S10E01

Welcome to Echoes of History, the place to explore the rich stories from the past that bring the world of Assassin's Creed to life. I'm Matt Lewis. In this sequence of episodes, we're travelling to the palaces of ancient Egypt as they stood when Cleopatra and Julius Caesar were deep into sustaining their diplomatic relations. They were arguably the defining figures of their era and certainly the most romanticized by fiction. But they're not who we're going to talk about today. Instead, I want to learn more about another equally important but much more overlooked ruler of the ancient world. Let's pop to the palace to look in on them. You raise your hood as you slip past the guards at the main entrance to the palace complex. This swift action not only helps you blend into the line of servants carrying bedding, furniture and foodstuffs to the royal apartments, but it also shields your eyes from the simply dazzling white stone of the palace walls. On a day as beautiful as this, the tall colonnades and richly detailed freezes look as unblemished as the moment they were first unveiled. As you follow the trail of servants through the palace grounds, you marvel at your surroundings. The city of Alexandria is full of paved streets and fine buildings, but nothing in the whole kingdom boasts the opulence of this place. Where the white stonework doesn't stun you in the sunlight, it's painted in vivid hues of blue, yellow and red. Decorative grooves in the columns are filled with gold paint, a few flakes of which you estimate would fetch a tidy sum in the marketplace. The roofs are covered in red tiles that are impressively maintained, something to bear in mind for later when you need to make a quick getaway. Beneath your feet, the flagstones turn into polished marble as you step inside the great hall of the royal residence. Here and there, you tread on finely woven rugs that probably cost more than your humble home, but in here, they've been carelessly crumpled where sandaled feet have caught the corners. Distracted, you almost walk into the enormous base of a statue. The plinth alone is twice your height and carved from pure marble. A topit stands the heroic representation of a royal ancestor. We don't know your history very well, but if you had to guess, you'd say it was a Ptolemy. From the adjacent chamber, you hear voices speaking seriously. You break away from the servant train and sneak between the large urns, behind the enormous plants and through the doorway. You're in the chamber where the official business of court is carried out. The royal advisors are in heated discussion about some foreign affair, it always is with Cleopatra, and listening to them is a surprisingly young man. He's barely beyond childhood and he has all the restlessness of a teenager. He wears the garb of a pharaoh. No doubt, it must be him, Ptolemy XIII. As you strain to believe that someone so inexperienced could hold sway over a vast kingdom like it, a hush falls over the room. The pharaoh has raised his hand for silence. He stands up. He's about to speak. Will his words carry unexpected wisdom, or will they be the rash remarks of a boy? You listen with great interest. Hans Creed gives us a rare glimpse of Ptolemy XIII, one of the last rulers of ancient Egypt. His reign was a turbulent time, and surrounded by so many icons of history, he's usually forgotten in favour of his more glamorous counterparts, whether Roman or Egyptian. Today I want to peer us through the fog that engulfs Ptolemy XIII and get as clear a view of him as we possibly can. To help with this, I'm joined by Professor Lloyd Llewelyn-Jones of Cardiff University, whose latest book is The Clear Patras, The Forgotten Queens of Egypt. Welcome to Echoes of History, Lloyd. Thank you, Matt. It's a real pleasure. Thank you for having me. I'm really interested to find out more about Ptolemy XIII because I think in the midst of all of the Egyptian stuff that everybody knows about, Ptolemy kind of slips through the gaps a little bit. I think one of the better-known figures from this period, if you're not inured, I'm a medievalist, so I don't know that much about it. There are lots of names that crop up in this period that I do know. Ptolemy XIII isn't one of them, so I'm quite keen to understand a little bit more about him. Yes, absolutely. I mean, by and large, he's a victim of circumstance because, of course, he ultimately lost in the civil war against Caesar and Cleopatra. Then, of course, he gets bad press in Julius Caesar's own written account of the Alexander and the Aedronian War. It's really quite nice that you're giving him a little bit of a five minutes of glory just for him to reclaim his crown again. We don't know a great deal about him, but we know enough to get some sense of what he was about. There's not a full biography to be written of him, but he's worthy of being known about certainly. Ptolemy XIII, his full name is Ptolemy Theos Philippator, which doesn't sound like a very Egyptian name. So where do the Ptolemies come from? Well, of course, the Ptolemies had been ruling in Egypt for almost 280 years at this point. They were, in fact, the longest