CHAPTER III.
THE BIRTH AND EARLY YEARS OF CLEOPATRA.
Cleopatra was the last of the regnant Ptolemaic sovereigns of Egypt, and was the seventh Egyptian Queen of her name,[13] in her person all the rights and privileges of that extraordinary line of Pharaohs being vested. The Ptolemaic Dynasty was founded in the first years of the third century before Christ by Ptolemy, the son of Lagus, one of the Macedonian generals of Alexander the Great, who, on his master’s death, seized the province of Egypt, and, a few years later, made himself King of that country, establishing himself at the newly-founded city of Alexandria on the sea-coast. For two and a half centuries the dynasty presided over the destinies of Egypt, at first with solicitous care, and later with startling nonchalance, until, with the death of the great Cleopatra and her son Ptolemy XVI. (Cæsarion), the royal line came to an end.
For the right understanding of Cleopatra’s character it must be clearly recognised that the Ptolemies were in no way Egyptians. They were Macedonians, as I have already said, in whose veins flowed not one drop of Egyptian blood. Their capital city of Alexandria was, in the main, a Mediterranean colony set down upon the sea-coast of Egypt, but having no connection with the Delta and the Nile Valley other than the purely commercial and official relationship which of necessity existed between the maritime seat of Government and the provinces. The city was Greek in character; the temples and public buildings were constructed in the Greek manner; the art of the period was Greek; the life of the upper classes was lived according to Greek habits; the dress of the court and of the aristocracy was Greek; the language spoken by them was Greek, pronounced, it is said, with the broad Macedonian accent. It is probable that no one of the Ptolemies ever wore Egyptian costume, except possibly for ceremonial purposes; and, in passing, it may be remarked that the modern conventional representation of the great Cleopatra walking about her palace clothed in splendid Egyptian robes and wearing the vulture-headdress of the ancient queens has no justification.[14] It is true that she is said to have attired herself on certain occasions in a dress designed to simulate that which was supposed by the priests of the time to have been worn by the mother-deity Isis; but contemporaneous representations of Isis generally show her clad in the Greek and not the Egyptian manner. And if she ever wore the ancient dress of the Egyptian queens, it must have been only at great religious festivals or on occasions where conformity to obsolete habits was required by the ritual.
The relationship of the royal house to the people was very similar to that existing at the present day between the Khedivial dynasty and the provincial natives of Egypt. The modern Khedivial princes are Albanians, who cannot record in their genealogy a single Egyptian ancestor. They live in the European manner, and dress according to the dictates of Paris and London. Similarly the Ptolemies retained their Macedonian nationality, and Plutarch tells us that not one of them even troubled to learn the Egyptian language. On the other hand the Egyptians, constrained by the force of circumstances, accepted the dynasty as the legal successor of the ancient Pharaonic line, and assigned to the Ptolemies all the titles and dignities of their great Pharaohs.
These Greek sovereigns, Cleopatra no less than her predecessors, were given the titles which had been so proudly borne by Rameses the Great and the mighty Thutmosis the Third, a thousand years and more before their day. They were named, “Living Image of the God Amon,” “Child of the Sun,” and “Chosen of Ptah,” just as the great Memnon and the conquering Sesostris had been named when Egypt was the first power in the world. In the temples throughout the land, with the exception of those of importance at Alexandria, these Macedonian monarchs were pictorially represented in the guise of the ancient Pharaohs, crowned with the tall crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt, the horns and feathers of Amon upon their heads, and the royal serpent at their foreheads. There they were seen worshipping the old gods of Egypt, prostrating themselves in the presence of the cow Hathor, bowing before the crocodile Sobk, burning incense at the shrine of the cat Bast, and performing all the magical ceremonies hallowed by the usage of four thousand years. They were shown enthroned with the gods, embraced by Isis, saluted by Osiris, and kissed by Mout, the Mother of Heaven. Yet it is doubtful whether in actual fact any Ptolemy at any time identified himself in this manner with the traditional character of a Pharaoh.
Very occasionally one of these Greek sovereigns left his city of Alexandria to visit Egypt proper, and to travel up the Nile. At certain cities he honoured the local temple with a visit and performed in a perfunctory manner the prescribed ceremonies, just as a modern sovereign lays a foundation-stone or launches a battleship. But there is nothing to show that any member of the royal house regarded himself as an Egyptian in the traditional sense of the word. They were careful as a rule to placate the priesthood, and to allow them a free use of their funds in the building and decoration of the temples; and Egyptian national life was fostered to a very considerable extent. But in Alexandria one might hardly have believed oneself to be in the land of the Pharaohs, and the court was almost entirely European in character.
