Alexandria.
The murder and mayhem that we associate with Cleopatra’s family (see Chapter 4) could be found anywhere in the ancient world and by 305, all of Alexander’s immediate family were dead. Ptolemy was sixty by now and known as ‘Soter’, the saviour, a title given to him by the inhabitants of the island of Rhodes to whose rescue he came during his reign. His coins show a strong profile with a prominent hooked nose, which was a characteristic of later Ptolemies and may explain his adoption of the eagle as his personal badge. In the ancient world such symbols were hugely important. In Cleopatra’s day, the eagle had been adopted by Rome (perhaps because of links with Egypt) and Gaius Pompeius (Pompey the Great) deliberately styled his dashing cavalry tactics on those of Alexander, even copying the conqueror’s hairstyle!
We shall look at the heirs of Ptolemy in the next chapter – and it is little short of astonishing that the family should hold on to power in Egypt for three centuries before Cleopatra bit off more than she could chew against the might of increasingly imperial Rome. Cleopatra was, according to some historians, thirty-two parts Greek, twenty-seven parts Macedonian and five parts Persian. The fact that bas-reliefs from her time and various descriptions of her in ‘fact’ and fiction ever since often portray her as purely Egyptian misses the vital starting point of her line. It began with a rough-and-ready soldier, a capable general and steadfast friend, who, against all the odds, died in his bed at the age of eighty-four.
Ptolemy I, the successor and saviour, was cremated according to Macedonian custom and his ashes were placed alongside Alexander’s embalmed body in the city they both had built.
4
THE FAMILY FROM HELL
ALEXANDRIA, 287
Cleopatra’s family tree has been described as more like a cobweb, tangled and, in its own way, deadly. Looking back as we are from 2,000 years later, two things emerge. First is the sheer confusion in a bloodline that contains Ptolemies, Arsinoes and Cleopatras by the dozen. ‘Our’ Cleopatra is the seventh of that name – and the last.15 It is practical to use Roman numerals for them – Ptolemy I, Ptolemy II and so on – and the ever-cynical Alexandrians usually gave them unflattering nicknames. So Ptolemy I Soter (saviour) got off very lightly, but Ptolemy VIII was Physcon (the Fat-bellied) and his father, Ptolemy VII was Neos Philopator (the New Father-loving). The other problem is much more difficult for us to grasp. Elimination by murder was the stock-in-trade of many ruling families in this period, but it was particularly prevalent among the Ptolemies. On the one hand, intermarriage between brothers and sisters, uncles and nieces – which was a Macedonian as well as an Egyptian custom – kept the bloodline pure and perhaps ought to have made for greater harmony. On the other, power politics was clearly more important than bloodlines or emotions, and assassinations were orchestrated on a regular basis. This extended to Cleopatra herself and is another way in which her ‘infinite variety’ is difficult for a twenty-first-century readership to comprehend.
Ptolemy Soter made his younger son Ptolemy co-regent in 287, marking a sort of semi-retirement. The younger Ptolemy was married to a daughter of another of Alexander’s successors, Lysimachos of Thrace, which might have created a unifying situation and helped bind Alexander’s empire. The fly in the ointment, however, was Ptolemy II’s sister, Arsinoe II, who had been married to Lysimachos herself. In an extraordinarily tangled example of family realpolitik, Arsinoe attempted to dispose of her own rivals and those of her children by turning to yet another successor, Seleucus of Babylonia, for help. By 275 she had married her brother Ptolemy II and become co-regent.
It was this Macedonian–Egyptian system of giving supreme political power to women that the Romans could not handle in Cleopatra’s day. Roman women were supposed to be virtuous, supportive of their husbands and excellent mothers. Their sole duties lay in the organization of their households and the ordering about of slaves. Unless they were Vestal Virgins, with a special place of sanctity in Roman eyes, they were excluded from any kind of public position. Murderous women like the emperor Nero’s mother Agrippina were an abomination and foreign women with power – like Cleopatra herself or the Icenian queen Boudicca in Britannia in the far west – were regarded with horror.
Ptolemy II and Arsinoe established the Ptolemaia, a vast festival held every four years, which had Olympic connotations and was both to honour the memory of Alexander and to worship the god Dionysus. Drinking and feasting were the order of the day and eyewitnesses tell of processions of 80,000, with elephants and giraffes laden with exotic imports from Africa and Asia. Huge statues of gods, Greek and Egyptian, were part of these processions, with moving fountains of wine and even an 80-foot-high gold phallus to symbolize the fertility of both the Niles and the Ptolemies.
These were fabulous years for the Ptolemies and their extraordinary wealth was real. Strict laws created taxes on everything from grain to papyrus, and the colossal revenue to the royal family was collected and recorded by a highly efficient and competent civil service that only Rome would surpass 300 years later. The economy was, of course, bas
ed on agriculture and slavery, but this was the norm in the ancient world and it would be 2,000 years before anybody seriously thought of an alternative system. The money was spent on making the Egyptian army and, more especially, the navy the largest and most impressive in the world. The Ptolemies also spent a fortune on the shrines of the gods throughout their lands. At the time, this was seen as essential as the gods were all-powerful and must be appeased with lavish presents. In terms of human psychology, it kept the priests happy and in Ptolemaic Egypt and in many states since, the mood was essentially theocratic – the Ptolemies themselves were gods and the priesthood, huge and influential, worshipped them as such.
Trade brought Egypt into contact with the then unimportant city of Rome on the Tiber and the first embassy sent there in 273 marked the official start of a symbiotic relationship that would end fatally for Egypt and for Cleopatra.
Culture for the Ptolemies reached its zenith in the Museion. So used are we to these buildings as collections of old artefacts that we have forgotten its original meaning. It was the home of the muses, where all things cultural were celebrated and the amazing building in Alexandria had laboratories, lecture halls, gardens and even a zoo. At its centre was the legendary library, with its 120,000 scrolls (books) on every topic under the sun. In an extraordinarily ambitious endeavour, successive Ptolemies tried to amass all the world’s knowledge under their own control, which, had it worked, would have been the ultimate in ‘Big Brotherdom’.