ruling dynasty in Egypt's history, believe it or not. Of course, they descended from Ptolemy I, who was a general of Alexander the Great. Throughout this almost 300-year period, the Ptolemies had been assiduously working themselves into the Egyptian system. They were projecting a bilingual sense of who they were, both appealing to their Greek subjects, who were mainly based in the Delta and in Alexandria, but also, of course, to their Egyptian subjects as well. It was Ptolemy's sister, Cleopatra VII, who actually was a master at doing this. She was the only Ptolemy ever to learn to speak Egyptian, for instance. All the other Ptolemies, all the other rulers, only spoke Greek. That was their native language, and that was their administrative language as well. It was rather like the colonial imposition of Britain on, say, India in the 19th century. The bureaucracy of state was in the language of the ruler, so English or Greek in this particular case. It's no surprise, really, that Ptolemy XIII gets this Greek title, his full name, which means of course he is a god, Theos, and he is father-loving. The father-loving god is his name. He was the son of Ptolemy XII, a man who's come down to us by the name of Fluta, Aulites, because he was a good flute player. Maybe he should have stuck to flute playing, not really to governance, because he wasn't a very good politician. During Ptolemy XII's reign, which lasted for about 14, 15 years, he very conscientiously and carefully persuaded the Romans to keep him on the Egyptian throne. He paid a fortune out to various Roman senators, basically, to back his claim to the Egyptian throne. By the time Ptolemy XII died, Egypt was forking out an enormous amount of revenue to the Romans. In fact, it's been estimated that Ptolemy XII, in just a few years, paid the entire year's revenue that the Egyptians were earning to Roman senators. He was tying himself closer and closer to Roman power. Of course, Ptolemy XII realized that Rome was in the ascendancy. This was going to be the real superpower in the Mediterranean. He realized that there was the safety, really, in Rome's backing. But at the same time, of course, he was getting into bed with a very powerful neighbor who really controlled Egypt thereafter. We really see this come to a head when Ptolemy XII wrote his will. He left his will in the hands of none other than Pompey the Great, who he had paid off a considerable amount of money for Pompey's backing. The will stated that upon Ptolemy XII's death, the throne should pass to his eldest daughter, Cleopatra VII, and to his eldest son, Ptolemy XIII. They should be married together, brother-sister marriage. This is a very old tradition within the Ptolemy royal house. It was considered absolutely proper for brothers and sisters to marry to keep the blood pure, and also, of course, to promote the pharaoh and the queen as gods on earth as well. Isis and Osiris, the Egyptian gods, were, of course, brother and sister, husband, wife. Zeus and Hera in the Greek pantheon were brother, sister, husband, and wife. The Ptolemies also took up this tradition. Ptolemy things would have been kind of normal in that relationship with Cleopatra marrying Ptolemy XIII had Cleopatra herself not seemed to have balked at the idea. We don't know why. It's really strange because in the long history of the Cleopatras who had ruled Egypt for 150 years alongside their brother Ptolemies, and I've just written a big book about this called the Cleopatras, it was absolutely standard for these women to marry their brothers. But for some reason, Cleopatra VII, the last Cleopatra, seems to buck that trend. She doesn't seem to want to. We get a picture of this very, very early on after the death of Ptolemy XII, that she begins to promote herself as the sole ruler of Egypt, completely ignoring her father's will to have her younger brother on the throne with her. That's very, very strange that she decides to do that. Yeah, it's an odd thing. I guess we've seen some of that sort of thing in Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon and stuff like that as well, this idea that a ruling elite will intermarry to keep bloodlines pure and all of that kind of thing. I guess it's odd if you're raised in that expectation that it would be something that wouldn't appeal to you. Yeah, that you will do. I guess we should probably say Cleopatra VII is what we usually think of as the Cleopatra. That's right. That's the Cleopatra. It is Taylor Cleopatra, right? So absolutely. Yeah, everyone just forgets the six before her. Exactly. So Ptolemy XIII, so to get to XIII Ptolemies and be the longest reigning dynasty would suggest that they're a fairly stable bunch, that they're doing a pretty good job. Would that be fair or? No. Just getting to XIII Belies something. No. The success of the dynasty belies the fact that underneath there was a lot of discontent. Particularly there was this rift between the kind of Greek speaking heart of Egypt, which was in the Nile Delta in the north, looking out to the Mediterranean, especially in the capital city of Alexandria, and then south in what we call the Thebide, that is today around