Little has come down to us from antiquity by way of detailed reports of the life of Cleopatra VII. This is not surprising in view of the tendency of ancient authors to neglect the lives of women,Footnote 1 and, in particular, a life that was subjected to the relentlessly negative propaganda of the Augustan house.Footnote 2 Our most substantial literary source is the biographer and philosopher Plutarch (c. 45–c. 125 ce), whose moralising accounts of famous Greek and Roman men, as presented in the Parallel Lives, deal with Cleopatra's role in the lives of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. Our most complete narrative of the period context of Cleopatra's reign comes from Cassius Dio's Roman History; writing long after the Roman victory over Cleopatra, Dio (c. 164 ce – after 229) is nevertheless our most substantial source for the preservation of Augustan propaganda against the queen. Otherwise, our most important literary account of Cleopatra is provided by the Jewish historian Josephus, writing towards the end of the first century ce, in the aftermath of the Jewish War against Rome and the fall of Jerusalem in the year 70. Josephus represents Cleopatra as a significant figure in two distinct contexts: first, in her relations with her close neighbour, Herod, the king of Judaea; and, secondly, as an enemy of the Jews of her capital, Alexandria. In both contexts, the queen is painted as a monster.Footnote 3
The testimony of Josephus has long served to define the rule of Cleopatra as profoundly negative for Jews, and it forms the basis for later judgements that Jews responded by betraying Cleopatra and rejoiced at her downfall.Footnote 4 In the case of the Jews of Egypt, there is no evidence for either contention. If Cleopatra's rule was indeed a negative experience for the Jews of her kingdom, this would mark her out as following a very different path from that taken by her predecessors with regard to the large and important Jewish community that prospered in Ptolemaic Egypt from the times of Ptolemy II Philadelphus onwards. A golden age of Jewish literature flourished in Ptolemaic Egypt, from the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek to tales of Jewish triumphs and happy relationships with Ptolemaic monarchs who valued their Jewish subjects and honoured the Jewish God. Inscriptions from Jewish prayer-houses record the loyalty of Jewish communities in Egypt to their Ptolemaic rulers, while the corpus of Jewish papyri from Egypt illuminates the lives of Jewish settlers, serving in the Ptolemaic army and administration.Footnote 5 Against this background, Josephus's testimony presents Cleopatra as an aberration. In so doing, he applied to the Jews the more general tendency of the Augustan literature to present the queen as a ‘singular stain’ on her Macedonian heritage;Footnote 6 the last, and worst, of Ptolemaic rulers. In what follows, I attempt to open up Josephus's evidence for closer scrutiny to see what lies beneath, together with an examination of other evidence that may offer alternative perspectives.
I begin with Josephus on Cleopatra and the Alexandrian Jews. Josephus's treatment of this subject forms part of an extended attack on Cleopatra in his work known as the Against Apion. Among ancient sources, this attack may be considered, as Duane Roller observes in his recent biography of the queen, ‘perhaps the most complete and concise polemic’ directed against Cleopatra's reputation.Footnote 7 As Josephus constructs her in the Against Apion, Cleopatra committed every possible crime: against her family, her husbands and her ‘benefactors’, the Roman people and their leaders; she murdered her siblings; desecrated the temples and tombs of her ancestors; her ‘husband’ Antony she made a traitor to Rome, and then betrayed him herself. In this great catalogue of monstrous crimes, the final place is given to Cleopatra's alleged hostility to the Jews of Alexandria.Footnote 8
As with all our literary sources for the representation of Cleopatra, the context is complicated. Indeed, in the case of Josephus's Against Apion, we are dealing with the polemical use of the figure of Cleopatra in different contexts over more than a century, and a brief look at that background is essential for understanding what Josephus is about. First, the Against Apion is a work of the late first/early second centuries ce (c. 94–c. 105 ce), in which Josephus sets out to defend the reputation of the Jewish people against their detractors and to promote a vision of Judaism as compatible with Roman values and loyalty to the Roman Empire.Footnote 9 A member of the ruling class of Judaea before the war, Josephus played a leading role on the rebel side before his imprisonment by the Romans in 67 ce; in the freedom awarded by the victors, Vespasian and Titus, Josephus dedicated his life to writing in defence of the Jewish people. Older studies often portrayed Josephus as traitor to the Jewish cause; the Roman lackey, living a life of ease in the household of the emperors who made their name with the destruction of Jerusalem. A very different and more complex portrait of Josephus emerges in modern scholarship: a courageous and loyal Jew, working in a context deeply hostile towards Jews. As a matter of imperial policy, all Jews of the Roman Empire were punished for the revolt in Judaea (66–73/4 ce) through the imposition of the fiscus iudaicus; the propaganda of the emperors promoted their own role as saviours of the Roman people by emphasising the magnitude of the Jewish threat that they had crushed. In the decades after the destruction of Jerusalem, the Roman world was not a comfortable place for Jews – not at all – and Josephus's work is a powerful witness to that fact.Footnote 10
The Against Apion is a deeply apologetic work, explicitly formulated as a response to specific accusations against the Jews and Jewish customs, and filled with features that look designed to appeal to Roman readers – with an emphasis on the venerable antiquity of the Jews and the harmonious relationship between the authentic Jewish way of life and loyalty to Rome and traditional Roman values.Footnote 11 At the heart of this work is a long, sustained refutation of hostile statements made by Greek-writing authors against Jews and Judaism.Footnote 12 Among these, the final example is represented by the figure of Apion of Alexandria, the eponymous villain of the book's best-known title.Footnote 13 It is Apion, according to Josephus, who was apparently the source for the allegation that Cleopatra VII treated the Jews of Alexandria badly.Footnote 14 Josephus aims to turn this charge around to benefit the reputation of the Jews, assuming his readers’ familiarity with the deeply negative reputation of Cleopatra in Rome: if the Roman people and its government were Cleopatra's deadly enemies, then ‘we’ Jews should be glorified, not maligned, for finding ‘ourselves’ also abused by this monstrous queen.Footnote 15 In fact, the strength of Josephus's argument is unimpressive on this point: the list of murders, sacrilege and betrayals attributed to the queen climaxes in her omission of the Jews from a distribution of grain in time of famine.Footnote 16
The charge that Cleopatra was hostile to the Jews of Alexandria has often been accepted at face value. The great Thackeray, editor of the 1926 Loeb edition of the Against Apion, still a great standard in scholarship, entitles this section ‘Persecution by the infamous Cleopatra’.Footnote 17 However, there are good reasons to be cautious about the reliability of this allegation against the queen. First of all, it relies on the testimony of Apion, as mediated through Josephus. A contemporary of neither Cleopatra nor Josephus, Apion was an Alexandrian scholar of the first half of the first century ce, famous for his commentaries on the classics of Greek literature but also with a mixed reputation, based on his publishing some manifestly outlandish lies.Footnote 18 Apion's many works are all lost, preserved only in fragments in the works of authors like Josephus, who uses them to his own end.Footnote 19 As his source for Apion's statements on the Jews, Josephus drew on Apion's five-volume work on Egyptian topics, the Aigyptiaka.Footnote 20 This was no systematic treatise against the Jews, but, in the extracts preserved by Josephus, Apion had created a hostile and unflattering portrait of the Jews and their ancestors. A major part of this material dealt with Apion's contempt for the idea that Jews could be called ‘Alexandrians’, even though Jews did not worship the gods of the city.Footnote 21 It is in this