Arsinoe II Philadelphus

Hellenistic queen

• Born: c. 316 b.c.e.
• Birthplace: Alexandria, Egypt
• Died: July 20, 270 b.c.e.
• Place of death: Alexandria, Egypt

A thrice-married queen, respectively of Thrace, Macedonia, and Egypt, Arsinoe was one of the first women in the ancient Mediterranean region to be deified within her lifetime.

Early Life

Arsinoe II Philadelphus (ar-SIH-no-ay fil-uh-DEHL-fuhs), the daughter of Ptolemy Soter and Berenice, was married about 300-299 b.c.e. by her father to one of Alexander the Great’s generals, Lysimachus, who had become king of Thrace (r. 323-281), northern Asia Minor (r. 301-281), and Macedonia (r. 285-281). Because she cannot have been much younger than fifteen at the time of her first marriage, her birth may be dated around 316-315. Nothing is known of her childhood before her wedding. It would seem a mistake to believe the ancient reports that the old king married Arsinoe out of love or that he separated from his Persian wife Amastris in order to marry Arsinoe. Lysimachus is not known to have married additional women in the remaining two decades of his life. With Arsinoe, the king had three sons born in a span of about five years: Ptolemy, Lysimachus, and Philip. He reportedly had more than ten children with other women.

Life’s Work

When the Persian princess Amastris was murdered by her own sons (293-289? b.c.e.), Arsinoe was able to gain territory from Lysimachus in Pontus (later Anatolia) that had belonged to the princess, such as the cities Heraclea, Tius, and Amastris. It is said that in Heraclea, Arsinoe had one Heraclides of Cyme govern with a strong hand. Lysimachus later granted her other cities and founded or renamed cities in her honor. Ephesus was renamed Arsinoea after Lysimachus recaptured the city from Demetrius Poliorcetes in 289-288. In fact, coins from this period until the mid-third century b.c.e. seem to represent Arsinoe as the city goddess. If so, they represent some of the earliest coinage to depict a deified woman in the ancient world. Another city, Aetolian Conopa, was renamed in Arsinoe’s honor. Although the Greek historian Strabo, writing more than two centuries later, appears to date the occasion to the time when Arsinoe was married to her brother Ptolemy II (as his second wife after his marriage with Arsinoe I), the city’s proximity to Lysimachea has led some scholars to believe that the refoundation occurred during Lysimachus’s lifetime, about 285-284. Inscriptions from Delos not only demonstrate political ties between Thrace and the island but also reveal the assimilation of Arsinoe with Agathe Tyche (the goddess of good fortune). Such public display of honor for a royal wife was exceptional for the times and gives clear indication of Arsinoe’s position among the wives at the Thracian court.

As the latest of Lysimachus’s wives, Arsinoe was understandably afraid that her children would be passed over in favor of Agathocles, who seemed to have been his father’s preferred heir. Possibly her jealousy was fueled even more when her older half sister, Lysandra, was married to Agathocles in 294. Arsinoe’s position was complicated further still around 285-284, when her husband Lysimachus and her father, Ptolemy I, wished to renew their ties and Lysimachus’s daughter, also called Arsinoe (and known as Arinsoe I), was married to Ptolemy’s son Ptolemy II Philadelphus (Arsinoe’s full brother), the newly appointed Lagid heir.

Pausanias offers the rather dramatic detail that Arsinoe now contrived to seduce Agathocles in an effort to secure the positions of her own children. Pausanias maintains that Arsinoe’s advances were unrequited. When she eventually conspired against Agathocles, her motive may simply have been to remove the threat to her own ambition. Proclaiming, one assumes, that he had tried to seduce her, she convinced Lysimachus to have Agathocles killed. Arsinoe II’s eldest son, Ptolemy, who had most to gain from the death of his elder half brother, may very well have executed the murder. It is of interest that about the same time he erected a statue of his mother in the Greek city of Thebes, on behalf of his father. After the assassination of her husband, Lysandra immediately fled with her children and her full brothers Ptolemy and Meleager to the court of King Seleucus I Nicator in Syrian Antioch.