the area of Luxor, Aswan in Upper Egypt in the south. That was a real Egyptian heartland. The Ptolemies really never quite got a complete foothold in the south. And there were rebellions throughout the Ptolemaic period trying to throw these Macedonians out of Greece. And even as late as the reign of Cleopatra VII Ptolemy XIII, these rebellions are still bubbling away on a small scale. But there's never really any guarantee of a holistic peace in Egypt at all. They get by, the Ptolemies do certainly, but it's not an easy ride for them. And in the wider world, of course, they've also got their Seleucid cousins in Syria who have been very, very troublesome for several hundred years. They really come to a swift end in the 60s BCE. So just before our period starts, when Syria becomes a Roman province, Cyrenaica in North Africa becomes a Roman province in the 60s BCE as well. So Egypt finds itself now not only with a troublesome population, but also with neighbours on both land borders who are now Romans. And that's a big sea change for the Egyptians at this point. Yeah. So I guess if they're caught in this sort of pincer movement and aware of their own internal issues that maybe make sense of why Ptolemy XII may have thought, I need to get in with Rome here before they come to me. Precisely, precisely. And what it was doing really, Ptolemy XII was buying time for Egypt, really. And that's all he wanted to see was that his succession would be settled and he hoped, therefore, that Rome would be a peacekeeper in this, would make sure that his will is enforced and that things go smoothly. The gap of ages, I suppose, between Cleopatra and her brother would have been about seven years. And I guess this is quite significant. Cleopatra must have been about 17 or 18 at the time of her father's death, which means that Ptolemy XIII can only be nine or 10 at the most. And of course, within any regnal system, I mean, that is quite a difference, quite a significant difference in ability for a ruler. So while Cleopatra had the nonce and some of the experience to govern on her own, certainly Ptolemy XIII didn't. And probably at that point as well, he hadn't even begun to build for himself at court a reliable faction that he could draw on, you know, a set of governors and counsellors that could be of aid to him. During the last few years of Ptolemy XII's reign, he had used his daughter, Cleopatra VII, as a kind of co-regent. And so she had a taste already of what governance was like. And of course, as history will show, she proves to be a very, very astute politician and diplomat, of course. So she's kind of built into the system. She understands it. But it's still very strange that she is reluctant, more than reluctant, absolutely headstrong, set against marrying her brother. Because what else is out there for her? It's very odd because a woman cannot function in that world, in this patriarchal world, without some kind of association to a man. And of course, you know, it's a lot, we're a long way off from Julius Caesar and Mark Antony coming into her life at this point. She's a single woman wanting to rule alone. And we can really see that happening in the way in which she passes her first decrees around 51 and into 50 BCE. We have only Cleopatra named in official documents. There is no sign whatsoever of Ptolemy XIII. And we even have a steely, which we discovered, showing Cleopatra in male pharaonic guise, probably the steely was cut for her father and he died before it was finished. And then her name is placed on it. Cleopatra the King. So she masculises herself in this particular steely to really play that role of the one ruler of Egypt. So it's very strange that she decides to do this and Ptolemy XIII is completely sidetracked. Yeah, so I was kind of wondering whether it was just that she didn't want to marry an annoying 10 year old who was getting under her feet. Or it sounds like maybe she actually didn't want to marry anyone irrespective of who it was because she was convinced that she could rule on her own and she didn't want because presumably as Ptolemy got older in a patriarchal system, he would have taken more of a leading role and she would have necessarily been forced into the background a little bit like Elizabeth I maybe that idea of the Virgin Queen who doesn't need to marry. She has family history to draw on and I do believe that Cleopatra VII knew about the other Cleopatras. So for instance, she could look at her, she would be a great aunt, Cleopatra V, Berenike III, who had managed to rule by herself independent of any man for one year. Now that doesn't seem a lot, but this is quite significant in the 80s BCE before she had really forced herself to find a husband she could marry. And it was a disastrous marriage. It lasted for just less than 11 days in which Queen Cleopatra V, Berenike ended up dead, and then the Ptolemaic mob killed the king she married. So there's not a good sort of background really in Cleopatra's family life that Cleopatra must have known about necessarily for finding a husband outside of the family. But it's still very, very strange just to think that this Cleopatra, Cleopatra