Everyone will be familiar with the story of Cleopatra, ancient Egypt’s last independent ruler before the country was swallowed up by the Roman Empire towards the end of the first century BCE.
Her feisty attempts to retain her country’s independence by flattering, even in one case marrying, a succession of Roman generals, among them Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, ultimately came to nothing as a result of her defeat, with Antony, at the hands of Roman forces at the battle of Actium in 31 BCE.
Wanting to avoid the indignity of being led a captive through the streets of Rome, at least in the ancient Greek historian Plutarch’s account that was later used by Shakespeare as the basis for his play Antony and Cleopatra, Cleopatra committed suicide in her palace in Alexandria by being bitten by an asp, a kind of venomous snake.
However, while she was defeated by superior forces led by Antony’s enemy Octavian, who later turned himself into the Emperor Augustus, the first of Rome’s emperors, perhaps Cleopatra had the last laugh. Augustus managed to persuade the Roman poets to hail him as the bringer of peace, even if it was at the cost of the destruction of the Roman Republic, whereas Cleopatra did not need to use such strong-arm tactics to ensure her future fame.
The story of her love for Antony and her doomed attempts to outwit Rome has attracted historians, writers, and painters for thousands of years, all of them fascinated by this extraordinary ancient Egyptian female ruler who came within a hair’s breadth of ruling the whole of the Eastern Mediterranean, dividing the then known world with Rome.
But Cleopatra was not the only ancient Egyptian female ruler of that name to demonstrate remarkable political skills, as a new book on her forebears reveals. Titled The Cleopatras and written by UK historian Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, it shows that Cleopatra was in fact the seventh female member of the Ptolemaic Dynasty that ruled Egypt from its conquest by Alexander the Great in 332 BCE until its annexation by Rome three centuries later to bear the name and to rule the country either alone or in association with a husband, a brother, or a son with whom she shared the throne.
While less is known about these other Cleopatras, in some cases at least their stories were almost as remarkable as that of Cleopatra VII herself. The first Cleopatra, for example, Cleopatra 1 Syra (“Syrian”), was the daughter of the Seleucid King Antiochus III and was shipped into Egypt at an early age for an inter-dynastic marriage. She married Ptolemy V Epiphanes (“manifestation of the god)” in 193 BCE, the same Ptolemy mentioned on the famous Rosetta Stone as the “living image of [the god] Amun” and “beloved of Ptah.”
Llewellyn-Jones imagines Cleopatra I arriving in Alexandria aged 17 for her marriage with the Egyptian king. She would have been impressed by a procession of almost unparalleled magnificence, the expression of Ptolemaic extravagance. “The Ptolemies were unspeakably rich, vulgarly, flamboyantly, brazenly wealthy and, like latter-day Russian oligarchs, they had no qualms about putting their wealth on conspicuous display,” he says.
Almost immediately, she had to help her husband put down a revolt in Upper Egypt, crushed by 185 and commemorated by a new temple erected for the crocodile god Sobek at Kom Ombo and extensions to the temple of Isis at Philae. Cleopatra I is shown in temple reliefs standing behind her husband, the “king of Upper and Lower Egypt, the son of Re, Ptolemy… and his wife, the female-ruler, Lady of the Two Lands, Cleopatra, two gods made manifest.”
Her status was underlined five years later when Ptolemy V was found dead, apparently poisoned. Llewellyn-Jones speculates that she may have been in on the plot, since it allowed her to arrange the elevation of her six-year-old son to the throne as Ptolemy VI Philometor (“mother-loving”) with herself as regent. Reliefs in the temples of Edfu and Karnak in Upper Egypt, built or extended at this time, show Cleopatra I being venerated, he says. Her co-rulership of Egypt with her son can be explained by the “careful groundwork” she had laid, “nurturing the most powerful and influential courtiers in Alexandria.”
Cleopatras II and III showed themselves to be almost as effective as political operators as Cleopatra VII, perhaps even more so since they managed to keep their thrones. Cleopatra II, daughter of Cleopatra I and sister of Ptolemy VI, ruled Egypt as the latter’s wife, soon to be joined by Ptolemy VIII Euergetes (“opulent”), their brother, also known as Physcon (“fatty”), in a ruling triad. Having arranged the murder of his nephew Ptolemy VII, the latter married his niece Cleopatra III.
Following much internal dissension, a period in exile, and several foreign wars, after Ptolemy VIII’s death his surviving sister-wife Cleopatra II, surviving niece-wife Cleopatra III, and son by the latter, Ptolemy IX Philometor Soter (“mother-loving saviour”), began a new ruling triad in 116 BCE. Following the death of Cleopatra II, Cleopatra III took the leading role, with surviving wall-reliefs showing her taking precedence over her son, such as those at the temple of Hathor at Deir al-Medina on the west bank of the Nile at Luxor.
