5. The King Who Got Himself Lynched
Perhaps none of the Ptolemies illustrates how tangled things had gotten after generations of incest than Ptolemy XI Alexander II, who ruled the kingdom for a few days in 80 BC. His uncle Ptolemy IX Lathryos had died in 80 BC, leaving the throne to his daughter Cleopatra Bernice, who briefly reigned alone as Bernice III. The Roman dictator Sulla however wanted a more pliant ruler, so he sent a young Ptolemy XI to Egypt. There, the new arrival married Bernice III, and ruled jointly with her.
Bernice, aside from being Ptolemy’s XI’s cousin as the daughter of his uncle Ptolemy IX, was also his half sister, step mother by dint of having been married to Ptolemy XI’s father, Ptolemy, and might even have been his actual mother – sources are confused on this point. Despite the close family ties – or perhaps precisely because of those ties – Ptolemy XI did not like his new wife, and 19 days into the marriage, he murdered her. That proved to be a mistake, because he was little known to the locals, while Bernice had been a popular ruler. Soon thereafter, Ptolemy XI was seized by an enraged Alexandrian mob, and publicly lynched.