VII, could have possibly thought that there's a future without a male consort in this world, you know, where there has to be really a kind of what the Egyptians thought of as duality, there has to be a male and a female component to make the world function, the universe functions significantly. So it was very strange that Cleopatra early on just completely dismisses the idea of marriage. To get back to Ptolemy then, he's obviously surrounded by lots of these people, Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, all of these stories that we know reasonably well that get told again and again and romanticized over the millennia centuries since then. What kind of sources do we have then for Ptolemy XIII's life? If he is being squeezed out to the margins a little bit, how much reliable evidence do we have for his story? Well, of course, when it comes to reliable evidence, not a great deal. I mean, you know, we have Julius Caesar's own accounts. We have Plutarch and we have Cassius Dio who write about him. But this is always in hindsight and with a narrative structure, which just simply wants to get rid of him really, you know. In Julius Caesar's own account, for instance, of the Alexandrian War, he says that Ptolemy III surrounded himself with a group of untrustworthy counselors who disliked the idea of being ruled by a woman. That's such a Roman point of view to put forward. You know, I doubt very much really if it was the feeling of these Ptolemaic counselors. So if we really want to get a handle on Ptolemy XIII himself, we have to go and look at the Egyptian sources. And although they're not plentiful, there are enough to steer us a little way into what occurred around about 50 BCE. When Ptolemy is obviously finding his feet within the court and finding a voice within the royal council as well, it's around 50 into 49 BC, for instance, that we get the first Egyptian evidence, demotic texts, very dry tax reports in which Ptolemy's name appears in front of his sister Cleopatra. And that is very significant because precedence is everything in Egypt. You know, Egypt is a very hierarchical society. So while Cleopatra is named, not called his wife, called his sister, Ptolemy takes precedence. And we also know that in late 50, early 49 BCE, there was a terrible famine in southern Egypt. And because the grain was not being exported north into Alexandria, the city of Alexandria was in danger of starvation. And we get a decree written in the name of Ptolemy XIII ordering merchants to divert their grain imports to the city of Alexandria to go into huge magazines, into huge sort of storage areas, so that the people of Alexandria can be fed. And that's a dictum, signed and dated, as it were, by Ptolemy XIII himself. So it shows that he's getting active. And also, you know, in crossing the T's and dotting the I's kind of bureaucracy there, whether he's doing it himself or whether he's getting his councillors probably to do it is by the by, really. The importance is that he is quite clearly taking control of governmental aspects of Egypt. How Cleopatra VII acts to this is difficult to know, of course, because we don't have balancing evidence to say that what she was doing at the time. After Dark, Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal is a podcast that delves into the dark side of history. Expect murder and conspiracy, ghosts and witches. I'm Anthony Delaney. And I'm Maddie Pelling. We're historians and the hosts of After Dark from History Hit, where every Monday and Thursday we enter the shadows of the past. We set sail on Victorian ghost ships. Learn the truth about the Knights Templar. And walk the grimy streets of Victorian London in search of a serial killer. Discover the secrets of the darker side of history twice a week, every week on After Dark from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Hey Prime members, are you tired of ads interfering with your favorite podcasts? Good news. With Amazon Music, you have access to the largest catalog of ad-free top podcasts included with your Prime membership. To start listening, download the Amazon Music app for free. Or go to Amazon.com slash ad-free podcasts. That's Amazon.com slash ad-free podcasts to catch up on the latest episodes without the ads. And so as Ptolemy begins to take a bit more power and authority for himself, could you explain to us a little bit about what the role and the powers of the Pharaoh precisely was? What would a Pharaoh be doing? Kind of what were their day to day responsibilities and were there any limits on their power and authority in Egypt? Well, the Pharaoh was there, first of all, in a religious role. He was a living God and the Ptolemies really endorsed this idea. So both Cleopatra and Ptolemy the 13th were considered to be God's incarnate on earth. And to that end, both the king and the queen were responsible for the running of the whole cosmos. And to do this, of course, they were appointed the chief priests of Egypt. And while they didn't necessarily conduct religious ceremonies themselves, by proxy, they were really the greatest religious authorities in Egypt. We don't see them operating in that way so