Euergetes, continued the literary traditions of the parental court. Soon
after his father's death, he married the Princess Berenice II. of
Cyrene, a young lady of beauty and spirit, who had already experienced
the corruption of the court life of the day. Demetrius the Fair had been
sent from Macedon to obtain her kingdom with her hand, but, while she
was waiting to be of marriageable age, he had beguiled himself by
intriguing with her mother. Berenice, in consequence, had him put to
death. Doubtless her marriage with the young King of Egypt was a
political alliance, but it was based also on mutual liking and appears
to have turned out well. This reign of Euergetes and Berenice is, in
fact, the one reign of the Ptolemies in which neither rival wives nor
mistresses agitated the court. Information concerning this important
period is meagre; we know, however, that no sooner had the bride entered
upon her new happiness than the bridegroom was called away to Syria to
avenge the horrid murder of his sister, also named Berenice, who had
been wedded to the old King Antiochus Theos on condition that the latter
repudiated his former wife Laodice and her children. But Laodice got the
aged king again into her power; and she forthwith poisoned him and had
her son proclaimed king. Her party in Antioch at once rose up against
the new Egyptian queen and murdered her and her infant child.
Queen Berenice, upon the departure of her husband, consecrated a lock of
her hair in the temple of Aphrodite, with a prayer for his safe return.
The lock mysteriously disappeared, and the philosopher Conon, happening
just at that time to discover a new constellation, declared that the
lock of Berenice's hair had been set among the stars. Callimachus, one
of the court poets, seized this occasion to compose a poem entitled the
_Lock of Berenice_,--preserved in Catullus's elegant Latin
version,--celebrating the accession to the constellations of this lock
of hair, which, according to the conceit of the poet, notwithstanding
its high honor, wishes that it had never been severed from Berenice's
fair head.
The reigns of Ptolemy Soter, Philadelphus, and Euergetes, with their
brilliant queens, mark the golden age of Alexandria. In Ptolemy IV.,
Philopator, we notice the curious and rapid change of the great family
of the Lagidae into debauchees, dilettanti, drunkards, dolts. This
sovereign was a feeble and colorless personage who was completely under
the control of his minister Sosibius, whom Polybius speaks of as "a wily
old baggage and most mischievous to the kingdom; and first he planned
the murder of Lysimachus, who was the son of Arsinoe, daughter of
Lysimachus, and of Ptolemy; secondly, of Magas, the son of Ptolemy and
Berenice, daughter of Magas; thirdly, of Berenice, daughter of Ptolemy
and mother of Philopator; fourthly, of Cleomenes the Spartan; and
fifthly, of Arsinoe, daughter of Berenice, the king's sister and wife."
Surely a criminal of the deepest dye, at whose hands the princesses of
Alexandria suffered untold horrors! During his later years, the king was
under complete subjection to his mistress Agathoclea and her brother
Agathocles. The Queen Arsinoe, the mother of the infant heir to the
throne, who was young and vigorous, was regarded throughout Egypt as the
natural protectress and regent of the young Ptolemy when his father's
life was on the wane; but Agathocles and his sister secretly murdered
her, and, when the king died, presented the prince to the populace and
read a forged will in which they themselves were made his guardians
during his minority. But the people learned of the sad fate of Queen
Arsinoe, and her ill treatment roused the indignation of the populace;
thereupon followed one of the mob riots for which Alexandria was noted.
Polybius gives a dramatic description of the great riot and tells how
the wicked regent Agathocles, his sister Agathoclea, and his mother
Oenanthe, were seized by the multitude and torn in pieces, limb by limb,
while yet they lived.
When the young King Ptolemy V., Epiphanes, grew up, he took for his
queen Cleopatra, daughter of Antiochus III., the Great, and sister of
Antiochus IV., Epiphanes. Now for the first time, with this Syrian
princess, enters the name of Cleopatra in the annals of Egypt. Previous
queens have been named either Berenice or Arsinoe, and from this time on
the three names appear in almost inextricable confusion, Cleopatra
prevailing and being applied at times even to sisters of the same house.
