The 50-odd-year period that stretched from the death of Cleopatra III to the rise of Cleopatra VII was Egypt’s period of terminal decline. In 101 BC, the feckless Ptolemy X Alexander I, having murdered his co-regent mother Cleopatra III, sat on the throne, generally disliked by everyone, especially the Romans who regarded him as a corpulent waste of space. The one thing Ptolemy X had in his favour was his brilliant young niece-wife Cleopatra V Berenice III, who was the antidote to Ptolemy’s ineptitude.
Cleopatra V Berenice III
Very little evidence has survived about the nature of their reign, but there is just enough to hazard a guess about the couple’s power dynamics. Cleopatra Berenice may not have wielded much personal power at first, acting more as a basilissa-consort than co-ruler during the initial period of their joint reign. But over time she grew in importance and visibility, especially after she bore the king a daughter sometime around 100-95 BC. By the mid- to late-90s BC, she had given birth to a second child, attested in an inscription from Philae which suggests that the king and queen visited the temple with their children.
Curiously, Cleopatra Berenice is absent from many inscriptions and documents where we might expect to find her. Four Greek inscriptions from the Fayum, for instance, which record donations and dedications made on behalf of the king to the crocodile deity Sobek in the 90s BC, fail to mention her at all. This is a stark departure from the regular inclusion of royal women in Greek inscriptions from the reigns of Ptolemy VI and ‘Potbelly’ (Ptolemy VIII), and even from Cleopatra III’s co-regencies with her two sons. Why was Cleopatra Berenice overlooked in these documents? Was Ptolemy X trying to marginalise the public image of his popular wife? Perhaps, although sadly the epigraphic sample is too small to be sure, but Ptolemy X seemed to have had the remarkable ability to alienate nearly all the constituent groups of his kingdom. His profound unpopularity among the populace of Alexandria, for instance, can be juxtaposed against the city’s deeply held affection for Cleopatra Berenice, a detail even mentioned by Cicero in his (now-fragmentary) work De rege Alexandrino: he notes that she was ‘dear to her people and well-established in their affections.’ Such reports fuel the inkling that Cleopatra Berenice was more popular than the king, despite his efforts to ostracise her.
