The Fall of Egypt and the Rise of Rome: A History of the Ptolemies

by Guy de la Bédoyère

Yale University Press 2024

Wedged between the end of Alexander the Great and the death throes of Antony and Cleopatra, are the generations of the Ptolemies mostly known to the non-specialist as a menagerie of inbred freaks who made an art of internecine bloodletting. In The Fall of Egypt and the Rise of Rome: A History of the Ptolemies, historian Guy de la Bédoyère attempts to pull back the coffin-lid on these bloody, gilded last years of Ancient Egypt, a time rife with rebellion and warfare that saw the rise of one Mediterranean power at the cost of another. The title of the book is slightly misleading insofar as it hints at a somewhat extensive coverage of Rome's ascent as a world-beater; the Eternal City gets minimal screen time, just enough to make possible an intelligent discussion of the end of the Ptolemies.

The Ptolemaic Kingdom was founded in 305 BC by the Macedonian general Ptolemy I Soter, a close companion of Alexander the Great who gobbled up Egypt in the aftermath of Alexander's unexpected demise and the unravelling of his empire. The new dynasty adopted the Egyptian titles and iconography, showing respect to local traditions, while also preserving their own Greek language and culture. To emulate the previous dynasties of Egypt, the Ptolemies eventually adopted the practice of sibling marriage, where all the male rulers took the name Ptolemy, while queens regnant were all called Cleopatra, Arsinoe, or Berenice. Alexandria, founded during Alexander's lifetime, became their capital city and a major centre of Greek culture, learning, and trade for the next several centuries. At first, the empire was "held together by a gossamer network of alliances and affiliations vested in the prestige and presence of personalities and fleets", but by the mid third century BC, Ptolemaic Egypt was the most powerful and wealthiest of Alexander's successor states. The Ptolemies were not shy of flexing their muscles and displaying the might of their armies, leading to a "long period of intermittent recreational warfare" with other Hellenistic powers in the region, especially with the Seleucid Empire. The kingdom had a complex government bureaucracy that exploited the country's vast economic resources to the benefit of a Greek ruling class, a state of affairs that led directly to internal rebellions that became a thorn in the side of the later Ptolemies.

As the Roman star shined brighter after the republic's victory over Carthage, the Ptolemaic Kingdom became weaker following domestic strife and foreign wars, making Egypt increasingly reliant on Rome to support it's crumbling tendrils of influence, and eventually ending up as a Roman province after the last Cleopatra got disastrously entangled in the civil wars erupting during the transition of Rome into an empire from a republic.

The author has produced a dutiful account of the Ptolemies, expertly navigating the wealth of papyri and ostraca that makes this one of the best documented time periods of the Hellenistic era. He's at his best at the beginning, talking with nuance and wit about Alexander's sojourn in Egypt and Ptolemy I's consolidation of power. His Ptolemy emerges as a dynamic and capable personality, reacting with pragmatism and "lateral thought" to the challenges of empire building. The narrative history of the dynasty is broken up into two parts, with a primer on life in Ptolemaic Egypt crammed in-between. He can be extremely granular in detail when discussing the nature of governance, economy, or religion under the Ptolemies, giving a strong textbook-like feel only strengthened by the presence of salient topics covered in boxes set outside the main narrative. He appears to believe that the more lurid and sensational details in the story of the Ptolemies, with mothers killing sons and sons mothers, will carry the weight of an enjoyable reading experience on their own, with minimal rhetorical effort on his part. These tendencies get worse the further one progresses in the book, with vivid personalities and thrilling events captured in prose only slightly more lively than the corpse of any of these later rulers in question. The Roman angle is covered as aridly as pyramids under sand, where larger than life figures like Mark Antony can be introduced as "a distant cousin of Caesar's, [who] had fought with him in Gaul, and had become his political supporter in Rome", and events as pregnant with narrative potential as Julius Caesar's characteristically stupid stumble into an Alexandrian siege handled with surprising monotony:

[in the face of an Alexandrian mob] Caesar urged Achillas, Ptolemy's troop commander, to calm matters down. Instead, Achillas whipped up his troops into a fury. Caesar had to send for more of his own men from Syria and meanwhile fortified the royal palace. Achillas turned up with his men ... and seized most of Alexandria. The city started to go up in flames. One of the losses was possibly part of the library.

While the effort of capturing the intricacies of Ptolemaic rule is scholarly if not by the numbers, the author's goal to give "the Ptolemies the place in modern culture they deserve" can only be called unsuccessful.

Siddharth Handa is a book critic currently living in New Delhi