The first Cleopatra was a great and good queen, and after the death of
her husband, whose reign was short and uneventful, and of her elder son,
who seems to have died soon after his accession, she became regent of
her second son, Ptolemy VI., Philometor, who was not seven years old
when he began to reign, Philometor married his sister, Cleopatra II.,
and was the last of the Ptolemies who could in any sense be called good.
His later years were clouded by the rivalry of his wicked brother
Physcon, who sought the throne.
When Philometor was killed in battle, Physcon, or Euergetes II., laid
siege to Alexandria, forced the widowed queen Cleopatra II. to marry
him, murdered her young son Ptolemy, Philopator Neos, the rightful heir,
for whom the mother had made a bold attempt to maintain the throne, and
reigned as Ptolemy VII. Physcon even married the queen's daughter,
Cleopatra III., and we see this remarkable man managing, at the same
time, two ambitious queens, mother and daughter, who were probably at
deadly enmity throughout the period in which they were associated with
him in the royalty. One story, almost too horrible to obtain credence,
tells that Physcon served up as a birthday feast to the mother,
Cleopatra II., his own heir Memphitis. When this wretch finally ended
his days, Cleopatra III., who was as great a monster of ambition,
selfishness, and cruelty as Physcon himself, seems to have murdered her
queen-mother and to have assumed the reins of government, at first
alone, and later associated with her eldest son, Lathyrus Soter II., who
reigned as the eighth Ptolemy. Lathyrus first married his sister
Cleopatra IV., but was finally compelled by his mother to divorce her
and to marry his other sister, Selene. He was finally turned out of his
kingdom by his mother, who desired the accession of his younger brother,
Alexander I., the ninth Ptolemy; and the latter repaid her maternal
interest in him by murdering her as soon as he was secure on the throne.
His queen was Berenice III., with whom he reigned until they were in
turn ousted by Lathyrus. Alexander II., Ptolemy X., succeeded Lathyrus,
and married his stepmother, Berenice III., whom he speedily murdered,
and was himself put to death after a brief reign of nineteen days.
Ptolemy XI., Auletes, an illegitimate son of Soter II., then mounted the
throne, his queen being Cleopatra V., Tryphaena. He was the last and the
weakest of the Ptolemies, and is worthy of mention merely because of his
base dealings with Rome, which introduced Roman intervention into
Egyptian affairs, and because he was the father of the great Cleopatra.
We have given this brief chronicle of the later kings and queens of
Egypt to prepare us for the consideration of the character of the
foremost Egyptian woman of antiquity--Cleopatra. The Ptolemies, we have
found, degenerated steadily and became in the end the most abominable
and loathsome tyrants that the principle of absolute and irresponsible
power ever produced. Regardless of all law, abandoned to the most
unnatural vices, thoroughly depraved, and capable of every crime, they
showed utter disregard of every virtuous principle and of every domestic
tie. The Ptolemaic princesses seem, as a whole, to have been superior to
the men. They usually possessed great beauty, great personal charm, and
great wealth and influence. Yet among them always existed mutual hatred
and disregard of all ties of family and affection. Ambitious to excess,
high-spirited and indomitable, they removed every obstacle to the
attainment of power, and fratricide and matricide are crimes at which
they did not pause. When the student of history sees pass before him
this dismal panorama of vice and crime, he wonders whether human nature
had not deserted these women and the spirit of the tigress entered into
them.
Cleopatra, the last Queen of Egypt, was the heiress of generations of
legalized license, of cultured sensuality, of refined cruelty, and of
moral turpitude, and she differed from her predecessors only in that she
had redeeming qualities which offset in some degree the wickedness that
she had inherited. To the thoughtful mind her character presents one of
the most difficult of psychological problems, and to solve the enigma
thus presented we have to consider her antecedents, her early training,
and the part which she was compelled to play in the world's history.
