Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt by Joyce Tyldesley Read Free Book Online Page B

work, now lost but surviving in valuable fragments in later histories, forms the basis of our modern division of Egyptian history into a sequence of ruling dynasties.
    Arsinoë I
    Daughter of Lysimachos of Thrace, wife of Ptolemy II
    Arsinoë I bore Ptolemy II two sons (Ptolemy III Euergetes and Lysimachos) and a daughter (Berenice II) before she was banished from court, accused of plotting against her husband. She took up permanent residence in the southern Egyptian city of Koptos.
    Arsinoë II
    Daughter of Ptolemy I and Berenice I, sister-wife of Ptolemy II
    The sixteen-year-old Arsinoë had been married to the elderly Lysimachos of Thrace, becoming stepmother to Arsinoë I. Several years later, hoping to promote the cause of her own two sons, she masterminded the death of Lysimachos’s heir, Agathocles, husband of her half-sisterLysandra. This tore the royal family apart, and Lysimachos died in battle in 281, fighting his dead son’s supporters. Arsinoë next married her half-brother Ptolemy Ceraunos. But Ceraunos, self-proclaimed king of Macedon, had her sons by Lysimachos murdered, and Arsinoë fled first to Samothrace and then to her brother’s court in Egypt. Ceraunos ruled Macedon for two years before dying in battle; his brother Meleager succeeded him but was deposed after a mere two months.
    Arsinoë II next married her younger brother, Ptolemy II. She was queen of Egypt for less than seven years, yet had an enormous influence on the developing role of the queen. Deified after her death, her statue stood in all of Egypt’s temples.
    Ptolemy III Euergetes I (Benefactor), King of Egypt 246–221
    Son of Ptolemy II and Arsinoë I
    The ending of the Third Syrian War (246–241) saw Ptolemy III, having captured the port of the enemy capital, Antioch, ruling an eastern Mediterranean empire whose influence stretched from the River Euphrates to Cyrenaica, as far north as Thrace and as far south as northern Nubia.
    Ptolemy III was a successful and hard-working king whose building achievements include the founding of the temple of Horus at Edfu and the construction of the Alexandria Serapeum, but the end of his reign was marred by an unprecedented series of native uprisings, a response to the high levels of taxation and the growing economic differences between the Egyptian peasants and the immigrant Greeks.
    Berenice II
    Daughter of Magus of Cyrenaica, wife of Ptolemy III
    The classical authors admired Berenice II as a strong andindependently wealthy consort who, not content with ruling Egypt in her husband’s absence, rode into battle alongside him. Less admirable, and equally unlikely to be true, is the rumour that the hot-tempered Berenice had murdered her first fiancé, the Macedonian prince Demetrios the Fair, because she had found him in bed with her mother, Apame. Ptolemy III and Berenice II seem to have been genuinely fond of each other and their marriage produced six children. Berenice was murdered during her son’s reign.
    Ptolemy IV Philopator (Father-Loving), King of Egypt 221–205
    Son of Ptolemy III and Berenice II
    The reign of Ptolemy IV heralded the beginning of the end of the Ptolemaic empire. The eldest son of Ptolemy III, Ptolemy IV has gone down in history as a pleasure-seeking drunkard who chose to stand silent as the highly influential, multi-talented athlete, priest and courtier Sosibios purged the royal family, murdering Ptolemy’s brother Magas, his uncle Lysimachos and his mother, Berenice II. Guided by Sosibios, Ptolemy took his younger sister, Arsinoë III, as his queen, but his affections lay with his mistress Agathoclea, who was herself the daughter of his father’s mistress. This formidable lady bore him at least one child before (allegedly) poisoning first Ptolemy IV and then Arsinoë III.
    Private life aside, Ptolemy’s reign was by no means all bad. He successfully and most surprisingly armed his people and defended his country against an attempted takeover by Antiochos III of