broader context that Josephus locates Apion's remarks about Cleopatra and the Jews. We also know from Josephus that Apion played a leading role in the politics surrounding the crisis of 38 ce, when a faction of the Greek elite in Alexandria led an attack on Jewish civic rights in that city, culminating in an outbreak of extreme violence against the Jews. Apion led an embassy to the emperor Gaius Caligula to put the case for the Greeks; Philo, the outstanding Jewish scholar of the time, headed up the delegation to speak for the Jews of Alexandria.Footnote 22 The precise nature and cause of the dispute is impossible to determine from the evidence available.Footnote 23 Philo, our chief source for events, emphasises the wholly unprecedented character of the attempt to destroy the civic privileges of the Jewish community, above all the right of Jews to observe their ancestral customs without compromising the fundamental Jewish prohibition of worshipping other gods.Footnote 24 The matters brought before Gaius, so Philo states, had not been brought up for 400 years;Footnote 25 in other words, at no time since the conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great and his foundation of the city of Alexandria. Under all the Ptolemaic monarchs, Philo declares, Jews were permitted to show their loyalty to the crown by making offerings to God on behalf of the monarchs, a way of honouring their rulers without taking part in the city's cults of the deified Ptolemies.Footnote 26 Philo leaves us in no doubt that this was also the situation under Cleopatra VII and that the policy continued under the rule of Roman emperors until the accession of the lunatic Gaius Caligula, who declared himself a god. It was only then that a certain faction in Alexandria, among whom we should include Apion (not named by Philo), stirred up accusations against the Jews that their refusal to worship the emperor was, in effect, treason. Against this background, it seems that part of Apion's argument was that Cleopatra's treatment of the Jews confirmed that they lacked civic privileges and that this state of affairs was also reflected in later Roman policy towards the Jews.Footnote 27
But what did Apion really say? We only have access to his words on these matters through Josephus; and we have access to Josephus's Greek original only through a sixth-century Latin translation (of variable reliability).Footnote 28 In this context, the introduction to Apion's statement about Cleopatra reads as follows: ‘(Apion) also mentioned Cleopatra, the last queen of the Alexandrians, as if it were a matter of reproach against us that she was ungracious (or ungrateful) towards us (nos fuit ingrata), instead of using his energy to indict her.’Footnote 29 Since Apion failed to condemn the queen, as (Josephus implies) he should have done, Josephus lists her alleged crimes at length – against her family and her ancestors, her husbands (Ptolemies XIII, XIV and Mark Antony), the gods and the Roman state – thus setting the scene for her alleged ingratia towards the Jews.Footnote 30 The task of interpreting Josephus is not helped by the Latin, in which textual corruption seems to have greatly augmented the queen's alleged offence against the Jews:
Finally, when Alexandria had been captured by Caesar (Octavian), she was reduced to such straits that she judged she could hope for salvation if, by her own hand, she could kill the Jews, after the cruelty and treachery which she had practised towards all. Would you not think it something to be proud of if, as Apion says, she did not distribute grain rations to Jews in a time of famine?Footnote 31
The suspect text belongs to Josephus's own formulation of the queen's crimes: that, after Octavian's conquest of Alexandria, Cleopatra was ‘reduced to such straits’ ‘ut salutem hinc sperare se iudicaret, si posset ipsa manu sua Iudaeos perimere’. Almost all critics take the Latin as hopelessly corrupt. Thus, for example, Thackeray: ‘The Latin is manifestly absurd’; the Greek original probably read something like ‘if she could kill herself (Greek: αὑτὴν) by her own hand’; αὑτὴν was corrupted to αὐτοὺς, ‘them’, and thence to Ἰουδαίους, ‘Jews’.Footnote 32 Cleopatra's hope for salus is surely for her deliverance from the fate of being paraded in Octavian's Roman triumph, an escape she secures ‘by her own hand’, through suicide.Footnote 33 This interpretation matches Josephus's emphasis in this same context on Cleopatra's death as a fitting punishment for her crimes against others.Footnote 34 It is hard to see how even the most hostile enemy of the queen could plausibly argue that Cleopatra sought escape from Octavian by killing Jews.Footnote 35 That proposition, in my view, can be safely set aside.Footnote 36 This leaves us with the allegation, based on Apion's words, that ‘in a time of famine, Cleopatra did not distribute grain rations to Jews (triticum non est mensa)’.Footnote 37 Josephus does not give the context, but instead focuses on Apion's allegedly astounding ignorance of written Roman testimony to the loyalty of the Jewish people towards Rome and, before the time of Roman rule, ‘under Alexander and under all the Ptolemies’.Footnote 38 Clearly, however, the real heart of the problem addressed by Josephus is the situation in the Roman administration of Egypt, since he follows the denunciation of Cleopatra with special pleading about the similar treatment of Jews by Germanicus, nephew of the emperor Tiberius, on his visit to Alexandria in the year 19 ce: ‘If (says Josephus) Germanicus was unable to distribute grain to all the inhabitants of Alexandria, that is an indication of the failure of the crops and the shortage of grain, not grounds for an indictment of the Jews.’Footnote 39 Josephus thus tries to dispose of what, presumably, were further claims made by Apion about the status of Jews in Alexandria under Roman rule. In response, Josephus seeks to show that Roman rule did not single out Jews for discriminatory purposes, while implying, on the other hand, that – if Cleopatra did indeed leave Jews out of a grain distribution – her policy was manifestly part of her appalling portfolio of evil acts committed against all those who deserved much better. What, we might ask, was Apion's purpose in mentioning Cleopatra's distribution of grain? In the context of a dispute over Jewish civic rights, the topic might well serve to underline the inferior status of those rights in relation to those of the Alexandrian citizen body. Nevertheless, the evidence is very unclear in this case, with no sense of why this distribution was made, and no clear identification of the recipients of the grain from the queen. Apion's argument seems to have presented this case as a one-off event rather than a regular occurrence. If, as seems likely, Cleopatra was engaged in the distribution of a grain dole, and that privilege was, as in other Greek cities,Footnote 40 reserved for the citizen class, it should be noted that the Alexandria's citizen body is likely to have included some Jews as well as others of non-Greek background, though certainly not the Jews of Alexandria as a whole.Footnote 41 As to a date for this episode, we know that serious famine struck Egypt following the failure of the Nile flood at the time of Cleopatra's co-rule with her young brother Ptolemy XIII (51/50 bce) and again in the years 43–41 bce, when she ruled with her infant son Ptolemy XV Caesar.Footnote 42 From October 50 bce, a royal decree prohibits the transport of grain supplies to anywhere other than Alexandria.Footnote 43 Its significance is best understood, as Dorothy Thompson suggests, as exemplifying ‘the Queen at work in Egypt’, concerned, in a time of crisis, to ensure political stability in the capital by ensuring sufficient food for its population; or perhaps specifically to benefit the wealthy landowners and elite of Alexandria, as a pitch for their support.Footnote 44 The queen's concern for the welfare of the landowning class of Alexandria is explicit in another decree of 41 bce, guaranteeing their fiscal privileges.Footnote 45 Both in 51, her first year as ruler, and in 41, following the defeat of the assassins of Julius Caesar at Philippi, Cleopatra faced turbulent times in which it was essential to do all she could to preserve stability and win support, particularly among the elite of Alexandria. If she restricted the distribution of grain to Alexandria's citizen class in time of famine, this was hardly a policy of discriminating against the Jews or anyone else, but a tried and tested means of keeping the powerful among the Alexandrian population on side.
