CHAPTER ONE
When everything seemed lost, the heirs of the house of Ptolemy would suddenly have almost put within their grasp a (dominion stretching not only over the lost ancestral lands, but over wider territories than Ptolemy I or Ptolemy II or Ptolemy III had ever dreamed of. Those kings, being men, had based their dominion on the power of their arms; but now, when the military power of Egypt had become contemptible beside that of Rome, the sovereign of Egypt would bring to the contest power of a wholly different kind – the power of a fascinating woman.
E. R. Bevan, The House of Ptolemy1
In 81 the death of Ptolemy IX, king of Egypt, plunged the Ptolemaic dynasty into crisis. Years of vicious family feuds had caused a shortage of legitimate male Ptolemies. With no more obvious heir to the throne, Berenice III, daughter of Ptolemy IX and widow of his brother Ptolemy X, inherited her father’s crown and restyled herself Cleopatra Berenice. Soon after, to comply with Ptolemaic tradition, she agreed to marry her young stepson-nephew, Ptolemy XI.
The Romans watched the unfolding royal saga with a proprietorial interest. They believed that they had a valid legal claim to Egypt, which had been gifted to them seven years earlier in a vexatious will drawn up by Ptolemy X. As yet, they had resisted the temptation to annex Egypt, but many believed that it could only be a question of time. Meanwhile, the Roman dictator Sulla gave his gracious approval to the marriage of Berenice and Ptolemy, but the pair were ill-suited and Ptolemy, as the natural son of Ptolemy X, believed that he should rule in his own right. Within three weeks of the wedding the over-eager Ptolemy had murdered his bride and seized her throne. The next day he was snatched by an angry Alexandrian mob, dragged off to the gymnasium, and killed. Egypt was once again in need of a king or queen.
The double murder threw Egypt into crisis. The Alexandrians had dared to kill the king that the Romans had chosen for them; would this provoke the Romans into claiming their property? A new Ptolemy was needed, and quickly. But this was no easy matter. Berenice had been the only surviving child of Ptolemy IX and his consort Cleopatra IV, and she had died childless. Just one legitimate Ptolemy remained. Berenice’s aunt, Cleopatra Selene, was the daughter of Ptolemy VIII and Cleopatra III and the ex-wife of Ptolemy IX, but she was also the widow of three kings of Syria2 and, as the mother of ambitious Syrian sons, she made an unsuitable guardian of Egypt’s interests. Bypassing Cleopatra Selene, the crown was offered to the two illegitimate sons of Ptolemy IX: sons born to an unrecorded mother and currently living in Syria. The elder son returned to Egypt and took the throne as Ptolemy Theos Philopator Philadelphos (the Father-Loving, Brother/Sister-Loving God). From 64/3 he was to add Neos Dionysos (the New Dionysos) to his name. In 76 Ptolemy XII was crowned by Pasherenptah III, the newly appointed high priest of the god Ptah, in a traditional Egyptian ceremony held at Memphis. His regnal years were to be counted from the death of his father, Ptolemy IX, a move which stressed continuity in the immediate royal family, but which effectively erased the reign of the ill-fated Berenice III from the official record. As a consolation prize the younger son, also named Ptolemy, was offered the crown of Cyprus. The Romans, irritated by this rapid turn of events, refused to recognise the new kings.
The identification of Ptolemy XII with Dionysos was an astute political move. ‘Twice born’, once when ripped from his stricken mortal mother, Semele, and again when delivered from the thigh of his divine father, Zeus, the mystical Greek god Dionysos had long been associated with the resurrected Egyptian fertility god-king Osiris. But while the bandaged Osiris promised a calm and ordered afterlife to anyone living a correct earthly existence, Dionysos offered his most enthusiastic followers a lifetime of secret rituals and ecstatic experiences, culminating in the twin promises of union with the god and eternal salvation beyond death. As the austere cult of Osiris retained its popularity with the native Egyptians, the more flamboyant cult of Dionysos flourished both within Egypt and without. In Alexandria, a city where the Greek concept of tryphe (endless undisciplined luxury and ostentatious display) underpinned many aspects of official life, Dionysos was considered both a protective deity and a royal ancestor: genealogists had helpfully determined that Arsinoë, mother of Ptolemy I, was a descendant of Heracles and Deianeira, the daughter of Dionysos. So, by identifying himself with Dionysos, Ptolemy was effectively allying himself both with his legitimate Ptolemaic ancestors and with Alexander the Great, who had revered Dionysos as the conqueror of much of the eastern world. At the same time he was distancing himself from the more restrained and conservative Romans who favoured the Olympian gods, and who tended to look upon Ptolemaic excess – indeed, any form of excess – with horror. The stoic philosopher, geographer and historian Strabo, writing some sixty years after Ptolemy’s death, was not at all impressed with the Dionysiac royal lifestyle:
Now all the kings after the third Ptolemy, being corrupted by luxurious living, administered the affairs of government badly, but worst of all the fourth, seventh, and the last, Auletes [Ptolemy XII], who, apart from his general licentiousness, practised the accompaniment of choruses with the flute, and upon this he prided himself so much that he would not hesitate to celebrate contests in the royal palace, and at these contests would come forward to vie with the opposing contestants.3
Devotees of Dionysos came from all walks of life; they were male and female, rich and poor, free and enslaved, old and young. They drank copious amounts of wine and, in defiance of the taboo against transvestism, challenged the natural order of things by donning diaphanous womanly clothing to perform their mysterious, sex-based rituals. Lucian preserves the story of the staid philosopher Demetrios, who angered Ptolemy XII by drinking only water and refusing to cross-dress during the Dionysiac revels; as punishment he was forced to don a gown, dance and play the cymbals.4 They also serenaded their god on the aulos, or double flute, and from this last association came Ptolemy’s irreverent nickname Auletes or ‘Flute Player’. Whether this less than flattering sobriquet referred to the king’s musical ability, or to his plump cheeks, permanently puffed out like the cheeks of a flautist, or whether it was a snide reference to the well-understood link between male and female aulos players and prostitution, is not now clear. More straightforward was Ptolemy’s alternative nickname, Nothos or ‘Bastard’.
