but, when they left the government in the hands of deputies, revolts
were numerous. Darius put his satrap Aryandes to death for presuming
to coin money; he being so distasteful to the Egyptians that they were
on the point of revolt when Darius returned. But spite of the personal
popularity of Darius the Persian yoke was hateful to the Egyptians, and
when the king’s back was once turned, his presence withdrawn, and he
became involved in other wars, they again rose against the invaders.
While preparing to crush Egypt Darius died, leaving the task to Xerxes,
his son by the beloved Atossa. His first wife had been a daughter
of Gobryas and her son, older than Xerxes, would naturally have,
succeeded, but Artobazanes had been born before his father became king,
and this fact, coupled doubtless with the paramount influence of Queen
Atossa, decided the question in favor of Xerxes, who had been born
after his father ascended the throne.
For the few succeeding dynasties the balance of power swung between
the native rulers and their Persian conquerors, Xerxes or Khshaiarsha,
whose wife was named Amestris, reconquered Egypt in the second year of
his reign, and increased its burdens. He also seems to have made love
to the wife of his brother Masistes and to her daughter, the wife of
his son Darius, and because Xerxes gave this daughter-in-law Artaynte,
for whom he had an unlawful affection, a beautiful mantle, woven by
his wife Amestris, the queen had the mother of her rival most cruelly
mutilated. Xerxes was himself subsequently murdered, apparently a not
undeserved fate.
Under Artaxerxes his son, who succeeded, B. C. 465, the Egyptians
again threw off the hated yoke, but after various vicissitudes were
reconquered. This prince was said to be largely under the influence of
his mother Amestris and his sister Amytir, both women of ill-regulated
lives. His only legal wife was Damaspia, but he had many children by
his concubines. Several native rulers who reigned briefly and were
murdered in succession, came next. Then we have Darius II, previously
called Ochus, and subsequently Nothus, said to be one of the seventeen
illegitimate sons of Artaxerxes I, who married Paraysatis, daughter
of Xerxes I. Darius II reigned nineteen years and was followed by
Artaxerxes II, said to be the last Persian king who left any memorial
of himself in Egypt. He styled himself “Beloved of Amen-Ra,” and
“Beautiful god, lord of the two lands.”
During this period the Egyptians associated themselves with the
Athenians and Amyrtaeus, a descendant of the Saite kings, ruled for
a period of six years. He is sometimes considered identical with
a certain Amen-rut and a portion of the coffin of his daughter,
Ar-Bast-utchat-nifu, is in the Berlin museum, but that the two are the
same king is questioned by others. Amyrtaeus was deemed of sufficient
importance, however, to be counted as the Twenty-eighth Dynasty, but we
find no mention of his queen.
Nepherites is given as the only king of the Twenty-ninth Dynasty,
from Mendes, and reigned some years, but again we learn nothing of
the queen. Akhoris or Haker was first king of the Thirtieth Dynasty,
he repaired various temples, and his name is found in several places.
Several unimportant kings followed, one authority says that the
revolt of the Medes permitted the authority of the Egyptian king
Hakis, Akhorus or Achorus, of whom we have made mention, and of whom
some memorials are found here and there, and a sphinx in Paris bears
his name. The kings who succeeded are regarded as of little moment,
Nectanebus I is frequently considered the next king and he succeeded
in keeping the authority in his hands, some say ten, some eighteen
years. He seems to have been capable both as a soldier and a ruler,
and somewhat revived the pomp which had been so characteristic of the
earlier kings. He built some temples and shrines and repaired many of
the important ones, and his name appears in various places. An obelisk
cut by this king (whose name occurs at Philae), but which was not
inscribed, was afterwards floated down the Nile by Ptolemy Philadelphus
and erected in honor of his sister in the Arsinoite home. The fine
stone lions once at the Fontane di Termine at Rome, but now placed in
the Egyptian Museum in the Vatican, are said to be the last piece of
Egyptian sculpture executed under native princes. He seems to have been
one of the few kings who defeated the Persians. Nectanebus II, who was
both a builder and a warrior, was the only other king of importance of
this dynasty.
Ochus, Artaxerxes III, of the Thirty-first Dynasty, out-heroded
Herod and led to the final collapse of the Persian power in Egypt.