Thus far, several factors emerge as shaping the image of Cleopatra in the Against Apion: the Augustan perspective on Cleopatra, adapted by Josephus for apologetic purposes after the Jewish War, to stress the alignment of loyal Jews with Roman values;Footnote 46 and the perspective of Apion, who seems to have appealed to Cleopatra as a precedent for his own times, under Gaius Caligula, in upholding status distinctions that put the Jews of Alexandria in their place, outside the Alexandrian citizen body.
Another element in the mix, I suggest, is the influence of Cleopatra's contemporary, Herod, king of Judaea (c. 73–4 bce), and his role in constructing the queen's negative reputation. In the Jewish War and the Antiquities, Josephus provides detailed reports of Herod's reign, including accounts of Herod's thoughts on Cleopatra.Footnote 47 Josephus gained access to those thoughts primarily through the work of Nicolaus of Damascus. Sometime tutor to the children of Antony and Cleopatra, Nicolaus later became Herod's courtier and historian: his account of Herod's reign, part of a massive work of world history, draws on the king's Memoirs as well as Nicolaus's knowledge of events in which he himself played a leading part, notably as Herod's ambassador to Augustus.Footnote 48 By the time that Nicolaus joined Herod's retinue (no later than 14 bce), Cleopatra was certainly a figure of the past; in Nicolaus's construction, however, she plays a vital role as one of several female figures portrayed as threatening Herod's kingship.Footnote 49
Of non-royal stock, Herod was a king made in Rome. Pompey's Roman settlement of Syria in 63 bce ended the rule of the Hasmonean monarchy in Judea (revived temporarily 40–37 bce, see below), while retaining the Hasmonean Hyrcanus II as high priest and ethnarch – but not king – of a country now under the control of the Roman governor of the newly created province of Syria. In this role, Hyrcanus was assisted by the powerful figure of Antipater of Ascalon, the father of the future Herod the Great, and Hyrcanus's long-time supporter in the inner-dynastic Hasmonean conflict that had led to Pompey's intervention in Jerusalem.Footnote 50 Following the demise of Pompey (killed in Egypt on the authority of Ptolemy XIII, 48 bce), Julius Caesar confirmed Hyrcanus as high priest, in recognition of the assistance received by Caesar from Antipater and Hyrcanus in the course of the Alexandrian War in which Ptolemy XIII was eliminated (47 bce); in the same year, Antipater's rewards included the prize of Roman citizenship and the position of procurator (epitropos) of Judea.Footnote 51 Early in the Second Triumvirate, following the assassinations of Caesar (44 bce) and Antipater (43 bce), Antony's settlement of the East (41 bce) promoted Antipater's sons, including Herod, as local governors (tetrarchs) within the Jewish territory.Footnote 52 In the following year, the Parthians invaded Roman Syria, taking Jerusalem and installing as its high priest and king Antigonus, who, as nephew of Hyrcanus II, was to be the last of the Hasmonean monarchs (40–37 bce).Footnote 53 Herod fled – via Cleopatra's Alexandria – to Antony in Rome, where, with the support of the triumvirs, he received from the Senate the kingship of Judea (40 bce); Footnote 54 and, in time, the might of Roman military backing to exterminate the pro-Parthian Antigonus, executed on the order of Antony, and to install Herod as king in Judea (37 bce).Footnote 55
Any evaluation of Herod must take into account the fundamental insecurity that dominated much of his reign. Internally, surviving Hasmoneans remained a powerful threat, not at all diminished by Herod's marriage to Mariamme, Hasmonean granddaughter of Hyrcanus II.Footnote 56 Josephus records Cleopatra's support for Alexandra and Aristobulus, Mariamme's mother and brother, promoting to Antony their claim to the right of Aristobulus to the high priesthood, and, on behalf of the old monarchy, challenging the legitimacy of Herod as commoner turned king.Footnote 57 Confined to house arrest by Herod, Alexandra appealed to Cleopatra for help.Footnote 58 The queen offered sanctuary to Alexandra and Aristobulus in Egypt, but their plan to escape was betrayed to Herod; Aristobulus, the last Hasmonean high priest, was dead within the year, drowned in Herod's swimming pool at Jericho (35 bce).Footnote 59 Alexandra again appealed to Cleopatra, hoping that the queen's influence with Antony would lead to Herod's punishment for the killing; while Josephus portrays Cleopatra's promotion of Alexandra's cause as the pursuit of her supposed long-term policy to make Antony the enemy of Herod, the power of the queen's hold over Antony was not proved on this occasion as Antony, bribed by Herod, dismissed the challenge to his client king.Footnote 60 In another episode, of uncertain date, Josephus reports the attempt by Costobarus, the Idumean husband of Herod's sister Salome and governor of Idumea, to persuade Cleopatra to collaborate with him against Herod. In this case, Costobarus allegedly appealed explicitly to Cleopatra's ancestral claims on Idumea as the basis on which she should ask Antony for the return of the land. The motive of Costobarus, we are told, involved another kind of ancestral claim: to free Idumea of subjection to Jewish laws and to promote his own rule of the country.Footnote 61 With Antony's refusal of Cleopatra's request, the plan came to nothing, but the story is striking for its explicit articulation of Cleopatra's ambition for the restoration of the empire of her ancestors.
