The literary scene that would provide the backdrop to Philopator’s disastrous reign had been created during his father’s lifetime, and it had begun with a new emphasis in the institution on literature rather than science. Ptolemy III had given his most gifted scholar-writer, Callimachus of Cyrene, the immense task of cataloging the ever-increasing mountain of books accruing in the library. This he began at the height of his powers around 250 BC when he embarked on his Pinakes (literally, “Lists”), whose full title translates as “List of Those Who Distinguished Themselves in All Branches of Learning, and Their Writings.” As the full title suggests, this was no mere catalog. Running to 120 separate books, it was a comprehensive survey of all the books held in the great library, along with biographical and bibliographical details of the authors—in short, a survey of all known classical literature up to the time of its compilation.
In this work he also introduced the notion of a library classification system—the forerunner of our Dewey decimal system—in which all books were classified as written by (1) dramatists, (2) epic and lyric poets, (3) legislators, (4) philosophers, (5) historians, (6) orators, (7) rhetoricians, or (8) miscellaneous writers. Not that this impressed everyone; one of the first new tomes Callimachus had to catalog with his system was Aristophanes of Byzantium’s highly critical Against Callimachus’s Library Lists. History does not record which number he chose for it.
Besides the mammoth task of the Pinakes, Callimachus also wrote his own poetry. His longest work, the Aitia (“Causes”), is a narrative elegy in four parts, one of which, The Lock of Berenice, records the story of the constellation Coma Berenice. This poem was freely copied by Catullus and subsequently became the model for Alexander Pope’s 1712 poem The Rape of the Lock.
Callimachus was above all a stylist, famed for his conciseness, precision, and artistry, a great master of the finely turned phrase, often in epigrammatic form. Even when he tackled enormous subjects like the Pinakes or Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, his method was to break up the longest works by having them copied into shorter sections. He is said to have maintained that all big books were boring books.
For all his love of brevity, Callimachus was a prolific writer, credited with producing about seven hundred works in all, and he became hugely famous in his day and in the succeeding centuries. In fact no other Greek poet except Homer is so often quoted by the grammarians of late antiquity. He was best known for his epigrams, of which sixty-three have survived. Epigram 31, an epitaph, displays his wit and elegance superbly. It takes the form of a dialogue:
Tell me, is Charidas buried here?
“If it’s the son of Arimmas you mean, he’s here.”
Charidas, how is it down there?
“Darkness.”
What of Return?
“A lie.”
And Pluto?
“A myth.”
We’re done for, then.
“I’ve given you the truth. If you prefer a pleasantry, beef ’s a penny a pound in Hades.”
Callimachus’s insistence on brevity put him somewhat at odds with his most famous pupil, Apollonius of Rhodes, whose lifetime ambition had been to set down in verse the epic adventures of Jason and the Argonauts. But Apollonius’s epic chimed with the times: an adventure tale of brave Greek warriors who journeyed (like Alexander) to the edges of the known world, visiting en route Cyrenaica, the Aegean Islands, and the Black Sea, all places of considerable interest to the Ptolemies and their trading, seafaring nation. The heroes are portrayed in overtly Homeric style, and the boat itself and accompanying technology are deliberately set in an archaic context, but Apollonius weaves into the text all sorts of “modern” scientific (and geographical) ideas and knowledge along with the more traditional fabulous geography of clashing rocks, sirens, and mythical beasts.
Into this admixture of modern science within the traditional setting, Apollonius introduces an innovation of his own, a running commentary on his own narrative, as Richard Hunter explains in the introduction to his 1993 translation of the Argonautica:
A particular mode for the expression of this textual self-consciousness is irony and humour; where the poet is constantly also a commentator on his poetry, the anticipation of reading and reception is inscribed in the text itself, and the poet becomes not just a creator but also a reader, himself surprised by his own creation. . . . When, for example, Medea puts the evil eye on Talos, Apollonius reacts as a particular type of reader of the Argonautica might react:
“Father Zeus, my mind is all aflutter with amazement, if it is true that death comes to us not only from disease and wounds, but someone far off can harm us, as that man, bronze though he was, yielded to destruction through the grim powers of Medea, mistress of drugs.”