He emulated and even surpassed Cambyses, causing the sacred bull not
only to be killed, but cooked and eaten at a feast. Darius Codomanus
was the last Persian king, and when Alexander came as conqueror of
these hated rulers the Egyptians made him welcome. He at once began a
conciliatory policy, sacrificed to Apis, built a temple to Isis, and
caused himself to be adopted by and proclaimed son of Zeus-Amon. He
remained some time, founded the city of Alexandria, placed rulers over
Egypt and departed from Memphis B. C. 331. Living he never again saw
the land, but his corpse was brought back from Babylon and deposited in
a sarcophagus in Alexandria.
The favorite stone of the Persian gem engravers was chalcedony, a
semi-transparent, white quartz, the blue variety of which is the
sapphire and on this one sometimes finds engraved the head of a Persian
king.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SECOND.
ROXANE.
The Persian yoke had become so intolerable to the Egyptians that they
were prepared to accept any other conqueror with positive enthusiasm,
and the Macedonian Alexander and his followers were welcomed rather as
friends than as enemies and hated masters.
The colossal empire created by the splendid military audacity combined
with the judicious tolerance of Alexander the Great may be said to have
dropped to pieces by its own weight, and a comparatively few years
after his short career was ended, for he died at thirty-two, it had
been partitioned among his generals.
Roxane or Roxana, first or chief wife of Alexander, for he married
others later, could only in a theoretic sense be called Queen of Egypt,
as of other countries of which her husband was master. The mad rush
of battle and conquest left little time for the ostentatious display
of royalty. Alexander was rather a great general than a reigning king
intent upon the government and internal improvement of the various
countries under his sway. He seemed to have hardly time to place one
crown upon his head before he was fighting for another, and the outward
trappings of his office must have been military rather than royal.
There could have been little opportunity for his wife to realize the
grandeur of her position. Hence it was, in all probability, not till
after his death that Roxane, the queen, entered Egypt, and then it was
rather as a captive than as a reigning princess.
By a previous connection, not a legal marriage, with Barsine, widow of
Darius’ best Greek general, Memnon, Alexander had a son named Herakles,
who afterwards laid some claim to the kingdom, but it was Roxane, a
Bactrian princess, famed for her beauty, that he first made his lawful
wife. She was the daughter of Oxyartes, “who commanded the Sagdian
rock for Darius,” and on the reduction of this fortress, married the
conqueror.
We can picture to ourselves a beautiful mountain region, the mad onrush
of troops, the clang of arms, the brief delirium of a battle and then
a cessation of hostilities and the natural man seeking once more
excitement in amusement. It is said that it was at a feast or drinking
bout, where dancing was also going on, that Alexander first saw and at
once fell in love with the handsome Roxane, spoken of by one writer as
“of surpassing beauty and a grace rarely seen among barbarians.”
Alexander himself was a handsome man in the perfection of manhood. Born
356 B. C. he was twenty-nine years of age at the time of this marriage,
which is said to have united two strains of Indo-European blood. The
bride was probably much younger. Of him many likenesses, usually busts
or profiles on coins, exist. There is a bust of him in the British
Museum, a terra-cotta in Munich, and he appears as the sun-god in the
Capitoline Museum in Rome, as the Vernal-sun in a marble relief in
the Louvre, in Paris, beside other places and his head on the coins.
He was fair and ruddy, with finely cut features, an alert agreeable
expression, a look of power and intellect and a full eye which could
blaze with anger or melt into tenderness.
As opposites attract, and judging by the race from which she sprang
(Bactria was approximately the present Bokhara and “has no small claim
to be called the cradle of our present civilization”), we may believe
Roxane to have been dark as Alexander was fair. A soft yet brilliant
black or brown eye, raven tresses, ideal in feature and in form, and
endowed with every grace. Alexander had proved himself invulnerable
to many of the sex. The wife and daughter of Darius—women famed for
their good looks—were treated by him with a respect and indifference
to their charms unusual in such times and in such cases. He worshipped
the god of war rather than the god of love. But the fair Roxane proved
irresistible. He left her for a brief time and then returned and
married her. To be the bride of the conqueror, especially when he was
young and handsome, what more could any maiden desire? “None but the
brave deserve the fair,” physical courage was the most admired of all
the virtues, holding its place even in these latter days, and of that
Alexander had a large share, as well as of other lovable qualities,
impulsive, generous and large-minded, as he often showed himself. He
wore a great plume of white feathers on either side of his helmet which
made his ever a conspicuous object of the field of battle, yet he bore
a charmed life and escaped injury.
