#Cleopatra II

[wishesofeternity]

"Three major elements form the basis of female power in Ptolemaic Egypt: (1) the valorization of the royal matrimonial couple (from at least the time of Berenike II); (2) the system of joint rule with two or three partners (from the time of Kleopatra I); and (3) the dynastic cult (from the time of Arsinoë II). Each reign introduced innovations that were usually accepted and developed by the next ruler, including the institutional revolution of joint rule. However, some innovations were tolerated only because circumstances necessitated it, despite the fact that they were neither valued nor developed: this can be observed in the case of the reign of a single queen. In fact, the strength of the Ptolemaic queens rested on the presence of a mixed–gender couple. It could be a husband–wife tandem (inbred or not), as in the case of Berenike II or Kleopatra II. It could also be a mother-son tandem, as in the case of Kleopatra I, who established the first joint rule with the young Ptolemy VI; or Kleopatra III, who innovated by leading a joint rule with each of her adult sons Ptolemy IX and Ptolemy X; or, finally, Kleopatra VII, who, through her joint rule with her son Caesarion, represents the climax of Ptolemaic female power."

-Anne Bielman Sánchez and Giuseppina Lenzo, "Ptolemaic Royal Women," The Routledge Comapnion to Women and Monarchy in the Ancient Mediterranean World (edited by Elizabeth D. Carney and Sabine Müller)

[tiny-librarian]

This intaglio shows the head of Ptolemaic Queen Cleopatra II, in profile to the left.

[mi-planta]

Introducing Cleopatra II and Mark Antony II; a co-worker asked for some baby plants so I'm propagating several cultivars.

[aq2003]

grabbed all of the ebook versions of the folger shakespeare library's annotated versions of shakespeare's plays (+sonnets and poems) and put them all in one place in case anyone is interested

[surfingkaliyuga]

“First Queen II: Sabaku no Joō” Yoshitaka Amano 1990

[butchhamlet]

i said i was going to arrange a list of my favorite articles/criticism about shakespeare, so here’s my first little roundup! obligatory disclaimer that i don’t necessarily agree with or endorse every single point of view in each word of these articles, but they scratch my brain. will add to this list as i continue reading, and feel free to add your own favorites in the reblogs! :]

essays

Is Shakespeare For Everyone? by Austin Tichenor (a basic examination of that question)

Interrogating the Shakespeare System by Madeline Sayet (counterpoint/parallel to the above; on Shakespeare’s place in, and status as, imperialism)

Shakespeare in the Bush by Laura Bohannan (also a good parallel to the above; on whether Shakespeare is really culturally “universal”)

The Unified Theory of Ophelia: On Women, Writing, and Mental Illness ("I was trying to make sense of the different ways men and women related to Ophelia. Women seemed to invoke her like a patron saint; men seemed mostly interested in fetishizing her flowery, waterlogged corpse.”)

Hamlet Is a Suicide Text—It’s Time to Teach It Like One (on teaching shakespeare plays about suicide to high schoolers)

Commuting With Shylock by Dara Horn (on listening to MoV with a ten-year-old son, as modern jewish people, to look at that eternal question of Is This Play Antisemitic?)

All That Glisters is Not Gold (NPR episode, on whether it’s possible to perform othello, taming of the shrew, & merchant to do good instead of harm)

academic articles

the Norton Shakespeare’s intro to the Merchant of Venice (apologies about the highlights here; they are not mine; i scanned this from my rented copy)

the Norton Shakespeare’s intro to Henry the Fourth part 1 (and apologies for the angled page scans on this one; see above)

Richard II: A Modern Perspective by Harry Berger Jr (this is the article that made me understand richard ii)

Hamlet’s Older Brother (“Hamlet and Prince Hal are in the same situation, the distinction resting roughly on the difference between the problem of killing a king and the problem of becoming one. ... Hamlet is literature’s Mona Lisa, and Hal is the preliminary study for it.”)

