Cleopatra II or Cleopatra III, her daughter. The sister wives of Ptolemy Potbelly
Try this for size. King Charles of Great Britain and Northern Ireland commissions a giant marble statue of Mountbatten-Windsor, the artist formerly known as Prince Andrew.
The King selects Trafalgar Square in the center of London as the perfect spot for the statue. There is an empty plinth there after all.
No expense is spared. The chump has one of the most impressive statues in the capital.
The King then tells the British people that it is their public responsibility and their patriotic duty to desecrate the statue every day. The population willingly obliges. For two weeks, crowds gather in large numbers at Trafalgar Square to feed the pigeons, take pictures, and throw rotten tomatoes and excrement at the chump’s statue.
The King then orders the army to demolish the statue piece by piece. The event is live-streamed to riotous applause.
And what has happened to the chump formerly known as Prince? Well, he’s dead, of course. Starved to death, drowned in the Thames, or thrown from the battlements of Windsor Castle. It doesn’t matter; the man is dead.
But of course, the King doesn’t do that. After all, he is not a member of the Ptolemaic dynasty, Cleopatra’s family.
Throughout history, there have been famous feuding families. The Borgias of Italy and Spain, the Habsburgs of Austria and Spain, the Tudors of Wales and England, the Plantagenets of England, the Severans, and the Julio-Claudians of Ancient Rome, to name a few.
But for sheer, relentless, creative spite that lasted for three centuries, no dynasty comes close to the Ptolemies of Ancient Egypt.
CLEOPATRA’S FAMILY
The Ptolemaic Dynasty ruled Egypt from 305 BC to 30 BC, beginning when Alexander the Great’s general, Ptolemy I, declared himself pharaoh and ending with the death of Cleopatra VII and the subsequent annexation of Egypt by Rome.
And for the entire length of their dynasty, they were challenged to devise new and original ways of killing and humiliating one another.
The Ptolemies adopted a tradition from the Egyptians that they had displaced of sibling marriages. It’s where G.R.R. Martin got the idea of Targaryen incestuous marriage. The idea was to keep the bloodline pure. In reality, Ptolemaic relationships worked like this.
Marry your sibling for legitimacy
Rule jointly for appearances
Murder them before they murder you
Marry another sibling
Repeat
Ptolemy VIII “Physcon,” known as “Potbelly,” married his sister Cleopatra II. Then he married her daughter, Cleopatra III, his own niece.
When Cleopatra II had had enough of him and rebelled, Potbelly murdered their son who was just a little tyke. He had the boy’s head gift-wrapped and sent to his mother. Want to take a bet that old Potbelly knew the kid wasn’t really his?
When Potbelly returned to power, he didn’t just kill his enemies. He tried to erase them. He smashed their statues, defaced their temple reliefs, and chiseled their names off monuments.
And here’s the fun bit we referred to earlier. When Potbelly had run out of statues to smash, he would commission new ones to be made just so he could ceremonially smash them to pieces in public.
Cleopatra II, for her part, did the same thing when she controlled different parts of Egypt, burning effigies of Potbelly, erasing his inscriptions, desecrating his images.
A generation or two later, Berenice IV led a rebellion against her father, Ptolemy XII, known as the flautist. Americans are going to love this: the issue was taxes. The Romans were taxing the hell out of Egypt, but the Egyptians had no say in the Roman senate. It was taxation without representation.
When Ptolemy XII returned, he killed Berenice. Then he smashed her statues.
DENYING THE AFTERLIFE
For the ancient Egyptians, proper burial wasn’t just tradition. It was the difference between eternal life and oblivion. You needed to be mummified, entombed correctly, with all the proper rituals and grave goods, or your soul couldn’t reach the afterlife.
The Ptolemies weaponized this belief.
They would burn the bodies of executed enemies, usually family members, to prevent mummification. They’d desecrate existing tombs. Ptolemy VIII publicly burned the bodies of political rivals, specifically to deny them the afterlife.
This wasn’t just killing your enemies. This was damning their souls for eternity.
SISTERLY ENMITY
One distinctive characteristic of the Ptolemaic dynasty was sisterly hatred. All men in the family were called Ptolemy, all the women were called Cleopatra, Arsinoe, or Berenice. Let’s use the acronym CAB.
CABs poisoned each other. They hacked each other’s hands off. They ordered other CABs tortured.
In 48 BC, history’s most famous CAB, Cleopatra VII, defeated her sister Arsinoe IV with the help of Julius Caesar.
Arsinoe was paraded through the streets of Rome in chains, a total humiliation for the proud teenage queen. But at the end of the triumph, she wasn’t strangled as was customary for prisoners of war. Caesar wouldn’t allow it. Instead, she was sent into exile in Ephesus.
But Cleopatra’s hatred of her sister had no limits. When she became Mark Antony’s paramour, Arsinoe came back into Cleopatra’s orbit. Antony controlled that bit of the Roman Empire where Arsinoe was. Cleopatra had Antony send assassins to the temple who hacked the young queen to pieces.
This was no small crime. The ancient world was appalled. To violate holy ground in ancient times was the worst thing you could do. The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus was the holiest of holy grounds. It was one of the Seven Wonders of the World.
It must have frustrated Cleopatra that it took her so long to finish off her hated sister.
This catalogue of events tells us a lot about Cleopatra’s relationship with the men in her life.
She did not control Caesar.
You can imagine Cleopatra railing at Caesar, “Just kill her already, do it for me?”
Caesar: “NO”
But Cleopatra controlled Antony, and Arsinoe paid for it with her life.
Think of the way Meghan controls Harry.
Oh…and Cleopatra also managed to kill off her other siblings. She had her younger brother, Ptolemy XIV, executed, and the other brother, Ptolemy XIII, drowned in the Nile. She had married both of them. Remember, Marry, kill, repeat!
HOW DID THEY SURVIVE SO LONG?
You’d think that a family this bloody and incestuous would go extinct fairly sharpish.
Yet the Ptolemies lasted 275 years. Ptolemaic kings had multiple concubines, and Ptolemaic queens also had lovers. It was simply a numbers game. They bred quickly enough to replace all those CABs and Ptolemies who had been cut off.
When one branch of the family murdered itself into oblivion, another would step in, and the pattern would repeat.
Cleopatra VII’s father was from a minor branch of the family that gained the throne after the main branch of the family had become extinct.
They created a culture where spite, pettiness, intrigue, and murder had been going on so long that everybody had gotten used to it.
So though the chump formerly known as Prince and Megan and Harry may feel aggrieved about how badly they have been treated, they really have nothing to complain about.
They haven’t been dismembered, poisoned, stoned to death, or had their hands chopped off. Nobody’s smashing their statues or denying them the afterlife.
By Ptolemaic standards, they have it easy.
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