“SISTERS, SISTERS….”
“There were never such devoted sisters…” so sang Rosemary Clooney and Vera Ellen in the classic 1942 movie ‘White Christmas’. I’m sure there are devoted sisters in the world today, but not every sibling relationship in history has been Hollywood happy. Take the Boleyn sisters… Mary and Anne Boleyn seemed to have had a distant but not hostile relationship, despite the fact that Henry Vlll might have dumped Mary as his mistress in favour of Anne, who became his second wife –though not for long! It was Anne who persuaded Henry to pay his discarded mistress a pension and Anne who ensured Mary was later banished from court for secretly marrying ‘beneath her’. This turned out to be a lucky move for Mary because when Anne lost her head (literally) in1536, Mary escaped the scandal and backwash that fell on their family and was able to live out the rest of her life in obscurity.
Another pair of sisters may have been mythical rather than historical, but did you know that Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra were sisters who were married to the brothers Menelaus and Agamemnon of Mycenae? There are no plays or poems extant that describe their relationship but if we look at how the Trojan War impacted their lives we can imagine a certain strain might have developed in their relationship. Before the Greek ships could set sail for Troy, Clytemnestra’s husband Agamemnon, the principal leader of the united Greek army managed to offend the goddess Artemis by killing one of her sacred deer. In revenge, the goddess prevented the wind from blowing until Agamemnon sacrificed his and Clytemnestra’s daughter Iphigenia to her. This he did and the fleet sailed. Clytemnestra never forgave him and on his triumphant return ten years later, she is said to have murdered him in his bath. We don’t know whether she bore a grudge against her sister for ostensibly causing the war by her elopement with Paris but as she herself was murdered by her son Orestes before Menelaus returned with his wife beside him, we can only speculate…
The last sisters I want to mention were definitely historical. Cleopatra, the last pharaoh of Egypt, had a half-sister named Arsinoe, who was as strong- willed and determined as her more famous sibling. Born c68 BCE Arsinoe was the younger of the two girls. She was married to one of their brothers, Ptolemy XlV while Cleopatra was married to another, Ptolemy Xlll as was the Ptolemaic custom. It was not a happy family. As the slightly older couple Cleopatra and her spouse were supposed to be ruling Egypt together but they hated each other and by the time Julius Caesar arrived in Egypt the two factions were at each other’s throats. Caesar attempted to arrange peace between them but failed. Fighting broke out. Arsinoe allied herself to Ptolemy while Cleopatra had managed to secure Caesar’s support. It was a near thing at first. Most of Caesar’s troops hadn’t arrived yet and when he attacked the Lighthouse at Alexandria he was beaten back by young Arsinoe and her troops and only escaped by jumping into the sea and swimming for the nearest Roman ship — not his greatest moment!
Of course, eventually Caesar and Cleopatra won and Arsinoe was sent to Rome in chains where she was paraded in Caesar’s triumph. Traditionally, defeated leaders were often executed after their display in a triumph but Arsinoe was only a teenage girl. Either the Roman people felt sorry for her or Caesar pardoned her to create a better relationship with his new ally Egypt. Whatever the reason, her life was spared and she was sent to Ephesus to serve as a priestess in the temple of Artemis where she safely remained for the next five years. Unfortunately Caesar was assassinated in 44BCE and by 41BCE Cleopatra had Mark Anthony so under her thumb that she could persuade him to dispatch soldiers to murder Arsinoe in the temple, in violation of holy sanctuary, just in case she might be used against her. So ended the sad tale of yet another dysfunctional family. They say blood is thicker than water, but is it thicker than power? I wonder.
Mary Boleyn: The Mistress of Kings by Alison Weir (2011)
The Mistresses of Henry VIII by Kelly Hart (2009)
Mary Boleyn: The True Story of Henry VIII’s Mistress by Josephine Wilkinson (2010)
www.newstatesman.com/.../04/slut-shaming-helen-troy
https://ancientherstories.com/the-ptolemy-sisters/cleopatra-siser-queen-arsinoe-.