—Apollonius, Jason and the Golden Fleece
[The Argonautica], trans. R. L. Hunter
The poet stands outside his poem and contemplates it, almost as though he had nothing to do with it.
This dreamlike, wistful mythmaking was now the setting for Ptolemy IV’s return from the wars. The revival in heroic literature gave him the perfect foil for his own reign, the perfect opportunity to revel in his own position as a hero-god to his people; but in this, as with so much, he was gravely mistaken.
Taking the sister who had accompanied him to war as his wife, although still entirely under the sway of his mistress Agathoclea, he now lost himself in romantic reveries of heroic tales. The future seemed bright. His father had fought a great war at the beginning of his reign and then retired, safe, to live out his years among his scholars and courtiers. Why shouldn’t the son do exactly the same? But Ptolemy was no returning Jason, and his Argonauts were no more than a gaggle of sycophants. Back at court the king and his favorites became ever more detached from the reality of life in Egypt and the political situation outside. The young king duly set about building his own literary court, but even here something was clearly different from his father’s day. In the place of the Aristarchus and Eratosthenes of previous years the court now, according to an early-twentieth-century biographer of the Ptolemies, “swarmed with literary pretenders, poets, grammarians, whores, buffoons, philosophers” (Edwyn R. Bevan, The House of Ptolemy, chapter 7).
It seems Ptolemy Philopator was not content simply to fund the museum; he intended to be its greatest star as well, and as such gathered around him a multitude of favorites to praise his own work. When he wrote his own, terrible play, an erotic idyll called Adonis, the obsequious Agathocles immediately produced a laudatory commentary on it. One story from the time tells how the king arranged a poetry competition where the entries were judged on the amount of applause each rendition received. However, one judge, Aristophanes of Byzantium, chose the poem that received the least applause. When asked why, he went to the great library and produced texts that proved that only the poem he had chosen was actually original. All the others were simply copied from earlier works. Ptolemy’s court had pretensions to be the museum, but in fact it was a mockery.
But far more serious than the pharaoh’s personal delusions was the situation in his country. The great victory Sosibius had orchestrated contained a poisonous seed.
That seed lay in the heart of Sosibius’s greatest achievement, among the native Egyptian troops he had raised and trained to fight for their pharaoh. They had seen the magnificence of the Greek Ptolemaic court, they had seen the plunder, and now they had returned to the reality of life in their country. Many of these highly trained warriors made their way back to the heartland of the ancient capital of Thebes (modern Luxor), only to find their families in extreme poverty and much of the land in disrepair. Native Egyptians had always known they were an underclass under Greek rule, but while the Ptolemies made Egypt great again, they had kept their silence. Now the administration was in the hands of corrupt favorites, taxes were exorbitant, and their sacrifice in the Middle East seemed to have benefited everyone except themselves.
There was only one conclusion: Ptolemy IV Philopator was not a god-kin
g, he was a foreign impostor; and when the situation in the countryside failed to improve, a full-scale rebellion broke out in Thebes in 206 BC against the “false gods” of the Alexandrians. This immediately struck chords with the Egyptian peasantry, who had been taxed to the breaking point to finance Ptolemy’s war. In fact many had fled to remote areas in the desert or in the marshy Nile Delta, where they had become outlaws, roaming the countryside and ravaging small villages and temple complexes, rather than working themselves to the bone for next to no reward. This process, known as anachoresis (literally, “to go up-country”), had occurred quite frequently in pharaonic times of famine, crop failure, or acute economic pressure. This time, however, it was spearheaded by fully trained, battle-hardened troops, troops who had seen how the other half lived in Alexandria.