Externally, Herod saw Cleopatra as his greatest threat, driven by her ambition for his territory. Josephus tells us that Herod fortified Masada as a refuge from his enemies, specifically pro-Hasmonean Jews, aiming to restore the old dynasty to power, and the even greater danger of Cleopatra, who allegedly sought the throne of Judea for herself.Footnote 62 A client king of Rome, Herod owed loyalty to Antony as commander in the East; after Antony's defeat at Actium (at which Herod was not present),Footnote 63 Herod presented himself to Octavian as always a loyal servant to Rome but an enemy of Cleopatra from the beginning.Footnote 64 Herod benefited greatly from Cleopatra's fall, and played a major role in promoting Octavian's victory as the salvation of the Roman state.Footnote 65
In Josephus's portrait of Cleopatra in the Against Apion, the influence of Herod's perspective may be seen in two respects, beginning with the condemnation of Cleopatra as ‘ingrata (circa nos fuit ingrata)’.Footnote 66 What does this mean here? The question goes back to Müller's commentary of 1877, in which he states that Josephus knew no reason why Cleopatra should be grateful to the Jews; rather, ingrata should be read as ‘ungracious’, a symptom of the queen's malevolence.Footnote 67 Müller's interpretation is widely adopted. But I would like to speak up for the ‘ungrateful’ reading of Cleopatra.Footnote 68 This, I suggest, reflects the view that Cleopatra should have counted the Jews, especially the family of Herod, among her benefactors. As Josephus reports it, Herod's father Antipater played a crucial military role in Roman efforts to restore Cleopatra's father to power in Alexandria (55 bce), while Antipater's support for Julius Caesar in Egypt (48/47 bce) brought Jewish troops to assist the restoration of Cleopatra.Footnote 69 Herod's actions in 40 bce, after the Parthian takeover in Judea, assume the strength of this connection, heading for Alexandria as his first source of refuge, and received ‘magnificently (λαμπρῶς)’ by Cleopatra as an ally.Footnote 70 Cleopatra did indeed have reason to be grateful.Footnote 71
Secondly, the list of crimes attributed to Cleopatra in the Against Apion matches very closely the account of her atrocities as given in Josephus's details of Herod's reign in Book 15 of the Jewish Antiquities.Footnote 72 In that context, Cleopatra's insatiable greed is repeatedly given as the root cause of all her other evil acts, with particular focus on her greed (πλεονεξία) for Herod's kingdom.Footnote 73 This idea is at the heart of Herod's construction of Cleopatra and exploits a powerful theme of the Augustan propaganda which justified going to war on the grounds that Antony was giving Cleopatra lands that belonged to the Roman people.Footnote 74 To this familiar theme, the Herodian perspective adds the further, specific charge – that Cleopatra sought to obtain his lands, either by seduction or by plotting to kill him.Footnote 75
Certainly, Herod's fear of Cleopatra centred on the threat to his newly acquired kingdom posed by Antony's policy of expanding the queen's lands outside Egypt in the period from 37 to 34 bce. Antony's organisation of the East involved the gradual redistribution of territories among rulers friendly to Rome. Herod benefited. But Cleopatra benefited most, her proven loyalty to Julius Caesar and Antony rewarded with Antony's enlargement of Cleopatra's territories and the extension of the Ptolemaic Empire in the East almost to its glory days at the beginning of the third century bce. In 37/36 bce, Antony's dispositions granted Cleopatra a vast extension to her territory: Chalcis (in Lebanon), parts of Judea and the Nabatean kingdom, together with the city of Cyrene and estates on Crete.Footnote 76 For Cleopatra, 37/36 bce marked the official beginning of a new era of her rule, ‘Year 16 which is also Year 1’.Footnote 77 In the East, coins of the new territories, with portraits of Antony (reverse), and Cleopatra (obverse), mark the new era and a new titulature for the queen: ‘Thea Neotera (the New Goddess)’ or ‘Queen Cleopatra Thea Neotera’.Footnote 78 The title promotes Cleopatra VII as successor to Cleopatra Thea (c. 164–c. 121 bce), daughter of Ptolemy VI and Cleopatra II; as queen of three Seleucid kings in turn, Cleopatra Thea had represented the Ptolemies’ ancestral claims over large parts of the Seleucid empire.Footnote 79
The expansion of Ptolemaic-controlled lands had already begun, in fact, under the Egyptian settlement of Julius Caesar, who in 48 bce restored Roman Cyprus to Ptolemaic rule (first acquired under Ptolemy I Soter); and, apparently with no objection raised by Octavian, Roman Cilicia (under Ptolemaic rule in the third century bce) was placed by Antony under Ptolemaic control c. 40 bce.Footnote 80 As tensions increased between Octavian and Antony, however, the further extension of Cleopatra's territories from 37 bce became a focus of Octavian's negative propaganda against his rival. These gifts, as Plutarch puts it, ‘particularly annoyed the Romans’, even though – as Plutarch justly notes – Antony had also distributed lands to others, including commoners who received the lands of former monarchs, the Hasmonean Antigonus among them.Footnote 81 The propaganda of Octavian, matched by Herod, makes Antony's land distributions to Cleopatra the product of his passion for the Egyptian queen. That view does not stand up to historical scrutiny. As Günther Hölbl observes in his History of the Ptolemaic Empire, ‘It is no longer the opinion of modern scholarship that these so-called gifts to Cleopatra were the acts of an unrestrained lover. Instead, they are now seen as a “balanced and clear-sighted reorganisation of the administration of the east which won over to Antony's cause capable figures and powerful dominions”’.Footnote 82
From Herod's perspective, outrage was particularly directed at Cleopatra's acquisition – as part of Antony's reorganisation of the East – of parts of Judaea, including Jericho, rich in balsam and date groves, and sections of the coastal area.Footnote 83 From then on, Herod leased from Cleopatra the lands ‘detached from his kingdom’ at 200 talents a year (at least a fifth of his annual income).Footnote 84 For Cleopatra, the deal could be seen as the restoration of ancestral territory, first won under Ptolemy I Soter in 301 bce; Palestine later came under the rule of Seleucid Syria with the conquests of Antiochus the Great in 201, but the marriage of his daughter Cleopatra I to Ptolemy V served to fuel Ptolemaic ambitions to reclaim sovereignty in this region. According to pro-Ptolemaic sources, including the Jewish ‘Tales of the Tobiads’, Cleopatra I, ‘the Syrian’, the first Cleopatra to rule Egypt, brought Palestine to the Ptolemies as part of her dowry, employing loyal Jews to collect the tax revenues.Footnote 85 In a sense, her descendant Cleopatra VII was continuing the practice of her ancestors.
From the testimony of Josephus and the world of Herod, I now turn to explore other sources of evidence bearing on the relationship between Cleopatra and Jews, based on documentary evidence from the Ptolemaic era and the testimony of Plutarch's biography of Mark Antony.Footnote 86
I An asylum decree for a Jewish place of prayer
Rare material evidence bearing on our subject appears in the form of a bilingual (Greek and Latin) marble plaque, on which is inscribed the grant of asylum by a Ptolemaic monarch to a Jewish place of prayer (Greek, proseuche) and the renewal of the grant ordered by ‘the queen and king’, who are almost certainly to be identified with Cleopatra VII and a co-ruler, probably her son Ptolemy XV Caesarion.Footnote 87 The royal grant of asylum to temples in Egypt represents a distinctive part of Ptolemaic domestic policy from the beginning of the first century bce until the fall of Cleopatra.Footnote 88 As Kent Rigsby shows in his comprehensive treatment of asylia documents from the Hellenistic world, Ptolemaic asylum decrees served to honour certain temples with the privilege of ‘religious immunity from the civil law’,Footnote 89 and at least in some cases to show royal favour towards powerful institutions that could promote crucial support for the monarchy. Judging by the number of decrees extant, the grant of asylia to religious institutions in Ptolemaic Egypt was a rather rare privilege.Footnote 90 Most of the extant evidence concerns temples of Egyptian gods, including institutions of ‘first rank’, such as the temple of Horus at Athribis in the southern Delta, distinguished by its fame and antiquity,Footnote 91 as well as the more modest temples of the Fayum.Footnote 92 From the reign of Cleopatra VII, we have the latest known example of the grant of asylum made to the temple of an Egyptian deity, the temple of Isis south of the city of Ptolemais in Upper Egypt.Footnote 93 Dated to year 6 of Cleopatra's rule (46 bce), following Julius Caesar's departure from Egypt and the birth of Cleopatra's son by Caesar, Caesarion (47 bce), the grant was issued at a very significant moment in the queen's political life: her first year in charge after the elimination of her brother Ptolemy XIII in the Alexandrian War, and a crucial period for building alliances for the future. As part of that strategy, the royal decree gives protection to a new Isis temple, built for the monarchy by Cleopatra's powerful ally Callimachos, close to Ptolemais, the Greek city founded by Ptolemy I to support the monarchy's interests in Upper Egypt.Footnote 94 By promoting the worship of the traditional gods of Egypt, Cleopatra continued the policies of her father, following a strategy of embracing Egyptian religion that goes back to the beginning of the Ptolemaic dynasty.
