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also yielded many potentially competing heirs, each with a different set of maternal kin, which helps explain the many intrigues and murders for which the Hellenistic dynasties were famous. No modern soap opera could compete with the goings-on among the ruling families of Egypt and Asia Minor. Wives plotted with sons to murder husbands, rival wives, and children. One queen, fearing her new husband might prefer her daughter to herself, tied the girl in a chariot and stampeded the horses over a cliff. Fathers killed sons by one wife in order to elevate sons of another or murdered their wives’ children by previous husbands. 18
    The Ptolemies of Hellenistic Egypt tried to skirt this problem by reviving the old Egyptian practice of taking sisters or half sisters as wives. The children of a sibling marriage were viewed, in effect, as superlegitimate because they came from the same bloodline in both parents. This was meant to reduce the conflict between the children of the kings’ other wives. But if a brother-sister marriage produced no heir, a sister’s children by other men might vie for the throne, further multiplying the number of rival claimants. And sometimes married brothers and sisters turned on each other. 19
    Ptolemy II of Egypt established a diplomatic marriage between his daughter Berenice and King Antiochus of Asia Minor in 253 B.C. Antiochus had supposedly repudiated Laodice, his original wife as well as half sister, in order to cement the marriage. But he later resumed their relationship. Before the disgruntled Berenice could mobilize her own kin, however, Laodice took action on her own. Not trusting her husband/half brother to hold firm in his commitment to her as primary wife and to their son as heir, she poisoned Antiochus and arranged the murder of Berenice and her child. Berenice’s brother, Ptolemy III, arrived too late to save his sister and her heir. However, he launched a war against the Seleucids and eventually conquered Syria and the south coast of Asia Minor. 20

Not a Love Story: The Marriage of Antony and Cleopatra
    The love affair between Antony and Cleopatra has been the subject of books, films, and a play by Shakespeare. As Plutarch tells it, the great Roman general Mark Antony fell hopelessly in love with Cleopatra after she dressed as the love goddess Aphrodite and sailed to meet him on a golden barge. The oars were made of silver, and the rowers kept time to the music of flutes and violins. Little boys dressed as Cupid were positioned on each side of Cleopatra and fanned her face and hair. Her ladies were costumed as mermaids, and the boat was furnished with precious metals, ornaments, and gifts. But, says Plutarch, despite all these delights to the senses, she relied above all on “the charms and enchantment of her passing beauty and grace” to secure Mark Antony’s protection, keep him in Egypt, and divert him from his duties to Rome. 21
    According to most stories, Cleopatra soon returned Antony’s love and the two married before the war with Rome broke out. After their defeat, believing that Cleopatra was already dead, Antony tried to commit suicide. He lived just long enough to die in her arms. Cleopatra followed her beloved husband into death by allowing a poisonous asp to bite her breast.
    The real story is more complicated, because both Cleopatra and Antony were playing for stakes that had little to do with undying love. Their saga can be understood only in the context of the role of princesses in conferring legitimacy in Hellenistic Egypt and their active participation in struggles for political power. Sexual passion may indeed have existed between Cleopatra and Antony and, prior to that, between Cleopatra and Julius Caesar. But on everyone’s part this was a calculated, even ruthless, political intrigue.
    Before the Egyptian emperor Auletes died, in 51 B.C., he designated his ten-year-old son, Ptolemy XIII, and his seventeen-year-old daughter, Cleopatra, joint heirs, with