Sister-Queens in the High Hellenistic Period

Kleopatra Thea and Kleopatra III

Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Alex McAuley

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781351797443
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: History
• Sous-sujet: Ancient History

Sister-Queens in the High Hellenistic Period is a cutting-edge exploration of ancient queenship and the significance of family politics in the dysfunctional dynasties of the late Hellenistic world.

This volume, the first full-length study of Kleopatra III and Kleopatra Thea and their careers as queens of Egypt and Syria, thoroughly examines the roles and ideology of royal daughters, wives, and queens in Egypt, the ancient Near East, and ancient Israel and provides a comprehensive study of the iconography, public image, and titles of each queen and their cultural precedents. In addition, this book also offers an introduction to the critical concept of the 'High Hellenistic Period' and the maturation of royal female power in the second century BCE.

Sister-Queens in the High Hellenistic Period is suitable for students and scholars in ancient history, Egyptology, classics, and gender studies, as well as the general reader interested in ancient queenship, ancient Egypt, the Hellenistic world, and gender in antiquity.

1The Importance of Being PtolemaicRoyal Women in Context

DOI: 10.4324/9781315206578-2

Hellenistic queens matter. Women who have traditionally been regarded as merely passive figures in a political game dominated by men are now, thanks to ground-breaking studies of recent years, retaking their places at the centre of Hellenistic life.¹ It has become clear that there was a visible and distinct ideological prominence of women in the practice and publicity of the Hellenistic states and monarchies. We cannot, as Grace Macurdy once did in the 1930s, simply judge Hellenistic royal women by the same standards as we judge Hellenistic kings; rather, we must acknowledge that they played a pivotal though very different role from men. In the same vein, we must resist the temptation to place male and female influence on a scale and see which comes out as superior to the other – as if male and female power were somehow oppositional or mutually exclusive. Rather, we must begin with the premise that Hellenistic royalty was characterised by a unique combination of male and female influence; one royal gender needed the other as part of a pair, or two complementary sides of the same coin, to use a slightly tired metaphor. Consequently, across all of the Hellenistic dynasties, women helped steer the course of history; the prominence of royal women is, in fact, a common denominator for the epoch, although this fact manifests itself in different ways in response to the particularities of each dynasty. In the priestesses of her cult bearing her image on elaborate crowns that were voted to Laodike III by Iasos, and in the massive images of the brother-sister gods on temples throughout Ptolemaic Egypt, we can see the same religious role of royal women, though expressed rather differently according to ethnic context and localised needs.

In the midst of these considerations of ideology, public image, and the rather more theoretical mechanics of succession and legitimation, it is easy to overlook the more mundane, practical aspects of what everyday life would have been like for princesses-cum-queens such as the two Kleopatrai of this study. Turning to the realia – the tangible, physical things – of the world into which they were born and raised allows us to see them from another angle. This acknowledgement of the more intimate side of life is not to detract from their ideological importance at all or to diminish centrality of women to Hellenistic dynasteia, but simply sheds interesting light into other corners of their existence. Where would royal women have lived? What would they have worn? How did the Kleopatrai pass their time? What are the smells and sounds, the experiences that marked their lives as highly visible members of an immensely powerful family? Of course, such questions are difficult to answer, but we can say with certainty that their world as we can glimpse it from inference and extrapolation was one of opulence, grandeur, and wealth on a scale that is often difficult to comprehend – but one that is at once menacing and macabre in a way that is equally difficult to imagine.

