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.
23
MITHRIDATES VI OF PONTUS
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
—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.
23
MITHRIDATES VI OF PONTUS
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
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