Much more unusual, based on what we know of Ptolemaic policy, is the grant of asylum for a Jewish proseuche, a ‘place of prayer’, preserved in a bilingual inscription of uncertain date and provenance, but which may, with good reason, be placed in the reign of Cleopatra VII. The royal command is given as follows:
(Greek). On the orders of the queen and king.
In place of the previous plaque concerning the dedication of the proseuche
(προσευχή) let the following be inscribed. King Ptolemy Euergetes
(proclaimed) the proseuche inviolate (ἄσυλον).
(Latin). The queen and king gave the order.Footnote 95
That the decree concerns a Jewish institution is not in doubt. The term proseuche means ‘prayer’, and by extension ‘place of prayer’, and in the latter sense, in ancient literary and documentary evidence, normally designates a Jewish place of worship.Footnote 96 The use of proseuche in this sense gives way only gradually in later centuries to the use of Greek synagoge, ‘place of assembly’, in Jewish communal contexts.Footnote 97 In the context of our evidence for Ptolemaic grants of asylia, this is the only known example of such a grant to a Jewish institution.
The decree is unique in another respect, as the only known witness to the renewal of an asylum decree in Ptolemaic Egypt. The royal order commands the renewal of an asylum grant made originally for a proseuche at the time of its dedication under ‘King Ptolemy Euergetes’. Two different monarchs may be in view here: Ptolemy III Euergetes (r. 246–221 bce) or Ptolemy VIII Euergetes II (r. 170–163, 145–116 bce). Since the dated evidence for the use of asylum decrees as an instrument of royal policy belongs to the later period of Ptolemaic rule, however, we are almost certainly dealing with Ptolemy VIII Euergetes II and therefore a latest possible date of 116 bce for the initial grant of asylum.Footnote 98 On this basis, the renewal may be seen as supplying rare and precious evidence for the continuity of a particular Jewish community in Egypt over a significant period of time.Footnote 99 Frustratingly, the identity or location of this community is not stated, a point to which we will return.
As for the date of the renewal of the grant of asylum, the decree is issued by order (προτάσσω/iusserunt) of ‘the queen and king’, βασίλισσα καὶ βασιλεùς, regina et rex. No names are given, but the unusual order of the royal titles, giving precedence to the queen, is matched in some of the official documents of powerful Ptolemaic queens as co-rulers with their children or siblings: in particular, Cleopatra III, widow of Ptolemy VIII, who ruled jointly with both her sons (Ptolemy IX and Ptolemy X) at different times until her assassination in 101 bce;Footnote 100 and Cleopatra VII, as co-ruler and official wife successively to her younger brothers Ptolemy XIII and XIV and from 44 to 30 bce as co-ruler with her son Ptolemy XV Caesarion.Footnote 101 Our inscription supplies no dates, but the use of Latin clearly points to the reign of Cleopatra VII, and the substantial presence in her kingdom from 47 bce onwards of a Latin-speaking, Roman military force to protect the queen and the interests of Rome as represented by Julius Caesar and, from 41 bce, by Mark Antony.Footnote 102
Of course, our decree relates to just one, unnamed proseuche, rather than to Jews in general. Theoretically, the decree could belong to any one of the multiple Jewish places of prayer known to have existed throughout Alexandria and the Egyptian countryside.Footnote 103 The exceptional character of the decree in its application to a Jewish proseuche, however, suggests the likelihood that this was no ordinary institution.Footnote 104 Might this then be identified with the ‘great proseuche’ of Alexandria, so large and prominent in Philo's time that the Alexandrian mob failed to destroy it?Footnote 105 A different place of origin is, however, indicated by the fact that the plaque turned up for sale in Cairo, not Alexandria, and that it was reportedly found in Lower Egypt.Footnote 106 In that context, Kent Rigsby makes a strong case for identifying the unnamed proseuche of the asylum decree with the Jewish temple of Onias at Leontopolis near Heliopolis in the Nile Delta, founded under the patronage of Ptolemy VI and Cleopatra II, the older siblings of Ptolemy VIII, the likely author of the original grant of asylum to the proseuche.Footnote 107 When dealing with a world that must be reconstructed from the survival of fragments and chance finds, great caution must of course be exercised in any attempt to draw conclusions based on linking one rare piece of evidence to another. But the hypothesis that Cleopatra VII singled out the temple of Onias for exceptional privileges has much to commend it. In scale, judging by Josephus's account(s), the Jewish foundation at Leontopolis might well have been considered a great temple, not only in size and importance,Footnote 108 but also in the prestige of its founder, Onias IV, descendant of the old Jerusalem high priesthood and a powerful supporter of the Ptolemaic monarchy.Footnote 109 From its beginnings, the Jewish settlement at Leontopolis repeatedly demonstrated its loyalty to the crown.Footnote 110 The founder Onias was probably one of the two Jewish commanders (Onias and Dositheos) to whom Ptolemy VI and Cleopatra II entrusted their army, as Josephus proudly reports in the Against Apion.Footnote 111 After the death of Ptolemy VI, the same Onias fought on the side of Cleopatra II in her military struggle against Ptolemy VIII to retain power.Footnote 112 In the next generation, Cleopatra III, daughter of Cleopatra II, relied on the military leadership of the sons of Onias IV in her war against her elder son, Ptolemy IX. Josephus quotes Strabo (a source with privileged access to information in Egypt in the first decade after the fall of Cleopatra) as confirming that ‘only the Jews of the district named for Onias remained faithful to her’ because of the queen's favour to her Jewish generals, ‘Chelkias and Ananias, sons of the Onias who had built the temple in the nome of Heliopolis’.Footnote 113 In the lifetime of Cleopatra VII, according to Josephus, the support of ‘the Jews from the so-called land of Onias’ (persuaded by Antipater, father of the future Herod the Great, and the authority of the Jerusalem high priest Hyrcanus) played an important role in the victory of Julius Caesar over the forces of Cleopatra's rival, Ptolemy XIII, in the course of the Alexandrian War (spring 47 bce).Footnote 114 Though Josephus does not say so, it follows that Jews from ‘the land of Onias’ played an important part in events that led to the restoration of Cleopatra VII as queen of Egypt.Footnote 115 The asylum decree may well reflect that context of a special relationship between the crown and the Jews of Leontopolis, and perhaps of Cleopatra's hopes of continued reliance on this powerful base of support outside Alexandria, as in the case of her patronage of the Isis temple near Ptolemais in the south.Footnote 116
Whether this decree originates with the Jews of Leontopolis or belongs to another Jewish place of worship in Egypt, other evidence points to the conclusion that the rule of Cleopatra VII did not deviate from the long-established practice of the Ptolemaic monarchs with regard to their official, publicly stated support for Jewish proseuchai. From the third century bce on, the Jews of Egypt dedicated their proseuchai ‘on behalf of (ὑπέρ)’ the royal family.Footnote 117 This custom, attested in diverse inscriptions and literary sources, adapted the practice known from non-Jewish temples in Egypt in using such dedications as a means of honouring the monarchs, promoting their image as pious rulers by associating them in the worship of the deity/ies, while refraining from any explicit ascription of divinity to the Ptolemies themselves.Footnote 118 Within the temples of Greek (non-Jewish) communities, the honorific dedication served, as Peter Fraser explains, as ‘a formula of loyalty, expressing the fact that the Greeks had a personal relationship with, and were therefore under the protection of the sovereign’.Footnote 119 Among Jews, the honorific dedication of a proseuche permitted public expression of loyalty towards the monarchy,Footnote 120 while at the same time not compromising their exclusive, ancestral commitment to the God of Israel, which permitted the worship of no other god.