Cruel at times, he was still warm-hearted. Between his mother and
himself existed a strong affection, and in a quarrel between her
and his father, Philip, he took her side and fled with her. She
was the imperious, passionate and fanatical Olympias, daughter of
Neoptolemus, king of Epirus, to which country she returned with the
son who inherited some of her traits, and to whom she was passionately
attached. Plutarch gives many pleasant anecdotes of Alexander and
refers to the numerous letters he wrote to his mother and other
relatives and friends. He deprecated his mother’s interference with
matters of war and state, but bore her reproaches with patience, and
when Antipater wrote to him complaining of her he nobly replied, “One
tear of a mother effaces a thousand such letters as these.”
With Alexander the name of Cleopatra is introduced into Egypt, where it
was borne by a bewildering number of the subsequent royal family. His
father put away his mother and married a second wife of that name, and
to his sister Cleopatra, who married her uncle Alexander, her mother’s
brother, King of Epirus, he was, as well as to Olympias, warmly
attached.
The marriage of the conqueror with the native princess placated the
Bactrians and peace was restored. But the restless spirit of Alexander
know no pause—he could not stay to dally in the arms of his love, no
matter how beautiful, ambition was even a more powerful mistress and he
rushed onward to new conquests.
He had adopted a conciliatory policy towards the Jews, he showed
the same in Egypt. He sacrificed to the gods of the land, to Apis
in particular, in marked and acceptable contrast to the conduct of
Cambyses and Ochus, showed great favor to the priests and placed native
Egyptians in posts of honor and command. He made a journey into the
desert, a most difficult, hazardous and dangerous expedition, to visit
the oracle of Amon, and caused himself to be proclaimed son of the god,
with a curious mingling of faith in the oracle and deliberate adoption
of a policy which conduced to his own interest as well as to those of
the people whom he had conquered. He founded the city of Alexandria,
which alone might have made famous any single or ordinary man, in
addition to all else that he accomplished in his comparatively short
life. The old Naucrates yielded its trade to the new city and the port
of Canopus was closed, while Alexandria grew in splendor, importance
and intellectual prestige and became one of the renowned cities of the
world.
Separation and the life of constant excitement which he led may have
lessened the hold of Roxane upon Alexander’s affection and a sudden
passion for other women have overtaken him, but it is more probable
that motives of policy dictated his subsequent course.
At Suza occurred what was called “the great marriage of Europe and
Asia.” Planned by Alexander to celebrate his victories and perhaps to
hasten the return of peace and good-will. He took to wife Statira,
daughter of Darius, and some authorities say, also Parysatis, daughter
of Ochus, brother of Darius and one of the last Persian kings of Egypt.
He coerced or persuaded his officers to follow his example, and not one
but many marriages were then performed.
So intent was Alexander on his purpose that he put a premium on such
connections and promised to pay the debts of those who would take
Persian wives. At this time Ptolemy, later king of Egypt, was united
to a certain princess Aatakama, daughter of Artabanes, of whom we
find no further mention, suggesting that these enforced unions were
not lasting, and were perhaps regarded by their principals as a
mere spectacular performance, or even a comedy. These nuptials were
celebrated with great magnificence the banqueting hall was laid with
tables for numberless guests and was gorgeously decorated. Pillars of
gold and silver, set with jewels, upheld the awning above, and nothing
that Eastern luxury could suggest was spared to embellish the feast.
According to the Persian custom a row of armchairs was placed for the
bridegrooms and one beside each for the brides, who came in procession,
fair to look upon, in beautiful and shining garments, enhanced by all
the appliances of the toilette, and took each her place beside her lord.