Auletes had inherited the most densely populated land in the Mediterranean world. It is impossible to give precise statistics, but historians have estimated a population of somewhere between two and a half and seven million, while Diodorus Siculus, visiting Egypt in 60, when Cleopatra was about ten years old, suggests a total Egyptian population of about three million. It was a tenuously unified and culturally segregated land. The vast majority of Auletes’s subjects were indigenous Egyptians, but over 10 per cent of the population were of Greek extraction, and there was also a sizeable and vociferous Jewish minority. Traditionally, the Egyptians had always made a firm distinction between those who lived in Upper, or southern, Egypt (the Nile Valley) and those who lived in Lower Egypt (the Delta). The southern Egyptians tended to regard themselves as the true guardians of Egypt’s heritage, while the northerners tended to regard themselves as superior to the unsophisticated valley dwellers. To further complicate matters, the people of Alexandria, a temperamental, cosmopolitan and racially well-mixed bunch, considered themselves a distinct cultural group, superior in every way to those unfortunate enough to live outside the city.
Tensions between the various factions could run high, and any group was liable to turn against their king at any time. The reigns of Ptolemies III, IV and V had been blighted by southern uprisings, while the reigns of the later Ptolemies had been heavily influenced by the Alexandrians, who considered that they had the right to chose and depose their own king. Ptolemy XII was to suffer rebellions, politically inspired strikes and blatant interference by the Alexandrians. But open warfare was the exception rather than the rule. For most of the time the various cultural groups coexisted in an uneasy truce, leading parallel lives, speaking their own languages, worshipping their own gods and making use of their own, entirely separate, legal systems whereby contracts written in the demotic script used by Egypt’s scribes were classified as Egyptian, contracts in Aramaic were considered Jewish and contracts written in Greek fell under the stricter Greek law.5 Two things unified the various groups: they were all prepared (albeit temporarily) to acknowledge Auletes as king, accepting his edicts as superior to all laws, and they all bitterly resented any form of Roman interference in their land.
The vast majority of Auletes’s Egyptian subjects led lives that would have been instantly recognisable to their earliest dynastic forebears. The bottom tier of their inflexible social pyramid was made up of the manual workers and peasants, the millions who lived in insignificant mud-brick villages and hamlets dotted along the Nile and the tributaries of the Delta, and who worked the land owned by the king, the temples and the elite. Illiterate and poor, these peasants have left many simple desert graves but few material remains and no writings, so, in consequence, we can say little about their lives and ambitions. We can, however, understand something of their work. Egypt’s phenomenal wealth derived from her abundant natural resources: the gold in the deserts, the papyrus in the marshes and, above all, the rich agricultural land. The Ptolemies had made some improvements – there were new iron tools, new crops, new harvesting policies, new methods of irrigation and vast tracts of newly reclaimed land in the Faiyum – but farming life continued much as it had for centuries. The late summer inundation was followed by an autumn sowing. The late spring/early summer harvest was followed by a dry season, when the hot sun baked the fields and sterilised the soil. Then the river burst her banks, the fields flooded and the cycle started all over again. We can get a flavour of this time-honoured, uniquely Egyptian rhythm by looking at the vivid agricultural scenes engraved on the private tomb walls of the Old, Middle and New Kingdoms.
Higher up the social pyramid came the skilled artisans and the educated scribes who lived in the towns and cities, and who made up what can loosely be defined as the middle class. Higher still came the elite: the high-ranking bureaucrats and the hereditary priests who worked closely with the new regime and who, having benefited from Ptolemaic generosity, used their private wealth to maintain Egypt’s religious and funerary traditions. Included among this group was the extended family of Egypt’s last native king, Nectanebo II, who had fled Egypt in 343.
The royal family occupied the final tier of the social pyramid, with the king standing alone and untouchable at the peak. For 3,000 years the king of Egypt had been recognised as the chief priest of all cults, the head of the civil service and the commander of the army. Only the king could offer to the gods; only the king, through his offerings, could prevent Egypt from being overwhelmed by the sea of chaos that surrounded and constantly threatened his tightly controlled world. Unique and irreplaceable, he was a demigod in his lifetime and a full god at death; Egypt simply could not manage without him. Any king – an infant, a woman, even a foreigner – was considered better than no king at all, and it was understood that the official coronation ceremony could instantly convert a mere mortal into a powerful monarch. Recognising that this belief in the semi-divine kingship did much to keep them in power, and appreciating the need to please the still-powerful and deeply conservative Egyptian priesthood, the Ptolemies were always happy to be seen to be conforming to the royal tradition that distinguished Egypt from the rest of the world. However they dressed, spoke and thought at home, however much they ran Egypt as a profitable business, in public they appeared more traditionally Egyptian – building and restoring temples and reviving long-forgotten rituals – than the Egyptians themselves.