much in the Ptolemaic period because we have more documentation, which is about the kind of bureaucratic and administrative roles of pharaohs and queens at this point. And so we can see them very active in the day to day governance of Egypt. But we also do see those ceremonial moments where they have to play an important role too. So for instance, around 50 BCE, Cleopatra the 7th does enter the limelight again. And we find her down south in Luxor, where she is celebrating the installment of a new buchess bull. This was a sacred bull, a sacred animal who was being installed in the temples. And she is represented that we have sort of demotic accounts of her worshipping the bull, adoring the bull and a speech that she gives to the people of Luxor, of Thebes as well, in which they then praise her as being the living goddess in Egypt. This is Cleopatra's, I suppose, something she has over her brother is her ability to speak Egyptian. And she goes down to the Egyptian heartland and uses self propaganda to promote herself in this kind of way. And that does her really well in the long run. We have no evidence of Ptolemy the 13th ever leaving Alexandria, not even to go to Memphis, which was the old religious capital of Egypt near modern day Cairo. So he seems to have been very orientated towards the north of Egypt, looking out towards the Mediterranean, maybe because of his youth and maybe because he doesn't have the right kind of council at this point, we can't be certain. But he doesn't play the political game in the way that Cleopatra the 7th does. In Assassin's Creed Origins in the game, he's kind of portrayed as very much a puppet king. Is that fair? Is that reasonable? Well, this is what comes over in the classical account. And again, we have to take this with a pinch of salt, of course. But in the classical account, you know, he is ruled really by this this powerful courtier named Potinus, who is a eunuch. Now that in itself, of course, while perfectly normal within a Hellenistic Egyptian context, eunuchs were part of the Egyptian court since the beginning of the Ptolemaic period. They'd been part of the court societies of the Near East for centuries and centuries. However, Romans find eunuchism in a castration of men, abnormal, abhorrent. And so just the very fact that Julius Caesar writes very clearly that this potinus is a eunuch brings a lot of pejorative judgments with it straight away anyway. And so, you know, potinus is crafted really. I always think of him like in Disney's Aladdin. He's like a Jafar character. You know, he sort of looms over this boy king and the boy has no power himself. You know, he's almost kind of Svengali hold over Ptolemy, you know, virtually hypnotic in the way that he controls this. But we have to be very, very careful about that. You know, it gives Ptolemy the 13th no sense of presence of ability or of authority of any kind. We hear also of two others. We have Theodotus, who's his tutor. We have also a man called Achilles, Ptolemy's chief general. And again, they are portrayed as incompetent tutors and incompetent military men at best. But this is very much the Roman and then the later Plutarchian play on this period. And I wouldn't really want to put so very much trust in it as, for instance, you know, filmmakers have done in the 1963 Cleopatra, you know, with Liz Taylor, for instance, Ptolemy the 13th is played by a young English actor. And, you know, he is completely and utterly under the sway of his tutors and the eunuch, even to the point, you know, he's carried around in a sedan chair, sort of petting a kitten all the time. And he's just a mere child. And I don't think that's quite the Ptolemy the 13th that comes over in those fragments of of Egyptian evidence that we have, where we see him actually active in the bureaucracy. Yeah, I wonder whether there's an element there of the Romans very carefully crafting that image that because kings of Egypt are these godlike figures, you can't openly criticize them openly attack them without sort of uniting the Egyptian people against them. So it's one of those things where you can attack the advisors, and you can be the one who's going to liberate them from bad advisors and, you know, these evil men that surround them, you're going to save Aladdin from Jafar. Yeah, I think that there's a big part of that at play here. And in fact, of course, you know, with within the, you know, the few references we have to Ptolemy the 13th in these Roman and later works, you know, there's a kind of tragic strain which is created around Ptolemy the 13th as well, you know, ultimately, of course, you know, he dies in battle, he drowns in the River Nile, allegedly, you know, that there's something which is tragic about the boy all the way through, he never comes into his potential, he never becomes the man, you know, he is born to be. And I think that's that's certainly part of the the agenda of these writers. Do we know anything about what Ptolemy the 13th looked like? Because I've seen the game, they have to present us with an image of him. And he is there as this this kind of fairly immature young man. And he's depicted wearing the the pharaonic