The Ptolemies as a family were extraordinarily callous in their estimate of the value of human life, and the history of the dynasty is marked throughout its whole length by a series of villainous murders. In this respect they showed their non-Egyptian blood; for the people of the Nile were, and now are, a kindly, pleasant folk, not predisposed to the arts of the assassin and not by any means regardless of the rights of their fellow-men. It may be of interest to record here some of the murders for which the Ptolemies are responsible. Ptolemy III., according to Justin, was murdered by his son Ptolemy IV., who also seems to have planned at one time and another the murders of his brother Magas, his uncle Lysimachus, his mother Berenice, and his wife Arsinoe. Ptolemy V. is described as a cruel and violent monarch, who seems to have indulged the habit of murdering those who offended him. Ptolemy VII. is said by Polybius to have had the Egyptian vice of riotousness, although on the whole averse to shedding blood. Ptolemy VIII. murdered his young nephew, the heir to the throne, and married the dead boy’s mother, the widowed queen Cleopatra II., who shortly afterwards presented him with a baby, Memphites, whose paternal parentage is doubtful. Ptolemy later, according to some accounts, murdered this child and sent his body in pieces to the mother. He then married his niece, Cleopatra III.; and she, on being left a widow, appears to have murdered Cleopatra II. This Cleopatra III. bore a son who later ascended the throne as Ptolemy XI., whom she afterwards attempted to murder, but the tables being turned she was murdered by him. Ptolemy X. was driven from the throne by his mother, who installed Ptolemy XI. in his place, and was promptly murdered by the new king for her pains. Ptolemy XII., having married his stepmother, murdered her, and himself was murdered shortly afterwards. Ptolemy XIII., the father of the great Cleopatra, murdered his daughter Berenice and also several other persons.
The women of this family were even more violent than the men. Mahaffy describes their characteristics in the following words: “Great power and wealth, which makes an alliance with them imply the command of large resources in men and money; mutual hatred; disregard of all ties of family and affection; the dearest object fratricide—such pictures of depravity as make any reasonable man pause and ask whether human nature had deserted these women and the Hyrcanian tiger of the poet taken its place.” In many other ways also this murderous family of kings possessed an unenviable reputation. The first three Ptolemies were endowed with many sterling qualities, and were conspicuous for their talents; but the remaining monarchs of the dynasty were, for the most part, degenerate and debauched. They were, however, patrons of the arts and sciences, and indeed they did more for them than did almost any other royal house in the world. Ptolemaic Alexandria was to some extent the birthplace of the sciences of anatomy, geometry, conic sections, hydrostatics, geography, and astronomy, while its position in the artistic world was most important. The splendour and luxury of the palace was far-famed, and the sovereign lived in a chronic condition of repletion which surpassed that of any other court. When Scipio Africanus visited Egypt he found our Cleopatra’s great-grandfather, Ptolemy IX., who was nicknamed Physkon, “the Bloated,” fat, puffing, and thoroughly over-fed. As Scipio walked to the palace with the King, who, in too transparent robes, breathed heavily by his side, he whispered to a friend that Alexandria had derived at least one benefit from his visit—it had seen its sovereign taking a walk. Ptolemy X., Cleopatra’s grandfather, obtained the nickname “Lathyros,” owing, it is said, to the resemblance of his nose to a vetch or some such flowery and leguminous plant: a fact which certainly suggests that the King was not a man of temperate habits. Ptolemy XI. was so bloated by gluttony and vice that he seldom walked without crutches, though, under the influence of wine, he was able to skip about the room freely enough with his drunken comrades. Ptolemy XIII., Cleopatra’s father, had such an objection to temperance that once he threatened to put the philosopher Demetrius to death for not being intoxicated at one of his feasts; and the unfortunate man was obliged the next day publicly to drink himself silly in order to save his life. Such glimpses as these show us the Ptolemies at their worst, and we are constrained to ask how it is possible that Cleopatra, who brought the line to a termination, could have failed to be a thoroughly bad woman. Yet, as will presently become apparent, there is no great reason to suppose that her sins were either many or scarlet.
Cleopatra’s father, Ptolemy XIII., who went by the nickname of Auletes, “the Piper,” was a degenerate little man, who passes across Egypt’s political stage in a condition of almost continuous inebriety. We watch his drunken antics as he directs the Bacchic orgies in the palace; we see him stupidly plotting and scheming to hold his tottering throne; we hear him playing the livelong hours away upon his flute; and we feel that his deeds would be hardly worth recording were it not for the fact that in his reign is seen the critical development of the political relationship between Rome and Egypt, which, towards the end of the Ptolemaic dynasty, came to have such a complicated bearing upon the history of both countries. After the battle of Pydna (B.C. 167) Rome had obtained almost absolute control of the Hellenistic world, and she soon began to lay her hands on all the commerce of the eastern Mediterranean. Towards the close of the Ptolemaic period the great Republic turned eager eyes towards Egypt, watching for an opportunity to seize that wealthy land for her own enrichment.