Egyptian Queens and Male Reviewers: Sexist Attitudes in Antony & Cleopatra Criticism (about more than just reviewers; my favorite deconstruction of shakespeare’s cleopatra in general)

Strange Flesh: Antony and Cleopatra and the Story of the Dissolving Warrior (“If Troilus and Cressida is [Shakespeare’s] vision of a world in which masculinity must be enacted in order to exist, Antony and Cleopatra is his vision of a world in which masculinity not only must be enacted, but simply cannot be enacted, his vision of a world in which this particular performance has broken down.”)

misc

Elegy of Fortinbras by Zbigniew Herbert (poem that makes me fucking insane)

Dirtbag Henry IV (what it sounds like.)

Cleopatra and Antony by Linda Bamber (what if a&c... was good.)

[thefollowersofthedivinesnake]

(Full view plz)

Some historical characters that will be making an appearance in the webcomic I'm developing!

[er-cryptid]

Cleopatra Eurydice

[cottoncandiescupcakes]

Some recommend for people that loved Gladiator II and the original Gladiator from your friend who is not afraid of men in leather mini skirts

Spartacus series(blood and sand, gods of the arena) about gladiators and nobles. Warning, VERY violent, sex, nudity. Not for the faint hearted. Also has gay characters represented

Rome series, about Ceasar and Cleopatra and other romans, war and court intrigue. Best portrayal of Ceasar ever by Ciaran Hinds

Troy about Greek Mythology but similar vibes, this movie is great but I think everyone probably saw it already but still putting it here

300, a very fictionilized version of the war between Sparta and Persian Empire. If you loved the rhino stuff this also has rhino and elephants LOL

Enjoy <33

also this song slaps

[princesadaisy]

i haven't drawn digitally in maybe five years, so here are some recent studies i did of tamara dobson from cleopatra jones and sylvester stallone from rocky ii. fun fact: i drew these with my finger bc i don't have a drawing tablet any more, haha!!

refs that i used are under the cut!

[fearsomeandwretchedandwrong]

[berenike-euergetis]

Today I visited two museums and came across coins featuring Cleopatra Selene, Juba II and Ptolemy!

Silver coins featuring Cleopatra Selene (Basilissa Kleopatra) and Juba II (Rex IUBA)

Date : 25 BC - 5 BC

📍MUSÉE DE L'HISTOIRE ET DES CIVILISATIONS, RABAT

Silver coins of Juba II (REX IVBA)

Date : 25 BC - 23 AD

📍Musée de Bank Al-Maghrib, Rabat

Rare gold coin depicting Juba II on the obverse and Cleopatra Selene on the reverse. Historians hold differing views on its issuance, some attribute it to the marriage of Juba and Selene, while others argue it commemorates the birth of their eldest son (X)

Date : 20 BC - 19 BC

📍Musée de Bank Al-Maghrib, Rabat

And lastly a silver coin featuring King Ptolemy adorned with an elephant scalp

Date : 23 BC - 40 AD

📍Musée de Bank Al-Maghrib, Rabat

@baudouinette

[tiny-librarian]

When Cleopatra took her own life, she left behind her four surviving children.

Her firstborn, and only living child with Caesar, Caesarion, did not live for long after her death. She had sent him away from Egypt for his own safety, but he was falsely lured back with promises of being allowed to rule in her place. He was murdered by Octavian’s men, after he’d received advice that “Too many Caesars is not good". As Caesar’s biological son, he was too much of a threat to Octavian’s rule. It’s thought he was likely killed by strangulation, but no one knows that for certain, or what happened to his body. He was 17 years old when he died, and had nominally been sole ruler of Egypt after his mother’s death.

It was a different story for her children with Mark Antony. There were the twins Cleopatra Selene II and Alexander Helios, who were both 9 at the time of their mother’s death, and Ptolemy Philadelphus, who was just 5 or 6. The three of them were taken to Rome by Octavian, and forced to walk behind his chariot in his Triumph Parade, attached to it with chains so heavy they could barely walk. This aroused not the scorn he’d been expecting, but sympathy for the poor young children. Octavian gave them to his sister Octavia, who had been married to their father, to be raised along with her children.

