The Book of Ancient Bastards (9 page)

Poisonous Evil Queen or Just Misunderstood?

(CA. 164–121 B.C.)

As soon as Seleucus assumed the diadem after his brother’s death his mother shot him dead with an arrow, either fearing lest he should avenge his father or moved by an insane hatred for everybody. After Seleucus, Grypus became king, and he compelled his mother to drink poison that she had mixed for himself. So justice overtook her at last.
—Appian, Syriaca

The evil queen meting out death and destruction to her own children before her own well-deserved death in the quotation excerpted above has a very famous name: Cleopatra. No, not that Cleopatra.

This Cleopatra was also born in Egypt, but about a century earlier than the more famous one. Her father, Ptolemy VI, used her as a pawn in his diplomatic chess match with his neighbors, the Seleucid dynasty in Syria. First, she was married off to a usurper (Alexander Balas), then taken back by her father and married to the heir to the Seleucid throne (Demetrius II). Then after this second husband became king and was captured by the Parthians, her father again intervened and married her to Demetrius’s younger brother (Antiochus IX). When that brother was killed in battle, she was returned to Demetrius, recently escaped from ten years of Parthian captivity.

By these three men she had several children, including the next two heirs to the Seleucid throne (Seleucus V and Antiochus VIII Grypus). And this was finally her opportunity to stop being a pawn and start being a queen. It was through her children that Cleopatra Thea exercised power, first murdering her son Seleucus V shortly after he became king in 125 B.C., then ruling as regent for her other son Grypus while he was still a child.

By 121 B.C., Grypus had grown into his teens, and well aware of the fate of his older brother, he apparently knew better than to trust his own mother. So when Mama Cleo decided to try to slip him a poison mickey in a drink, he turned on her and had her drink it herself.

Done in by her own treachery, Cleopatra Thea died as she lived the majority of her life: at the hands of a close male relative.

What’s In a Bastard’s Name?

Cleopatra was a common name in ancient Macedonia; in fact, Alexander the Great had a sister by that name. And the Macedonian rulers of the Hellenistic state in Egypt glommed on to the name as a potential connection to anything related to Alexander. So just as there were countless Ptolemys coming out of Egypt, damn near every female born to the royal family there over the 300 years of Ptolemaic rule in Egypt was named, you guessed it: Cleopatra.

Gold-Plated Bastard

(134– 63 B.C.)

[Mithridates VI] was ever eager for war, of exceptional bravery, always great in spirit and sometimes in achievement, in strategy a general, in bodily prowess a soldier, in hatred to the Romans a Hannibal.
—Velleius Paterculus, Compendium of Roman History

Here’s one for ya: a monarch in the vein of that fascinating bastard Alexander the Great. Equal parts paranoid and propagandist, a matricide who also killed his siblings, all while dosing himself with antidotes to build his immunity to poison, Mithridates VI, ruler of the Greek kingdom of Pontus (in what is now northern Turkey), was a thorn in the side of an expanding Roman military-industrial complex for decades until his death in 63 B.C.

King from the time he was thirteen, Mithridates did not actually rule until he turned twenty, whereupon he had his regent (aka “Mom”) killed, along with his brother and sister for good measure. According to his carefully scripted life story, before this, he’d fled into the forest for fear for his own life (Mom apparently wanted him dead), where he lived for years, killing lions and strengthening himself to take his kingdom back.

This guy knew how to frame a narrative.

Mithridates’s neighbors to the west consisted of a bunch of small post-Hellenistic Greek-speaking kingdoms, all of them dominated from afar by the Roman Republic. Beginning in 133 B.C. with the foundation of the Roman province of Asia in central Turkey, the Romans had begun to gradually expand into the region, first ruling indirectly through existing monarchs, whom they would co-opt and then set up as puppets, and eventually integrating territory into their provincial system after they had their hooks dug deep into the local economy.

Rome had civilian contractors (the Halliburtons of their day) called
publicani
who did everything from road- and public-building construction to tax collection in these conquered and soon-to-be conquered territories. It was a system ripe for the corrupting, and in no time Roman governors were looking for excuses to annex more and more territory in the hopes of getting hefty windfalls from the publicani who would in turn get lucrative government contracts to strip the newly incorporated territory of its wealth and then build a lot of very expensive roads.

So when the inevitable happened and in 88 B.C. a Roman general named Manius Aquillius trumped up an excuse to pick a fight with the kingdom of Pontus, Mithridates correctly read simmering Greek resentment of these Roman leeches and set himself up as defender of Greek liberty. Aquillius had the triple misfortune of getting out-generaled and crushed in battle near the city of Protostachium, being caught and handed over to Mithridates, and of being the son of a former governor of Asia who had levied ruinous taxes (50 percent and higher) on inhabitants who turned out to have long memories.