The reign of Cleopatra VII is very likely the setting for the last known proseuche inscription of this kind.Footnote 121 Found among rubbish in modern Gabbari, a suburb in the south-west of Alexandria, a badly damaged plaque preserves the following words:
[On behalf] of the queen and king, for the great God who listens to prayer,
Alyp[os (made) the] prose[uche] in the 15th year, Me[cheir. . .]
[ὑπὲρ] βασ[ιλίσση]ς καὶ β[ασι]λέως θεῶι [με]γάλωι ἐ[πηκό]ωι (?) Ἄλυπ[ος τὴν] προσε[υχὴν] ἐπόει [?vacat] (ἔτους) ιε´ Με[χείρ. . .]Footnote 122
A date of 37 bce, the fifteenth year of Cleopatra's rule, is suggested by the sequence of royal titles, giving precedence to the queen (over Caesarion).Footnote 123 If this identification is correct, it offers a striking example of the declaration of loyalty to the monarchs by at least one group of Jews within the royal capital, in a momentous year for the politics of the Ptolemaic kingdom. At the same time, the dedication suggests the confidence of the Jews of this Alexandrian proseuche in the patronage and support of the queen and her co-ruler.Footnote 124 This was no doubt one of the many proseuchai which Philo describes as scattered throughout the city in the 30s ce.Footnote 125 Many, if not all, of those buildings will have been part of the landscape of Cleopatra's Alexandria. In his powerful denunciation of those who violated the proseuchai of Alexandria in 38 ce, Philo emphasises that no such violation ever took place in the Ptolemaic era. In the context of Roman-ruled Egypt, more than sixty years after the death of Cleopatra VII, Philo reflects on the stark contrast between the respectful treatment of the proseuchai under all the Ptolemaic monarchs and the disastrous situation in his own Alexandria. According to Philo, the proseuchai of Alexandria's Jews became the target for accusations of Jewish disloyalty and impiety towards the emperor Gaius; in 38 ce, as Philo reports, most of the proseuchai were destroyed with great violence or transformed, with images of Gaius ‘the god’, into shrines for the worship of the emperor. Philo condemns these actions as an illegal innovation, designed only to inflict suffering on the Jews by their enemies in Alexandria. In this perspective, the rule of Cleopatra and her predecessors provides the model of appropriate monarchic piety with regard to the proseuchai. Philo's testimony serves to confirm the continuation of Ptolemaic policy under Cleopatra VII in permitting Jews to dedicate their places of prayer ‘on behalf of’ the monarchs, without imposing on the Jews the worship of the Ptolemaic rulers themselves as gods.Footnote 126
II Plutarch, Cleopatra and the Jews
The final group of evidence to be considered comes from Plutarch's Life of Antony. A younger contemporary of Josephus, Plutarch is of first importance as a source for many details of the life of Cleopatra VII, including some intriguing passages bearing on the question of the queen's relations with individual Jews. The task of interpreting this version of Cleopatra is by no means straightforward. In his account of Mark Antony, Plutarch's portrait of Cleopatra as enslaving and bewitching Antony is clearly shaped by the hostile perspective of Octavian's propaganda. Plutarch's Antony is the story of a great man who went wrong through lack of self-discipline and submission to the control of others, including his wife Fulvia, whose unwomanly desire ‘to rule a ruler’ helped Cleopatra by establishing ‘the female domination (γυναικοκρατία)’ of Antony.Footnote 127 According to Plutarch, Antony's passion for Cleopatra represents the ‘final evil (τελευταῖον κακόν)’ in the story of the Roman's downfall.Footnote 128 Plutarch's account is nevertheless valuable not only for confirming the enduring power of the negative propaganda against Antony and Cleopatra, but also for what it offers by way of alternative viewpoints, including reports by those who apparently witnessed first-hand the activities and appearance of the queen.Footnote 129 To the last category belongs the following well-known anecdote about Cleopatra's multi-lingual skills, which, among other things, are said to have included her ability to speak to ‘Hebrews’ without an interpreter:Footnote 130
There was pleasure even in the sound of her voice, and her tongue, like an instrument of many strings, she could easily turn to whatever kind of language she wished, so that with barbarians she very rarely conversed through an interpreter, but gave her answers to most of them herself and in her own person, whether Ethiopians, Trôgodytes, Hebrews (Hebraioi), Arabians, Syrians, Medes or Parthians. It is said that she knew the languages of many other peoples too, though the monarchs before her did not even trouble themselves to learn the Egyptian language, and some of them had even abandoned speaking Macedonian.Footnote 131
This statement finds its place within Plutarch's spectacular description of Antony's first meeting with Cleopatra at Tarsus (41 bce), to which the triumvir had summoned the queen to test her loyalties in the context of the struggle for power in Rome after the assassination of Julius Caesar.Footnote 132 Here, however, Plutarch's interest is less in the politics than the impact of Cleopatra on Antony's mental state. Thus, according to Plutarch, this meeting serves to explain how Antony was ‘taken prisoner (ἁλίσκεται)’;Footnote 133 how Cleopatra ‘overpowered (ἥρπασεν)’ him, hurrying him away from Tarsus and his duties in Rome to join her in Alexandria.Footnote 134
How then to explain this captivating power over Antony? In our passage, Plutarch's rationale appeals to the testimony of those who saw and heard Cleopatra. In terms of the queen's appearance, Plutarch cites others as confirming (‘as they say’) that Cleopatra's beauty was not wholly ‘incomparable (οὐ πάνυ δυσπαράβλητον)’;Footnote 135 on the other hand, he reports (‘it is said’) that her overpowering attractiveness lay rather in her remarkable interaction with all those she encountered.Footnote 136 While Plutarch's primary purpose in this context is to explain Cleopatra's power over Antony, the description of the queen, from unnamed sources, may offer a rare insight into the ‘real’ Cleopatra, at work in her personal diplomacy with Egypt's neighbouring peoples; it also offers significant evidence about Cleopatra's identification with Egypt, with the strong suggestion that she was fluent in Egyptian, the language of the vast majority of her subjects.Footnote 137
In Plutarch's report, the list of ‘barbarians’ (non-Greek-speaking peoples) with whom the queen is said to have spoken corresponds to regions in which the Ptolemaic monarchy had long-standing interests; these peoples represent the importance of diplomacy for the queen, particularly on behalf of Antony and his campaigns in the East.Footnote 138 As Duane Roller observes, the details may also be indicative of Cleopatra's intellectual interests: the learned ruler represents an ideal of Hellenistic monarchy (male),Footnote 139 and one that Cleopatra seems to have embraced if we follow Roller's carefully constructed evaluation of the young queen as ‘a remarkably educated person’.Footnote 140
That Cleopatra is said to have spoken with ‘Hebraioi (Hebrews)’ in their own language has been interpreted as a sign of her favour towards Jews.Footnote 141 That judgement goes beyond the evidence of Plutarch's text, which confirms (if we believe the report) only that the queen had taken the trouble to learn enough of their language to speak directly with ‘Hebrews’ and a number of other barbarian peoples. It does not prove the queen's favour or particular friendship towards any particular group, though it at least suggests that she sought alliances with these peoples.