The Syrian king subsequently used Lysimachus’s nefarious crime to further his own case against the Thracian king, whose territory in Asia Minor encroached on Seleucus’s holdings. Lysimachus’s allies abandoned him, subject cities might even have been revolting against him, and now Seleucus declared war on him. When their armies met at Corupedium in Lydia, the old general Lysimachus, seventy or eighty years of age, died in battle (281). Arsinoe had stayed behind in the city named after her, Arsinoea-Ephesus. When Lysimachus’s troops defected and more cities came over to Seleucus, Arsinoe was no longer safe. The Greek scholar Polyaenus (second century c.e.) narrates the stratagem by which she managed to escape the Seleucid forces: She slipped out of the city to the shore dressed in rags, with her face besmeared, and while she sailed off to Macedonia, a maid dressed in royal robes was mistaken for Arsinoe and slain. Arsinoe secured herself in Cassandrea, where she gathered a mercenary army with her immense wealth.

In the meantime (late summer, 281), Arsinoe’s half brother Ptolemy (not to be confused with her full brother or her eldest son)—who would receive the surname Ceraunus (“Thunderbolt”) for his violent character—had stabbed Seleucus to death, allegedly to avenge the death of Lysimachus. He then appeared before the army and proclaimed himself king of Macedonia and Thrace. Soon he advanced to Cassandrea and, it is said, feigning to act out of love, Ptolemy Ceraunus offered to marry his half sister Arsinoe, to declare her queen of Macedonia and Thrace, and to adopt her children. The Roman historian Justin (third century c.e.) provides an epitome of Pompeius Trogus that gives a substantial, though dramatized, description of the ceremony in the presence of the assembled army. Arsinoe was proclaimed queen, and she invited Ptolemy Ceraunus into Cassandrea, where the celebration was continued with a banquet for the entire population.

The marriage with Lysimachus’s widow could have provided Ceraunus the leverage to legitimize his claim to the Thracian throne. Nevertheless, his immediate concern was to deprive Arsinoe’s children of their claim to the same throne. He ordered his troops to seize the city’s citadel and to kill her sons, who fled to their mother. Arsinoe’s eldest son, Ptolemy, mistrusting Ceraunus, had already fled to the Illyrian king, Monunius. According to Justin’s sensationalist account, Arsinoe’s younger sons, Lysimachus and Philip, were slaughtered on her lap.

Ceraunus was soon deprived of his kingdom when a Celtic army attacked Macedonia. He engaged the Celts in battle, but when the elephant on which he rode was wounded, he was captured and killed in early 279 b.c.e. The Celts carried his head affixed on a spear as they pillaged Macedonia—“as he had deserved,” Justin added. Arsinoe’s eldest son, Ptolemy, tried in vain to gain power during the period of anarchy in Macedonia. The kingdom would ultimately fall to the Antigonids in 277-276. Eventually, Ptolemy and his descendants would govern the Ptolemaic domain in Lycian Telmessus until 190 b.c.e.

Arsinoe had to flee in exile once more and found refuge on the island of Samothrace. In her honor a rotunda was built, the largest circular building of its time, known as the Arsinoeum. Here, “Queen Arsinoe, daughter of King Ptolemy, wife of King Lysimachus,” set up an inscription, “as a vow to the Great Gods” of Samothrace. She left the island, in all likelihood still in 279, for her brother’s palace at Alexandria. If her life at the Thracian court reads like a tragedy—seducing her stepson like Phaedra, witnessing the murder of her children like Clytemnestra—in Egypt her life would take on mythic proportions—marrying her brother like Hera, being worshiped as Aphrodite. At the royal court in Alexandria, Arsinoe’s full brother Ptolemy II had been living with his wife, Arsinoe I, the daughter of Lysimachus, since their marriage in 285 or 283. This Arsinoe had borne the king three children, Ptolemy (who would eventually succeed his father), Lysimachus, and Berenice. Little else is known about Arsinoe I but that she was supposedly discovered in conspiracy and afterward banished to Koptos (now Qeft) in Upper Egypt. She evidently continued to live there in comfort and liberty, for a court official commemorated her with an honorary inscription. Perhaps Ptolemy II’s first wife fell victim to his sister’s ambition, but her exile did not involve a formal repudiation.

Soon Ptolemy and his full sister Arsinoe II married and celebrated their wedding with public pomp (commemorated by the poet Callimachus). One can only speculate who instigated this unprecedented violation of ancient customs. The date of the wedding is not known either but seems to have taken place before 274-273, when the Pithom stele refers to Arsinoe as queen, wife, and sister of Ptolemy II. Whether in mock or as flattery, their sibling marriage occasioned comparison to Zeus’s union with his sister and spouse, Hera. Ancient authors believed Ptolemy and Arsinoe followed Egyptian traditions, but little evidence is found for full sibling marriage in Pharaonic times. As such close endogamy certainly breached Greco-Macedonian mores, it is all the more remarkable that Arsinoe received the cultic epitheton Philadelphus (“Who Loves Her Brother”), which also assimilated her with the Egyptian goddess Isis, sister and spouse of Osiris. Together, Arsinoe and Ptolemy were worshiped as the Theoi Adelphoi (“Sibling Gods”) after 272-271. At Alexandria their cult was incorporated into that of the deified Alexander the Great. The office of the cult’s eponymous priesthood (used in dating formulae), the highest of the country, was held by prominent individuals, such as army officers, court advisers, and members of the royal family.