Neither of the boys would see adulthood, both apparently dying sometime before 25 B.C. There were rumours that Octavian had both of them killed, not wanting any adult sons of Antony and Cleopatra to remain alive.

Cleopatra Selene however, had a somewhat kinder fate. She was married to Juba II, King of Numidia and later Mauretania. She inherited the same strength and pride in her heritage of the Ptolemaic women that came before her, and used the same titles as her mother on coins. She had at least one child, a son she named Ptolemy, and possibly a daughter named Drusilla. Her exact date of death is unknown, but she was placed in the Royal Mausoleum of Mauretania when she died. It is still visible today, and a fragmentary inscription there is dedicated to Juba and Cleopatra, as the King and Queen of Mauretania.

[rendnotmyheart]

I just ordered so many new Shakespeare plays (+ Paradise Lost)

[jeannereames]

Would Alexander have really married Cleopatra Eurydice? He seems to have respected her enough despite her relation to Attalus- some sources say when removing her statue from the Philippeum he transferred it to another respected place in Heraion. Did they get along personally? How would their marriage have changed matters, if at all?

Okay, first, I believe we have a confusion/conflation of Eurydikes. The one from the Philippion is Philip’s mother, wife of Amyntas III. Her statue was never removed out by Alexander, so I’m unsure what the asker is referring to? The statues were lost over time, but we have the statue bases, and descriptions of the monument. See especially Elizabeth D. Carney, “The Philippeum, Women, and the Formation of Dynastic Image,” in W. Heckel, L. Tritle, and P. Wheatley (eds.) Alexander’s Empire: Formulation to Decay (Claremont, CA, 2007) 27-70. For Eurydike herself, see Olga Palagia, “Philip's Eurydice in the Philippeum at Olympia,” in E. Carney and D. Ogden (eds.), Philip II and Alexander the Great (Oxford 2010) 33-41.

“Eurydike” became a dynastic name, so it keeps popping up among Argeads (and later). Philip’s mother was Eurydike, as was his daughter, wife of Philip III Arrhidaios: (Hadea) Eurydike. Also Kleopatra, niece of Attalos, took the name Eurydike when she married Philip. But she was never in the Philippeon. Philip’s only wife represented there was Olympias, mother of his heir, Alexander. Amyntas III and Eurydike appeared as his parents.

We have no idea if Alexander shared more than a few words with Attalos’s neice. Given her uncle’s hostility towards him, he would likely have minimized contact. Also, timing was against it. Alexander left on the heels of the marriage, was gone 6 months to a year, then likely kept his distance after his return. While Macedonian women were not as sequestered as in Athens, men and (respectable) unrelated women still didn’t mingle freely. If he did interact with her, it would have been when visiting the women’s rooms to see his sisters, with plenty of women present. If marrying a dead father’s widow had precedent, an affair with the wife of one’s living father was another thing. Alexander knew his mythology, and would’ve had no desire to be Hippolytos.* After he took the throne, he had to leave relatively quickly to settle affairs in the south…and she was (likely) dead before he returned.

As for the marriage… this was suggested by my colleague, Tim Howe: “The Giver of the Bride, the Bridegroom, and the Bride,” in T. Howe, S. Müller, and R. Stoneman, Ancient Historiography on War and Empire (Oxbow, 2017) 92-124. Nothing in the ancient sources says Alexander planned such a marriage BUT marrying the wife (especially if young) of the former king wasn’t novel in Macedonia; Archelaos did the same. It was accepted practice generally.

The titbit that might suggest Alexander did plan to wed Kleopatra-Eurydike … Olympias murdered her.

Now, ignoring Justin’s account of a son Karanos, which is wrong (for reasons I don’t have time to go into), Kleopatra-Eurydike’s child was a girl (Europa). That means Kleopatra had no power in the women’s rooms after Philip’s assassination. So why the hell would Olympias kill the infant (and her, by extension)? Revenge alone?