The rebellion soon spread to the delta, where a vicious twenty-one-year guerrilla war broke out; but if it was bad in the delta, it was far worse farther up the Nile. Around the old Egyptian city of Thebes, just across the river from the resting places of the greatest native Egyptian pharaohs in the Valley of the Kings, nationalism was rife. Upper Egypt, backed by the kings of Nubia, now effectively seceded from the north, and the rebels declared their leader, an Egyptian named Herwennefer, their pharaoh in 206 BC.
Though Ptolemy had retrieved his territories in Syria, he had almost simultaneously lost more than half of Egypt, and his lifeblood: her grain. The Nile Valley and the Fayyum were the great breadbaskets of Egypt, and with them in rebel hands the Ptolemies’, and Alexandria’s, revenues plummeted. So severe was the economic crisis that at one point Ptolemy had to abandon the use of silver coinage and introduce a worthless bronze currency instead. The need to retain a large standing army to oppose the rebels further increased the burden on the economy. Egypt could no longer pay her bills.
At the very center of the maelstrom stood the temples. The early Ptolemies had always been extremely careful to cultivate the temple priests, whose institutions not only nominally owned much of the land but also collected the taxes on behalf of the crown. Traditionally the temples had also been a way for these foreign pharaohs to demonstrate their credentials for ruling Egypt.
As the revolt gained momentum, many of these institutions fell into rebel hands, including the vast new complex begun under Ptolemy III at Edfu, the temple of Horus. This magnificent building, measuring 448 feet in length and 246 feet in breadth, would become a monument to Philopator’s increasingly unsustainable belief that he could live as a Greek basileus but rule Egypt as a divine pharaoh.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the temple is how this huge monument—the pylons at the entrance are nearly 130 feet tall—and all its architecture and decoration are executed entirely in the pharaonic tradition. Great bas-relief carvings depict the (Greek) pharaohs in battle, and specific mythological tales relating to the patron god, Horus, the falcon-headed son of Isis and Osiris, are all depicted in traditional fashion. The temple itself was said to be built on the site of the mythic battle between Horus and his deadly enemy Seth, god of chaos and murderer of Osiris. And it was doubtless to Philopator’s taste that the great temple was also the scene of a love match. Every year, at the Feast of the Beautiful Meeting, a statue of Horus’s wife, Hathor, traveled by river from her temple at Dendera to be brought together with her husband, arriving at the full moon and spending their nights in the mamissi, or birthing house. Reliefs at the entrance to the mamissi, some still retaining their colored paint, portray the ritual of the birth of Harsomtus, Horus and Hathor’s son, and symbolically represent the fertility of the gods, their royal descendants, and the nation as a whole.
Yet the inscriptions on the temple itself show that from the beginning of the troubles, no further work was carried out on the building, and therefore, we must assume, no revenues from the temple’s estates were returned to Alexandria until long after the king’s death.
Then trouble arose, because ignorant rebels interrupted in the South the works on the Throne-of-the-gods [i.e., the temple of Edfu]. The rebellion raged in the South until year 19 of the king of Upper and Lower Egypt, “the heir of the gods Philopatores,” the son of Re “Ptolemy, loved by Ptah,” now deceased, the god Epiphanes, the strong one, the king who chased disorder out of the country.
Inscription from the Naos, temple of Edfu
It was ironic that after the outrageous success at Raphia, it would be his own Egyptians, those “ignorant rebels,” who would humble the all-conquering pharaoh and bring his most Egyptian work—the building of the temple of Horus at Edfu—to a halt. After his victory in Palestine, Ptolemy IV had chosen to return to Egypt on that god’s birthday, traveling like the new Horus downstream by ship from Memphis to Alexandria at the inception of the annual flooding (and symbolic rebirth) of the Nile. To honor him and his sister-wife it was decreed that statues of the king and queen be placed in the largest courts of all the major temples in Egypt; Ptolemy Horus, it was declared, was his father’s protector and his victory at Raphia was “beautiful.” In this way the polite fiction of the divinity of Ptolemy Philopator was at least maintained in his own mind. In truth the victory was not beautiful but hollow.