headdress, the Nemez. Do we have any idea of what whether that might be what he he would have presented like? We have no reliable image of Ptolemy the 13th. Although we do have a series of sculpted pharaonic style portraits of young, unidentified kings or princes from this period. They have been either labeled as Cisarian Cleopatra the seventh son by Julius Caesar, or unidentified prince. So there's a possibility that these youthful statues could represent Ptolemy the 13th. But we certainly know that the Ptolemies and the Cleopatras did not go around dressed as characters from Aida on a day to day basis. They were Greeks and they wore Greek clothing when they presented themselves to their Egyptian subjects as living gods. Of course, they would almost put on like fancy dress essentially to perform that kind of role. But we have to get out of our heads this this whole myth that they went around looking like New Kingdom pharaohs like Tutankhamu. That's absolutely not the way. And in fact, the the hallmark of monarchy in Ptolemy Egypt was not anything like the Nemez headcloth or the Ureyi, the cobras. It was the simple diadem, which is just a strip of white linen, which was tied around the head into a knot at the nape of the neck. And that actually was the most powerful image of monarchy that you had in the Hellenistic world. Interesting. So we need to think of them dressing more as Greeks and maybe just cosplaying Egyptian specifications. Cosplaying Egyptian. Absolutely. That's exactly it. That makes sense of when like in Plutarch's wonderful story of the death of Cleopatra, when she commits suicide, she dresses as the goddess Isis. That's because she's she's she's putting on a show. Her suicide is a show for the Romans, you know, and this is what she does. She puts on the cosplay outfit. Is there any point at which Ptolemy tries to rule for himself or do we see him always being overshadowed by Cleopatra and perhaps his advisors as well? No, there is a there is a point. I mean, again, it's kind of anything that was independently done by Ptolemy the 13th is lost in the Roman narrative. But there is a point, of course, that comes where Cleopatra is driven out of Egypt and she goes to Syria into self-imposed exile. And this is when Ptolemy the 13th finds his feet. But it's written in the Roman sources as Pothinus and this sort of wicked mob find their feet. And still Ptolemy the 13th doesn't have much of a much of a say in what's going on. And that's the frustrating thing, really. We'll never really know how much leeway Ptolemy the 13th had to rule as an independent pharaoh. Certainly in her exile in Syria, Cleopatra didn't waste time whatsoever. She utilized the mint in the city of Ashkelon, for instance, to forge coin images of herself, which she sent out to the Mediterranean world in droves. So she was self-promoting all the time that Ptolemy the 13th certainly wasn't. And she also used this little sojourner in Syria to write to Julius Caesar, who at that point was based in Ephesus and was beginning to muster his army to move down through the Levant to congratulate him on his latest military successes. And also on the fact that he had been voted a god by the people of Ephesus. And she said in this letter, it's good to be a god, isn't it? We've got something in common now, you and I. So she was using that exile to her political ends. And unfortunately in our sources, what's going on in Alexandria is just a fallow period. We don't hear anything about what Ptolemy the 13th might have been doing at this point. I quite like the idea of Cleopatra writing to Julius Caesar and being like, welcome to the club. I know, exactly. It's good to be a god. So if internal Egyptian politics is dominated by a lot of squabbling between Ptolemy and Cleopatra, mainly by the sound of it, what do we know about the foreign policy during this period? So if Cleopatra is in exile, sort of cozying up to the Romans, what is Egyptian foreign policy doing? We know their father had been keen to kind of get in with Rome and maybe buy a bit of time, but do they use that time in any way? Not particularly well, no, because I think this clash between brother and sister dominates this faction at court, you know, put Tynus in his lot, if we follow the Roman narrative, which we kind of obliged to do, then we don't really see them being very proactive in adopting a kind of policy for themselves. What we do know is that put Tynus and Ptolemy the 13th throw in their lot with Pompey, Pompey the Great, because they think that, you know, he is going to come out top dog in the civil war that's going on with Julius Caesar. And so they really are prepared to back him in whatever way they can. So for instance, there is a battalion of Roman soldiers who are based in Alexandria and they've been there for about 30 years. They were first formed by a general called Gabineus and they called the Gabineani. And they're kind of quite a band of sort of rough hewn squaddies, I suppose, really, there's not much discipline to them at all. But they are used by the royal family as kind of bodyguards and sort of crack troops to go and put down any kind of bar, sort