Cleopatra III also kept a steady eye on Rome, since it was from there, rather than from the increasingly defunct Seleucid Kingdom, that the chief threats to Egypt came. “Her diplomacy chiefly focused on inviting influential Roman senators to Egypt and dazzling them with upmarket Nilotic tours,” Llewellyn-Jones says, adding that the latter might take place, depending on the visitor’s importance, in the Queen’s own “superyacht” 100 metres long and 20 metres wide.
He recounts this history in sometimes jaunty style for the general reader while not forgetting those who would like to know more, helped by his extensive notes. While Cleopatra VII will likely always be the best-known female member of the Ptolemaic Dynasty, the other six who ruled before her can help us to understand more about ancient Egypt’s final queen.
Seven Cleopatras: There had been ancient Egyptian ruling queens before the Ptolemaic Cleopatras – the 18th-Dynasty female Pharoah Hatshepsut comes to mind – but this was unusual in Egypt’s earlier history.
The exercise of political power was usually a male prerogative, even if certain royal women did succeed in establishing a public profile, among them Queen Nefertiti, wife of the monotheistic Pharoah Akhenaten, and Queen Nefertari, wife of Ramses II, the most magnificent of all the New Kingdom Pharoahs.
The Ptolemies at first installed male rulers on the Egyptian throne. However, over time they began to pioneer new forms of rule in which power was shared by a man and a woman, or a woman and two men, or two woman and one man, or some other combination of individuals who were too important to be overlooked in this complex game of thrones.
Another feature of the Ptolemaic Dynasty for which there was no precedent among Egypt’s earlier dynasties was the habit of its members of marrying each other, such that it was not uncommon for brother to marry sister or for some other combination to be installed at the head of the state in a system of politically legitimated incest.
Where the Ptolemies got this idea from is a moot point, as it was not practiced in ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, or ancient Rome. Indeed, it was this custom, among others associated with the Ptolemaic court, that partly explains the contempt with which the Ptolemies were held by their Roman conquerors.
Llewellyn-Jones thinks that the Ptolemies’s incestuous marriages can be explained by the Dynasty’s habit of excess. Where there was a set of rules, they would break them, and where there were norms that other people observed, they would flaunt them as a way of showing off their superior status. Everything had to be done on a splendid scale, with excessive behaviour being a kind of Ptolemaic trademark that set them off from their subjects as well as from even the greatest of foreign visitors.
Ptolemaic excess could also be signaled in other ways – in eating, for example, with many of the male members of the Dynasty being so enormously fat that they could barely move. Llewellyn-Jones sees this emphasis on physical bulk as something that was consciously pursued on the part of at least some of the Ptolemaic kings as a way of underlining their physical presence, even if it caused them (like their incestuous marriages) significant problems with their health.
Cleopatra VII was a typical member of the Dynasty in her magnificence, her excess, and her unhesitating use of unorthodox methods to get her way. “She was the last vestige of a royal Dynasty of other outstanding Cleopatras who wielded absolute power,” Llewellyn-Jones says. Like them, she masqueraded as a compliant wife, daughter, and sister, manoeuvering to get rid of her co-ruler, her brother Ptolemy XIII, and then to use Julius Caesar’s invasion of Egypt in 47 BCE as a way of cementing her rule.
She arrived in Rome for a state visit in 46 accompanied by her son by Caesar, Caesarion, and was apparently unfazed by the disapproving reception she received from members of the Roman establishment and their wives. She was still in Rome when Caesar was murdered by his rivals in 44, after which she returned to Egypt where she had her new sibling co-ruler Ptolemy XIV poisoned and took the throne alone.
Her last conquest was of the Roman general Mark Antony, described here as a vainglorious and oafish man who was no match either for Cleopatra, who swiftly saw ways in which she might make use of him, or for his Roman rival Octavian. Perhaps Cleopatra’s real miscalculation was to have expected too much of Antony. Had she found a Roman general more worthy of her own superior political talents, who is to say that she would not have succeeded even in her last trial of strength with Rome?
Summarising the achievement of the Dynasty, Llewellyn-Jones says that it survived longer and ruled probably more successfully than the other Greek-speaking successor kingdoms set up in the wake of the conquests of Alexander the Great. Ensconced in Egypt and protected by the natural boundaries of the Mediterranean and Red Seas, for the 300 years or so of the Dynasty’s rule the Ptolemies could focus on getting rich from the fertile land of the Nile Valley while at the same time beautifying their capital of Alexandria.
Among their many contributions were the city itself with its palaces and monuments, the Lighthouse, one of the Wonders of the Ancient World, and the Library, then the largest repository of learning in the known world. It is this other side of Ptolemaic rule that must be placed in the balance when weighing the Dynasty’s achievements.
Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, The Cleopatras: The Forgotten Queens of Egypt, New York: Basic Books, pp361.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 27 March, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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