Ghost on the Throne - James S. Romm [53]
Ptolemy already had two remarkable women by his side. For years he had kept a famous mistress, the beautiful Athenian courtesan Thais. According to one account, it was Thais who, while drinking and carousing with Ptolemy and other generals in the Persian palace at Persepolis, impishly suggested that they all set the place on fire. Alexander, drunk as well, took the dare and threw a torch at the roof timbers of the palace, starting a conflagration that left it a ravaged shell (the ruin still standing today in southern Iran). Perhaps the fire really did start this way, or perhaps, as a different account suggests, it was a deliberate move by a sober Alexander. But even if Thais was the instigator, she had not thereby lost Ptolemy’s affections. The couple had three children born during the Asian campaign, two boys and a girl, now settled with them in their new home in Egypt.
Ptolemy also had a wife, the Greco-Persian noblewoman Artacama, given to him by Alexander at the mass wedding in Susa the previous year. She was the daughter of Artabazus, a great Persian warrior-chief, and sister of Barsine, Alexander’s former mistress and mother of his son Heracles. By marriage to Artacama, Ptolemy had been taken into Alexander’s extended family, and into the hybrid Euro-Asian elite destined to rule the brave new world.
It was an odd combination of consorts, a highborn Persian princess and a high-priced Athenian courtesan, but then Ptolemy was a man for all seasons, versatile and rangy. Alexander had given him a variety of commands, diverse and sensitive missions, and he had always succeeded. Not by nature a military man—at least he played no major role in the Asian invasion during its first five years—he had learned the art of war from those around him. Perhaps he did not have as much boldness as Perdiccas, nor as much authority as Craterus, nor as much cleverness as Eumenes the Greek. But he had a balance of all three qualities that was stronger than any single one by itself.
Ptolemy was going to need his versatility now that he had arrived in Egypt. His new satrapy was a land of strange and powerful religious passions. In his capital city of Memphis, a glittering temple housed a black-and-white bull calf worshipped as a divine being called Apis. Worship of animal deities was peculiar to Egypt and often hard for foreigners to stomach; once a Persian king had brutally stabbed the Apis in the thigh, calling it a silly god worthy of silly people. The beast later contracted sepsis and died. Alexander had taken the opposite approach: upon entering Egypt, he offered sacrifices at Memphis to gods that conspicuously included the Apis bull. Ptolemy had learned much on that occasion about adaptability, tolerance, and openness to change.
Ptolemy was by nature a tolerant person, not charismatic like Alexander, but reasonable and fair-minded. In years to come his benevolence would earn him the epithet Soter, or Savior, by which he has been known ever since. And the Egyptians desperately needed a tolerant ruler, for in the past few years they had once again, as in the days of the Persians, been oppressed by a cruel foreigner—in this case a conniving Greek named Cleomenes.
Appointed by Alexander as finance minister in Egypt, Cleomenes had come to control all the levers of power and had also become spectacularly wealthy. A record survives of the gangland-type schemes by which he amassed his riches. He extorted money by taking away age-old priestly privileges and then selling them back; he manipulated the price of grain, Egypt’s chief export, by cornering the market; he shook down the Egyptians by thuggish bullying. Once, when sailing along the Nile in a region where crocodiles were sacred, Cleomenes lost a slave to an attack by one of these beasts. He promptly declared a roundup and slaughter of crocodiles. The local priests averted this sacrilege only by bringing Cleomenes heaps of gold. He had held their very gods