Part 21 (1/2)

”There were once upon a time two young people of marvellous beauty, called Acontius and Cydippe. All previous attempts on the part of any youth or maiden to gain their affections had been fruitless; and the one went about, a modern Achilles in manly splendor; the other, with the roses and lilies of her cheeks, added a fourth to the number of the Graces. But the G.o.d Eros,--now already the winged urchin of the Anacreontics,--angry at this contumacy, determined to a.s.sert his power.

They met at a feast of Delos, she from Athens, he from Ceos.... Seized with violent love at first sight, the youth inscribes on a quince, which was a fruit used at this particular feast, 'I swear by Artemis that Acontius shall be my husband,' and this he throws at the girl's feet.

Her nurse picks it up and reads the words to the girl, who blushed 'in plots of roses' at the oath which she had never taken. But she too is seized with an absorbing pa.s.sion, and the situation is complicated by the ignorance or hardness of heart of her parents, who had determined to marry her to another man. Her grief prostrates her with sore sickness, and the marriage is postponed. Meanwhile, Acontius flees the city and his parents, and wanders disconsolate through the woods, telling to trees and streams his love, writing 'Cydippe' upon every bark, and filling all the groves with his sighs. Thrice the parents of the maiden prepared the wedding, and thrice her illness rendered their preparation vain. At last the father determined to consult the oracle at Delphi, which revealed to him the facts and ordered him no longer to thwart the lovers. Acontius arrives at Athens. The young couple are married, and the tale ends with an explicit description of their happiness.”

Though there were in Alexandrian literature shocking stories of unnatural pa.s.sion, as found later in Ovid, among Roman poets, yet the type of the Acontius and Cydippe tale fascinated the age and held its ground, and its moral elevation in contrast to the prevailing corruption shows how the men and women of the times prized ”the original purity of the maiden, and the importance of its preservation until the happy conclusion of marriage.”

The son and successor of Philadelphus, the young King Ptolemy III., 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 ent.i.tled 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 mult.i.tude 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 a.s.sociated 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 a.s.sumed the reins of government, at first alone, and later a.s.sociated 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 pa.s.s 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 fas.h.i.+on. 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 va.s.sal 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 surpa.s.sed. 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 companions.h.i.+p 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 gus.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sion.

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 fas.h.i.+oned 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 surpa.s.s 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 a.s.sert her rights.