mediterranean literature 319
the lock, the poem clearly reflects Greek history, politics, and culture—the apotheosis
confirming both the royal couple’s privileged heritage and, by implication, the legiti-
macy of Ptolemaic rule (Selden, 1998: 328).^8 At the same time, as Daniel Selden has
shown, the poem is also legible in terms of classical Egyptian culture. Since the time
of the Old Kingdom, one of Pharaoh’s central duties had been to subdue and annex
Libyans and Asiatics, both considered enemies of the state; “smiting” these border
peoples was an obligation—memorialized in inscriptions, art, and verse—central to
the maintenance of the cosmic order, such that each ruler began his reign by ritually
declaring war on these enemies, with Asia often figuring as the first target of this
symbolically-laden campaign. In Egyptian terms, both Ptolemy’s marriage alliance
with Cyrene and his Syrian campaign marked him as a “righteous and effectual” king
who assured the stability of his realm by bringing the political and moral chaos of
Libya and Syria into line (Selden, 1998: 331–333, 336–337). In this alternative con-
text, Berenice’s lock evokes the luxuriant hair of the goddess Isis (of whom the
Egyptian queen is traditionally seen as an avatar)—likewise transposed to the heavens
as the star Sirius (Selden, 1998: 337–339, 344). Strategically situated at the nexus of
Greek and Egyptian history, religious beliefs, and cultural practices, the Lock of
Berenice “transumes the stuff of Hellenic history into Egyptian matter.” Even this
interpellation of a dual audience of politically-aware Greeks, on the one hand, and
Greek-reading Egyptians, on the other, proves consonant with Egyptian ways of
thinking, which “eschews the ‘either/or’ for a ‘both/and’ rationale that admits a
plurality of divergent actualities” (Selden, 1998: 349–350). Taken as a quintessen-
tially Greek text, the Lock of Berenice reveals the full range of its cultural resonance
only when reinserted in its bilingual and bicultural Mediterranean context.
A second example of a multivalent Mediterranean occurs in the medieval Castilian
work, the Poem of Fernán González. Composed in the northern Spanish monastery of
San Pedro de Arlanza in the 1250s—contemporary with Alfonso X’s Castilian transla-
tion of the Arabic Kalila and Dimna—it is cast in the monorhymed quatrains (quad-
erna via) of the mester de clerecía (a movement, begun in the 1220s, which had
produced translations such as the Libro de Alexandre and the Libro de Apolonio from
the Latin). A legendary reworking of history, the Poem of Fernán González mentions
an interregnum following the death of Alfonso II of Asturias (d. 842) during which
Castile was ruled by two elected judges, Nuño Rasura (“shaving”), and his son-in-law,
Laín Calvo (“bald”). Commentators have long struggled to explain why rule is attrib-
uted to judges, why there are two of them, and what significance to attribute to their
lack of hair. Opaque from a strictly Castilian perspective, these puzzling features, as
historian Maribel Fierro has shown in an unpublished essay, are made legible when
resituated in a broader Iberian context. In the history of al-Andalus, it was not uncom-
mon to find judges (qadis) in positions of local or regional authority, filling the power
vacuum at moments of political crisis, such as the collapse of the Caliphate of Cordoba
in the early eleventh century, or the turbulent transition from Almoravid to Almohad
rule in the mid-twelfth. Examples of double judgeships, or of two judges alternating in
power annually, can be found in eighth- and early eleventh-century Andalusia, and
across the Muslim world from Basra and Baghdad to Qayrawan. Finally, shaved heads
or unusual hairstyles were adopted by various Berber groups in both North Africa and
al-Andalus, either to distinguish themselves (ethnically or doctrinally) from other
Muslims, or to signal their unity over and across discrete tribal affiliations, reflecting