of squabbles or street fighting, you know, they're kind of that sort of type of soldier. And certainly, put Tynus and Ptolemy the 13th promise Pompey that they can use the Gabinei whenever he wishes. So there's support for him on the streets of Alexandria, should his troops move down towards Egypt and need them at all. So I suppose that's something about putting them anywhere where their mouth is there. They're prepared to support Pompey in that way. But of course, after the Battle of Pharsalus, it all goes drastically wrong for Pompey. And this is where we see Tolomey the 13th being blamed for his greatest mistake. Pompey did indeed come down to Egypt. And Plutarch, as well as Cassius Dio, gave gives us this beautiful image of him sailing very close to the Egyptian sea border together with his wife Cornelia and their son Sextus. And he appeals to Ptolemy the 13th for sanctuary in Egypt. Julius Caesar and his army now are marching down through the Levant and are just across the Egyptian border at Pelusium. And so Ptolemy the 13th, the Bataenus can see that it's all lost for Pompey. And in a, well, what's painted in the Roman narrative as a very black trick, Ptolemy the 13th writes a message to Pompey inviting him to step onto Egyptian soil where he will be given safe place. But of course, as soon as Pompey makes his little journey on this skiff towards Egypt, he is killed and he is decapitated and the head is brought to Ptolemy the 13th. Who thinking this would be a good move, then presents it as a gift to Julius Caesar when he arrives in Alexandria. And of course, Caesar is horrified by this, you know, his worthy Roman opponent, one time father-in-law has been murdered by this brutal barbaric dog head worshiping group of Egyptians. You know, what worse end could there be? Whether Ptolemy the 13th really did that is impossible to know. Certainly Pompey was killed, but whether there was this kind of gruesome exchange of diplomatic gifts is really impossible. But it's become part of the essential narrative really of why Julius Caesar got so involved in Egypt at this time. How then does Ptolemy's reign come to an end? You know, we know now that we will largely forget him behind people like Cleopatra and Julius Caesar and things like that. So how and when does his rule end? Well, the first thing that happens is that Julius Caesar moves into Alexandria with his troops and he puts Ptolemy the 13th under house arrest. Cleopatra, meanwhile, is smuggled back into Egypt. And of course, very famously, she is unrolled at the feet of Julius Caesar in a carpet. It's actually supposed to be a sort of bed sack, Plutarch tells us. And that night, she and Julius Caesar become lovers. And it really is a sort of hot, steamy meeting that they have. I think it's also a meeting of minds. They are intellectual equals. And the next day, Julius Caesar summons Cleopatra and Ptolemy the 13th into the throne room in Alexandria and Ptolemy the 13th realizes straight away what the relationship is now between his sister and this conqueror. And apparently, he throws off his diadem and he storms out of the palace room, furious at what has gone on here. But at that point, then from there on in for the next couple of months, Ptolemy the 13th is held prisoner in this sort of gilded cage. But Julius Caesar utilizes the rest of the royal family in order to cement Roman rule. So first of all, he insists that Cleopatra and Ptolemy the 13th marry and are represented as king and queen, brother, sister, just as Ptolemy the 12th's will stipulated. But they also have another brother and sister as well, Arsinoe, and Ptolemy, who becomes Ptolemy the 14th. These two siblings are forced to marry as well. And they are made by Julius Caesar, the king and queen of Cyprus. Arsinoe is probably about 17 at this point. Little Ptolemy the 14th is probably only about seven or eight at this point. Now, Arsinoe manages to escape the Alexandrian palace, and she goes to Pelusium and there with Pithinus, with Achilius, and with other generals. She actually raises an army against Julius Caesar. And so we have the outbreak of what's called the Alexandrian war fought against Julius Caesar by part of Cleopatra's family. And eventually, as kind of a bit of an armistice deal, Julius Caesar is persuaded to allow Ptolemy the 13th to leave Alexandria and go join his sister. Now why he does this is a mystery, because surely he must have known that Ptolemy the 13th now will join his sister, Arsinoe, in fighting the Romans. And maybe this was Julius Caesar's plan all the time, because that is exactly, of course, what happens. And in a skirmish which takes place outside Pelusium on the banks of the Nile, Ptolemy the 13th, at least according to the Roman sources, fully decked out in gold armor, stumbles into a ditch, part of a canal, loses his balance, falls forward and drowns an ignominious death. It's highly likely that it did happen in that way. But his body was never claimed. He never received any form of formal burial. As for Arsinoe herself, the princess, she was captured and sent to Rome as a captive. Some years later, Cleopatra actually watched her sister being led in