#thaïs

[thefugitivesaint]

José de Zamora (1899-1971), 'Thaïs', ''La Esfera'', Vol. 6, #291, 1919

[fashionlandscapeblog]

Thaïs (1917) - dir. Anton Giulio Bragaglia and Riccardo Cassano

[charnel-grounds]

Frank C. Papé, “One morning she visited him in a dream”

Illustration from Thaïs by Anatole France.

[thesorceresstemple]

Thaïs, Anatole France, Illustration by Frank C. Papé

[leopardtrip]

Louis Icart, Thaïs, 1927.

[lafleurdunord]

Movie posters based on Thaïs, the book by Anatole France.

[illustratus]

Virgil shows Dante the Shade of Thaïs by Gustave Doré

[deathlessathanasia]

„Like the other Successors, Ptolemy imitated Argead polygamy (Plut. Pyrrh . 4, 4; Dem. and Ant .4.1) and had children by many women. … Thaïs, the hetaira (courtesan) who supposedly urged Alexander to burn the palace at Persepolis, had sexual relationships with both Alexander and Ptolemy. Cleitarchus (ap . Ath. 576d = FGrH 137 F11) asserted that Ptolemy married Thaïs after the death of Alexander. Judging by the apparent ages of Thaïs’ children, the relationship (and possibly marriage) predated the death of Alexander: Thaïs and Ptolemy had two sons, Leontiscus and Lagus, and a daughter, Eirene. That Thaïs’ oldest son was named after his paternal grandfather strongly suggests that Ptolemy had, at the time, no other sons. Even years later, when Ptolemy certainly did have other sons, his sons by Thaïs apparently accompanied him on campaign (Leontiscus was captured during Ptolemy’s great defeat at Salamis in 306; Just. 15.12) and in peace time as well. … Eirene married Eunostus, king of Soli in Cyprus. Her marriage, though not on a par with the more prestigious marriages of Ptolemy’s daughters by Eurydice and Berenice nonetheless constituted a marriage alliance. … Since they did not figure in the succession struggle that developed much later in Ptolemy I’s reign, Thaïs’ sons did not apparently present serious competition to their father’s sons by more famous (and less notorious) wives once, that is, those younger sons had reached adulthood. …

Another and more notorious hetaira , Lamia, also had a relationship with Ptolemy. It ended when Demetrius Poliorcetes defeated Ptolemy at Salamis in 306 and she became part of his plunder (Plut. Demetr . 16). Two more respectable but exotic women may have been present at court when Arsinoë was growing up. As we have noted, at Susa in 324, Ptolemy married a daughter of Artabazus, a half sister of Alexander’s mistress Barsine, called Artacama (Arr. 7.4.6) or Apama (Plut. Eum . 1.3). Perhaps Ptolemy abandoned his Persian wife soon after Alexander’s death, but Artacama/Apama may have lived out her life in comparative obscurity in Alexandria. There might also have been an Egyptian wife, a member of the last native Egyptian dynasty. …

The woman who would have loomed much larger—not in a good way, probably—in Arsinoë’s childhood was Eurydice, daughter of Antipater. Antipater had served as general and diplomat for Philip II and administered Macedonia during Alexander’s long absence on the Asian campaign. Ptolemy Soter, like Perdiccas before him, wanted to ally himself with this grand old man of the Macedonian political world. Ptolemy married Eurydice (Paus. 1.6.8; App. Syr . 62.30) around the time (ca. 322–20) that the surviving Successors renegotiated the distribution of power in Alexander’s former empire at Triparadisus, after the elimination of Perdiccas. Eurydice had at least four children by Ptolemy I. Two were sons: Ptolemy (App. Syr . 62) and a son of unknown name. This Ptolemy acquired the epithet Ceraunus (thunderbolt) and would later become king of Macedonia and marry his half sister Arsinoë. Ptolemy II killed Eurydice’s other son for fomenting revolt among the Cyprians (Paus. 1.7.1). There were also two daughters: Lysandra, who would marry one of Cassander’s sons and then Agathocles, son of Lysimachus; and Ptolemais, one of the last of the many brides of Demetrius Poliorcetes (Plut. Demetr . 46.5). Eurydice may have borne two more sons to Ptolemy. … As we shall see, Eurydice and Berenice, Arsinoë’s mother, were having children by Ptolemy at the same time.

