Cleopatra…and her monstrous family | Daily Mail Online
Ptolemy XII, king of Egypt, once threatened a philosopher at his court with death for refusing to drink wine and dress in women’s clothes. The philosopher gave in, put on a sheer gown and danced with cymbals. It must, as Jane Draycott says, have been quite a sight.
Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra (1960)
Ptolemy was the father of Cleopatra, and of two other daughters, Berenike and Arsinoe, who also ruled Egypt, or at least tried to. Three sister queens in a single generation was unprecedented, and it set Egypt on a collision course with Rome. Romans loathed kings; queens were even worse. Horace, celebrating Cleopatra’s defeat in 31BC, called her a ‘fatal monster’ – and the phrase has stuck. Draycott wants to push past that label. Cleopatra’s reputation, she argues, was largely the product of Roman propaganda, and historians have leaned on those sources so heavily that Ptolemaic queens are still routinely described as ‘murderous tigresses’. In this lively book, Draycott sets out to do two things. First, she proposes to bring Cleopatra’s sisters back into the story, and second, she wants to see all three women through Greek and Egyptian eyes as well as Roman ones.
Not that the Ptolemies were anyone’s ideas of shrinking violets. They married their sisters, nieces and uncles as a matter of course. Killing their nearest and dearest was a longstanding family tradition. One Ptolemaic princess had a soldier cut off her sister’s hands, so that she could no longer cling to a statue for sanctuary. Another was so reluctant to share power with her sons that the Alexandrians gave her an unprintable nickname, and her favourite son had her murdered.
Berenike, Cleopatra’s elder sister, is this book’s real find. While her father was in Rome seeking backing, the Alexandrians put her on the throne, either with her mother or against her – the sources disagree. Berenike’s first husband met a violent end; her second, Archelaus, lasted just six months. On his return from Rome in 55BC, her father promptly had her executed. The sources don’t say how, but Draycott notes that the physician Galen describes one popular Alexandrian method, in which venomous snakes were riled up and thrown at the condemned.
Arsinoe, the youngest of the sister queens, was bolder still. With Julius Caesar holed up in the palace at Alexandria, she took command of the Egyptian army. Her rule did not last long: the soldiers resented taking orders from a woman. (‘Patriarchy in action,’ remarks Draycott tartly). Captured, Arsinoe was paraded in chains through Rome in Caesar’s triumph, then parked at the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus until Cleopatra persuaded her lover Antony to send assassins.
Even Arsinoe’s bones have caused controversy: a skeleton at Ephesus was always assumed to be hers until last year when DNA testing revealed it to be a boy’s.
Cleopatra, the middle sister, inevitably takes up much of this book, and here the story is on firmer ground: the barge, the banquets, the distinctive hair-dos. Still, Draycott adds some fresh touches. The famous carpet in which Cleopatra supposedly had herself smuggled in to Caesar was actually a linen sack.
A volcanic eruption in Alaska in 43BC disrupted the Mediterranean climate for several years and brought famine to the Nile Delta. And Draycott offers a shrewd reading of Cleopatra’s statecraft. The Queen of Egypt had seen her father grovel to Rome and her sister defy it, and concluded that neither tactic had worked. So she took a middle course instead, treating Rome with casual confidence as just another kingdom, and Caesar as just another king. And for 22 years it worked.
Draycott begins her book at the end, treating Cleopatra’s death as an ancient locked-room mystery. Did the queen use a poisoned hairpin, a sinister vial, a toxic ointment, or, as the most popular version has it, an asp smuggled into her rooms in a basket of figs?
In addition, Draycott suggests a teasing twist of her own. Ptolemaic queens wore gold bracelets shaped like coiled snakes, and an effigy of Cleopatra was carried through Rome in the triumph that followed her death in 30BC. If the wax figure was wearing those bracelets, perhaps the crowd mistook Cleopatra’s jewellery for the means of her suicide and a rumour began that has lasted to this day.
Draycott’s main challenge throughout this book is lack of hard evidence. In the classical sources, Berenike and Arsinoe have only walk-on parts, which means that they vanish from the narrative for long stretches at a time.
In the gaps left behind, Draycott is burdened with having to insert a string of ‘perhaps’ and ‘may have’.
Some of her speculations are illuminating, such as the snake bracelets. Some go too far, notably the suggestion that Arsinoe’s killers raped her first, because the Romans were squeamish about executing virgins.
Even so, Fatal Monsters emerges as an important corrective to all the old cliches about female power in the classical world. The Romans called Cleopatra simply ‘the queen’ and ‘the Egyptian’, as if there were no other. Jane Draycott shows that there were actually three, each as ambitious as the others – although none, in the end, a match for the might of Rome.