chains through Rome during one of Julius Caesar's triumphs. And Cleopatra's relationship, therefore, moves on to Ptolemy the 14th. Julius Caesar insists that now she marries her younger brother, this infant Ptolemy the 14th, while, of course, the relationship between Caesar and Cleopatra develops a pace. And in 48 BCE, she gives birth to Julius Caesar's son, Cesarion. So she's married both to her Egyptian brother, Ptolemy the 14th, and in a bizarre kind of way also to Julius Caesar. From there on in, there is only one man in Cleopatra's life, and that's her son, Cesarion. That is her role. She is the ultimate mother. That's what she maybe always wanted. Who knows? So poor Ptolemy the 13th disappears from the sources. We know nothing more about him. We know nothing about a burial for him. He has no particularly good afterlife. You know, he's not written about in Egyptian sources anymore. He is just entirely forgotten. Yeah, it's interesting. His death in the game is quite ambiguous. And it sounds like there's there's plenty of mystery. I think there's a lot of ambiguity there. How old was he by that point as well? So if he was nine or 10 when he came to the throne, how long has he actually been? He could only have been 16 at best, I think, you know, still not really of an age to rule. We know that Caesar finally had his revenge on Patinus. Certainly, he executes Patinus after the death of Patinus, his master Ptolemy the 13th. And that must have made Caesar feel very good. And of course, Arsenoe herself is after she's paraded through the streets of Rome, she's then sent to live at Ephesus. And it's only some 10 years later that she is killed on the orders of Mark Antony and Cleopatra. And her tomb is still in Ephesus. We can see it today. It's the only tomb of a Ptolemy to survive. And we actually have her bones as well. So the only osteo archaeological evidence we have for the whole of the House of Ptolemy was found in Ephesus. And it's a young woman in her mid 20s. It absolutely would, you know, would readily identify with Arsenoe. Does Ptolemy the 13th then have any kind of a legacy in the story? Or is he simply someone who never quite reached the point at which they were going to make an impact and fulfill their potential? Yeah, he never makes his impact at all. And he serves really as a weak character in this narrative. You know, he is the annoying step brother kind of figure, half brother or whatever you want to call him. And in a way, the historical Ptolemy the 13th is ceased to matter. And what has become important, of course, is the kind of narrative figure, the character that he is forced to play in the many, many narrated versions we have of the Caesar Cleopatra story and very little else. Yeah, it seems a shame he's doomed to remain a bit playery even in his own story. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, it doesn't get better for his poor brother Ptolemy the 14th, who has actually even less of an impact. You know, he goes to Rome with Cleopatra the 7th, you know, and spends several years in Rome with her. But on the way back to Egypt, she decides to get rid of him entirely. And in a motif, actually, which is quite interesting, she has him pushed off the ship and he drowns in the Mediterranean. So both of her brothers drowning, there's something of a plot going on there, isn't there? I think, you know, there's a narrative. I was gonna say it sounds a little bit like Ptolemy the 13th got that unlucky number 13, but it doesn't sound like the 14th is any good either. Neither did the 15th Cisarian. I mean, you know, everything Cleopatra did was for her son Cisarian, that's Ptolemy the 15th. But ultimately, of course, he met an untimely death before the age of 15 himself as well. None of these later Tollowies were really destined to rule, it seems. Thank you so much for joining us. It's been fascinating to try and get a little bit closer to this guy who he appears in Assassin's Creed origin as a little bit of a bit character. But it sounds like he was almost that in real life as well. And it's difficult to get much closer to him. But it's been really interesting to try and pull a bit more of the real Ptolemy out of the history. Absolutely. You know, that it's why it's always important to try. And I think, you know, whatever we can glean from the disparate sources we should try to use. So if, you know, he comes down to us mainly through Roman narratives, or so well and good, that's how we have to deal with it. But actually, when we get to look at those few demotic Egyptian texts, where he really is doing a bit of hard work in the bureaucracy, well, at least that shows a little bit more of his character. And it's not to be dismissed. I hope you've enjoyed this episode of Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit. In the next episode, we're leaving Alexandria and going to Giza, where, in the shadow of the pyramids, one of Egypt's greatest mysteries still stands today. The Sphinx. Don't forget to subscribe and follow Echoes of History wherever you get your podcast. And if you're enjoying it, you can leave us a review too. I'll see you next time amongst the Echoes of History.