Her early years were spent in the storm and turmoil of the conflict
between her father Auletes and her sister Berenice. Ptolemy XI.,
Auletes, called "the Piper,"--because of his only accomplishment, his
skill in playing the flute,--was perhaps the most degraded, dissipated,
and corrupt of all the sovereigns of the dynasty. He inspired his
contemporaries with scorn for his weakness of character and with
abhorrence for his vices and crimes. His one redeeming trait was his
love for his younger children, and he seems to have brought them up with
every obtainable advantage and as much as possible removed from the
turmoil of the court. For fear of losing his kingdom, he sought
recognition from Rome and paid Caesar enormous sums of money for his
patronage. The people rose in revolt against the heavy taxes, and
Ptolemy fled to Rome for aid. Berenice IV., his eldest daughter, was
raised to the throne by the Alexandrians, and she began her reign in
great splendor. Hoping to strengthen her position by marriage with a
royal prince, she first wedded Seleucus of Syria. But she soon found him
not to her taste, and disposed of him by strangling--in true Ptolemaic
fashion. After many intrigues, she found a second husband in Archelaus,
a prince of Asia Minor. She then made every preparation to offer
effectual resistance to her father. Auletes succeeded in gaining a
hearing at Rome, and a Roman army under Gabinius, with Mark Antony as
his lieutenant, marched against the forces of Berenice and Archelaus.
After many battles, the Romans were victorious. Archelaus was slain;
Berenice was taken prisoner; her government was overthrown; and Auletes
was restored to power, as a vassal of Rome. Ptolemy was filled with
savage joy at his daughter's capture, and at once ordered her execution.
After a reign of three years, Auletes died, leaving the kingdom jointly
to Cleopatra, now eighteen years of age, and her brother Ptolemy, aged
ten; and the brother and sister, in obedience to the custom of the
Ptolemies, were married, that they might rule together.
Amid such scenes and excitements, a constant witness of the cruelty of
her father and elder sister, Cleopatra had grown up, and with such
examples before her she entered upon her reign. Her training, under most
skilful masters, had been of the broadest character, and her
intellectual endowments have seldom been surpassed. She was very
learned, and is said to have mastered eight or ten languages; so that
she could address in his own tongue whoever approached her--whether
Egyptian, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, or Syriac.
"With a fondness for philosophy she united a love of letters as rare as
it is attractive; and in the companionship of scholars and poets her
mind expanded as it added to its priceless store of wealth. She was not
only familiar with the heroic tales and traditions, the poetic myths and
chronicles, and the religious legends, of ancient Egypt, but she was
well versed, too, in the literature and science of Phoenicia and
Chaldaea, of Greece and Rome; she was skilled also in metallurgy and
chemistry; and a proficient in astronomy and the other sciences
cultivated in the age in which she lived. Her skill in music found none
to equal it. Her voice itself was perfect melody, and touched by her
fingers the cithara seemed instinct with life, and from its strings
there rolled a gushing flood of glorious symphonies. She was eloquent
and imaginative, witty and animated. Her conversation, therefore, was
charming; and if she exhibited caprice, which she sometimes did, it was
forgotten in the inevitable grace of her manner."
Essentially Greek in all her characteristics, she possessed the wisdom
of Athena, the dignity of Hera, and the witchery of Aphrodite. An
enthusiastic writer has thus described her: "She was tall of stature and
queenly in gait and appearance. The warm sun of that southern clime had
tinged her cheek with a hue of brown, but her complexion was as clear
and pure as the serene sky that smiled above her head, and distinctly
traced beneath it were the delicate veins filled with the rich blood
that danced so wildly when inflamed with hate or heated with passion.
Her eyes and hair were like jet and as glossy as the raven's plume. The
former were large and, as was characteristic of her race, apparently
half-shut and slightly turned up at the outer angles, thus adding to the
naturally arch expression of her countenance; but they were full, too,
of brilliancy and fire. Both nose and chin were small, but fashioned as
with all the nicety of the sculptor's art; and her pearly teeth nestled
lovingly between the coral lips whose kisses were as sweet as honey
from the hives of Hybla."
Plutarch expresses himself rather differently from the modern
writer,--who draws largely on his imagination,--and perhaps more
truthfully:
"There was nothing so incomparable in her beauty as to compel
admiration; but by the charm of her physiognomy, the grace of her whole
person, the fascination of her presence, Cleopatra left a sting in the
soul." Hence, as has been said, she probably possessed not supreme
beauty, but supreme seductiveness.
Her social and moral qualities at this time seem not to have been
inferior to her beauty or her intellectual endowments. Falsehood and
hypocrisy were foreign to her. She gained her ends by the winningness of
her disposition, the melody of her voice, the gentleness of her manner.
