Cleopatra the Great Read Free

she stared through the hazy crystal glass into the face of the mummified god. It was well known that his blood ran through her veins, and although she was a mere seventeen years old he had been even younger when he led the first of his military campaigns which ultimately conquered the known world. By reviving his empire to its former greatness, she would prove herself his true heir.
    As light from the flickering torches of the burial chamber hit the crystal coffin, Alexander’s distinctive features would have been plainly visible as she contemplated past and future. Although the man before her had been dead for almost three hundred years, the skill of the embalmers had ensured his permanent physical presence, while the rites of mummification had reunited his soul with his body according to ancient lore in which he himself had so passionately believed.
    The greatest prize of ancient times, his body had been fought over by successors unable to function without him until eventually he had been laid to rest here in Alexandria in a splendid tomb close to the palace. Following Egypt’s long tradition of venerating royal remains he was worshipped as Alexander Ktistes, ‘Founder of the City’, whose body contained the city’s ‘daimon’ or spirit attended by its own priesthood. He was the focus of the reigning dynasty and its source of inspiration, and his royal descendants who led these rites were incredibly proud of their shared blood — something which Cleopatra felt more keenly than any of her predecessors.
    Although her plans to take sole possession of the throne would have been easier to implement if she too had been male, she was fully aware that many other women had ruled Egypt before her. Indeed, from the fabled female pharaohs of ancient times to the women of her own dynasty her half-sister had ruled as sole monarch until their deposed father had regained his throne and ordered her immediate execution. By a very early age, Cleopatra knew all too well that within the royal house of the Ptolemies one’s closest family were the most dangerous enemies of all. And at that moment, the main obstacles to her own ambition were two small boys and a young girl, her remaining siblings, who thoroughly despised their elder sister. Although all of them had been considered divine since birth, she had always been their father’s favourite and, prior to his death, he had named her his heir alongside the elder of her two brothers as family tradition dictated. Yet her decision to seize sole control and ignore the ten-year-old boy and the ambitious advisers who controlled him meant that even now they were busily plotting her downfall.
    If life inside the labyrinthine palace with its intrigues of cliques and courtiers posed a constant hazard for all four children, life beyond its fortified walls was little better. The volatile citizens of Alexandria had repeatedly demonstrated their feelings for previous rulers through rebellion, revolution and regicide, on several occasions storming the palace and removing the royals by force. Only seven years earlier they had driven Cleopatra’s father from his throne; his eventual return, with Rome’s military backing, had drained most of the contents of Egypt’s treasury. And given the Alexandrians’ hatred of Roman intervention, not to mention the money it was costing them, only the permanent presence of Roman troops within the palace had been able to guarantee the survival of the newly restored king.
    With its forces already in place, Rome was simply biding its time before Egypt fell into its hands as easily as the rest of the Mediterranean kingdoms of Alexander’s once mighty empire had done — Macedonia and Greece in 146 BC , Cyrene in 96 BC , Asia Minor and Syria in 65 BC and finally Cyprus in 58 BC . And following the recent death of the Egyptian king during a partial solar eclipse, surely a most terrible omen, all that stood between mighty