Because of the unfortunate scarcity of sources for the last decade of her life, Arsinoe’s political influence at the Ptolemaic court is difficult to assess—even if one may assume it, based on her character. According to the Pithom stele, Arsinoe accompanied the king during his campaign in 274-273 to defend the border of the Ptolemaic Empire against the Seleucid Antiochus I. As a poem by Theocritus reveals, she evidently promoted the cult of the fertility god Adonis with public festivals at the royal palace and elsewhere. In classical Athens this festival had been exclusively for women and had been derided by men, but Arsinoe raised its prestige with her patronage. The queen’s care for Adonis also allowed for comparison with Aphrodite, Adonis’s lover. Perhaps while he held office as priest of the Sibling Gods, admiral Callicrates established the cult of Arsinoe-Aphrodite Zephyritis-Cypris on Cape Zephyreum, east of Alexandria (commemorated in Hellenistic poetry). Additional evidence for her influence may be gleaned from an Attic decree that states that she supported preparations for the Chremonidean War (266-261). Probably for this reason, the Athenians erected statues of Arsinoe and Ptolemy in front of the Odeum.

After her death in July of 270, Arsinoe’s popularity continued in many forms of posthumous veneration. Callimachus composed a poem on the apotheosis of Arsinoe. An individual eponymous priesthood, the canephorus (“basket-carrier”) of Arsinoe Philadelphus, was added to the cult of Alexander the Great and the Sibling Gods by at least 268. Heavy silver and gold coins were issued for about 150 years, featuring her deified portrait on the obverse and a double horn of plenty on the reverse, with the legend “Of Arsinoe Philadelphus.” As synnaos theos (“temple-sharing deity”) she was the first of the Lagid Dynasty to be incorporated into the local worship of Greek and Egyptian deities throughout the country down to Nubia. A temple (Arsinoeum) and an annual religious festival (Arsinoea) were established in her honor at Alexandria. Shrines were erected for her throughout the country. In fact, she is the only queen for whom individual Egyptian priesthoods are recorded. A tax on vines and fruits (apomoira) was diverted to her cult in order to pay for its expenses. Districts, cities, city quarters, and streets were named after her, often denoting her divinity (in assimilation with goddesses such as Aphrodite, Demeter, and Isis). While the cults of most Ptolemaic kings and queens declined from the late second century b.c.e., worship of the deified Arsinoe survived even after the Roman conquest and into the common era.

Significance

Like Olympias before and Cleopatra VII after her, Arsinoe Philadelphus was an ambitious queen, who gathered her own army and whose political influence strengthened the monarchies with which she was associated. She patronized art and public religion. Her full-sibling marriage set the precedent for many subsequent close-kin marriages among the Ptolemies. Her importance and popularity are reflected in the widespread public and private veneration she received during her lifetime and long after.

Bibliography

Burstein, Stanley M. “Arsinoe II Philadelphus: A Revisionist View.” In Philip II, Alexander the Great, and the Macedonian Heritage, edited by W. L. Adams and E. N. Borza. Washington: University Press of America, 1982. Questions the influence of Arsinoe at the Ptolemaic court in the light of silence in reliable ancient historiography.

Longega, Gabriella. Arsinoë II. Rome: Bretschneider, 1968. Analyzes literary sources relevant for Arsinoe’s life and influence. Includes index.

Macurdy, Grace H. Hellenistic Queens: A Study of Woman-Power in Macedonia, Seleucid Syria, and Ptolemaic Egypt. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932. Reprint. New York: AMS Press, 1977. First monograph devoted to the political significance of Macedonian queens and their successors. Includes bibliography and index.

Pomeroy, Sarah B. Women in Hellenistic Egypt. New York: Schocken Books, 1984. First study of social history of women in Hellenistic Egypt, with a chapter on the Ptolemaic queens—incidentally rebutting Burstein’s revisionism by pointing out Egyptian sources that reveal Arsinoe’s influence and popularity. Includes bibliography and index.