Says Ebers, who of modern writers has drawn the most attractive picture
of her character: "The fundamental principles which dominated this rare
creature's life and character were two ceaseless desires: first, to
surpass everyone, even in the most difficult achievements; and,
secondly, to love and be loved in return." Ambition and love were the
two ruling principles in her nature which raised her above all other
women of her time.
Such was Cleopatra when she began to reign. But neither her learning nor
her beauty nor the charm of her manner protected her from the
machinations of the court. Ptolemy XII., her boy husband, was under the
control of his tutor, Pothinus, who, becoming jealous of Cleopatra's
growing power, organized a conspiracy against her; and she was compelled
to flee to Syria, where she began to raise an army to assert her rights.
But a greater power now intervened in the affairs of Egypt. Caesar
entered upon the scene. Cleopatra appealed to him, and, rolled in a
bale of carpet, gained admittance to his presence. When the carpet was
unrolled and the queen appeared to view, the great conqueror was
captivated at the spectacle. She was now about twenty-one, slender and
graceful and of bewitching manner. Caesar was about fifty-two, but
thoroughly susceptible to the charms of youth and beauty. He warmly
espoused her cause, and, after a conflict which nearly ended his career,
restored her to the throne; and as Ptolemy XII. had been accidentally
drowned in the Nile, he associated a younger brother, Ptolemy XIII., as
her consort in the kingdom.
This is perhaps the most fascinating period in the life of Cleopatra,
when, just entering upon her womanhood, she captivates the great
commander and becomes, for a season, his Aspasia. In Egyptian eyes their
union was regarded as a marriage, and the relations of these two never
assumed the grossness and voluptuousness that were later exhibited by
Antony and Cleopatra. Caesar, with all his lofty intelligence, no doubt
found in her one whose intellectual faculties rose to the level of his
own. He passed the winter in her company, but at last had strength of
mind enough to break away from her seductions, that he might continue
his conquests and establish his dictatorship at Rome. When at the height
of his power, he summoned to Rome Cleopatra, with his young son,
Caesarion, and gave them a residence in his villa on the Tiber. Here she
lived in splendid state, and exercised a dominating influence over the
ruler of the world, much to the disgust of the Romans. It was the height
of her ambition to have Caesar proclaim their son Caesarion his heir, but
the dictator in this regard resisted her allurements, and remained true
to Roman traditions. Upon Caesar's assassination, Cleopatra, disappointed
in her fondest hopes, hastily returned to Egypt and her throne. There
now appears a great change in the character of Cleopatra. The simplicity
of nature and gentleness of spirit of earlier years gradually give place
to a nature selfish, heartless, and designing. Jealous of her little
brother, now fast approaching the age of fifteen, when he would share
her power, she caused him to be poisoned. She was troubled by no
conscientious scruples which might interfere with the fullest and most
unrestrained indulgence of every propensity of her heart. In all her
subsequent life she showed herself passionate and ambitious, cunning and
politic, luxurious and pleasure-seeking.
Cleopatra was in her twenty-ninth year when she first met Antony--"a
period of life," says Plutarch, "when woman's beauty is most splendid,
and her intellect is in full maturity."
When Antony summoned Cleopatra to appear before him at Tarsus to answer
charges brought against her for aiding Cassius and Brutus in the late
war, she, fired with the idea of achieving a second time the conquest of
the greatest general and highest potentate in the world, employed all
the resources of her kingdom in making preparation for her journey.
Shakespeare has most admirably described the splendor of her barge and
the scene of enchantment that greeted Antony as she sailed up the Cydnus
to meet him, a veritable Aphrodite surrounded by the Graces:
"The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne,
Burn'd on the water; the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfum'd that
The winds were love-sick with them: the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water, which they beat, to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggar'd all description: she did lie
In her pavilion (cloth-of-gold of tissue)
O'er-picturing that Venus, where we see
The fancy outwork nature: on each side her
Stood pretty dimpl'd boys, like smiling Cupids,
With diverse-color'd fans....
Her gentlewomen, like the Nereides,
So many mermaids, tended her i' the eyes.
... At the helm
A seeming mermaid steers....