What Plutarch means here by Hebraioi is not clear-cut and deserves brief comment.Footnote 142 Elsewhere in Plutarch's writings, he refers only once to the Hebraioi, their ‘secret rituals’ a topic of one of several questions about the practices and beliefs of the Jews, discussed at a symposium (narrated by Plutarch, who presents himself as participant) whose participants appear neither positive nor particularly well informed about the culture of the Jews.Footnote 143 Elements of their description of Jewish practices are clearly derived from a source, and that same source may be responsible for the use of the term Hebraioi.Footnote 144 In the same context, Plutarch's symposiasts also refer to the Ioudaioi and their customs,Footnote 145 and it is clear that both terms are used here interchangeably to refer to a people (Hebraioi or Ioudaioi) defined by religious practices and beliefs, though not by territory.Footnote 146
In the case of Cleopatra's ‘Hebrews’, the geographical shape of Plutarch's report (almost a half circle around Egypt) probably points to Jews from Herod's kingdom. A good number of the Jews of Judea, including Herod and his courtiers, would have spoken Greek. But since Plutarch specifies Cleopatra's prowess in speaking with ‘barbarians’, conversation with ‘Hebrews’ must mean Aramaic or Hebrew. As other evidence confirms, the language of the ‘Hebrews’ in the Graeco-Roman period could include Hebrew or Aramaic, and the context does not usually reveal which language is meant. Aramaic and Hebrew were both spoken in first-century Judea and the wider Palestinian region.Footnote 147 If Aramaic was the language in which Cleopatra addressed certain ‘Hebrews’, it was also the language in which she likely spoke with others including Syrians. And if Cleopatra really could speak to ‘Hebrews’ in their own language, she could do more than is usually presumed for most of the Jews of Ptolemaic Egypt in which few traces of the use of Hebrew or Aramaic survive. In any case, Plutarch's evidence for Cleopatra's conversations with Hebraioi adds to the broader picture of what we know of Cleopatra's personal interactions with Herod, as ally of Mark Antony,Footnote 148 and with Hasmonaean members of his family by marriage.
Eiras and Cleopatra
Plutarch also supplies important evidence that allows at least for the possibility that one of Cleopatra's most trusted companions was a Jew. The issue rests on the question of the identity of Eiras, one of the two women who, according to Plutarch's Antony, accompanied Cleopatra in her last days after the Battle of Actium and who died with the queen.Footnote 149 Plutarch first mentions Eiras in words attributed directly to Octavian:
Caesar (Octavian) said in addition that Antony had been drugged and was not even master of himself, and that the Romans were carrying on war with Mardion the eunuch, and Potheinos, and Eiras, Cleopatra's hairdresser, and Charmion, by (all of whom) the principal affairs of the government were managed.Footnote 150
Octavian's reported words stress the humiliation of Antony, no longer a man, no longer in control of himself, but the slave of a foreign government under the misrule of eunuchs and women. There is good reason to think that such images of Antony and his relationship to Cleopatra's court indeed originated with Octavian and his supporters, in the context of the campaign from the mid-30s bce onwards to justify the elimination of Antony. A strong emphasis on Antony as the ‘slave’ of the ‘Egyptian woman’ and the unmanly, female character of Egypt's government, whose destruction is the duty of loyal Romans, pervades the sources for Octavian's war of words against Antony and Cleopatra. We see this powerfully exemplified in Dio's report of Octavian's arguments for war on the eve of the Battle of Actium,Footnote 151 or in the celebration of Octavian's victory by the poet Horace who makes Antony ‘a Roman (you future generations will refuse to believe it!) enslaved to a woman (emancipatus feminae)’, a soldier who ‘can bear to serve a lot of shrivelled eunuchs (spadonibus servire rugosis potest)’.Footnote 152 Writing as a friend of the prefect of Roman Egypt in the 20s bce, the geographer Strabo writes approvingly of the fact that, in contrast with the years of Antony's subservience to Cleopatra, Egypt is now ruled ‘by prudent men (ὑπὸ σωφρόνων ἀνδρῶν)’.Footnote 153 Certainly, Plutarch reflects the influence of Octavian's propaganda when he places the description of Cleopatra's unmanly court in prime position within the arguments presented by Octavian in Rome for war against Cleopatra (32 bce), with the goal of removing from Antony ‘the authority which he had surrendered to a woman’.Footnote 154 Whether Octavian is also Plutarch's source for identifying Eiras and the other names of Cleopatra's retinue we do not know; it is more likely that Plutarch drew such details from a different source with close knowledge of the Alexandrian court.Footnote 155
The description of Eiras as ‘hairdresser (κουρεύτρια)’ is suggestive of low status, marked by a job associated with slaves or freedwomen. For Ptolemaic queens, with their power hair and melon coiffures, the hairdresser was an essential and influential role.Footnote 156 But in this context, ‘hairdresser’ might be intended as a term of abuse, not a real job description,Footnote 157 – serving to underline the construction of the unmanly, servile character of Cleopatra's followers, a rabble that has turned the natural order of male-led government upside down.