Egypt’s most venerable tourist supplies a lively account of this traditional Egyptian way of life. Herodotus of Halicarnassus (modern Bodrum, Turkey) visited northern Egypt some time after 450, at a time when Egypt, temporarily reconciled to Persian rule, was both peaceful and prosperous. An experienced traveller, he could not hide his astonishment at finding himself in a land where everything appeared contrary to the natural order of things:
Not only is the Egyptian climate peculiar to that country, and the Nile different in its behaviour from other rivers elsewhere, but the Egyptians themselves in their manners and customs seem to have reversed the ordinary practices of mankind. For instance, women attend markets and are employed in trade, while men stay at home and do the weaving. In weaving the normal way is to work the threads of the weft upwards, but the Egyptians work them downwards. Men in Egypt carry loads on their heads, women on their shoulders; women urinate standing up, men sitting down. To ease themselves they go indoors, but eat outside in the streets, on the theory that what is unseemly but necessary should be done in private, and what is not unseemly should be done openly. No woman holds priestly office, either in the service of goddess or god; only men are priests in both cases. Sons are under no compulsion to support their parents if they do not wish to do so, but daughters must, whether they wish it or not … Men in Egypt have two garments each, women only one.6
Herodotus is by no means an infallible source. Culturally, he is unashamedly anti-Persian, pro-Greek and, up to a point, pro-Egyptian. He is prone to believing what he is told, no matter how unlikely, and he is attracted to tales of the strange and unexpected. Far from keeping an open mind, he contrasts all his experiences with the proper (i.e. Greek) way of doing things. Yet there is clearly more than a grain of truth in his writing. Egypt’s rainless climate was peculiar, and the river was undeniably strange; it flooded in summer, whereas normal rivers, as everyone knew, flooded in winter. And Egypt’s women, however they might choose to urinate, were definitely unusual when compared to the women in Herodotus’s own family. Egyptian women were free to live alone, and to own, inherit, buy and sell property. They could choose their own husbands, initiate a divorce and raise children without male interference. In marked contrast, Greek custom decreed that women should play a non-conspicuous role in society, living permanently under the protection of a male guardian. As Greek women never formally came of age they could never become legally competent; they had no independent political or social rights, no right to choose a husband and no rights over their own children. Family circumstances permitting, Greek women were expected to remain indoors, providing for the family, guarding their chastity and weaving wool.
As an educated Greek, Herodotus would have arrived in Egypt with an inbuilt admiration for its ancient traditions, its scientific, magical and medical knowledge, and its gods. The Egyptians were barbarians, it was true, but unlike the Persians they were cultured barbarians worthy of respect, and Herodotus would have felt quite at home in a land where, even before the arrival of the Ptolemies, so many people were of Greek heritage. There were Greek mercenaries in the Egyptian army and navy, a sizeable Greek population in the northern cities, and one specifically Greek city, orpolis, run on entirely Greek lines in the western Nile Delta. The city-port of Naukratis (modern Kom Ge’if) had been specifically developed to handle trade between Egypt and Greece; Herodotus tells us that the site was given to the Greeks by the 26th Dynasty king Ahmose II (570–526), although archaeological evidence shows Greek settlement at the site dating to at least sixty years earlier. As the only legal outlet for Greek merchandise in Egypt, Naukratis flourished, surviving the political and international upheavals that characterised the later dynasties and outliving the Ptolemies to serve as a trading centre throughout the Roman era.
Ptolemy I had encouraged large-scale Greek immigration, a policy that continued until the reign of Ptolemy V, when almost overnight the stream of new arrivals slowed to a trickle. In consequence, by the time Auletes took his throne Naukratis had been joined by a further two Greek cities. Alexandria, founded by Alexander the Great soon after the Macedonian conquest of Egypt, lay on the Mediterranean coast and was home to some 300,000 people, including the largest Jewish community outside Jerusalem. Ptolemais Hormou (modern el-Mansha, near Sohag), founded by Ptolemy I, lay near the ancient city of Thinis in Upper Egypt and served as a Greek regional capital that might, it was hoped, provide a check to the notorious hot-headed nationalism of the southern Egyptians.
The early Ptolemies, who were by no means averse to imposing Greek-style rule on their colonies, had recognised the Egyptian bureaucratic system as one of the most competent in the world. Leaving the basic structure in place, they had ‘improved’ it by adding several more tiers of officials to the scribes and tax collectors already in place. An extract from an official document concerning an army enlistment, written in Memphis in February 157, shows just how unwieldy the bureaucracy had become:
… I received back the decree from Ptolemaios the memorandum-drafter and the letter from Epimenides. And I conveyed them to Isidoros … and from him I carried them to Philoxenos and from him to Artemon and from him to Lykos, and he made a rough draft, and I brought that to Sarapion in the office of the secretary and from him to Eubios and from him to Dorion, and he made a rough draft, and then back again to Sarapion. And they were handed in to be read to the chancellor and I received them back from Epimenides and I carried them to Sarapion and he wrote to Nicanor…7
Egypt was still divided into approximately forty traditional nomoi or nomes (administrative districts) run by local officials, but the nomes now had Greek rather than Egyptian names, so that the Middle Egyptian Hare nome, for example, became the Hermopolite nome.8 Each nome had been under the authority of a nomarch, or local governor; the role of the nomarch was now taken over by a Greek strategos (literally ‘general’) appointed by the king. The strategoi themselves reported to an epistrategos.
As increasing numbers of educated Greeks arrived in Egypt, they started to take over the more important administrative posts, while the indigenous Egyptians retained the bulk of the menial and unpleasant jobs, including all the jobs that in Greece would have been assigned to slaves. The king himself – an absolute ruler – was advised by official ‘friends’, who bore honorific kinship titles designed to stress their personal ties to the royal family, and by high-ranking hand-picked bureaucrats who were, of course, of Greek extraction. He was protected by a Macedonian bodyguard. This institutional racism rankled with the Egyptians, who recognised that they were quickly becoming second-class citizens in their own land. While many elite Egyptians retained their inherited positions, Greek gradually became the language of public life. Ambitious Egyptians were forced to become bilingual; Greeks, on the other hand rarely bothered to learn the notoriously difficult demotic Egyptian script. The decree issued by the priesthood at Memphis on 27 March 196, in honour of the anniversary of the accession of Ptolemy V, had to be published both in the Egyptian language (in two scripts) and in Greek so that all the king’s literate subjects could read it. A copy of this bilingual decree, engraved on the so-called Rosetta Stone, was to prove instrumental in Champollion’s AD 1822 deciphering of the hieroglyphic script.