It was a marriage of fatal import to all concerned. We can imagine
the jealous passion aroused in the breast of Roxane at the sight or
report of all this, doubtless in striking contrast with her own simple
nuptials, jeopardizing as it did the right of succession which might
be claimed by her own children, yet unborn. Perchance the new queen
added fuel to the flame by a haughty demeanor, a half-concealed or
openly expressed contempt for the barbarian chief’s daughter who had
preceded her. Be this as it may, Roxane rested not till, with the aid
of Perdiccas, one of Alexander’s generals, she had her put to death.
The story goes that after Alexander was dead she sent a forged letter
to Statira, either as coming from him or with purport that he was still
alive and got Queen Statira into her power and caused both her and her
sister, perhaps the before-mentioned Parysatis, to be murdered and
their bodies thrown into a well and covered with earth. Having thus
disposed of a hated rival, she rested in fancied security, but her own
destruction eventually avenged this cruel deed.
The life of Alexander, lived too fast, and with little regard perhaps
either to the laws of health or morality, came to a speedy close. He
died 323 B. C. Either ignorant of or indifferent to the approaching
birth of a child of his own, he is said to have left his kingdom to
“the worthiest,” or some say “the strongest”—the first a person far to
seek in the midst of such a grasping blood-thirsty throng. Some months
after Alexander’s death Roxane bore a son, who was named Alexander
Aegus, and the infant, in conjunction with Alexander’s natural brother
Philip Arridaeus, apparently a man of weak intellect, were nominally
kings, under the regency of Perdicas, or Perdikkas, one of Alexander’s
most prominent generals. No such giant succeeded the heroic figure,
almost that of a demi-god, whose life had just closed, and the
conglomerate kingdom which he had created fell into numerous fragments
or divisions.
Roxane evidently could play the part of a Margaret of Anjou and her
subsequent history is but a pitiful tale. She and her son fell into the
power of the generals, who, like vultures, settled upon their prey.
No noble emotion of protecting the helpless stirred in their breasts.
It was a period of the world’s history in which weakness courted its
own destruction. “Might was right,” a theory not altogether known in
modern times, was the general rule of existence and some years after
Alexander’s death Roxane and the young Alexander were put out of the
way to make room for the grasp of stronger hands than those of a woman
and child.
At first the spoilers called themselves Satraps, but eventually
claimed or accepted the title of king. Ptolemy took Egypt; Seleucus,
Babylon and Syria; Antigonus, Asia Minor, and Antipater, Macedon,
later conquered by descendants of Antigonus; Lysimachus took Thrace;
Leonatus, Phrygia; and Eumenes, Cappadocia.
Alexander Aegus, like Caesarion, son of Cleopatra VI of Egypt, was
never allowed to succeed his father, but his life was cut short in
youth. Mother and child were simply used as pawns on the great chess
board of kings and when their existence interfered with the designs
of those in power they were disposed of. The then known world was in
a tumult, war was the order of the times, peace almost unknown. The
uprising and overthrow of one power and of one individual after another
was continuous, the pages of history were stained with the blood, alike
of the guilty and the innocent.
The years succeeding the death of Alexander must have been ones of
anxiety, if not of absolute terror to Roxane, and the possibility of a
violent death for herself and her child could not but have suggested
itself to her. Nominally wife and mother of a king, she enjoyed little
of the pleasures of state, but was hurried here and there and from camp
to camp with scant ceremony. A possession too valuable to those who
held her to let her go and in the end too valuable to keep.
The disposal of Alexander’s body was a matter of dispute. A counsel of
officers decreed that it should be buried in the Oasis of Amon, where
Alexander had been adopted by the god; Perdikhas wished that it should
be laid with the ancient Macedonian kings, while Ptolemy was determined
that it should rest in Alexandria, the new city. Ptolemy triumphed
and the sarcophagus of gold remained there for some time; we do not
know how long. Diodorus says “a coffin of beaten gold was provided, so
wrought by the hammer as to answer the proportion of the body. It was
half filled with aromatic spices, which served as well to delight the
senses as to preserve the body from putrefaction. Over the coffin was
a cover of gold, so exactly fitted as to answer the higher part every
way. Over this was thrown a curious purple coat, near to which were
placed the arms of the deceased, that the whole might represent the
acts of his life.” This was placed on a magnificent chariot adorned
with figures, symbolic designs, arches, floral designs in gold and
funerary urns, an absorbing spectacle to the people. It seems almost
strange that so much honor was paid to the body of Alexander, so little
to his very flesh and blood.