In 204 BC, still in the midst of the native rebellion and just forty years old, Philopator departed to join the gods. The circumstances surrounding his death are shrouded in mystery. There was no formal announcement of his death from Sosibius or Agathocles; he simply wasn’t seen for several months. Then, mysteriously, his wife-sister, Arsinoe, who would certainly have taken the role of regent, disappeared too. Finally, Sosibius summoned the court and announced that both king and queen were dead. He then proceeded to read out a forged royal will appointing himself and Agathocles guardians of the new king. There were few tears shed for the death of the king, but the people were immediately suspicious about Arsinoe’s death. How had she come to die simultaneously with her husband, and what, or who, had killed her? Polybius tells us that on receiving the news of her unhappy death “the people fell into such a state of distraction and affliction that the town was full of groans, tears and ceaseless lamentation, a testimony, in the opinion of those who judged correctly, not so much of affection for Arsinoe as of hatred for Agathocles” (Polybius, The Histories, book 15, chapter 25).
Sosibius escaped the backlash, dying a few months later, but Agathocles was determined to continue as sole guardian of the new king and proxy ruler of the nation. His first acts were to send away from Alexandria all the most able and influential people at court, on diplomatic missions, so that he gained absolute ascendancy there. Having secured his own position, he began to revel in it, living a life of constant drunkenness and debauchery, “sparing neither women in the flower of their age nor brides nor virgins, and all this he did with the most odious ostentation” (Polybius, The Histories, book 15, chapter 25).
Loathing of Agathocles had spread throughout the streets of Alexandria and among the Macedonian soldiers quartered there, and when Agathocles attempted to torture and execute some soldiers he thought were plotting against him, word spread around the garrison and among the townsfolk that revolt was imminent. At the same time, Agathocles was engrossed, as Polybius would have it, in his nightly banquet and orgy, after which he fell into a drunken sleep. He was aroused from this by a party of furious soldiers demanding that the king be surrendered to them. Realizing that he and his sister were trapped, Agathocles eventually surrendered the boy with his bodyguard to the soldiers, who took him on horseback to the stadium, where crowds of citizens and soldiers had assembled.
The crowds were elated to see the king freed but bayed for the blood of the tyrant Agathocles and his harlot sister. At that moment Sosibius’s son, who had remained in the background since his father’s death, saw an opportunity to betray his father’s old colleague and perhaps improve his own standing. Approaching the king, he asked his assent for the crowd to be given satisfaction. The pharaoh apparently nodded, and the crowd roared its approval as soldiers set off to the houses of Agathocles and his siste
r. In due course they, their attendants, and all their families were brought shackled to the stadium, the women naked, where they were stabbed, bitten, and mutilated until they were all dead. “For terrible is the cruelty of the Egyptians when their anger is aroused,” notes Polybius (The Histories, book 15, chapter 33). The younger Sosibius meanwhile slipped away with the young king, eager to protect him from the sight of the mob at work.
Polybius is equally merciless in his final assessment of Agathocles, damning his memory as formidably as the Alexandrians had damned the man:
Agathocles displayed neither courage in war nor conspicuous ability, nor was he fortunate and exemplary in his management of his affairs, nor, finally, had he that acuteness and mischievous address which serve a courtier’s ends and which made Sosibius and several others so successful until the ends of their lives in their management of king after king. On the contrary it was quite different with Agathocles. Owing to Philopator’s incapacity as a ruler he attained an exceptionally high position; and in this position finding himself after the king’s death most favourably circumstanced to maintain his power, he lost both his control and his life through his own cowardice and indolence.
Polybius, The Histories, book 15, chapter 34
The key phrase here, however, is not about Agathocles, it’s about Ptolemy IV: “Owing to Philopator’s incapacity as a ruler . . .” And there lies the rub. Ptolemy’s failings had sadly not died with him; indeed, his legacy was only just beginning to bear its bitter fruits. Yet from the inscriptions surviving from the early reign of his son, Ptolemy V, one could be forgiven for thinking that another renaissance was in the air.
The Rise and Fall of Alexandria Page 19
