Berenice I of Egypt

1. Born c.340 BC, half-sister and third wife of Ptolemy I Soter, king of Egypt (hence known as Berenice I). Their children were Ptolemy II Philadelphus and Arsinoē II, who married her brother as his second wife (his first wife being Arsinoe I).

2. Daughter of Ptolemy II and Arsinoe I and sister of Ptolemy III, born c.280 BC and married to Antiochus II, king of Syria. After his death she and her son were murdered by Antiochus' first wife.

3. Daughter of the king of Cyrene, born c.273 BC and married to Ptolemy III Euergetes in 247. In 246 Ptolemy set out for Syria to support, too late, the claims of his sister's son to the throne of Syria (see (2) above). On his departure, his wife Berenice dedicated to the gods a lock of her hair as an offering for his safe return. This lock mysteriously disappeared. Conon, the court astronomer, claimed flatteringly to have discovered it in a hitherto unnamed constellation, seven faint stars near the tail of Leo, thereafter known as Coma Berenices (Berenīkēs plokamos), ‘the lock of Berenice’. This event was celebrated in an ingenious and entertaining poem by Callimachus, in which the lock of hair addresses the reader. Catullus' poem 66 is virtually a translation of it into Latin, and Alexander Pope based upon it his Rape of the Lock (1712).

4. Born AD 28, daughter of Herod of Acts 12 (who is usually known as Agrippa I) and great-granddaughter of Herod the Great, king of Judaea. After the death of her second husband she lived with her brother Agrippa II, and to allay suspicion of incest married the king of Cilicia (AD 54). She soon left him, however, and returned to her brother, with whom she was living when the apostle Paul spoke his defence before them both (Acts 25, where she is called Bernice). She and her brother tried in vain to dissuade the Jews from rebelling against Rome in AD 66, and when war broke out they both sided with the Romans. When Titus, the son of the Roman emperor Vespasian, was fighting in Judaea in 67–70, he fell in love with her, and after she visited Rome with Agrippa in c.75 they lived openly together for three or four years. This liaison was unpopular and Titus was compelled to send her away when he succeeded to the throne in 79. Juvenal mentions her contemptuously in his Satire 6. She is the Berenice who was the heroine of tragedies by Corneille (1606–84) and Racine (1639–99).

For other uses, see Berenice (disambiguation).

Head of Ptolemy I and Berenice I

Berenice I, daughter of Magas, was first the wife of Philip, an obscure Macedonian nobleman, with whom she gave birth to Antigone and the future Magas of Cyrene. Upon Philip's death, she came to Egypt as a lady-in-waiting to Eurydice, bride of Ptolemy I, Alexander's general and founder of the Ptolemaic dynasty. Berenice caught the eye of the king. Her son with Ptolemy I, Ptolemy II Philadelphos, was recognized as heir in preference to Eurydice's children. She was the mother of Arsinoe II.

Ptolemy gave her name to the new port he built on the Red Sea, Berenice. King Pyrrhus of Epirus – Antigone's husband – also gave the name Berenicis to a new city. Her son Ptolemy II Philadelphos decreed divine honours to her on her death. (See Theocritus, Idylls xv. and xvii.)

References

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

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