Hellenistic queens are on the ascendent, as a plethora of recent works on their lives and careers demonstrates.[1] Llewellyn-Jones has been a significant contributor to this field of late, most recently in his 2023 monograph with Alex McAuley, Sister-Queens of the High Hellenistic Period, on Cleopatra III and Cleopatra Thea, royal women of the Ptolemaic and Seleucid houses. His current public-facing book, The Cleopatras: The Forgotten Queens of Egypt, extends naturally from this earlier work, aiming both to introduce these women and to trace their contributions to the development of female agency and authority in the ancient world. Although a much-needed update to John Whitehorne’s 1994 The Cleopatras, Llewellyn-Jones’ chronicle of the foundations laid by the ascent to power of these often-ignored royal women is hindered by a novelistic style and less-than critical approach to the complexities of the source material.
The subject of Hellenistic royal women is of course often dominated by that final and most (in)famous Cleopatra, long the subject of popular works but only rarely given serious academic attention despite the significance of her social, political, and economic contributions to Egypt and the Mediterranean world. As is often the case with the Hellenistic world the well-known end—death and the collapse of the Ptolemaic dynasty——tends to obfuscate the long and generally successful work of ruling undertaken by Cleopatra VII as well as her dynastic context. The much-vaunted threat and allure of that Cleopatra has become closely entwined with the narrative of her exceptionalism as the unique fatale monstrum who came so close to upending the Roman drive towards all-encompassing control in the first-century Mediterranean. By widening the spotlight to encompass the other Cleopatras of the Ptolemaic and Seleucid houses Llewellyn-Jones emphasizes the position of Cleopatra VII as not a singular, extraordinary figure but rather the last in a long line of powerful women who came to dominate a period when dynastic rule and socio-religious dynamics gave women a growing place in the political theater. Llewellyn-Jones touches on key themes surrounding female agency in this period, including marital diplomacy, the adoption of sibling marriage, and the essentially liminal role of the Hellenistic basilissa (misleadingly translated here as ‘queen’ rather than the more accurate ‘royal woman’), which led to the peaks of royal female rule in the late second and first centuries BCE.[2]
Chronologically organized, the book is divided into three sections. The first, “Beginnings,” treats the first two of Llewellyn-Jones’ Cleopatras, the Seleucid royal daughter turned Ptolemaic wife Cleopatra I Syra and her daughter Cleopatra II. Particularly in these early chapters, those turning to the text for a straightforward narrative on the titular Cleopatras may be somewhat bewildered by the extensive digressions with which the scanty evidence for these women is padded out. The result is a loose, sprawling narrative rather than a tightly focused discourse on the foundations laid by the early Cleopatras. While the discussions on Alexandrian culture and society will no doubt be informative for the book’s intended audience, the thesis of the work—the Cleopatras as necessary foundations and context for the evolution of female authority in the Hellenistic period—would be better served by connecting with the developments attained under earlier Egyptian, Argead, and Ptolemaic women, who receive only minimal notice here. Instead, the author falls into familiar tropes, describing the young Cleopatra Syra (daughter of the most powerful ruler of his time, the Seleucid Antiochus III) as “mainly attentive to her trousseau” in the days leading up to her marriage to Ptolemy V (p. 46). The description is redolent of typically gendered assumptions of royal women, as is the depiction of her childhood as passed in a Sappho-esque haze of song and flower crowns. Discussion of Syra’s dowry, the revenues of Coele Syria, long a hotly contested territory between the Ptolemies and Seleucids, is relegated to two sentences (28), dismissing the very real fiscal and political implications of the marriage for both kingdoms and thus the significance of Cleopatra Syra herself as a bridge and political mediator between the two.[3]
Part Two, “Expanding Horizons,” delves into the complicated morass of the late second and first centuries and the Cleopatras’ increasing proximity not only to Ptolemaic power but to that of their longstanding rivals to the east, the Seleucid empire. Better attested than the earlier generations, the six Cleopatras of this section receive more sustained focus and less narrative meanderings, drawing out their developing political agency even as the familial and marital relationships within and between the two dynasties become entangled to an unprecedented degree. Despite the clear depths of the author’s knowledge of the period, the narrative often succumbs again to well-worn tropes which might have been avoided by simply contextualizing the rank hostility of the later Roman sources to the Hellenistic dynasts in general and the actions of the Cleopatras in particular.