This settlement of the place of burial brought on a conflict with the
regent who came to Egypt, bringing King Philip and his wife Euridike
and Alexander IV and his mother Roxane, perhaps her first visit to
a land where she had been nominally queen. Perdikhas acted in his
treatment of soldiers and enemies with great cruelty, Ptolemy with a
marked clemency, and the cavalry of the former rose up and murdered
him. Ptolemy was then offered the regency and the charge of the royal
princes. But he was a cautious and far-seeing man and content with
what he had already secured—the mastership of Egypt—firmly declined
so dangerous a responsibility. The regency was then conferred upon or
seized by Antipator, and new distributions and divisions of ownership
ensued.
A mother and sister of Alexander, Olympias and Cleopatra, had raised a
faction against Antipator and divided the government between them. A
firm believer in “women’s rights” were these ancient and warlike dames;
rights in which there should be no distinction of sex, yet as ever the
weaker went to the wall. Cleopatra, it is said, lived a royal widow
at Sardis, wooed by all the world—a woman doubtless of beauty, as she
showed herself of vigor and capacity. She would have married Perdikhas
or Leonatus, who had died, but spurned the rest. Like England’s Queen
Elizabeth, she had many suitors. At last to escape Antigonas she
agreed to marry Ptolemy, and thereby secured her own destruction, for
Antigonas could not contemplate a union which might prove so injurious
to himself and had her secretly murdered. Some one seems always to have
stood ready for the commission of such deadly crimes. But to throw dust
in the eyes of the people Antigonas gave her a magnificent funeral and
proceeded against the woman who had been instrumental in her murder.
Time passed on and Antipater was succeeded by his son Cassander, more
ruthless, cruel and self-seeking, if possible, than his predecessor,
and he determined to rid himself of a charge become useless to him
and assume full regal power. Olympias had meanwhile secured the death
of Philip Arridaeus and his wife and carried off the young king and
his mother to Pydna. Cassander besieged and took them, and Olympias
was cited to appear before a public assembly of the Macedonians and
answer for the murders she had committed. Trusting in her own power
and influence she haughtily complied, but was condemned to death and
secretly executed by the relatives of those she had injured.
The young king and his mother were shut up in the castle of Amphipolis,
where they were treated rather as captives than as royal personages,
and finally put to death. It seems almost strange that Roxane, still
young and probably beautiful, was not forcibly married by one of the
contestants, and the question settled in this way rather than by such
tragic means, but it was not to be, and the son of Alexander must needs
die or others could not grasp the power which should have descended to
him.
Ptolemy, if not directly accessory, at least connived at this murder,
and thus secured himself in his new kingdom. It is said that the
restoration of the outward shrine of the great temple at Luxor, built
by Thothmes III and ruined by the Persians, took place during the
nominal sovereignty of Philip Arridaeus and Alexander IV, and therefore
quite early in Ptolemy’s satrapy. This restoration of the inner cella
was in the name of the boy king Alexander. A statue of the young king
is in the Gizeh Museum. It is of granite and about nine feet in height.
The gentle and melancholy expression seems well suited to the youth’s
tragic fate, but he is represented as much older than when he died,
and it is probably a conventional likeness, with a mingling of the
Egyptian and Greek in type and attributes. A certain inscription in
Egypt mentions Ptolemy in the seventh year of the absent Alexander. His
destroyer kept up the fiction of his authority, thus Ptolemy granted
lands in the name of Alexander and Philip after their decease.
We can almost imagine the unfortunate Queen Roxane ready to lay down
her harassed and weary life, but such is the natural clinging to the
known and visible that doubtless she had occasional periods of pleasure
and even of reviving hope for her child and herself. She had committed
or been accessory to the blackest crime to secure his succession.
Surely it could not be in vain?
Alexander the Great was born in 355 B. C. and died in 323. His son
Alexander IV was born 323 B. C. and died 310, but his name appears as
king till 305. Thus all the family of Alexander the Great perished by
violent deaths. First his mother, then his wife and child, and lastly
in 309 B. C. his sister and his natural son Herakles or Hercules.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE.
PTOLEMY QUEENS.