Possibly. Revenge, especially for a slight to timē (personal honor), was a perfectly respectable reason to kill someone. “Turn the other cheek,” or “When they go low, we go high,” is a very Christianized view. But an even better revenge would have been to let her live to raise an extra daughter under the king her uncle had insulted and schemed to replace. Philip had 3 prior adult/almost adult daughters. A 4th, well over a decade from marriageability, was a day late and a dollar short. She could expect a miserable existence in the Pella palace where she was no threat to Olympias.

Unless Alexander planned to marry her in a diplomatic solution to suppress Attalos’s faction, and secure Parmenion’s support. (Attalos had married Parmenion’s daughter.) I strongly suspect Philip’s final marriage was not the midlife-crisis love match Plutarch/Diodoros present, but an attempt to deal with push back in his latter years. Alexander may have decided that marrying the girl was the best way to deal with it too.

And if Alexander did plan to marry her, she was a threat to Olympias’ influence. This isn’t necessarily jealousy. Olympias may have decided that wooing the snake wasn’t sound policy. Remember that Alexander was barely twenty and Olympias would have been between 36 and 38, with oodles more political experience. While sure, her move was self-serving, it also may have been sound policy to keep her son from the match. (Two things can be true at once.)

Alexander need not have publicly declared an intention to marry his father’s widow; he had bigger fish to fry in the immediate aftermath. Yet if he’d discussed it privately, his mother may have moved to eliminate the possibility while he was out of the country. The brutality of the murder certainly suggests a vengeance theme.

Incidentally, while the death of Europa at Olympias’s hands (and Eurydike’s subsequent suicide) is not securely dated in our sources—except that Alexander wasn’t in Pella—it almost certainly occurred in the first months after Philip’s death, during Alexander’s first trip into the Greek south, to shore up support for the Persian invasion and re-ratify the Corinthian League.

As for how their marriage may have changed things…it would almost certainly have put Alexander under the thumb of Attalos-Parmenion. We can see, in the appointments of his two sons, that Parmenion alone held great sway in Alexander’s early years—but at least he wasn’t an in-law. For once, Olympias and Antipatros were likely on the same side. (Antipatros and Parmenion weren’t precisely friendly.) If, as I suspect, Philip made that marriage for political reasons, it suggests the Attalos faction—whatever that entailed—was strong enough to force Philip’s hand before leaving on a probable long-term campaign. That means Attalos was powerful. And a 20-year-old Alexander was no match for him, even if adolescent arrogance may have made him think he was. Olympias may also have decided/suspected that the Attalos-Parmenion tie wasn’t as strong as Alexander feared—which proved to be true. When push came to shove, Parmenion allowed Attalos to be eliminated on Alexander’s order.

Arrian glosses over all this. I wish we had the first two books of Curtius, who likely covered the story of Alexander’s accession in more detail. It would provide more clues. Attalos sorta comes out of nowhere at the end of Philip’s life. Although Diodoros’ account of his reign is so truncated we don’t know the marshals under Philip well, so he may have been around longer than it seems.

————-

* Alexander knew his mythology. Theseus’s second wife, Phaidra, was reportedly cursed to conceive a passion for her (more age-appropriate) son-in-law, Hippolytos. Yet Hippolytos had pledged his virginity to Artemis, offending Aphrodite, who was behind the curse. When Hippolytos rebuked poor Phaedra’s advances, she suicided, leaving a note implicating Hippolytos (for rape). As punishment, Theseus asked his father Poseidon to kill his son. While out in his chariot, a sea monster spooked the horses, he fell out the back but got tangled in the reins, and they dragged him to death. A variation exists in which Aisklepios brings him back from death but Hades is so offended/(worried) by this power, he asks his brother Zeus to strike down Aisklepios by lightning…which he does. One of the few cases of a god dying. (They’re immortal, yes…but can be killed; it’s just that few things can kill one. Being fried by lightning will do it.)