Ideology and materiality were, of course, never disconnected from one another in the Hellenistic world. The successors of Alexander and their many progeny were by all accounts eminently aware that politics, especially dynastic politics of the elaborate style of the High Hellenistic Period, was also theatre. Everything from art and architecture, from spectacular processions and ostentatious clothing, as Rolf Strootman has elaborated, was part and parcel of the theatre of royalty – and the locale of the court was the stage on which the show played out. The ancients themselves were not unaware of this deliberate theatrical construction of monarchy: in the writing of Demetrios Poliorketes, for instance, Plutarch asserts that he, like so many of Alexander’s successors, ‘did but assume Alexander’s majesty and pomp, like actors on a stage’ before going on to list what was theatrical about his appearance – purple robes shot with gold, gold-embroidered shoes of purple felt, and a Ziegfeld Follies-style cloak of gold depicting the world and the heavenly bodies.² In an interesting collapse between the worlds of theatre and politics, there are numerous examples of kings and tyrants from the period performing as actors, and Angelos Chaniotis has demonstrated that Hellenistic public ritual was fundamentally like drama.³ All the Hellenistic world was a stage.

Pomp and Circumstance: Ptolemaic tryphē

Arguably the most overtly theatrical of the Hellenistic dynasties – or at least the most aware of the power of ceremony and spectacle – were the Ptolemies themselves. The concept of tryphē – which we can translate loosely as ‘magnificence’, ‘luxuriousness’, even ‘wantonness’ – was part and parcel of Ptolemaic royal ideology and had been so since the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphos. His father, Ptolemy I, had been praised in Egyptian documents for his marital prowess, his skill with the bow, his courage, strength, and his piety, as captured in the famous Satrap Stele from early in his reign:

A person of youthful vigour was he, strong in his two arms, wise in spirit, mighty among the people, of stout courage, of firm foot, resisting the furious, not turning his back, striking his adversaries in the face in the midst of the battle. When he had seized the bow, it was not to shoot (from afar) at the assailant, his fighting was with the sword; in the midst of the battle none could stand against him, because of the might of his arm there was no parrying his hand; there was no return of that which went forth out of his mouth, there was not his like in the world of foreigners. He brought back the images of the gods found in Asia; all the furniture and the books of all the temples of North and South Egypt, he had them restored to their place.⁴

But when Ptolemy II took the throne of Egypt in mid-280s BCE, a very different tone of kingship emerged. Gone is the Homeric emphasis on valour and military might that we find among the first generation of Alexander’s successors, and instead we see kingship expressed in the terms of Fabulousness. This concept would continue to characterise the Ptolemies during the lives of Kleopatra Thea and Kleopatra III and well beyond, even when Egypt was struggling for independent survival. Under the Ptolemies extravagance, wealth, magnificence, and opulence elevated the kings and queens of Egypt to the level of the gods. Compare, then, Ptolemy I’s Satrap Stele with Theocritus’ Idyll 17 (95–98, 107–10) – the Encomium of Ptolemy II – where the ruler is eulogised by his celebrated court poet:

In wealth he would outdo all other kings, so great are the

revenues that come every day and from every direction to his

rich store.

…

Gold is not piled up pointlessly in his rich palace, like the wealth of ants that toil

without pause: much do the glorious houses of the gods receive,

as Ptolemy ever offers first-fruits and other gifts of honour;

much too he bestows upon powerful kings, much upon cities,

and much upon his brave companions. Nor does any man,

skilled in raising aloud tuneful song, enter the sacred contests

of Dionysus without receiving a gift worthy of his art. The

intermediaries of the Muses sing of Ptolemy in return for his

benefactions. What finer thing could a wealthy man win than

good renown among men?⁵

In Theocritus’ honeyed-words we see the various realms into which Ptolemaic tryphē extends: not merely the stockpiling of resources in a decadent palace, but their generous expenditure on everything from his friends and armies to benefactions to the gods and muses – this poem praising Ptolemy’s tryphē is, ironically, itself a product of his largesse in sponsoring Theocritus.