An example should suffice: describing the outbreak of murderous violence between the sisters Cleopatra Tryphaina and Cleopatra IV, Llewellyn-Jones seems to treat with complete credulity the depiction of the episode in Justin’s Epitome (39.3.7-10). With both Cleopatras married to Seleucid half-brothers and rival claimants to the throne, Cleopatra IV to Antiochus Kyzikenos and Cleopatra Tryphaina to Antiochus Grypos, dynastic violence reached new highs—or lows—with the murder of each sister at the hand of her brother-in-law. Justin’s account, given in full by Llewellyn-Jones, lays the blame for the murder of Cleopatra IV squarely at the feet of Cleopatra Tryphaina who orders her sister dragged bodily from the sanctuary at Daphne and put to death. This Tryphaina may well have done—no Ptolemy, male or female, ever shied away from the brutalities of power. But the reasoning behind her action is as complex as any political motivation and unlikely to be summed up by Llewellyn-Jones’ assessment of sexual jealousy: “at the heart of the matter lay Cleopatra Tryphaina’s dread that her sister would rob her of her man” (219). With his typical eye for the salacious Justin does indeed credit Tryphaina with paranoid jealousy at her husband Grypos’ attempts to beg off from the murder, but only after listing the political reasoning behind it, which includes Cleopatra IV’s introduction of foreign armies into the Seleucid realm and her transgressive act of exogamic autoekdosis, undertaken without the consent of their powerful mother, Cleopatra III, currently on the Egyptian throne. Titillating though the jealousy may be in an already sordid moment of sororal violence, privileging emotional and sexual motives over the political not only plays into tired stereotypes of women as governed first and foremost by uncontrollable emotions and sexual appetites but glosses over what Cleopatra IV’s norm-breaking behavior reveals about the agency and expectations of the Cleopatras as dynastic and political actors. Similar interpretations ground the presentation of male actors as well; an earlier discussion of the relationship between the Seleucid Antiochus IV and the Jews (120-121) takes the narrative presented in I Maccabees completely at face value despite the much more nuanced reading of these interactions current in Seleucid studies. While a work intended for a general audience cannot be expected to engage with all the complexities of scholarly debate, the bias and hostility of the various extant literary sources lies very near the heart of Hellenistic history and requires clear identification and discussion to prevent furthering misleading narratives.
The final section, “Terminal Decline,” briefly discusses the two predecessors of Cleopatra VII, Cleopatra V Berenike III and Cleopatra VI Tryphaina, before turning to an in-depth discussion of the seventh Cleopatra. Llewellyn-Jones dismisses the discussions surrounding the identity of Cleopatra VI, presenting her as indisputably the daughter of Ptolemy X and Cleopatra V and thus the niece of her husband Ptolemy XII (whose nickname Auletes translated as ‘Fluter’ throughout). The absence of polemic here allows the author to sidestep any debate surrounding the parentage and ethnicity of Cleopatra VII, avoiding among other questions a needed discussion on the definition of legitimacy in polygamous dynasties. Although a generally measured presentation of this Cleopatra’s life, the author’s novelistic style often inexplicably predominates, particularly in interpreting Cleopatra’s relationship with Mark Antony, whom the author describes as a superficial, womanizing fool, “vulgar, ambitious, sexy” and broke, ripe for Cleopatra’s manipulations and domination (285). Accurate or otherwise, the pervasiveness of this character description overshadows the real significance of Antony as a political actor in the eastern Mediterranean and detracts from the intelligence of Cleopatra, reduced to stringing along an oversexed Roman boor in an ultimately failed bid for political survival. Emphasis on her son by Julius Caesar, Ptolemy XV Caesar (Caesarion) as the lodestar of her life provides a more nuanced perspective to Cleopatra’s actions, particularly her increasing emphasis on the military defense of Egypt over the eastern Mediterranean as a whole, which so disastrously impacted the shape and outcome of the battle of Actium. Further development of the significance of the relationship between ruling mother and minor (male) heir throughout could only have increased the impact of the seventh Cleopatra’s careful program of self-representation in the style of Isis/Aphrodite accompanied by the Horus/Eros child.[4]
It is the epilogue, centered around a discussion of Constantine Cavafy’s achingly evocative poems on the Ptolemies, particularly his “Caesarion” and the posthumously published “The Dynasty,” which suggests the fullest potential for Llewellyn-Jones’ reexamination of the Cleopatras and their place in history. Noting that he shares with Cavafy a desire to examine the Ptolemies as individuals outside of the boxes into which they have been forced by gender, position, and hindsight, Llewellyn-Jones elaborates on the “mixed emotions of male commentors” (309) which have long relegated female rule to the outskirts of scholarship. He notes, perhaps not entirely incorrectly, that the dismissal of the Cleopatras to the academic shadows may stem from their being “simply too melodramatic” (308) for serious scholars. That melodrama, however, does not belong solely to the Cleopatras but is largely a product of the male authors who occasionally documented and often embellished their lives; like Cleopatra VII these women are the product of a more or less hostile and androcentric Roman gaze. The business of scholarship on women such as the Cleopatras ought to be to press harder on those sources and to recontextualize the role of royal women in the Hellenistic age in terms of their contributions to dynastic politics and the survival of the kingdoms they gave their lives to. Neither the capacious sexual appetites of Julius Caesar, nor his histrionic weeping before an image of Alexander the Great, nor even his crocodile tears on being presented with the head of Pompey (a man he had pursued with all the vicious relentlessness of a bloodhound), disqualify Caesar as a serious political actor in the Republic whose end he brought about. Whither therefore the Cleopatras?
A narrative of the development of female authority through the Hellenistic age this is not, but rather a dynastic history in which women are often able to predominate. As such, the work will hopefully bring new eyes to some of the most fascinating figures of a complex period of the ancient world. Well produced and with only minimal errors (p. 117 Egyptian rights should be rites, p. 282 Dei el-Medina should be Deir el-Medina), the careful attention to family trees, lists describing the main actors and their familial and/or marital relations, and sixteen pages of well-chosen historical images of the Cleopatras make this a useful general introduction and tool for undergraduate teaching on the powerful women of the Hellenistic world.
Notes
[1] To name only a few: Coşkun and McAuley 2016; Bielman Sánchez, Cogitore, and Kolb 2016; D’Agostini, Anson, and Pownall 2020; Carney and Müller 2021.
[2] On the basilissa title, Carney 2021; Coşkun 2024.
[3] On the dowry, Kaye and Amitay 2015.
[4] I.e. the bronzes struck in Cyprus in 47 BCE with the heads of Cleopatra VII and Caesarion.