[wishesofeternity]

“The queen (Cleopatra Selene II) and Juba arrived in Mauretania at the end of 25 BC, taking up residence at a place called Iol, on the coast (modern Cherchel in Algeria). It was originally a Carthaginian outpost that had been developed as a Mauretanian royal city in the second century BC. Its location probably had much to do with the presence of an island immediately offshore (the modern Corniche des Dahra) that provided a certain amount of shelter on a coast otherwise lacking it; except for this, the site of Iol is hardly propitious, with virtually no coastal plain and mountains rising high behind the city. Iol was probably in decline when the new monarchs arrived, and they chose to live there presumably because it lay roughly midway along the lengthy Mediterranean coast of Mauretania.  In the emerging fashion of the era, Iol was renamed Kaisareia, or Caesarea, honoring Augustus; cities with such names were founded by allied monarchs during much of the last quarter of the first century BC.

“...  Decayed Iol was rebuilt lavishly, with all kinds of marble used in constructing the royal city, including Italian, Greek, and African. How much Cleopatra Selene participated in this architectural transformation is not known—the city did include a temple to Isis, her mother’s alter ego—but her efforts are most apparent in the artistic program of the kingdom. As the exiled queen of Egypt, she took care to commemorate her heritage. She would have felt devoted to her mother’s legacy: at the time that she became queen, the demonization of Cleopatra VII was being vigorously asserted in contemporary Latin literature, and Cleopatra Selene would have taken no comfort in reading that her mother was merely the cowardly Egyptian mate of Antonius or that her death caused great rejoicing. As her only living descendant, she had not only the chance but the obligation to set the record straight by commemorating her mother at her new capital, especially through portrait sculpture.

“It may seem that she took a personal risk in promoting her mother’s heritage so vigorously, given the official opinion in Rome, but this suggests that the attitude toward Cleopatra VII was far more nuanced than is generally believed today, and the official point of view—mostly vividly represented in Augustan poetry—was essentially government propaganda. Moreover, Cleopatra Selene was a daughter of Antonius, whose other living descendants were still quite active in the political life of Rome. Her status—as well as the memory of her mother—is well shown on her coinage; a series of autonomous issues (without the name of her husband) having the legend “Kleopatra basilissa” demonstrates royal privileges separate from his. Some of these coins have the Nile crocodile, a reminder not only of Egypt but also of the coins issued in the 30s BC when she was named queen of the Cyrenaica. Juba also had his autonomous coins, indicating that the two monarchs acted independently of one another in certain undefined ways. There was also joint coinage, but even here the distinction between the two is apparent, since Juba’s legend is always in Latin while Cleopatra Selene’s is in   Greek—emphasizing the bilingual nature of the court���and the two monarchs appear on opposite sides of the coins, never together. In at least one case, Cleopatra is identified merely as “Selene,” a memory of the role that she was destined to play before the collapse of the Ptolemaic dynasty. Most significantly, she also issued coins with the legend “queen Cleopatra, daughter of Cleopatra,” strong evidence of her devotion to her mother’s memory.

“Cleopatra Selene’s emphasis on her Ptolemaic heritage was also apparent in the sculptural program at Caesarea. In addition to the expected portraiture of herself and her mother, there was an elaborate display of historical Egyptian sculpture, from as far back as the time of Tuthmosis I (reigned ca. 1504-1492 bc). There was also a statue of the Egyptian god Ammon, and he and Isis appeared on the obverse and reverse of the joint coinage, suggesting divine roles for the monarchs.  

Perhaps the most interesting sculpture at Caesarea is a statue of the Egyptian priest Petubastes IV, who died (according to the inscription) 31 July 30 BC at the age of sixteen. He was perhaps a cousin of Cleopatra Selene and, as a member of the priestly aristocracy, would have been the last indigenous claimant to the Egyptian throne. There is little doubt that he and Cleopatra Selene knew each other in Alexandria, and the setting up of his statue in Caesarea is the most tangible evidence of her memory of that last summer in Egypt. As much as possible, she sought both to establish herself as the last Ptolemaic queen and to create a new Alexandria at Caesarea, bringing Egyptian material culture from more than fifteen hundred miles away.”

- Duane W. Roller, “Cleopatra’s Daughter and Other Royal Women of the Augustan Era”