The Ptolemies were unspeakably rich. They were vulgarly wealthy. More so than any of their contemporaries, like latter-day Russian oligarchs splashing out during a Las Vegas vacation, the Ptolemies had absolutely no qualms about putting their wealth on conspicuous, ostentatious, display. Art, architecture, court ceremony, and public entertainments were all used to promote Ptolemaic super-wealth. Even intellect and learning were treated as objects of avarice, and the Ptolemies greedily scooped up the most learned and renowned scholars from all corners of the Hellenistic world and accommodated them in the cosmopolitan metropolis of Alexandria. For the Ptolemies academics were symbols of spending power.⁶

It would, however, be too easy to read Ptolemaic tryphē as crass decadence; talk of wealth, extravagance, magnificence, and ostentation, can so easily be applied to a vulgar, collapsing society. The misrepresentations are many – Achaemenid Persia, the Late Roman Empire, Ming China, Louis XVI’s Versailles, Ottoman Turkey. Polybius, writing in the second century BCE, blamed the beginning of the end of Ptolemaic power on Ptolemy IV who neglected the affairs of state and threw himself into a party-lifestyle of ‘shameless love-affairs and senseless binge-drinking’.⁷ But this is to do serious damage to the political acumen of the use of over-indulgence as spectacle and the over display of wealth cultivated with such care by the Ptolemies (and indeed, the Achaemenids, the Ming, the Ottomans, the Late Roman Emperors, and the Bourbon Kings). Consider Ptolemy VIII, the most maligned (probably justifiably so, to be fair) of all the scions of Ptolemy. A man of immense girth, large tastes in food (a gourmand, no less), entertainment, women, and other carnal pleasures, Ptolemy VIII has been read as a miscreant, a lush, and a living-breathing corruption of humanity. He was the very antithesis of the Greek notion of sōphrosynē, the Greek ideal of ‘abstinence’ and ‘moderation’, for he was ‘a monster steeped in murder and rape and incest’ and under his rule the dynasty reached its self-indulgent nadir.⁸ In the BBC drama The Cleopatras, he was played brilliantly by Richard Griffiths, a rotund Shakespearean actor and gifted comic, perhaps most famous for his role as Uncle Monty in Withnail and I, a character who, like his Ptolemy VIII, is a fat and greasy, slimy, repulsive sexual deviant – and yet oddly charismatic. Indeed, in scene after scene, Griffiths’ Ptolemy (Pot-Belly) is drawn with the same dark humour as Uncle Monty. The script draws attention to his ugliness and undesirability and by doing so, Philip Mackie, the writer, might well have hit upon Ptolemy’s psychological rationale:

pot-belly: Do you really find me disgusting?

cleopatra [iii]: Yes, I do. Although you have a kind of horrid fascination, an obscene fascination. I suppose it’s because you’re the king …

pot-belly: Nature denied me beauty, so I denied myself virtue, I couldn’t be loved so I decided to be feared. I was ugly, so I had to settle for ‘an obscene fascination’. It’s remarkably convenient; it means that I can do what I want and nobody thinks any worse of me.

King Ptolemy VIII Euergetes II – the Benefactor – was generally known to his Alexandrian subjects as kakergetēs – the Malefactor – or even simply as physkon, ‘fatty’ or, as Philip Mackie’s BBC script nicely conjures it, ‘Pot-Belly’. In a poem entitled Ptolemy VIII Evergetes II or Kakergetes the sublime Greek poet Constantine Cavafy crafted a vivid pen-portrait of this most alarming of the Ptolemies:

Most obese, slothful Ptolemy

Physkon, and due to gluttony somnolent

observed: wise poet

your verses are somewhat exaggerated …

And from obesity heavy as a stone,

and from voracity somnolent

the unalloyed Macedonian

could scarcely keep his eyes open.

Indeed, during a visit of a Roman delegation to Egypt in 139 BCE he was des...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Scholarly Conventions
• Introduction
• 1 The Importance of Being Ptolemaic: Royal Women in Context
• 2 Princesses to Queens
• 3 Mothers, Wives, Queens
• 4 Queenship in Name; Queenship through Image; Queenship in Practice
• 5 Fast-Forward: The Pentēkontaetia
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index