However many wives and mistresses Ptolemy kept about him at court, Eurydice would long have had the most prestige. Initially, this prestige would have stemmed from her father’s reputation, later from her brother Cassander’s role (after 316) as the ruler of Macedonia, and from the impressive marriages of her sisters. What must have seemed decisive, however, was that Ptolemy named the first son she bore him after himself. By this stage, as his name choice suggests, Soter had begun to think like a dynast. He may have hoped that the son who shared his name, once he was old enough, would be his heir, replacing his sons by Thaïs.

When Eurydice arrived in Egypt, a sort of lady-in-waiting, a young widow named Berenice (I) accompanied her (Paus. 1.6.8). Berenice’s mother was Antigone, the daughter of a brother of Antipater (Schol. Ad Theoc. 17.61), making Antipater Berenice’s great-uncle. Berenice’s father was apparently a man named Magas, about whom nothing is known. … Berenice had first married a man named Philip, by whom she had a son called Magas (Paus. 1.7.1–3), a daughter Antigone (and possibly another daughter, Theoxene). Berenice’s first husband, Philip, had apparently died and Pausanias (1.6.8) says that Antipater sent this widowed poor relation (she was Eurydice’s second cousin) to Egypt with his daughter Eurydice. ... According to Pausanias (1.7.1) Berenice I’s first husband was obscure and of low birth; the names of two of Berenice’s children by this first marriage—since they refer to their maternal grandparents—seem to confirm Pausanias. Theocritus (a poet under Ptolemaic patronage), rather than employing the usual patronymic, refers to Berenice as the daughter of Antigone; the matronymic not only stresses her ties to Antipater but again confirms that her maternal ancestry was more distinguished than her paternal, much as was the case with her husband. …

Berenice became Ptolemy I’s wife, possibly as soon as she caught his eye. Was she his mistress first? The line between wife and mistress was not a very clear one, as we have seen in terms of Thaïs. At the very least, by the time Berenice began to have children by Ptolemy, she was his wife, just as we know Thaïs was. Their relationship, whether origi-nally a marriage or not, must have begun comparatively soon after Berenice’s arrival in Egypt. The evidence for the length of their relationship is the marriage date of their oldest child, Arsinoë, around 300 bce , implying, as we have noted, that Arsinoë was born between 318 and 314. Thus her parent’s relationship dated, at the very least to 315, but may well have begun several years earlier. Berenice had another daughter by Soter, Philotera (Strab. 16.4.5; Callimachus Fr. 228), whose date of birth is unknown and hard to surmise since she apparently never married and died before Arsinoë. In 309/8 on the island of Cos, Berenice gave birth to the future Ptolemy II Philadelphus. It is surely significant that Ptolemy I chose to name a second son after himself; indeed the name choice itself implies that these two Ptolemies literally became rivals at birth.

Berenice was, more or less, in Anne Boleyn’s position and managed a similar rise to prominence, though she was able to improve rather than lose her status (not to mention her head) as Boleyn did. Ptolemy I had no worldly reason to marry Berenice. Despite the fact that kings virtually always married for policy, as part of some sort of alliance, ancient authors almost always claim that kings married for love. Ptolemy I is the exception who actually did. Pausanias (1.6.8), discussing Ptolemy’s preference for Berenice, speaks of his being epimanēs (mad for women). Ptolemy, after all, already had an aristocratic and well-connected wife who was producing children, apparently more than one son, and Berenice had no powerful relatives who were not closer kin of Eurydice. Berenice resembles that staple of Victorian fiction, the poor relative dependent for a living on her more well-to-do kin, who manages to find a rich and distinguished husband. Theocritus’ celebration of Ptolemy’s love for Berenice ( Id . 17.38–39) is entirely justified in the sense that theirs was actually a unique royal marriage, based, so far as one can tell, on eros. The scholiast (someone who wrote comments in the margin of a manuscript) for Theocritus 17.34 implausibly proclaimed that Berenice was the most chaste of Soter’s wives. Had she really been so chaste, she might not have become his wife. True, Ptolemy I did marry Thaïs as well, but Thaïs’ sons did not become contenders for the throne. The really remarkable thing about Berenice is not simply that Ptolemy married her but that, in the end, her son would become king.”

- Elizabeth Donnelly Carney, Arsinoe of Egypt and Macedon: A Royal Lif