Many of the new arrivals chose to live insular, colonial lives in the self-governing Greek cities, where they hoped to maintain Greek traditions, marry fellow Greeks and avoid mixing with the Egyptians, whom, on the whole, they considered their social inferiors. Despite their self-imposed segregation, the city dwellers gradually succumbed to the influence of their adopted land, and we find increasing numbers of Greeks worshipping Egyptian gods, consulting skilled Egyptian doctors and abandoning cremation in favour of mummification. But by no means all the immigrants headed for the cities. The astute Ptolemy I, intent on extracting the maximum profit from his new land, encouraged Egypt-wide settlement by rewarding his loyal soldiers and senior civil servants with plots of land in the countryside (chora), spread throughout the valley, the Delta and the fertile Faiyum Oasis, which he gave either at a nominal rent or rent-free. This tradition was continued until as many as 100,000 ex- and serving soldiers, plus unknown numbers of male civilians and accompanying women, were settled in the Egyptian countryside and in the reclaimed agricultural lands of the Faiyum (now known as the Arsinoite nome), where there was a thriving Greek culture.9 This system, superficially generous, ensured a maximum return from the land. The settlers enjoyed the right to cultivate their own fields; the state then levied a heavy tax on their produce and Egypt’s granaries filled with the wheat that underpinned the economy. Taxes – paid by everyone in Ptolemaic Egypt, be they producer, consumer or importer – were invariably high, and a constant cause of complaint. So much so that Ptolemy II had been forced to issue a decree forbidding lawyers to represent clients disputing their tax bill.10 Meanwhile, hand in hand with the development of a punitive tax regime went the development of state monopolies in the textile, papyrus and oil industries, the development of a centralised banking system and the development of a specific Egyptian coinage that replaced the traditional barter system and allowed the Ptolemies to make a profit on every foreign coin exchange. While most taxes were still collected in kind, those who offered services rather than goods could now look forward to paying monetary taxes on their income.
Mixed Greek-Egyptian marriages were forbidden in the Greek cities. But there were no restrictions in the chora and, as time went by, Greek settler families started to intermarry with the local Egyptians. Graeco-Egyptian families experienced a fusion of cultures: marriages were conducted along either Greek or Egyptian lines (often utilising a comfortable mixture of the two), and parents were happy to give their children a seemingly random mixture of names, making it almost impossible for modern Egyptologists to judge ethnicity on the basis of a personal name alone. Indeed, many Egyptians found it convenient to have two names, an Egyptian name that they used at home and a Greek name that they used at work. We now find some astute Greek women making absolutely sure of their rights by employing the more ‘liberated’ Egyptian legal system, which allowed them all the privileges and responsibilities accorded to Egyptian women.
Strict Greek law relating to women was becoming unsustainable in a rapidly expanding world where respectable single women were starting to travel far from the shelter of their city-states, and where growing numbers of Greek men were settling with non-Greek women. Legal papyri, written in Greek, introduce us to independent, strong-minded women who act as guardians for their children, arrange their own and their children’s marriages, and initiate divorces. Some women own houses, slaves, orchards or vineyards; others own large boats – important possessions in Nile-centred Egypt, where the river acted as the main highway and where barges were used for transporting grain. The poet Theocritos writes about elite Greek women who feel free to walk in the streets of Alexandria, and who consider it perfectly acceptable both to talk to unrelated men and to grumble loudly about the ‘rascally’ Egyptians who surround them.11 As educational opportunities for elite women gradually increase throughout the Mediterranean world, we find occasional female musicians, poets, artists, philosophers, doctors and lawyers. Some women, wealthy in their own right, are invited to play a part in civic affairs. Many who stay at home are able to read the novels that are now being published with a female readership in mind. Others, as this letter of complaint shows, are expected to contribute to the family finances:
To King Ptolemy [Ptolemy III], greetings from Ctesicles. I am being wronged by Dionysos and my daughter Nike. For though I had nurtured my daughter, and educated her and raised her to womanhood, when I was stricken with bodily infirmity and my eyesight grew feeble she would not provide me with any of the necessities of life. And when I wished to obtain justice from her in Alexandria she begged my pardon, and in Year 18 she gave me in the temple of Arsinoë a written oath by the king that she would pay me 20 drachmae every month from her earnings. If she failed to do so, or transgressed any of the terms of her bond, she was to pay me 500 drachmae or incur the penalties of her oath. Now however, corrupted by Dionysos, who is a comic actor, she is not keeping any of her promises …12
The story of the well-brought-up daughter who runs away with an unsuitable boyfriend – in this case the comic actor Dionysos – is one familiar to parents of all ages.
In spite of the new air of freedom, the overwhelming majority of women living in Egypt, be they Greek, Egyptian or Jew, were denied a formal education. We can see from the surviving papyri that some women could sign their own names, but the extent to which women were taught to read and write is unclear and many more women required a scribe to both write and sign on their behalf. Taught at home, women studied the household skills that they would need to care for their husband and children. Those who, for economic reasons, had to work outside the home took unimportant and archaeologically invisible jobs; none expected to enjoy a career beyond that of wife and mother.
