The choice of a mate.

  • Anthony Ludovici
Date:
[1935]
Catalogue details
    109/546 page 79
    INCEST OF THE PTOLEMIES to advocate “ the sterilization of criminals This would too often mean getting rid of some of our best stocks. When, therefore, the average middle-class male or female writes as Mr. Poole writes in the Encyclopedia Britannica, or rises in the body of a lecture hall, to point out to me and my audience that the Ptolemies were immoral because they were degenerate, and that they were degenerate because they were incestuous, my heart always sinks before the task of exposing the mass of error involved in such a statement. Of the Ptolemies, Ptolemy II was the first to marry his sister, but the marriage was without issue. It was by his wife Arsinoe II that he had Ptolemy III Euergetes. Ptolemy III married his sister and cousin, Berenice, and their son, Ptolemy IV, was thus the first fruit of incest in the line. Ptolemy IV married his sister, Arsinoe III, by whom he had Ptolemy V, who was thus the second monarch to be the issue of incest. Ptolemy V married Cleopatra I, with whom he was hardly connected, and had Ptolemy VI. The latter married his sister, Cleopatra II. He was succeeded by his brother, Ptolemy VII, who married his sister, Ptolemy Vi’s widow, by whom he had a son who ultimately murdered him. But it was by his second marriage to his niece, Cleopatra IV, the daughter of his brother and sister, that he had Ptolemy VIII and IX. Thus both Ptolemy VIII and IX, in addition to coming from closely inbred stock, were themselves the fruit of incest. By his second wife, Selene, his sister, Ptolemy VIII had two children, but they never came to the throne. Ptolemy IX, on the other hand, by his first wife, had Ptolemy X. With him the direct male line of the Ptolemies became extinct, and the throne fell to Ptolemy XI, Auletes, who was an illegiti mate son of Ptolemy VIII, and it was he who became the father of the famous Cleopatra, the last reigning member of the family. It is neither desirable nor possible to deny that the majority of these rulers were debauchees. But that they were degenerates, in the sense of being physiologically and morphologically below normal, is, I believe, false. We must remember that if they were connected with Egypt in her decline, this was inevitable from the nature of the case. They were a race of foreign rulers im posed on Egypt by conquest. They would hardly have been there had Egypt not started decaying before the inception of their dynasty. She had endured over four thousand years, and, through the increasing miscegenation of her people, her in stitutions were tottering. Her people were as debauched
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