Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt (5 page)

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.
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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.