Golden-Throated Bastard

Never one to miss an opportunity, Mithridates had Aquillius dragged to Pergamum (a major city) on the back of a donkey, pelted with filth the entire way. Then, on stage in front of thousands in the city’s gorgeous outdoor amphitheatre, he had him executed in a particularly grisly manner. The historian Appian tells us how: “Mithridates poured molten gold down his throat, thus rebuking the Romans for their bribe-taking.”

In the decades that followed, the armies of the Roman Republic fought no less than three wars against Mithridates, eventually wearing him down and defeating his forces, then incorporating his kingdom into their foreign territories. On the run and trying to evade capture (and the subsequent march through Rome in chains as part of some general’s triumph before being executed), Mithridates is reputed to have attempted suicide by taking poison. In a fitting irony, he proved immune to the effects of the drug and had to opt for running onto a sword held steady by one of his officers.

Gold-plated bastard.

Yes, That Cleopatra

(69–30 B.C.)

I will not be triumphed over.
—Cleopatra VII of Egypt

Cleopatra, the queen who made Rome tremble with equal parts fear, hatred, and awe. The last ruler of the last independent successor state of Alexander the Great’s empire, she imposed her will not with military might or massed sea power (although she initially possessed plenty of the latter) but instead used her wits and outlasted or co-opted all of her political foes save one.

Although born in Egypt, Cleopatra was a Macedonian down to her toenails. And unlike so many other members of the Ptolemaic dynasty, she was smart, smart, smart. Succeeding her doting father at the age of eighteen in 51 B.C., she cut a remarkable figure. Fluent in nine languages (Latin, interestingly enough, not being one of them), she was the only Ptolemy ever to bother to learn Coptic, the language of ancient Egypt.

Rather than playing up her Greek bloodlines, Cleopatra emphasized her “Egyptian-ness,” publicly and ostentatiously taking part in Egyptian religious rituals; dressing more like Nefertiti than like Athena, she styled herself the “New Isis,” the living embodiment of the Egyptian mother goddess (something earlier attempted to lesser effect by that Seleucid bastard Antiochus IV). Her Egyptian subjects (if not always her Greek ones) literally worshipped her for it.

To Romans, she represented every ethnocentric prejudice they so despised about so-called “decadent Easterners.” Married in succession to both of her younger brothers (likely never consummated, because propaganda aside, Cleopatra was, as far as we can tell, very choosy about whom she slept with), she waited to have a child with Julius Caesar, into whose bedroom she famously had herself smuggled by being rolled up in a carpet when he came to Egypt in 47 B.C.

Rarely apart after that for the remaining years of Caesar’s life, the couple had a son (Caesarion), and both he and his mother returned to Rome with Caesar. Until the day of Caesar’s death, Cleopatra lived with him in his villa in Rome, a symbol to his political opponents of Caesar’s intent to be a king himself in his own right.

Inbred Bastard

A direct descendant of Ptolemy I, Cleopatra VII was the product of centuries of inbreeding. The Ptolemaic dynasty had adopted the previous Egyptian royal policy of marrying royal children to each other (the idea being that royal children in Egypt possessed no other social equals on earth to whom they could be married, and if one royal parent made for a child blessed by the gods, then a child with two royal parents would be doubly blessed). Genetics being completely unknown at the time, the Ptolemys couldn’t possibly know the likely outcome: a royal family who proved “selfish, greedy, murderous, weak, stupid, vicious, sensual, vengeful,” in the words of one modern historian. In contrast, Cleopatra, the intelligent, shrewd exception who proved the rule, shone all the brighter. This fit in with her billing herself as “the New Isis.”

Getting out of Rome one step ahead of a Roman mob after Caesar’s assassination, Cleopatra settled in for a fight once back in Egypt. When summoned to a meeting with Rome’s newest eastern warlord, Marcus Antonius, she made a grand entrance that entranced the loutish Antonius.

The two made common cause against Antonius’s rival Octavian, and whether or not theirs was the passionate love match recorded by both history and Shakespeare, they had three children together. Also together they ruled the east for a decade, until finally forced into yet another civil war with Octavian, who defeated them at the battle of Actium in 31 B.C.

Within a year, the both of them had committed suicide; their children were either killed or adopted into the family of Octavian, and Egypt had become a Roman province.

Say this for Cleopatra, though: she didn’t lack for either brains or courage, and she came within an ace of winning!