Cleopatra V Tryphaena (the Opulent One), wife of Auletes, is a shadowy figure whose parentage is never mentioned. But it is possible to hazard a guess at her origins. Her first and only confirmed child, Berenice IV, was born during the 70s. This suggests that Cleopatra married Auletes after his assumption of the throne in 80. She must, therefore, have been chosen to be queen consort of Egypt, a role of such overwhelming political and religious importance that it was only awarded to women of impeccable social standing. Given the Ptolemaic penchant for incestuous unions, it is likely that Auletes would have preferred to marry a close relative. His wife’s name tends to support this assumption. The Macedonian name Cleopatra – literally ‘Renowned in her Ancestry’ or ‘Famous in her Father’ – had been favoured by the Ptolemies for six generations, but was not particularly popular outside royal circles. Names, of course, can easily be changed, and we cannot assume that the queen was born Cleopatra Tryphaena. Nevertheless, we may tentatively deduce that Cleopatra V was either a daughter born to Ptolemy IX by an unknown woman (and therefore full or half-sister to her husband) or, perhaps, a previously unidentified daughter born to the unfortunate Berenice III and her first husband, Ptolemy X (and therefore her husband’s cousin). If the latter was the case we should perhaps reinterpret the post-Berenice III succession, and see Berenice’s crown passing directly to her daughter and indirectly to her daughter’s husband.
Incest had been an occasional feature of earlier dynasties, when some of Egypt’s kings married their sisters or half-sisters. In a land happily oblivious to the perils of inbreeding, these incestuous marriages brought definite practical benefits. They kept non-royals at arm’s length, restricted the number of potential claimants to the throne, provided a suitably royal husband for princesses who could not be allowed to marry foreigners or men of low social status, and ensured that a future queen could be trained from birth to understand her demanding role. On a more theoretical level, but perhaps of equal importance, they allowed the royal family to differentiate themselves both from their subjects, who favoured cousin–cousin or uncle–niece unions, and from other, more conventional royal families. The kings and queens of Egypt allied themselves with the gods, who, at the very beginning of time, had been more than happy to marry their sisters. Those who studied Egypt’s ancient mythologies knew that Shu, the dry god of the air, had married his damp sister Tefnut, goddess of moisture. Their son Geb, the green earth god, then married his sister Nut, goddess of the sky, and their children Osiris and Isis, Seth and Nephthys also wed each other. Royal brother–sister marriages were, however, by no means compulsory, and by the end of the New Kingdom the tradition had more or less died out.
The Greek gods, too, had not been averse to incest, and Zeus had happily married his quarrelsome sister Hera. But in Greece full-sibling incest was discouraged, and the Macedonians had mocked the ‘inbred’ Persian royal family for their brother–sister unions. It was considered acceptable for Arsinoë II to marry her half-brother Ptolemy Ceraunos, but her marriage to her full-brother Ptolemy II, which took place some time between 279 and 274, was seen as scandalous perversion outside Egypt. Just how it was perceived in Alexandria is not clear, as few cared to make public comment. Sotades the Obscene, inventor of the palindrome and celebrated author of many fine and filthy poems, was foolish enough to pen some humorous verses about the royal union; he was rewarded by a long period of imprisonment and, having fled Alexandria, was eventually captured, sealed in a lead chest and thrown into the sea. The far wiser Theocritos recorded the incestuous marriage with approval. Ptolemy II, who was not averse to associating himself with Zeus, would have been pleased to read how:
… no better wife embraces her young husband in the halls, loving with all her heart her brother and her husband. In this manner too was accomplished the sacred marriage of the immortals whom Queen Rhea bore as kings of Olympus: it is one bed that Iris, to this day a virgin, prepares for Zeus and Hera, when she has cleansed her hands with perfumes.13
Perversion or not, the marriage was perceived as beneficial to the royal family – it had all the advantages of the earlier royal incestuous marriages, and the additional benefit of linking the nouveaux Ptolemies to the earlier Egyptian kings – and it set a precedent that subsequent monarchs would follow with increasing enthusiasm so that only Berenice II (daughter of Magas of Cyrene; cousin and wife of Ptolemy III) and Cleopatra I (daughter of Antiochos III of Syria; wife of the sister-less Ptolemy V) subsequently married into the royal family. Outside the royal circle full-sibling incest would remain rare until the Roman period, when it became a popular means of avoiding inheritance disputes. Roman census returns from the Faiyum suggest that an astonishing 25 per cent of the population adopted the practice. Egypt’s queens now found that they were expected to provide not only an heir to the throne plus a spare, but also a sister for the king to marry. It perhaps comes as no surprise to find the Ptolemaic sister-queens assuming an increasingly prominent role in both politics and religion. The queens develop their own regalia and are well represented in the surviving statuary. They also, for the first time, have their own title. While ancient Egypt had no word for queen – all royal women were classified by their relationship to the king, so we find many ‘king’s wives’ (queens), ‘king’s great wives’ (queen consorts), ‘king’s mothers’ (dowager queens) and ‘king’s daughters’ (princesses), plus a handful of ‘female kings’ (queens regnant) – Greek had the word basilissa, or queen.
While some of the dynastic kings of Egypt enjoyed incestuous unions, all of them enjoyed polygamous marriages. In this respect they differed from both their people and their gods. Kings maintained one ‘king’s great wife’; the consort who played a well-defined role in state and religious ceremonial, who was featured in official writings and art, and whose son, gods willing, would inherit his father’s crown. At the same time there were many secondary wives condemned to live sheltered, dull lives in harem palaces away from the court. All these harem wives could be classed as queens, or ‘king’s wives’, but they were by no means wives of equal status and all ranked far below the great wife. As all the harem queens were wives, there could be no illegitimate royal children. Each and every child was a potential future king, his or her chances of succeeding being determined by gender, age and, most important of all, their mother’s status. Just occasionally, when the queen consort failed to produce an heir, a harem-born son acceded to the throne, allowing his mother to shed her obscurity and become a ‘king’s mother’.
The kings of Macedon had also been polygamous. Their multiple marriages and their oft-repeated failures to nominate a successor from among their many children caused endless familial strife, which was made worse by the fiercely ambitious Macedonian queens, all too many of whom were prepared to lie, cheat and kill to place their own favoured son on the throne. But the Ptolemies, like their people, practised serial monogamy, taking one partner at a time, remarrying after death or divorce and, in many cases, maintaining an unofficial harem of mistresses whose children were not considered legitimate. Thus Auletes the Bastard, son of an unknown and we assume insignificant mother, was in the curious position of being completely acceptable to his Egyptian subjects, who recognised both his paternity and the validity of his coronation, but less acceptable to the Greeks and Romans, who consistently questioned his right to the throne.
We know that Auletes had either five or six children – three or four daughters, (Berenice IV, the ephemeral Cleopatra VI, Cleopatra VII, born 70/69, and Arsinoë, born some time between 68 and 65), followed by two sons (Ptolemy XIII, born 61, and Ptolemy XIV, born 59) – but, with the exception of Berenice, we cannot with certainty name their mother or mothers. The natural assumption is that Cleopatra V bore all five (or six) and, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, this is the view that many modern historians take. But, as the archaeologist’s mantra reminds us, absence of evidence can never be equated with evidence of absence, and Strabo specifically tells us that just one child, the first-born Berenice, was legitimate. The unspoken implication is that the other children were not legitimate to Graeco-Roman eyes, and therefore not born to the queen consort. We may justifiably choose not to believe Strabo, who, writing half a century after Octavian’s conquest of Egypt, was keen to belittle the Ptolemies as a means of flattering the Romans. The suggestion that Cleopatra VII was innately, irredeemably flawed – a bastard like her father – even before she came to the throne was perhaps his means of prejudicing his readers against her from the start, and it is curious that no contemporary historians mention her illegitimacy. But maybe Strabo is correct, and maybe some or all of the younger children were born to a variety of different mothers. The large age gaps between the children – with a possible twenty years between the eldest and the youngest – combined with the fact that Cleopatra V vanishes from royal documents during 69, perhaps indicate that Auletes had more than one wife. We can then further speculate that Cleopatra V either died (perhaps in childbirth) or for some reason retired from public life before the birth of Cleopatra VII. Auletes, a still-vigorous king without a son, would naturally seek to replace her.
The birth of Cleopatra VII in the winter of 70/69 is nowhere recorded. To calculate her birth year we have to work backwards from Plutarch’s account of her death, which is known to have occurred on 12 August 30, when, he tells us, she was thirty-nine years old. The name of Cleopatra’s mother, as we have already seen, is similarly unrecorded. Given that Auletes openly acknowledged Cleopatra as his daughter, do we really care who this missing mother was? That depends very much on our viewpoint. The royal family, Cleopatra included, would certainly have cared, both at a personal level and when considering the succession. It is highly unlikely that a daughter born to a slave would have been mentioned in the king’s will; the fact that Cleopatra was classed as a princess is a strong indication that her mother was a woman worthy of respect. The Egyptian people – including the all-important priesthood – would not have cared at all: as Cleopatra was an acknowledged king’s daughter, her mother was an irrelevance. Contemporary Greeks and Romans may have cared, as they held strong views on legitimacy, but the Egyptian Greeks very much took the view that any Ptolemy was better than none. Later classical historians, Strabo included, demonstrably did care.
And what of people today? Yes, we care. Not because we care overmuch about illegitimacy, but because we care perhaps too much about race and appearance and, with Cleopatra’s paternal line firmly rooted in the Macedonian Ptolemaic family tree, Cleopatra’s mother and grandmother(s) hold the key to her ethnicity. Two thousand years after her death Cleopatra still has political relevance, and arguments over her racial heritage – was Cleopatra black or white? – inspire fierce debate, with ‘black’ variously defined as meaning of Egyptian origin, or a person from non-Mediterranean Africa, or any person of colour, and ‘white’ usually being equated with Greek. These definitions in themselves, of course, are open to charges of Eurocentrism and Afro-centrism – can we not have black Greeks? Or non-black Africans? Is white not a colour? In the USA in particular, the recognition that traditional history has too often been written by a male, Eurocentric elite who, consciously or not, have promoted their own agenda and cultural expectations has led to the development of the theory – sincerely held by many – that Cleopatra was a black Egyptian queen whose achievements have been reallocated to a white proto-European.14 Scholarly discussions and heated Internet arguments abound between the ‘black’ and ‘white’ camps. It is easy, but lazy, to ignore this popular debate, classify Cleopatra and her family as Greek and move swiftly on, tacitly dismissing any claim that Cleopatra may have a mixed-race heritage. So, who exactly was Cleopatra VII?
We know that Cleopatra was a direct descendant of Ptolemy I, and we know that Ptolemy I was a Macedonian. Whether he was of ‘pure’ Macedonian descent we will never know – can anyone, anywhere in the world, swear that they are of pure descent, with all the compatibility of race, nationality and religious belief that this emotive term involves? Was he then a ‘Greek’? The kingdom of Macedon stretched across northern Greece, an anomaly topping a land of oligarchic and democratic city-states. The Macedonian people spoke a distinctive, almost unintelligible dialect, they drank their wine undiluted with water, worshipped their own gods and buried their dead under tumuli as well as cremating them. But Macedon was by no means culturally isolated and by the time of Ptolemy’s birth there were many true Greeks living within her borders. The Macedonian elite certainly regarded themselves as true Greeks, or Hellenes, and after a certain amount of argument they had, during the reign of Alexander I (c. 495–450), been permitted to compete in the Olympic Games – a sure and certain measure of ‘Greekness’. But not everyone was convinced. Macedon’s non-elite regarded non-Macedonians with the habitual suspicion reserved for all foreigners, while the true Greeks tended to regard all the Macedonians at best as uncouth quasi-foreigners.
Ptolemy and his descendants belong to the Hellenistic Age, the three centuries between Alexander’s accession to the Macedonian throne in 336 and the death of Cleopatra in 30, when an evolved form of classical Greek (or Hellenic) culture spread throughout the eastern Mediterranean world. Culturally, then, the Ptolemies were Hellenistic Macedonians who had, by the time of Cleopatra’s birth, lived in Egypt for long enough to have acquired at least some Egyptian habits. But what of Cleopatra’s racial heritage? Her mother is, of course, unknown, although we suspect that she was Cleopatra V, who in turn we suspect of being closely related to Cleopatra’s father, Auletes. If this assumption is wrong, if Cleopatra’s mother was not a Ptolemy, then she could have been an elite woman from anywhere in the Hellenistic world, although it seems most likely that she was either Egyptian or Greek. Auletes is known to have had a close working relationship with Pasherenptah III, high priest of Ptah at Memphis, and it is not impossible that this relationship was sealed with a diplomatic marriage. An Egyptian mother might, perhaps, explain Cleopatra’s reported proficiency in the Egyptian language.
But again, to assume that an Egyptian mother would be ‘pure’ Egyptian is perhaps an assumption too far. For almost 3,000 years tradition, theology and ideology had taught the Egyptian elite that they lived at the heart of the controlled, civilised world. Other, non-Egyptian lands were places of unrestrained chaos occupied by ill-favoured peoples destined to be denied eternal life. It followed that those who lived and died by Egyptian custom within Egypt were Egyptian: the most blessed people in the world. ‘Egyptianness’, like ‘Greekness’, was very much a matter of culture. Colour – both skin tone and racial heritage – was an irrelevance. The well-known Greek tale of the xenophobic King Busiris, who habitually slaughtered any foreigner who set foot in Egypt until Heracles put an end to his cruelty, was quite simply a myth. Egypt had always been open to immigrants. Libyans, Nubians, Asiatics and others had settled beside the Nile and there had never been any problem with individual Egyptians marrying people who looked or spoke differently. As a result, the Egyptian people showed a diverse range of racial characteristics, with redheaded, light-skinned Egyptians living alongside curly haired, darker-skinned neighbours. Problems only came when too many people attempted to settle at once, bringing their own cultures with them. This willingness to accept, and the willingness of foreigners to assimilate, make it difficult to estimate just how many ‘Egyptians’ were actually of non-Egyptian origin.
If we step back one generation, our problems grow worse. Cleopatra’s paternal grandfather was Ptolemy IX, but her paternal grandmother, who may have been her sole grandmother, is again unknown. She could have been a Ptolemy but, as her children are regarded as illegitimate, she is more likely to have been an outsider from Egypt, Syria, Greece, Rome, Nubia or somewhere else entirely. Her maternal grandmother and grandfather are equally unknown. Moving back in time again, we get a further dilution of the ‘pure’ Macedonian blood with the introduction of Berenice I, Berenice II and the part-Persian Cleopatra I into the incestuous family tree. All we can conclude from this survey of just two generations is that, in the crudest of statistical terms, Cleopatra was somewhere between 25 per cent and 100 per cent of Macedonian extraction, and that she possibly had some Egyptian genes. And, although there are blond Macedonians (Ptolemy II was apparently fair-haired) and red-headed Egyptians (the mummy of Ramesses II the Great confirms his fiery hair), this suggests that Cleopatra is most likely to have had dark hair and an olive or light brown complexion.
Roman historians did not subscribe to the theory that childhood experiences help to shape the adult and so rarely showed any interest in their subjects’ early years. In consequence, we know very little about Cleopatra’s infancy and childhood in (we assume) Alexandria. But we do know that no one expected Ptolemaic princesses to confine themselves to the palace or to weave wool. Raised to stand alongside their brothers as queens, the Ptolemaic women participated both covertly and overtly in state affairs, with Arsinoë II, Cleopatras I, II and III, and Berenices III and IV all proving themselves effective, and occasionally ruthless, queens. They were women of substance, owning land, property, barges and bank accounts. Many controlled sizeable estates that they leased out to generate additional income. The extent to which these highly professional businesswomen were formally educated is unclear. To be effective they had not only to be able to read, write and do arithmetic, but to understand the laws, history and traditions of Greece, Egypt and the wider Mediterranean world. Cleopatra VII must have had one or more private tutors borrowed, we might reasonably assume, from the Museion, home to the world-famous scholars of Alexandria: we know the names of Ptolemy XIII’s tutor-guardian (Theodotos of Chios) and of Arsinoë’s tutor-guardian (the eunuch Ganymede), but Cleopatra’s tutor, like most of her personal advisers, goes unrecorded. Cicero, who met and took an instant dislike to Cleopatra, confirms that she had academic leanings – ‘Her promises were all things to do with learning, and not derogatory to my dignity …’ – while Appian tells us that she tried to interest Mark Antony in education and learned discussion.15 Plutarch was impressed by her unusual (some might say unbelievable) command of the barbarian tongues, although he omits Latin from his list, possibly because he assumes that every well-educated person will be able to speak it:
She could readily turn to whichever language she pleased, so that there were few foreigners she had to deal with through an interpreter, and to most she herself gave her replies without an intermediary – to the Ethiopians, Troglodytes, Hebrews, Arabs, Syrians, Medes and Parthians. It is said that she knew the language of many other peoples also, although the preceding kings of Egypt had not tried to master even the Egyptian tongue, and some had indeed ceased to speak the Macedonian dialect.16
This tradition of Cleopatra the intellectual would persist, and long after her death medieval Arab historians would revere Cleopatra as ‘the virtuous scholar’: a philosopher, alchemist, mathematician and physician with a special interest in gynaecology. However, we have no confirmation of any scientific training, and the only evidence for her interest in medicine is the fact that she supported the temple of Hathor at Dendera, a temple associated with female health and healing. It is perhaps more telling that Cleopatra herself employed the distinguished scholar Nikolaos of Damascus to educate her twins Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene. Clearly, Cleopatra regarded education as an important matter for both boys and girls.