Eiras is also named by Plutarch as one of the ‘two women’ who accompanied Cleopatra in her imprisonment in Alexandria, under Roman guard, and who joined the queen in a self-inflicted death in her tomb in August 30 bce.Footnote 158 In Plutarch's account of those final days, Eiras and Charmion play a crucial role in helping Cleopatra to avoid humiliation in Octavian's triumph, and to die a noble death of her own making. The high status of these women is indicated by Plutarch's note that their bodies received ‘honourable interment’ on the orders of Octavian.Footnote 159 If we follow Plutarch, Eiras and Charmion were Cleopatra's most trusted and devoted people. Their loyalty is enshrined in the words of the dying Charmion, as she responds defiantly to the Roman soldiers of Octavian: that the queen's death was ‘excellently done (κάλλιστα) and befitting the woman who was the descendant of so many kings’.Footnote 160
As for the possible association of Eiras with Jewish identity, the issue rests on the significance of her name.Footnote 161 The volumes of the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names published thus far do not include Εἰρᾶς as a female name.Footnote 162 Most of the (currently meagre) evidence for parallels comes from Egypt, to the extent that Εἰρᾶς may be designated a ‘Graeco-Egyptian’ name,Footnote 163 attested by the following examples:
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(i) The genitive form Εἰρᾶτος in a Herakleopolis papyrus of ce 224.Footnote 164
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(ii) A possible variant of the name in Εἴρα (or Εἰρᾶ?) Εἰκαβαθίου, documented in the Fayum in the sixth–seventh centuries ce.Footnote 165
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(iii) Closer to the era of Cleopatra VII, the epitaph of Εἰρᾶς θυγάτηρ, ‘Eiras the daughter’, from the necropolis at Tell el-Yehoudieh, associated with the Jewish settlement of Onias at Leontopolis.Footnote 166 Though the inscription includes no date, it must belong to the period of settlement between Onias's foundation in the mid-second century bce to the presumed end of the settlement as a consequence of the revolt under Trajan (ce 115–117).Footnote 167 Here, Eiras the daughter is commemorated in a modest epitaph, together with ‘Tryphaina the mother’, placed over two burial niches.
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(iv) Finally, from the Akeldama burial caves, south of Jerusalem, an ossuary of the first centuries bce/ce contains the bones of a woman commemorated by two brief lines: eipatoΣ | ΣeΛeyk, ‘eiras’ | ‘(daughter of?) seleuk[os]’, or ‘from seleuk[ia]’.Footnote 168 As indicated by the inscriptions, Akeldama's burial caves seem to have been used by interrelated families, with most names recorded in Greek, others in a Jewish script or in bilingual records.Footnote 169 In the case of Eiras, it is not certain whether the second, incomplete word refers to her patris, or (as is more likely, based on the use of patronymics in the associated ossuaries) to her father.Footnote 170 If Seleuk- does not refer to Seleucia in Syria (there are two candidates for this location), a Syrian origin for Eiras and other family members buried at Akeldama is suggested but not proved by a reference to Apamea as the home of one of the deceased,Footnote 171 and by the predominant use of Greek in the inscriptions, characteristic of other Jewish inscriptions from Syria but not generally of Jerusalem ossuaries.Footnote 172 Certainly, the Eiras buried at Akeldama is likely to have come originally from outside Judaea; whether she lived at some point in Jerusalem or simply had her bones transported to Judaea is unknown.Footnote 173
On the basis of this evidence, the case for identifying Εἰρᾶς as a name strongly suggestive of Jewish origins depends on several factors. First, while the name is rarely documented in the ancient world, Εἰρᾶς is attested in two contexts associated with Jews, in Egypt at Tell el-Yehoudieh, and in Judaea, apparently as part of a diaspora Jewish burial site in the vicinity of Jerusalem. Furthermore, a distinctively Jewish association with the name Εἰρᾶς is also indicated by the likelihood, as demonstrated in the authoritative analysis of Heinz Heinen, that Εἰρᾶς is a hypocoristic form (the short form of a name, typically used in intimate circles) of Eirene, a name generally widespread from the Hellenistic period on, and well documented among the Jews of Egypt and elsewhere.Footnote 174 As Heinen puts it, ‘The popularity of the name Eirene among the Jewish population of Ptolemaic Egypt is a fact.’Footnote 175 In the Jewish context, Eirene (Greek: εἰρήνη, ‘peace’) may have been used as the equivalent of the Hellenised Hebrew name Salome (Hebrew: Shalom, ‘Peace’), the most popular female name in Graeco-Roman Palestine.Footnote 176 The strongest case for identifying Cleopatra's companion Eiras as a Jew is based on the rarity of this name formation, probably a hypocoristic form of Eirene, and its appearance, despite that rarity, in distinctively Jewish contexts. New evidence may transform that picture. Following Heinen's cautious findings, the evidence does not prove that Cleopatra's Eiras was a Jew,Footnote 177 but her name is certainly suggestive of Jewish origins,Footnote 178 and this suggestion is further strengthened by the Akeldama inscription not yet available at the time of Heinen's study. Certainly, the context of Cleopatra's rule, her connections to the Hasmoneans of Judaea, and the evidence for her good relations with Jewish groups within Egypt, allows for the possibility that one of her most trusted companions might have been a Jew. Was Eiras perhaps a Jew from a high-ranking family in the Jewish colony of Leontopolis? The presence of Jews in the Ptolemaic court is not so unusual in the context of the practice of Cleopatra's predecessors, particularly from the time of the earlier Cleopatras, when the bond of loyalty was forged between the Jewish priest Onias IV and his followers with Ptolemy VI Philometor and Cleopatra II, and with their daughter, Cleopatra III, the great-grandmother of Cleopatra VII.Footnote 179
III Conclusion
Any attempt to get back to the realities of the last Cleopatra must contend with a subject profoundly obscured by the propaganda of her enemies and the instrumentalisation of Cleopatra as the Roman ‘other’. In the case of Josephus's testimony, I suggest that – despite his noble purpose, the exoneration of the Jews under Roman rule – he has not served truth well in the case of Cleopatra. There is no good evidence for Cleopatra as persecutor of the Jews. Indeed, Josephus gives us glimpses of another Cleopatra, offering refuge to members of the Jewish aristocracy among the Hasmoneans, as they sought survival away from Herod. Cleopatra may have learned Hebrew or Aramaic; among her supporters, someone thought it worthy of record that the queen held conversations, in person, with ‘Hebrews’. And perhaps among those very few who stayed loyal to Cleopatra at the end, the courtier Eiras may have been a Jew.
But what perhaps speaks most powerfully against the negative tradition about Cleopatra and the Jews is our evidence for her patronage and protection of the fundamental Jewish institution of the prayer-house. After Cleopatra, we have no more decrees of asylum, no dedications of prayer-houses to Roman emperors; this phenomenon simply disappears with the Roman conquest of Egypt. When Philo the Jew from Alexandria despaired at the destruction of his city's Jewish prayer-houses, he insisted that nothing like this had ever happened under Ptolemaic rule.Footnote 180 Philo does not hold back in a fight; but, despite the world of Augustan propaganda around him, he never condemns Cleopatra or her Ptolemaic predecessors. His is a voice from within ancient Alexandria, from a man born in the decade after Actium. Philo's voice has the ring of authenticity and it deserves our attention.
