Predecessors of Cleopatra

by Leigh North

His Egyptian projects had now to be abandoned, as Antiochus, son of Seleukos, was already hastening to avenge the death of his father. So Keraunos, nothing loth probably, seized upon the throne of Thrace, the king and his eldest son both being dead. Grabbing a Kingdom seems to have been comparatively easy—the pastime of adventurers in those days—but it was frequently “light come and light go”—there was seldom any real stability in these self-made royalties.

Again Arsinoe, the Egyptian born, appears in an unfavorable light (though how far independence of action or any other course was possible to her we cannot judge) for she married this murderer of kings, the son of her father’s first wife. Doubtless she must have foreseen the possibility of ill consequences, for she was a woman of acute mind, but probably in the midst of such troublous times and so many perplexities it seemed the safest thing to her to marry the strongest, the man who had proved himself a success, and she believed that it would secure her and her children the throne of Thrace. She had already lent herself to cruel deeds to secure this object, she must needs go on in the same path. Few more unlovely characters than Keraunos appear in this dark period of history. It is evident that he simply married Arsinoe to get her in his power, for no sooner had he done so than he murdered her young children and banished her childless and heart-broken to the island of Samothrace, to repent in bitterness of soul her sad mistake. Two years later the monster was overthrown in battle, dragged from his elephant, and hacked to pieces by the barbarous Gauls, leaving, we may imagine, but few to mourn his well-deserved fate.

Meanwhile the childless widow, stripped of throne, honors and kindred abode in the holy, isle. To her perhaps life seemed ended, little foreseeing the splendid future before her. Turning to religious consolations in time of sorrow, she worshipped the strange divinities of the place, building shrines to them, of which traces have been discovered in modern times, and even adding them to the long list of Egyptian divinities and building temples to them when she returned to her native land.

Deeply attached to her as he proved himself to be later, we cannot suppose Ptolemy Philadelphus to have been unmoved by the great misfortunes of his sister, but news traveled slowly in those days, and whatever the cause, he seems to have done nothing at once to avenge her losses. Whether at his instance or hers we know not, but after a certain length of time Arsinoe returned to Egypt. She took new hold of life and perhaps even began to scheme for the attainment of the honors which she shortly won. Recognized or not, her presence was a menace to the reigning queen. Equally it remains possible that she was innocent in this matter, further than acquiescence in the wishes of the king, but her previous course in Thrace lends color to the former idea.

So Arsinoe I was banished and Ptolemy married the widow, who now became Arsinoe II, called Philadelphus during her lifetime, and only subsequently was the title bestowed upon her husband to distinguish him among the long list of Ptolemy kings. This strange marriage was quite in accordance with Egyptian customs, where the queen was frequently called the king’s sister, as a term of honor, whether she was so or not, and shows how the Ptolemies had accepted Egyptian ideas, which no doubt largely account for their popularity. But to the Greeks such unions were an offence and deemed, as we would in a Christian age, incestuous. But the king was absolute, one of the courtiers, if not more, who dared to criticise and disapprove, paid with life for his temerity.

The first marriage occurred probably when Arsinoe II was about sixteen, her third and last when she was thirty-nine or forty. There can be little doubt that she had beauty and charm, a vigorous mind and great tact. She needed scope for her powers and in becoming queen of Egypt found a field well suited to her desires and abilities. We seem to see some resemblance between her and Queen Mertytefs of ancient times. Both were in succession wife to different kings, both were women of great attractiveness and capacity, and both took a personal share in public affairs. Step by step the new queen rose to greater prominence. Her sorrows were of the past, now life was all sunshine. She attained the highest point to which mortal could reach, she was finally worshipped as a goddess, and on a certain stele found at Pithon, she is even represented as a deity bestowing favors on her husband.

In the fifteenth year of Ptolemy’s reign Arsinoe II was made goddess of Mende, in the nineteenth at Thebes and in the twentieth or twenty-first, as Isis-Arsinoe, she was worshipped at Sais, and the king claimed these honors for her in all the temples of Egypt. There had been a city, the centre of the Egyptian worship of the crocodile, this Ptolemy re-named after the queen; it was enlarged, embellished and Hellenised to a great extent by the introduction of the Greek language and the erection of temples to the Greek gods and institutions on a Greek pattern. Its population at one time was said to amount to a hundred thousand.

Among other attractions for the king, perhaps, was also the fact that Arsinoe was a great heiress. She had proprietary claims on Cassandrea, Pontiac, Heraclia and its dependent cities, bestowed on her by her first husband. In the region called the Fayum, the former Lake Moeris was drained and turned into a fertile plain and this work was attributed to Arsinoe and it was now called the Arsinoe nome, and from it the queen derived part of her revenues. Old records show that it was settled by veteran soldiers who brought wives from Greek lands, and that it was an orderly and well managed society, with few crimes laid to its account.

Arsinoe II was an ideal stepmother, in the better sense of the word. The children of Ptolemy were treated by her as her own—only one son appears to have accompanied his mother into exile, if even he remained permanently with her—all the others dwelt in apparent harmony and affection with her supplanter. Thus Ptolemy Philadelphus had an intellectual companion whose advice he sought and upon whose judgment he relied, whose personal charms were great, who made life smooth and agreeable and who dwelt at peace both with his favorite sister and his children. While last, and perhaps not least in her catalogue of virtues in his eyes, she was lenient to his defections from the moral code and saved him from the desire and peril of other alliances. Such as she was the king seems to have idolized her and paid her every possible honor in life and in death. That she was some years his senior in no way interfered with a marriage apparently most congenial to both.