Auletes understood that Egypt’s future was bound up with the future of Rome. Unfortunately, he was incapable of persuading his people – the kingmakers of Alexandria – to accept the situation. With the benefit of hindsight, it all seems terribly obvious. Egypt was a fertile and ill-defended land ripe for the taking, while Rome was a greedy, ever-expanding military nation with a constant need for grain and a legal claim, however dubious, over Egypt. Now, as Auletes’s reign progressed, Egypt’s position was deteriorating from bad to worse. In 65 the Roman censor Marcus Licinius Crassus proposed the annexation of Egypt; two years later the tribune Publius Servillius Rullus proposed an agrarian reform that would give Romans a right to Egyptian land. Both proposals were defeated, but Egypt’s days of independence were clearly numbered. Only by increasing his cooperation with Rome did Auletes have any hope of keeping his kingdom. And so, very much against the wishes of the Alexandrians, he bent over backwards to cooperate. In 63 the influential Roman general Gnaeus Pompeius (Pompey the Great) graciously accepted a golden crown, the lavish gift of Auletes and Egypt. Later that same year Egyptian soldiers were sent to fight alongside Pompey’s troops in Palestine. Meanwhile, back in Rome, senators of all political factions received copious bribes; bribes which Auletes, impoverished after years of bad management and overspending, had borrowed from Roman moneylenders, and which he could only hope to repay by raising the taxes that were already causing his people much suffering.
In 60 Pompey, Crassus and Gaius Julius Caesar united to form the ‘first triumvirate’.17 Essentially, the three now ruled Rome. Seizing his moment, Auletes offered Pompey and Caesar 6,000 silver talents, an almost unimaginable sum, the equivalent of half of Egypt’s entire annual revenue, in exchange for recognition as Egypt’s true king. They accepted and Auletes, having borrowed the money from the Roman moneylender Gaius Rabirius Postumus, was confirmed in his position as ‘friend and ally of the Roman people’ (amicus et socius populi Romani), a specific legal phrase that conferred obligations on both parties. Auletes had sacrificed his dignity, saved his crown and bought Egypt a few more years of independence; his achievement had little to do with his persuasive diplomatic powers and generous bribes, and much to do with Rome’s reluctance to reduce Egypt to the status of a province. The senators feared, with some justification, that this would allow the ambitious Caesar too much power.
Auletes had been recognised as a friend and ally but his brother had not. And, as Cyprus as well as Egypt had been gifted to Rome in the will of Ptolemy X, this left the younger Ptolemy in a precarious position. In 58 the Romans decided to claim their property. Cyprus was annexed by Marcus Porcius Cato (Cato the Younger) and King Ptolemy, declining the offer of an honourable retirement as high priest of Aphrodite at Paphos, swallowed poison. As the people of Alexandria took to the streets to protest against their king’s apparent indifference to his brother’s fate, Auletes fled to Cato in Rhodes. His visit was conspicuously unsuccessful: he arrived soon after Cato had taken a laxative, and was forced to plead his case as Cato sat on the toilet. From Cato’s latrine he moved on to Pompey’s villa in Rome. Few fathers choose to take young children on business trips, and it is generally assumed that Auletes left all his children behind in Alexandria. However, an undated dedication made in Athens at about this time by a ‘king’s daughter from Libya’ has led some historians to suggest that perhaps the twelve-year-old Cleopatra accompanied her father at least as far as Greece. The confusion between Egypt and Libya is, however, an odd one and, with no precise date for the dedication, the Libyan princess is far more likely to be a daughter or granddaughter of Juba II of Mauretania, and therefore Cleopatra’s granddaughter or great-granddaughter.
With her unpopular father indefinitely absent, Berenice IV proclaimed herself queen. She was associated in her early reign with a ‘Cleopatra Tryphaena’; whether this is Berenice’s ephemeral sister or her mother, who has been missing from our history for over a decade, is not clear. Just one historian, Porphyrius of Tyre, writing three centuries after the event, specifies that this Cleopatra, who is by convention numbered Cleopatra VI, is a daughter of Auletes. Porphyrius’s somewhat confused and occasionally incorrect Ptolemaic history is today lost, but fragments have been absorbed into the works of later historians, including Eusebius’s Chronicle, where we read how:
In the reign of the New Dionysos, a three year period was ascribed to the rule of his daughters Cleopatra Tryphaena and Berenice, one year as a joint reign and the following two years, after the death of Cleopatra Tryphaena, as the reign of Berenice on her own.18
If Porphyrius is wrong, and his Cleopatra VI Tryphaena is to be equated with Cleopatra V, this brief joint rule offers further indirect proof that Cleopatra V was born a member of the Ptolemaic dynasty with an inherited right to rule Egypt. Whoever she was, Cleopatra VI Tryphaena vanished before the end of 57 and, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, is presumed to have died a natural death.
History had started to repeat itself. Berenice, now renamed Cleopatra Berenice, was a female ruler in need of a husband. Ideally she would have married one of her younger brothers, but as the elder was just three years old she chose an insignificant cousin, Seleucos, instead. This time it was the bride who took a violent dislike to the bridegroom: according to Strabo, the refined Berenice was unable to bear her husband’s ‘coarseness and vulgarity’, while his crude and unappealing personality and perhaps his low standards of personal hygiene inspired the Alexandrians to rename him Cybiosactes, or ‘salt-fish monger’. The unfortunately vulgar Seleucos was strangled within a week of his wedding and a replacement husband was hastily recruited. Berenice’s second choice, Archelaos, self-appointed son of Rome’s great enemy Mithridates VI of Pontus (and actual son of Mithridates’s general, Achelaos), proved more satisfactory and the couple ruled for two years with the full support of the people of Alexandria.
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.