... From the barge
A strange invisible perfume hits the sense
Of the adjacent wharves. The city cast
Her people out upon her; and Antony,
Enthroned i' the market-place, did sit alone,
Whistling to th' air; which, but for vacancy,
Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too,
And made a gap in nature."
Antony was completely fascinated with her charms. Her beauty, her wit,
and, above all, the tact, adroitness, and self-possession which she
displayed in consenting thus to appear before him, forced him to yield
his heart almost immediately to her undisputed sway. Cleopatra remained
at Tarsus for some time, in an incessant round of gayety and revelry,
and by her flatteries and caresses she prevailed on Antony, forgetful of
his wife Fulvia and his duty as a Roman, to spend the winter at
Alexandria, where the pair engaged in continual feastings, spectacles,
and sports, as well as in every species of riot, irregularity, and
excess. It is not our purpose to follow the well-known career of
Cleopatra during these years of turmoil, or to dwell on the
circumstances that caused her to prove the destruction of Antony's hopes
at the battle of Actium; neither shall we describe in detail those
closing days when both committed suicide rather than suffer the
consequences of humiliation and defeat.
The case of Mark Antony is the most conspicuous example in history of
the complete subjugation by the arts and fascinations of a woman of a
will stern and indomitable, if reckless, and of a heart that was
naturally generous and noble. Cleopatra led him to betray every public
trust, to alienate from himself the affections of all his countrymen, to
repel most cruelly the kindness and devotedness of a beautiful and
faithful wife; and at last she led him away in a most cowardly and
ignoble flight from the field of duty as a soldier, he knowing full well
that she was hurrying him on to disgrace and destruction, and yet being
utterly without power to break from the control of her irresistible
charms.
Yet they were lovers--lovers who sacrificed wealth, ambition, duty,
honor, on the altar of Aphrodite. It was a love which brought
destruction; still, we may charitably account for the weakness exhibited
by each as the natural consequence of that romantic love, than which
history has given us no greater example.
Dire was the fate of Cleopatra. Hopes all frustrated,--Antony dying in
her arms,--Octavius impervious to all her allurements,--rather than
grace the conqueror's triumph, the most fascinating of Greek women ended
her days, according to the prevailing tradition, by the bite of an asp,
in her thirty-ninth year.
Cleopatra's character is a most fascinating and baffling study. Of many
faults and vices she was guilty, but they were characteristic of her
age. Her virtues must have been also many, for had she not possessed
virtues she would not have been loved and admired by all who knew her.
Her faithful attendants, Iras and Charmion, sacrificed themselves over
her dead body, and by their devotion made even the Roman Proculius
exclaim, in the words of Plutarch: "No other woman on earth was ever so
admired by the greatest, so loved by the loftiest. Her fame echoed from
nation to nation throughout the world. It will continue to resound from
generation to generation; but, however loudly men may extol the
bewitching charm, the fervor of the love which survived death, her
intellect, her knowledge, the heroic courage with which she preferred
the tomb to ignominy--the praise of these two must not be forgotten.
Their fidelity deserves it. By their marvellous end they unconsciously
erected the most beautiful monument to their mistress; for what genuine
goodness and lovableness must have been possessed by the woman who,
after the greatest reverses, made it seem more desirable to those
nearest to her person to die rather than to live without her!"
Cleopatra was not a great queen, regarded as a ruler, yet she did a
great service to her country in preserving its independence for a score
of years after it had reached its end by a natural process of
degeneracy; but she accomplished this end by the arts of intrigue.
Cleopatra was too essentially a woman to be a great ruler, having all a
woman's weaknesses, a woman's faults, and yet withal the charms and
graces that make woman beautiful and lovable. Yet when we weigh her
character with due reference to the times in which she lived, to the
family influences which moulded her early years, and to the degeneracy
of the Ptolemies to which she fell heir, she must rank as one of the
best of her dynasty. Horace, the Roman poet, called Cleopatra: "_non
humilis mulier_ [a woman capable of no baseness];" and the phrase gains
in importance from the fact that it occurs in the hymn which the poet
dedicated to Octavius in honor of his victory over Antony and Cleopatra.
In thus characterizing, in such an ode, the victor's foe, Horace gives
us an estimate of the "Serpent of the Nile" which may stand as an
epitome of her character and as a just claim to the partial respect and
admiration of posterity.
"Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety."