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The Life and Times of
Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt

“Histories make men wise.”—Bacon.

“I have no expectation that any man will read history aright who thinks that what was done in a remote age ... has any deeper sense than what he is doing to-day.”—Emerson.

“To philosophise on mankind exact observation is not sufficient.... Knowledge of the present must be supplemented from the history of the past.”—Taine.

“Only the dead men know the tunes the live world dances to.”—Le Gallienne.

“Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust: for ... the earth shall cast out the dead.”—Isaiah.

British Museum.]

[Photograph by Macbeth.

CLEOPATRA.

The Life and Times of
Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt

A Study in the Origin
of the Roman Empire

BY
ARTHUR E. P. BROME WEIGALL

INSPECTOR-GENERAL OF ANTIQUITIES, GOVERNMENT OF EGYPT

AUTHOR OF ‘THE LIFE AND TIMES OF AKHNATON, PHARAOH OF EGYPT,’ ‘THE TREASURE
OF ANCIENT EGYPT,’ ‘TRAVELS IN THE UPPER EGYPTIAN DESERTS,’
‘A GUIDE TO THE ANTIQUITIES OF UPPER EGYPT,’ ETC., ETC.

WITH MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS

William Blackwood and Sons
Edinburgh and London
1914

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

I DEDICATE THIS BOOK
TO MY FRIEND OF MANY YEARS,
RONALD STORRS,
ORIENTAL SECRETARY TO THE BRITISH AGENCY IN EGYPT,
SCHOLAR, POET, AND MUSICIAN.

PREFACE.

I have to thank most heartily the Honourable Mrs Julian Byng, Mrs Gerald Lascelles, Mr Ronald Storrs, and my wife, for reading the proofs of this volume, and for giving me the benefit of their invaluable advice.

CONTENTS.

ILLUSTRATIONS.

INTRODUCTION.

In the following pages it will be observed that, in order not to distract the reader, I have refrained from adding large numbers of notes, references, and discussions, such as are customary in works of this kind. I am aware that by telling a straightforward story in this manner I lay myself open to the suspicions of my fellow-workers, for there is always some tendency to take not absolutely seriously a book which neither prints chapter and verse for its every statement, nor often interrupts the text with erudite arguments. In the case of the subject which is here treated, however, it has seemed to me unnecessary to encumber the pages in this manner, since the sources of my information are all so well known; and I have thus been able to present the book to the reader in a style consonant with a principle of archæological and historical study to which I have always endeavoured to adhere—namely, the avoidance of as many of those attestations of learning as may be discarded without real loss. A friend of mine, an eminent scholar, in discussing with me the scheme of this volume, earnestly exhorted me on the present occasion not to abide by this principle. Remarking that the trouble with my interpretation of history was that I attempted to make the characters live, he urged me at least to justify the manner of their resuscitation in the eyes of the doctors of science by cramming my pages with extracts from my working notes, relevant or otherwise, and by smattering my text with Latin and Greek quotations. I trust, however, that he was speaking in behalf of a very small company, for the sooner this kind of jargon of scholarship is swept into the world’s dust-bin, the better will it be for public education. To my mind a knowledge of the past is so necessary to a happy mental poise that it seems absolutely essential for historical studies to be placed before the general reader in a manner sympathetic to him. “History,” said Emerson, “no longer shall be a dull book. It shall walk incarnate in every just and wise man. You shall not tell me by languages and titles a catalogue of the volumes you have read. You shall make me feel what periods you have lived.”

Such has been my attempt in the following pages; and, though I am so conscious of my literary limitations that I doubt my ability to place the reader in touch with past events, I must confess to a sense of gladness that I, at any rate, with almost my whole mind, have lived for a time in the company of the men and women of long ago of whom these pages tell.

Any of my readers who think that my interpretation of the known incidents here recorded is faulty may easily check my statements by reference to the classical authors. The sources of information are available at any big library. They consist of Plutarch, Cicero, Suetonius, Dion Cassius, Appian, ‘De Bello Alexandrino,’ Strabo, Diodorus Siculus, Livy, Velleius Paterculus, Seneca, Lucan, Josephus, Pliny, Dion Chrysostom, Tacitus, Florus, Lucian, Athenæus, Porphyry, and Orosius. Of modern writers reference should be made to Ferrero’s ‘Greatness and Decline of Rome,’ Bouché-Leclercq’s ‘Histoire des Lagides,’ Mahaffy’s ‘Empire of the Ptolemies,’ Mommsen’s ‘History of Rome,’ Strack’s ‘Dynastie der Ptolemäer,’ and Sergeant’s ‘Cleopatra of Egypt.’ There are also, of course, a very large number of works on special branches of the subject, which the reader will, without much difficulty, discover for himself.

I do not think that my statements of fact will be found to be in error; but the general interpretation of the events will be seen to be almost entirely new throughout the story, and therefore plainly open to discussion. I would only plead for my views that a residence in Egypt of many years, a close association with Alexandria, Cleopatra’s capital, and a daily familiarity with Greek and Egyptian antiquities, have caused me almost unconsciously to form opinions which may not be at once acceptable to the scholar at home.

To some extent it is the business of the biographer to make the best of the characters with which he deals, but the accusation of having made use of this prerogative in the following pages will not be able to be substantiated. There is no high purpose served by the historian who sets down this man or that woman as an unmitigated blackguard, unless it be palpably impossible to discover any good motive for his or her actions. And even then it is a pleasant thing to avert, where possible, the indignation of posterity. An undefined sense of anger is left upon the mind of many of those who have read pages of condemnatory history of this kind, written by scholars who themselves are seated comfortably in the artificial atmosphere of modern righteousness. The story of the Plantagenet kings of England, for example, as recorded by Charles Dickens in his ‘Child’s History of England,’ causes the reader to direct his anger more often to Dickens than to those weary, battle-stained, old monarchs whose blood many Englishmen are still proud to acknowledge. An historian who deals with a black period must not be fastidious. Nor must he detach his characters from their natural surroundings, and judge them according to a code of morals of which they themselves knew nothing. The modern, and not infrequently degenerate, humanitarian may utter his indignant complaint against the Norman barons who extracted the teeth of the Jewish financiers to induce them to deliver up their gold; but has he set himself to feel that pressing need of money which the barons felt, and has he endeavoured to experience their exasperation at the obstinacy of these foreigners? Let him do this and his attitude will be more tolerant: one might even live to see him hastening to the City with a pair of pincers in his pocket. Of course it is not the historian’s affair to condone, or become a party to, a crime; but it certainly is his business to consider carefully the meaning of the term “crime,” and to question its significance, as Pilate did that of truth.

In studying the characters of persons who lived in past ages, the biographer must tell us frankly whether he considers his subjects good or bad, liberal or mean, pious or impious; but at this late hour he should not often be wholly condemnatory, nor, indeed, need he be expected to have so firm a belief in man’s capacity for consistent action as to admit that any person was so invariably villainous as he may be said to have been. A natural and inherent love of right-doing will sometimes lead the historian to err somewhat on the side of magnanimity; and I dare say he will serve the purpose of history best when he can honestly find a devil not so black as he is painted. Being acquainted with the morals of 1509, I would almost prefer to think of Henry the Eighth as “bluff King Hal,” than as “the most detestable villain that ever drew breath.”[1] I believe that an historian, in sympathy with his period, can at one and the same moment absolve Mary Queen of Scots from the charge of treachery, and defend Elizabeth’s actions against her on that charge.

In the case of Cleopatra the biographer may approach his subject from one of several directions. He may, for example, regard the Queen of Egypt as a thoroughly bad woman, or as an irresponsible sinner, or as a moderately good woman in a difficult situation. In this book it is my object to point out the difficulty of the situation, and to realise the adverse circumstances against which the Queen had to contend; and by so doing a fairer complexion will be given to certain actions which otherwise must inevitably be regarded as darkly sinful. The biographer need not, for the sake of his principles, turn his back on the sinner and refuse to consider the possibility of extenuating circumstances. He need not, as we so often must in regard to our contemporaries, make a clear distinction between good and bad, shunning the sinner that our intimates may not be contaminated. The past, to some extent, is gone beyond the eventuality of Hell; and Time, the great Redeemer, has taken from the world the sharpness of its sin. The historian thus may put himself in touch with distant crime, and may attempt to apologise for it, without the charge being brought against him that in so doing he deviates from the stern path of moral rectitude. Intolerance is the simple expedient of contemporaneous society: the historian must show his distaste for wrong-doing by other means. We dare not excuse the sins of our fellows; but the wreck of times past, the need of reconstruction and rebuilding, gives the writer of history and biography a certain option in the selection of the materials which he uses in the resuscitation of his characters. He holds a warrant from the Lord of the Ages to give them the benefit of the doubt; and if it be his whim to ignore this licence and to condemn wholesale a character or a family, he sometimes loses, by a sort of perversion, the prerogative of his calling. The historian must examine from all sides the events which he is studying; and in regard to the subject with which this volume deals he must be particularly careful not to direct his gaze upon it only from the point of view of the Imperial Court of Rome, which regarded Cleopatra as the ancestral enemy of the dynasty. In dealing with history, says Emerson, “we, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner.” Even so, as we study the life of Cleopatra, we must set behind us that view of the case that was held by one section of humanity. In like manner we must rid ourselves of the influence of the thought of any one period, and must ignore that aspect of morality which has been developed in us by contact with the age in which we have the fortune to live. Good and evil are relative qualities, defined very largely by public opinion; and it must always be remembered that certain things which are considered to be correct to-day may have the denunciation of yesterday and to-morrow. We, as we read of the deeds of the Queen of Egypt, must doff our modern conception of right and wrong together with our top-hats and frock-coats; and, as we pace the courts of the Ptolemies, and breathe the atmosphere of the first century before Christ, we must not commit the anachronism of criticising our surroundings from the standard of twenty centuries after Christ. It is, of course, apparent that to a great extent we must be influenced by the thought of to-day; but the true student of history will make the effort to cast from him the shackles of his contemporaneous opinions, and to parade the bygone ages in the boundless freedom of a citizen of all time and a dweller in every land.

THE KNOWN WORLD
IN THE TIME OF
CLEOPATRA

PART I.
CLEOPATRA AND CÆSAR

CHAPTER I.
AN INTRODUCTORY STUDY OF THE CHARACTER OF CLEOPATRA.

To those who make a close inquiry into the life of Cleopatra it will speedily become apparent that the generally accepted estimate of her character was placed before the public by those who sided against her in regard to the quarrel between Antony and Octavian. During the last years of her life the great Queen of Egypt became the mortal enemy of the first of the Roman Emperors, and the memory of her historic hostility was perpetuated by the supporters of every Cæsar of that dynasty. Thus the beliefs now current as to Cleopatra’s nefarious influence upon Julius Cæsar and Marc Antony are, in essence, the simple abuse of her opponents; nor has History preserved to us any record of her life set down by one who was her partisan in the great struggle in which she so bravely engaged herself. It is a noteworthy fact, however, that the writer who is most fair to her memory, namely, the inimitable Plutarch, appears to have obtained much of his information from the diary kept by Cleopatra’s doctor, Olympus. I do not presume in this volume to offer any kind of apology for the much-maligned Queen, but it will be my object to describe the events of her troubled life in such a manner that her aims, as I understand them, may be fairly placed before the reader; and there can be little doubt that, if I succeed in giving plausibility to the speculations here advanced, the actions of Cleopatra will, without any particular advocacy, assume a character which, at any rate, is no uglier than that of every other actor in this strange drama.

The injustice, the adverse partiality, of the attitude assumed by classical authors will speedily become apparent to all unbiassed students; and a single instance of this obliquity of judgment is all that need be mentioned here to illustrate my contention. I refer to the original intimacy between Cleopatra and Julius Cæsar. According to the accepted view of historians, both ancient and modern, the great Dictator is supposed to have been led astray by the voluptuous Egyptian, and to have been detained in Alexandria, against his better judgment, by the wiles of this Siren of the East. At this time, however, as will be seen in due course, Cleopatra, “the stranger for whom the Roman half-brick was never wanting,”[2] was actually an unmarried girl of some twenty-one years of age, against whose moral character not one shred of trustworthy evidence can be advanced; while, on the other hand, Cæsar was an elderly man who had ruined the wives and daughters of an astounding number of his friends, and whose reputation for such seductions was of a character almost past belief. How anybody, therefore, who has the known facts before him, can attribute the blame to Cleopatra in this instance, must become altogether incomprehensible to any student of the events of that time. I do not intend to represent the Queen of Egypt as a particularly exalted type of her sex, but an attempt will be made to deal justly with her, and by giving her on occasion, as in a court of law, the benefit of the doubt, I feel assured that the reader will be able to see in her a very good average type of womanhood. Nor need I, in so doing, be accused of using on her behalf the privilege of the biographer, which is to make excuses. I will not simply set forth the case for Cleopatra as it were in her defence: I will tell the whole story of her life as it appears to me, admitting always the possible correctness of the estimate of her character held by other historians, but, at the same time, offering to public consideration a view of her deeds and devices which, if accepted, will clear her memory of much of that unpleasant stigma so long attached to it, and will place her reputation upon a level with those of the many famous persons of her time, not one of whom can be called either thoroughly bad or wholly good.

So little is known with any certainty as to Cleopatra’s appearance, that the biographer must feel considerable reluctance in presenting her to his readers in definite guise; yet the duties of an historian do not permit him to deal with ghosts and shadows, or to invoke from the past only the misty semblance of those who once were puissant realities. For him the dead must rise not as phantoms hovering uncertainly at the mouth of their tombs, but as substantial entities observable in every detail to the mental eye; and he must endeavour to convey to others the impression, however faulty, which he himself has received. In the case of Cleopatra the materials necessary for her resuscitation are meagre, and one is forced to call in the partial assistance of the imagination in the effort to rebuild once more that body which has been so long dissolved into Egyptian dust.

A few coins upon which the Queen’s profile is stamped, and a bust of poor workmanship in the British Museum, are the sole[3] sources of information as to her features. The colour of her eyes and of her hair is not known; nor can it be said whether her skin was white as alabaster, like that of many of her Macedonian fellow-countrywomen, or whether it had that olive tone so often observed amongst the Greeks. Even her beauty, or rather the degree of her beauty, is not clearly defined. It must be remembered that, so far as we know, not one drop of Oriental blood flowed in Cleopatra’s veins, and that therefore her type must be considered as Macedonian Greek. The slightly brown skin of the Egyptian, the heavy dark eyes of the East, full, as it were, of sleep, the black hair of silken texture, are not features which are to be assigned to her. On the contrary, many Macedonian women are fair-haired and blue-eyed, and that colouring is frequently to be seen amongst the various peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean. Nevertheless, it seems most probable, all things considered, that she was a brunette; but in describing her as such it must be borne in mind that there is nothing more than a calculated likelihood to guide us.

The features of her face seem to have been strongly moulded, although the general effect given is that of smallness and delicacy. Her nose was aquiline and prominent, the nostrils being sensitive and having an appearance of good breeding. Her mouth was beautifully formed, the lips appearing to be finely chiselled. Her eyes were large and well placed, her eyebrows delicately pencilled. The contour of her cheek and chin was charmingly rounded, softening, thus, the lines of her clear-cut features. “Her beauty,” says Plutarch, “was not in itself altogether incomparable, nor such as to strike those who saw her”; and he adds that Octavia, afterwards Antony’s wife, was the more beautiful of the two women. But he admits, and no other man denies, that her personal charm and magnetism were very great. “She was splendid to hear and to see,” says Dion Cassius, “and was capable of conquering the hearts which had resisted most obstinately the influence of love and those which had been frozen by age.”

It is probable that she was very small in build. In order to obtain admittance to her palace upon an occasion of which we shall presently read, it is related that she was rolled up in some bedding and carried over the shoulders of an attendant, a fact which indicates that her weight was not considerable. The British Museum bust seems to portray the head of a small woman; and, moreover, Plutarch refers to her in terms which suggest that her charm lay to some extent in her daintiness. One imagines her thus to have been in appearance a small, graceful woman; prettily rounded rather than slight; white-skinned; dark-haired and dark-eyed; beautiful, and yet by no means a perfect type of beauty.

Her voice is said to have been her most powerful weapon, for by the perfection of its modulations it was at all times wonderfully persuasive and seductive.

“The Devil hath not, in all his quiver’s choice,
An arrow for the heart like a sweet voice,”

says Byron; and in the case of Cleopatra this poignant gift of Nature must have served her well throughout her life. “Familiarity with her,” writes Plutarch, “had an irresistible charm; and her form, combined with her persuasive speech, and with the peculiar character which in a manner was diffused about her behaviour, produced a certain piquancy. There was a sweetness in the sound of her voice when she spoke.” “Her charm of speech,” Dion Cassius tells us, “was such that she won all who listened.”

Her grace of manner was as irresistible as her voice; for, as Plutarch remarks, there seems to have been this peculiar, undefined charm in her behaviour. It may have been largely due to a kind of elusiveness and subtilty; but it would seem also to have been accentuated by a somewhat naïve and childish manner, a waywardness, an audacity, a capriciousness, which enchanted those around her. Though often wild and inclined to romp, she possessed considerable dignity and at times was haughty and proud. Pliny speaks of her as being disdainful and vain, and indeed so Cicero found her when he met her in Rome; but this was an attitude perhaps assumed by the Queen as a defence against the light criticisms of those Roman nobles of the Pompeian faction who may have found her position not so honourable as she herself believed it to be. There is, indeed, little to indicate that her manner was by nature overbearing; and one is inclined to picture her as a natural, impulsive woman who passed readily from haughtiness to simplicity. Her actions were spontaneous, and one may suppose her to have been in her early years as often artless as cunning. Her character was always youthful, her temperament vivacious, and her manner frequently what may be called harum-scarum. She enjoyed life, and with candour took from it whatever pleasures it held out to her. Her untutored heart leapt from mirth to sorrow, from comedy to tragedy, with unexpected ease; and with her small hands she tossed about her the fabric of her complex circumstances like a mantle of light and darkness.

She was a gifted woman, endowed by nature with ready words and a happy wit. “She could easily turn her tongue,” says Plutarch, “like a many-stringed instrument, to any language that she pleased. She had very seldom need of an interpreter for her communication with foreigners, but she answered most men by herself, namely Ethiopians, Troglodytes, Hebrews, Arabs, Syrians, Medes, and Parthians. She is said to have learned the language of many other peoples, though the kings, her predecessors, had not even taken the pains to learn the Egyptian tongue, and some of them had not so much as given up the Macedonian dialect.” Statecraft made a strong appeal to her, and as Queen of Egypt she served the cause of her dynasty’s independence and aggrandisement with passionate energy. Dion Cassius tells us that she was intensely ambitious, and most careful that due honour should be paid to her throne. Her actions go to confirm this estimate, and one may see her consumed at times with a legitimate desire for world-power. Though clever and bold she was not highly skilled, so far as one can see, in the diplomatic art; but she seems to have plotted and schemed in the manner common to her house, not so much with great acuteness or profound depth as with sustained intensity and a sort of conviction. Tenacity of purpose is seen to have been her prevailing characteristic; and her unwavering struggle for her rights and those of her son Cæsarion will surely be followed by the interested reader through the long story before him with real admiration.

It is unanimously supposed that Cleopatra was, as Josephus words it, a slave to her lusts. The vicious sensuality of the East, the voluptuous degeneracy of an Oriental court, are thought to have found their most apparent expression in the person of this unfortunate Queen. Yet what was there, beyond the ignorant and prejudiced talk of her Roman enemies, to give a foundation to such an estimate of her character? She lived practically as Cæsar’s wife for some years, it being said, I believe with absolute truth, that he intended to make her Empress of Rome and his legal consort. After his assassination she married Antony, and cohabited with him until the last days of her life. At an age when the legal rights of marriage were violated on every side, when all Rome and all Alexandria were deeply involved in domestic intrigues, Cleopatra, so far as I can see, confined her attentions to the two men who in sequence each acted towards her in the manner of a legitimate husband, each being recognised in Egypt as her divinely-sanctioned consort. The words of Dion Cassius, which tell us that “no wealth could satisfy her, and her passions were insatiable,” do not suggest a more significant foundation than that her life was lived on extravagant and prodigal lines. There is no doubt that she was open to the accusations of her enemies, who described her habits as dissipated and intemperate; but there seems to be little to indicate that she was in any way a Delilah or a Jezebel. For all we know, she may have been a very moral woman: certainly she was the fond mother of four children, a fact which, even at that day, may be said to indicate, to a certain extent, a voluntary assumption of the duties of motherhood. After due consideration of all the evidence, I am of opinion that though her nature may have been somewhat voluptuous, and though her passions were not always under control, the best instincts of her sex were by no means absent; and indeed, in her maternal aspect, she may be described as a really good woman.

The state of society at the time must be remembered. In Rome, as well as in Alexandria, love intrigues were continuously in progress. Mommsen, in writing of the moral corruption of the age, speaks of the extraordinary degeneracy of the dancing girl of the period, whose record “pollutes even the pages of history.” “But,” he adds, “their, as it were, licensed trade was materially injured by the free act of the ladies of aristocratic circles. Liaisons in the first houses had become so frequent that only a scandal altogether exceptional could make them the subject of special talk, and judicial interference seemed now almost ridiculous.” Against such a background Cleopatra’s domestic life with Cæsar, and afterwards with Antony, assumes, by contrast, a fair character which is not without its refreshing aspect. We see her intense and lifelong devotion to her eldest son Cæsarion, we picture her busy nursery in the royal palace, which at one time resounded to the cries of a pair of lusty twins, and the vision of the Oriental voluptuary fades from our eyes. Can this dainty little woman, we ask, who soothes at her breast the cries of her fat baby, while three sturdy youngsters play around her, be the sensuous Queen of the East? Can this tender, ingenuous, smiling mother of Cæsar’s beloved son be the Siren of Egypt? There is not a particle of trustworthy evidence to show that Cleopatra carried on a single love affair in her life other than the two recorded so dramatically by history, nor is there any evidence to show that in those two affairs she conducted herself in a licentious manner.

Cleopatra was in many ways a refined and cultured woman. Her linguistic powers indicate a certain studiousness; and at the same time she seems to have been a patron of the arts. It is recorded that she made Antony present to the city of Alexandria the library which once belonged to Pergamum, consisting of 200,000 volumes; and Cicero seems to record the fact that she interested herself in obtaining certain books for him from Alexandria. She inherited from her family a temperament naturally artistic; and there is no reason to suppose that she failed to carry on the high tradition of her house in this regard. She was a patron also of the sciences, and Photinus, the mathematician, who wrote both on arithmetic and geometry, published a book actually under her name, called the ‘Canon of Cleopatra.’ The famous physician Dioscorides was, it would seem, the friend and attendant of the Queen; and the books which he wrote at her court have been read throughout the ages. Sosigenes, the astronomer, was also, perhaps, a friend of Cleopatra, and it may have been through her good offices that he was introduced to Cæsar, with whom he collaborated in the reformation of the calendar. The evidence is very inconsiderable in regard to the Queen’s personal attitude towards the arts and sciences, but sufficient may be gleaned to give some support to the suggestion that she did not fall below the standard set by her forefathers. One feels that her interest in such matters is assured by the fact that she held for so long the devotion of such a man of letters as Julius Cæsar. There is little doubt that she was capable of showing great seriousness of mind when occasion demanded, and that her demeanour, so frequently tumultuous, was often thoughtful and quiet.

At the same time, however, one must suppose that she viewed her life with a light heart, having, save towards the end, a greater familiarity with laughter than with tears. She was at all times ready to make merry or jest, and a humorous adventure seems to have made a special appeal to her. With Antony, as we shall see, she was wont to wander around the city at night-time, knocking at people’s doors in the darkness and running away when they were opened. It is related how once when Antony was fishing in the sea, she made a diver descend into the water to attach to his line a salted fish, which he drew to the surface amidst the greatest merriment. One gathers from the early writers that her conversation was usually sparkling and gay; and it would seem that there was often an infectious frivolity in her manner which made her society most exhilarating.

She was eminently a woman whom men might love, for she was active, high-spirited, plucky, and dashing. To use a popular phrase, she was always “game” for an adventure. Her courageous return to Egypt after she had been driven into exile by her brother, is an indication of her brave spirit; and the daring manner in which she first obtained her introduction to Cæsar, causing herself to be carried into the palace on a man’s back, is a convincing instance of that audacious courage which makes so strong an appeal on her behalf to the imagination. Florus, who was no friend of the Queen’s, speaks of her as being “free from all womanly fear.”

We now come to the question as to whether she was cruel by nature. It must be admitted that she caused the assassination of her sister Arsinoe, and ordered the execution of others who were, at that time, plotting against her. But it must be remembered that political murders of this kind were a custom—nay, a habit—of the period; and, moreover, the fact that the Queen of Egypt used her rough soldiers for the purpose does not differentiate the act from that of Good Queen Bess who employed a Lord Chief Justice and an axe. The early demise of Ptolemy XV., her brother, is attributable as much to Cæsar as to Cleopatra, if, indeed, he did not die a natural death. The execution of King Artavasdes of Armenia was a political act of no great significance. And the single remaining charge of cruelty which may be brought against the Queen, namely, that she tested the efficacy of various poisons on the persons of condemned criminals, need not be regarded as indicating callousness on her part; for it mattered little to the condemned prisoner what manner of sudden death he should die, but, on the other hand, the discovery of a pleasant solution to the quandary of her own life was a point of capital importance to herself. When we recall the painful record of callous murders which were perpetrated during the reigns of her predecessors, we cannot attribute to Cleopatra any extraordinary degree of heartlessness, nor can we say that she showed herself to be as cruel as were other members of her family. She lived in a ruthless age; and, on the whole, her behaviour was tolerant and good-natured.

In religious matters she was not, like so many persons of that period, a disbeliever in the power of the gods. She had a strong pagan belief in the close association of divinity and royalty, and she seems to have accepted without question the hereditary assurance of her own celestial affiliation. She was wont to dress herself on gala occasions in the robes of Isis or Aphrodite, and to act the part of a goddess incarnate upon earth, assuming not divine powers but divine rights. She regarded herself as being closely in communion with the virile gods of Egypt and Greece; and when signs and wonders were pointed out to her by her astrologers, or when she noted good or ill omens in the occurrences around her, she was particularly prone to giving them full recognition as being communications from her heavenly kin. Her behaviour at the battle of Actium is often said to have been due to her consciousness of the warnings which she had received by means of such portents; and on other occasions in her life her actions were ordered by these means. It is related by Josephus that she violated the temples of Egypt in order to obtain money to carry on the war against Rome, and that no place was so holy or so infamous that she would not attempt to strip it of its treasures when she was pressed for gold. If this be true, it may be argued in the Queen’s defence that the possessions of the gods were considered by her to be, as it were, her own property, as the representative of heaven upon earth, and in this case they were the more especially at her disposal since they were to be converted into money for the glory of Egypt. As a matter of fact, it is probable that in the last emergencies of her reign, the Queen’s agents obtained supplies wherever they found them, and, if Cleopatra was consulted at all, she was far too distracted to give the matter very serious thought.

It is not necessary here to inquire further into the character of the Queen. Her personality, as I see it, will become apparent in the following record of her tragic life. It is essential to remember that, though her faults were many, she was not what is usually called bad. She was a brilliant, charming, and beautiful woman; perhaps not over-scrupulous and yet not altogether unprincipled; ready, no doubt, to make use of her charms, but not an immoral character. As the historian pictures her figure moving lightly through the mazes of her life, now surrounded by her armies in the thick of battle; now sailing up the moonlit Nile in her royal barge with Cæsar beside her; now tenderly playing in the nursery with her babies; now presiding brilliantly at the gorgeous feasts in the Alexandrian palace; now racing in disguise down the side-streets of her capital, choking with suppressed laughter; now speeding across the Mediterranean to her doom; and now, all haggard and forlorn, holding the deadly asp to her body,—he cannot fail to fall himself under the spell of that enchantment by which the face of the world was changed. He finds that he is dealing not with a daughter of Satan, who, from her lair in the East, stretches out her hand to entrap Rome’s heroes, but with mighty Cæsar’s wife and widow, fighting for Cæsar’s child; with Antony’s faithful consort, striving, as will be shown, to unite Egypt and Rome in one vast empire. He sees her not as the crowned courtesan of the Orient, but as the excellent royal lady, who by her wits and graces held captive the two greatest men of her time in the bonds of a union which in Egypt was equivalent to a legal marriage. He sees before him once more the small, graceful figure, whose beauty compels, whose voice entices, and in whose face (it may be by the kindly obliterations of time) there is no apparent evil; and the unprejudiced historian must find himself hard put to it to say whether his sympathies are ranged on the side of Cleopatra or on that of her Roman rival in the great struggle for the mastery of the whole earth which is recorded in the following pages.

CHAPTER II.
THE CITY OF ALEXANDRIA.

No study of the life of Cleopatra can be of true value unless the position of the city of Alexandria, her capital, in relationship to Egypt on the one hand and to Greece and Rome on the other, is fully understood and appreciated. The reader must remember, and bear continually in mind, that Alexandria was at that time, and still is, more closely connected in many ways with the Mediterranean kingdoms than with Egypt proper. It bore, geographically, no closer relation to the Nile valley than Carthage bore to the interior of North Africa. Indeed, to some extent it is legitimate in considering Alexandria to allow the thoughts to find a parallel in the relationship of Philadelphia to the interior of America in the seventeenth century or of Bombay to India in the eighteenth century, for in these cases we see a foreign settlement, representative of a progressive civilisation, largely dependent on transmarine shipping for its prosperity, set down on the coast of a country whose habits are obsolete. It is almost as incorrect to class the Alexandrian Queen Cleopatra as a native Egyptian as it would be to imagine William Penn as a Red Indian or Warren Hastings as a Hindoo. Cleopatra in Alexandria was cut off from Egypt. There is no evidence that she ever even saw the Sphinx, and it would seem that the single journey up the Nile of which the history of her reign gives us any record was undertaken by her solely at the desire of Cæsar. Bearing this fact in mind, I do not think it is desirable for me to refer at any length to the affairs, or to the manners and customs, of Egypt proper in this volume; and it will be observed that, in order to avoid giving to events here recorded an Egyptian character which in reality they did not possess in any very noticeable degree, I have refrained from introducing any account of the people who lived in the great country behind Alexandria over which Cleopatra reigned.

The topographical position of Alexandria, selected by its illustrious founder, seems to have been chosen on account of its detachment from Egypt proper. The city was erected upon a strip of land having the Mediterranean on the one side and the Mareotic lake on the other. It was thus cut off from the hinterland far more effectively even than was Carthage by its semicircle of hills. Alexander had intended to make the city a purely Greek settlement, the port at which the Greeks should land their goods for distribution throughout Egypt, and whence the produce of the abundant Nile should be shipped to the north and west. He selected a remote corner of the Delta for his site, with the plain intention of holding his city at once free of, and in dominion over, Egypt; and so precisely was the location suited to his purpose that until this day Alexandria is in little more than name a city of the Egyptians. Even at the present time, when an excellent system of express railway trains connects Alexandria with Cairo and Upper Egypt, there are many well-to-do inhabitants who have not seen more that ten miles of Egyptian landscape; and the vast majority have never been within sight of the Pyramids. The wealthy foreigners settled in Alexandria often know nothing whatsoever about Egypt, and Cairo itself is beyond their ken. The Greeks, Levantines, and Jews, who now, as in ancient days, form a very large part of the population of Alexandria, would shed bitter tears of gloomy foreboding were they called upon to penetrate into the Egypt which the tourists and the officials know and love. The middle-class Egyptians of Alexandria are rarely tempted to enter Egypt proper, and even those who have inherited a few acres of land in the interior are often unwilling to visit their property.

Egypt as we know it is a terra incognita to the Alexandrian. The towering cliffs of the desert, the wide Nile, the rainless skies, the amazing brilliance of the stars, the ruins of ancient temples, the great pyramids, the decorated tombs, the clustered mud-huts of the villages in the shade of the dom-palms and the sycamores, the creaking sakkiehs or water-wheels, the gracefully worked shadufs or water-hoists,—all these are unknown to the inhabitants of Alexandria. They have never seen the hot deserts and the white camel-tracks over the hills, they have not looked upon the Nile tumbling over the granite rocks of the cataracts, nor have they watched the broad expanse of the inundation. That peculiar, undefined aspect and feeling which is associated with the thought of Egypt in the minds of visitors and residents does not tincture the impression of the Alexandrians. They have not felt the subtle influence of the land of the Pharaohs: they are sons of the Mediterranean, not children of the Nile.

The climate of Alexandria is very different from that of the interior of the Delta, and bears no similarity to that of Upper Egypt. At Thebes the winter days are warm and brilliantly sunny, the nights often extremely cold. The summer climate is intensely hot, and there are times when the resident might there believe himself an inhabitant of the infernal regions. The temperature in and around Cairo is more moderate, and the summer is tolerable, though by no means pleasant. In Alexandria, however, the summer is cool and temperate. There is perhaps no climate in the entire world so perfect as that of Alexandria in the early summer. The days are cloudless, breezy, and brilliant; the nights cool and even cold. In August and September it is somewhat damp, and therefore unpleasant; but it is never very hot, and the conditions of life are almost precisely those of southern Europe.

The winter days on the sea-coast are often cold and rainy, the climate being not unlike that of Italy at the same time of year. People must needs wear thick clothing, and must study the barometer before taking their promenades. While Thebes, and even the Pyramids, bask in more or less continual sunshine, the city of Alexandria is lashed by intermittent rainstorms, and the salt sea-wind buffets the pedestrians as it screams down the paved streets. The peculiar texture of the true Egyptian atmosphere is not felt in Alexandria: the air is that of Marseilles, of Naples, or of the Piræus.

In summer-time the sweating official of the south makes his way seaward in the spirit of one who leaves the tropics for northern shores. He enters the northbound express on some stifling evening in June, the amazing heat still radiating from the frowning cliffs of the desert, and striking up into his eyes from the parched earth around the station. He lies tossing and panting in his berth while the electric fans beat down the hot air upon him, until the more temperate midnight permits him to fall into a restless sleep. In the morning he arrives at Cairo, where the moisture runs more freely from his face by reason of the greater humidity, though now the startling intensity of the heat is not felt. Anon he travels through the Delta towards the north, still mopping his brow as the morning sun bursts into the carriage. But suddenly, a few miles from the coast, a change is felt. For the first time, perhaps for many weeks, he feels cool: he wishes his clothes were not so thin. He packs up his helmet and dons a straw hat. Arriving at Alexandria, he is amused to find that he actually feels chilly. He no longer dreads to move abroad in the sun at high noon, but, waving aside the importunate carriage-drivers, he walks briskly to his hotel. He does not sit in a darkened room with windows tightly shut against the heat, but pulls the chair out on to the verandah to take the air; and at night he does not lie stark naked on his bed in the garden, cursing the imagined heat of the stars and the moon, and praying for the mercy of sleep; but, like a white man in his own land, he tucks himself up under a blanket in the cool bedroom, and awakes lively and refreshed.

A European may live the year round at Alexandria, and may express a preference for the summer. The wives and children of English officials not infrequently remain there throughout the warmer months, not from necessity but from choice; and there are many persons of northern blood who are happy to call it their home. In Cairo such families rarely remain during the summer, unless under compulsion, while in Upper Egypt there is hardly a white woman in the land between May and October. Egypt is considered by them to be solely a winter residence, and the official is of opinion that he pays toll to fortune for the pleasures of the winter season by the perils and torments of the summer months. Even the middle and upper class Egyptians themselves, recruited, as they generally are in official circles, from Cairo, suffer terribly from the heat in the south—often more so, indeed, than the English; and I myself on more than one occasion have had to abandon a summer day’s ride owing to the prostration of one of the native staff.

The Egyptian of Alexandria and the north looks with scorn upon the inhabitants of the upper country. The southerner, on the other hand, has no epithet of contempt more biting than that of “Alexandrian.” To the hardy peasant of the Thebaid the term means all that “scalliwag” denotes to us. The northern Egyptian, unmindful of the relationship of a kettle to a saucepan, calls the southerner “black” in disdainful tones. A certain Alexandrian Egyptian of undiluted native stock, who was an official in a southern district, told me that he found life very dull in his provincial capital, surrounded as he was by “all these confounded niggers.” And if the Egyptians of Alexandria are thus estranged from those who constitute the backbone of the Egyptian nation, it will be understood how great is the gulf between the Greeks or other foreign residents in that city and the bulk of the people of the Nile.

I am quite sure that Cleopatra spoke of the Egyptians of the interior as “confounded niggers.” Her interests and sympathies, like those of her city, were directed across the Mediterranean. She held no more intimate relationship to Egypt than does the London millionaire to the African gold-mines which he owns. Alexandria at the present day still preserves the European character with which it was endowed by Alexander and the Ptolemies; or perhaps it were more correct to say that it has once more assumed that character. There are large quarters of the city, of course, which are native in style and appearance, but, viewed as a whole, it suggests to the eye rather an Italian than an Egyptian seaport. It has extremely little in common with the Egyptian metropolis and other cities of the Nile; and we are aware that there was no greater similarity in ancient times. The very flowers and trees are different. In Upper Egypt the gardens have a somewhat artificial beauty, for the grace of the land is more dependent upon the composition of cliffs, river, and fields. There are few wild-flowers, and little natural grass. In the gardens the flowers are evident importations, while the lawns have to be sown every autumn, and do not survive the summer. But in Alexandria there is always a blaze of flowers, and one notes with surprise the English hollyhocks, foxgloves, and stocks growing side by side with the plants of southern Europe. In the fields of Mariout, over against Alexandria, the wild-flowers in spring are those of the hills of Greece. Touched by the cool breeze from the sea, one walks over ground scarlet and gold with poppies and daisies; there bloom asphodel and iris; and the ranunculus grows to the size of a tulip. There is a daintiness in these fields and gardens wholly un-Egyptian, completely different from the more permanent grace of the south. One feels that Pharaoh walked not in fields of asphodel, that Amon had no dominion here amidst the poppies by the sea. One is transplanted in imagination to Greece and to Italy, and the knowledge becomes the more apparent that Cleopatra and her city were an integral part of European life, only slightly touched by the very finger-tips of the Orient.

Approximate plan of
ALEXANDRIA
in the time of Cleopatra.

The coast of Egypt rises so little above the level of the Mediterranean that the land cannot be seen by those approaching it from across the sea, until but a few miles separate them from the surf which breaks upon the sand and rocks of that barren shore. The mountains of other East-Mediterranean countries—Greece, Italy, Sicily, Crete, Cyprus, and Syria—rising out of the blue waters, served as landmarks for the mariners of ancient days, and were discernible upon the horizon for many long hours before wind or oars carried the vessels in under their lee. But the Egyptian coast offered no such assistance to the captains of sea-going galleys, and they were often obliged to approach closely to the treacherous shore before their exact whereabouts became apparent to them. The city of Alexandria was largely hidden from view by the long, low island of Pharos, which lay in front of it and which was little dissimilar in appearance from the mainland.[4] Two promontories of land projected from the coast opposite either end of the island; and, these being lengthened by the building of breakwaters, the straits between Pharos Island and the mainland were converted into an excellent harbour, both it and the main part of the city being screened from the open sea. There was one tremendous landmark, however, which served to direct all vessels to their destination, namely, the far-famed Pharos lighthouse, standing upon the east end of the island, and overshadowing the main entrance to the port.[5] It had been built during the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus by Sostratus of Cnidus two hundred years and more before the days of Cleopatra, and it ranked as one of the wonders of the world. It was constructed of white marble, and rose to a height of 400 ells, or 590 feet. By day it stood like a pillar of alabaster, gleaming against the leaden haze of the sky; and from nightfall until dawn there shone from its summit a powerful beacon-light which could be seen, it is said[6], for 300 stadia, i.e. 34 miles, across the waters.

The harbour was divided into two almost equal parts by a great embankment, known as the Heptastadium, which joined the city to the island. This was cut at either end by a passage or waterway leading from one harbour to the other, but these two passages were bridged over, and thus a clear causeway was formed, seven stadia, or 1400 yards, in length. To the west of this embankment lay the Harbour of Eunostos, or the Happy Return, which was entered from behind the western extremity of Pharos Island; while to the east of the embankment lay the Great Harbour, the entrance to which passed between the enormous lighthouse and the Diabathra, or breakwater, built out from the promontory known as Lochias. This entrance was dangerous, owing to the narrowness of the fairway and to the presence of rocks, against which the rolling waves of the Mediterranean, driven by the prevalent winds of the north, beat with almost continuous violence.

A vessel entering the port of Alexandria from this side was steered towards the great lighthouse, around the foot of which the waves leapt and broke in showers of white foam. Skirting the dark rocks at the base of this marble wonder, the vessel slipped through the passage into the still entrance of the harbour, leaving the breakwater on the left hand. Here, on a windless day, one might look down to the sand and the rocks at the bottom of the sea, so clear and transparent was the water and so able to be penetrated by the strong light of the sun. Seaweed of unaccustomed hues covered the sunken rocks over which the vessels floated; and anemones, like great flowers, could be seen swaying in the gentle motion of the undercurrents. Passing on into the deeper water of the harbour, in which the sleek dolphins arose and dived in rhythmic succession, the traveller saw before him such an array of palaces and public buildings as could be found nowhere else in the world. There stood, on his left hand, the Royal Palace, which was spread over the Lochias Promontory and extended round towards the west. Here, beside a little island known as Antirrhodos, itself the site of a royal pavilion, lay the Royal Harbour, where flights of broad steps descended into the azure water, which at this point was so deep that the largest galleys might moor against the quays. Along the edge of the mainland, overlooking the Great Harbour, stood a series of magnificent buildings which must have deeply impressed all those who were approaching the city across the water. Here stood the imposing Museum, which was actually a part of another palace, and which formed a kind of institute for the study of the sciences, presided over by a priest appointed by the sovereign. The buildings seem to have consisted of a large hall wherein the professors took their meals; a series of arcades in which these men of learning walked and talked; a hall, or assembly rooms, in which their lectures were held; and, at the north end, close to the sea, the famous library, at this time containing more than half a million scrolls. On rising ground between the Museum and the Lochias Promontory stood the Theatre, wherein those who occupied the higher seats might look beyond the stage to the island of Antirrhodos, behind which the incoming galleys rode upon the blue waters in the shadow of Pharos. At the back of the Theatre, on still higher ground, the Paneum, or Temple of Pan, had been erected. This is described by Strabo as “an artificial mound of the shape of a fir-cone, resembling a pile of rock, to the top of which there is an ascent by a spiral path, from whose summit may be seen the whole city lying all around and beneath it.” To the west of this mound stood the Gymnasium, a superb building, the porticos of which alone exceeded a stadium, or 200 yards, in length. The Courts of Justice, surrounded by groves and gardens, adjoined the Gymnasium. Close to the harbour, to the west of the Theatre, was the Forum; and in front of it, on the quay, stood a temple of Neptune. To the west of this, near the Museum, there was an enclosure called Sema, in which stood the tombs of the Ptolemaic Kings of Egypt, built around the famous Mausoleum wherein the bones of Alexander the Great rested in a sarcophagus of alabaster.[7]

These buildings, all able to be seen from the harbour, formed the quarter of the city known as the Regia, Brucheion, or Royal Area. Here the white stone structures reflected in the mirror of the harbour, the statues and monuments, the trees and brilliant flower-gardens, the flights of marble steps passing down to the sea, the broad streets and public places, must have formed a scene of magnificence not surpassed at that time in the whole world. Nor would the traveller, upon stepping ashore from his vessel, be disappointed in his expectations as he roamed the streets of the town. Passing through the Forum he would come out upon the great thoroughfare, more than three miles long, which cut right through the length of the city in a straight line, from the Gate of the Necropolis, at the western end, behind the Harbour of the Happy Return, to the Gate of Canopus, at the eastern extremity, some distance behind the Lochias Promontory. This magnificent boulevard, known as the Street of Canopus, or the Meson Pedion, was flanked on either side by colonnades, and was 100 feet in breadth.[8] On its north side would be seen the Museum, the Sema, the palaces, and the gardens; on the south side the Gymnasium with its long porticos, the Paneum towering up against the sky, and numerous temples and public places. Were the traveller to walk eastwards along this street he would pass through the Jewish quarter, adorned by many synagogues and national buildings, through the Gate of Canopus, built in the city walls, and so out on to open ground, where stood the Hippodromos or Racecourse, and several public buildings. Here the sun-baked soil was sandy, the rocks glaring white, and but little turf was to be seen. A few palms, bent southward by the sea wind, and here and there a cluster of acacias, gave shade to pedestrians; while between the road and the sea the Grove of Nemesis offered a pleasant foreground to the sandy beach and the blue expanse of the Mediterranean beyond. Near by stood the little settlement of Eleusis, which was given over to festivities and merry-making. Here there were several restaurants and houses of entertainment which are said to have commanded beautiful views; but so noisy was the fun supplied, and so dissolute the manners of those who frequented the place, that better-class Alexandrians were inclined to avoid it. At a distance of some three miles from Alexandria stood the suburb of Nicopolis, where numerous villas, themselves “not less than a city,” says Strabo,[9] had been erected along the sea-front, and the sands in summer-time were crowded with bathers. Farther eastwards the continuation of the Street of Canopus passed on to the town of that name and Egypt proper.

Returning within the city walls and walking westwards along the Street of Canopus, the visitor would pass once more through the Regia and thence through the Egyptian quarter known as Rhakotis, to the western boundary. This quarter, being immediately behind the commercial harbour, was partly occupied by warehouses and ships’ offices, and was always a very busy district of the town. Here there was an inner harbour called Cibotos, or the Ark, where there were extensive docks; and from this a canal passed, under the Street of Canopus, to the lake at the back of the city. On a rocky hill behind the Rhakotis quarter stood the magnificent Serapeum, or Temple of Serapis, which was approached by a broad street running at right angles to the Street of Canopus, which it bisected at a point not far west of the Museum, being a continuation of the Heptastadium. The temple is said to have been surpassed in grandeur by no other building in the world except the Capitol at Rome; and, standing as it did at a considerable elevation, it must have towered above the hubbub and the denser atmosphere of the streets and houses at its foot, as though to receive the purification of the untainted wind of the sea. Behind the temple, on the open rocky ground outside the city walls, stood the Stadium; and away towards the west the Necropolis was spread out, with its numerous gardens and mausoleums. Still farther westward there were numerous villas and gardens; and it may be that the wonderful flowers which at the present day grow wild upon this ground are actually the descendants of those introduced and cultivated by the Greeks of the days of Cleopatra.

Along the entire length of the back walls of the city lay the Lake of Mareotis, which cut off Alexandria from the Egyptian Delta, and across this stretch of water vast numbers of vessels brought the produce of Egypt to the capital. The lake harbour and docks were built around an inlet which penetrated some considerable distance into the heart of the city not far to the east of the Paneum, and from them a great colonnaded thoroughfare, as wide as the Street of Canopus, which it crossed at right angles, passed through the city to the Great Harbour, being terminated at the south end by the Gate of the Sun, and at the north end by the Gate of the Moon. These lake docks are said to have been richer and more important even than the maritime docks on the opposite side of the town; for over the lake the traffic of vessels coming by river and canal from all parts of Egypt was always greater than the shipping across the Mediterranean. The shores of this inland sea were exuberantly fertile. A certain amount of papyrus grew at the edges of the lake, considerable stretches of water being covered by the densely-growing reeds. The Alexandrians were wont to use the plantations for their picnics, penetrating in small boats into the thickest part of the reeds, where they were overshadowed by the leaves, which, also, they used as dishes and drinking-vessels. Extensive vineyards and fruit gardens flourished at the edge of the water; and there are said to have been eight islands which rose from the placid surface of the lake and were covered by luxuriant gardens.

Cairo Museum.]

[Photograph by Brugsch.

PORTRAIT OF A GREEK LADY

THE PAINTING DATES FROM A GENERATION LATER THAN THAT OF CLEOPATRA, BUT IT IS AN EXAMPLE OF THE WORK OF THE ALEXANDRIAN ARTISTS.

Strabo tells us that Alexandria contained extremely beautiful public parks and grounds, and abounded with magnificent buildings of all kinds. The whole city was intersected by roads wide enough for the passage of chariots; and, as has been said, the three main streets, those leading to the Gate of Canopus, to the Serapeum, and to the Lake Harbour, were particularly noteworthy both for their breadth and length. Indeed, in the Fifteenth Idyll of Theocritus, one of the characters complains most bitterly of the excessive length of the Alexandrian streets. The kings of the Ptolemaic dynasty, for nearly three centuries, had expended vast sums in the beautification of their capital, and at the period with which we are now dealing it had become the rival of Rome in magnificence and luxury. The novelist, Achilles Tatius, writing some centuries later, when many of the Ptolemaic edifices had been replaced by Roman constructions perhaps of less merit, cried, as he beheld the city, “We are vanquished, mine eyes”; and there is every reason to suppose that his words were no unlicensed exaggeration. In the brilliant sunshine of the majority of Egyptian days, the stately palaces, temples, and public buildings which reflected themselves in the waters of the harbour, or cast their shadows across the magnificent Street of Canopus, must have dazzled the eyes of the spectator and brought wonder into his heart.

The inhabitants of the city were not altogether worthy of their splendid home. In modern times the people of Alexandria exhibit much the same conglomeration of nationalities as they did in ancient days; but the distinguishing line between Egyptians and Europeans is now more sharply defined than it was in the reign of Cleopatra, owing to the fact that the former are mostly Mohammedans and the latter Christians, no marriage being permitted between them. In Ptolemaic times only the Jews of Alexandria stood outside the circle of international marriages which was gradually forming the people of the city into a single type; for they alone practised that conventional exclusiveness which indicated a strong religious conviction. The Greek element, always predominant in the city, was mainly Macedonian; but in the period we are now studying so many intermarriages with Egyptians had taken place that in the case of a large number of families the stock was much mixed. There must have been, of course, a certain number of aristocratic houses, descended from the Macedonian soldiers and officials who had come to Egypt with Alexander the Great and the first Ptolemy, whose blood had been kept pure; and we hear of such persons boasting of their nationality, though the ruin of their fatherland and its subservience to Rome had left them little of which to be proud. In like manner there must have been many pure Egyptian families, no less proud of their nationality than were the Macedonians. The majority of educated people could now speak both the Greek and Egyptian tongues, and all official decrees and proclamations were published in both languages. Many Greeks assumed Egyptian names in addition to their own; and it is probable that there were at this date Egyptians who, in like manner, adopted Greek names.

Besides Greeks and Egyptians, there were numerous Italians, Cretans, Phœnicians, Cilicians, Cypriots, Persians, Syrians, Armenians, Arabs, and persons of other nationalities, who had, to some extent, intermarried with Alexandrian families, thus producing a stock which must have been much like that to be found in the city at the present day and now termed Levantine. Some of these had come to Alexandria originally as respectable merchants and traders; others were sailors, and, indeed, pirates; yet others were escaped slaves, outlaws, criminals, and debtors who were allowed to enter Alexandria on condition that they served in the army; while not a few were soldiers of fortune who had been enrolled in the forces of Egypt. There was a standing army of these mercenaries in Alexandria, and Polybius, writing of the days of Cleopatra’s great-grandfather, Ptolemy IX., speaks of them as being oppressive and dissolute, desiring to rule rather than to obey. A further introduction of foreign blood was due to the presence of the Gabinian Army of Occupation, the members of which had settled down in Alexandria and had married Alexandrian women. These soldiers were largely drawn from Germany and Gaul; and though there had not yet been time for them to do more than add a horde of half-cast children to the medley, their own presence in the city contributed strikingly to the cosmopolitan character of the streets. This barbaric force, with its Roman officers, must have been in constant rivalry with the so-called Macedonian Household Troops which guarded the palace; but when Cleopatra came to the throne the latter force had already been freely recruited from all the riff-raff of the world, and was in no way a match for the northerners.

The aristocracy of Alexandria probably consisted of the cosmopolitan officers of the mercenaries and Household Troops, the Roman officers of the Gabinian army, the Macedonian courtiers, the Greek and Egyptian officials, and numerous families of wealthy Europeans, Syrians, Jews, and Egyptians. The professors and scholars of the Museum constituted a class of their own, much patronised by the court, but probably not often accepted by the aristocracy of the city for any other reason than that of their learning. The mob was mainly composed of Greeks of mixed breed, together with a large number of Egyptians of somewhat impure stock; and a more noisy, turbulent, and excitable crowd could not be found in all the world, not even in riotous Rome. The Greeks and Jews were constantly annoying one another, but the Greeks and Egyptians seem to have fraternised to a very considerable extent, for there was not so wide a gulf between them as might be imagined. The Egyptians of Alexandria, and, indeed, of all the Delta, were often no darker-skinned than the Greeks. Both peoples were noisy and excitable, vain and ostentatious, smart and clever. They did not quarrel upon religious matters, for the Egyptian gods were easily able to be identified with those of Greece, and the chief deity of Alexandria, Serapis, was here worshipped by both nations in common. In the domain of art they had no cause for dissensions, for the individual art of Egypt was practically dead, and that of Greece had been accepted by cultivated Egyptians as the correct expression of the refinement in which they desired to live. Both peoples were industrious, and eager in the pursuit of wealth, and both were able to set their labours aside with ease, and to turn their whole attention to the amusements which the luxurious city provided. Polybius speaks of the Egyptians as being smart and civilised; and of the Alexandrian Greeks he writes that they were a poor lot, though he seems to have preferred them to the Egyptians.

The people of Alexandria were passionately fond of the theatre. In the words of Dion Chrysostom, who, however, speaks of the citizens of a century later than Cleopatra, “the whole town lived for excitement, and when the manifestation of Apis (the sacred bull) took place, all Alexandria went fairly mad with musical entertainments and horse-races. When doing their ordinary work they were apparently sane, but the instant they entered the theatre or the racecourse they appeared as if possessed by some intoxicating drug, so that they no longer knew nor cared what they said or did. And this was the case even with women and children, so that when the show was over, and the first madness past, all the streets and byways were seething with excitement for days, like the swell after a storm.” The Emperor Hadrian says of them: “I have found them wholly light, wavering, and flying after every breath of a report.... They are seditious, vain, and spiteful, though as a body wealthy and prosperous.” The impudent wit of the young Græco-Egyptian dandy was proverbial, and must always have constituted a cause of offence to those whose public positions laid them open to attack. No sooner did a statesman assume office, or a king come to the throne, than he was given some scurrilous nickname by the wags of the city, which stuck to him throughout the remainder of his life. Thus, to quote a few examples, Ptolemy IX. was called “Bloated,” Ptolemy X. “Vetch,” Ptolemy XIII. “Piper”; Seleucus they named “Pickled-fish Pedlar,” and in later times Vespasian was named “Scullion.” All forms of ridicule appealed to them, and many are the tales told in this regard. Thus, when King Agrippa passed through the city on his way to his insecure throne, these young Alexandrians dressed up an unfortunate madman whom they had found in the streets, put a paper crown upon his head and a reed in his hand, and led him through the town, hailing him as King of the Jews: and this in spite of the fact that Agrippa was the friend of Caligula, their Emperor. Against Vespasian they told with delight the story of how he had bothered one of his friends for the payment of a trifling loan of six obols, and somebody made up a song in which the fact was recorded. They ridiculed Caracalla in the same manner, laughing at him for dressing himself like Alexander the Great, although his stature was below the average; but in this case they had not reckoned with their man, whose revenge upon them was an act no less frightful than the total extermination of all the well-to-do young men of the city, they being collected together under a false pretence and butchered in cold blood. These Alexandrians were famous for the witty and scathing verses which they composed upon topical subjects; and a later historian speaks of this proficiency of theirs “in making songs and epigrams against their rulers.” Such ditties were carried from Egypt to Rome, and were sung in the Italian capital, just as nowadays the latest American air is hummed and whistled in the streets of London. Indeed, in Rome the wit of Alexandria was very generally appreciated; and, a few years later, one hears of Alexandrian comedians causing Roman audiences to rock with laughter.

The Emperor Hadrian, as we have seen, speaks of the Alexandrians as being spiteful; and, no doubt, a great deal of their vaunted wit had that character. The young Græco-Egyptian was inordinately vain and self-satisfied; and no critic so soon adopts a spiteful tone as he who has thought himself above criticism. The conceit of these smart young men was very noticeable, and is frequently referred to by early writers. They appear to have been much devoted to the study of their personal appearance; and if one may judge by the habits of the upper-class Egyptians and Levantines of present-day Alexandria, many of them must have been intolerable fops. The luxury of their houses was probably far greater than that in Roman life at this date, and they had studied the culinary arts in an objectionably thorough manner. Dion Chrysostom says the Alexandrians of his day thought of little else but food and horse-racing. Both Greeks and Egyptians in Alexandria had the reputation of being fickle and easily influenced by the moment’s emotion. “I should be wasting many words in vain,” says the author of ‘De Bello Alexandrino,’ “if I were to defend the Alexandrians from the charges of deceit and levity of mind.... There can be no doubt that the race is most prone to treachery.” They had few traditions, no feelings of patriotism, and not much political interest. They did not make any study of themselves, nor write histories of their city: they lived for the moment, and if the Government of the hour were distasteful to them they revolted against it with startling rapidity. The city was constantly being disturbed by street rioting, and there was no great regard for human life.

The population of Alexandria is said to have been about 300,000 during the later years of the Ptolemaic dynasty, which was not much less than that of Rome before the Civil War, and twice the Roman number after that sanguinary struggle.[10] In spite of its reputation for frivolity it was very largely a business city, and a goodly portion of its citizens were animated by a lively commercial spirit which quite outclassed that of the Italian capital in enterprise and bustle. This, of course, was a Greek and not an Egyptian characteristic, for the latter are notoriously unenterprising and conservative in their methods, while the Greeks, to this day, are admirable merchants and business men. Alexandria was the most important corn-market of the world, and for this reason was always envied by Rome. Incidentally I may remark that proportionally far more corn was consumed in Cleopatra’s time than in our own; and Cæsar once speaks of the endurance of his soldiers in submitting to eat meat owing to the scarcity of corn.[11] The city was also engaged in many other forms of commerce, and in the reign of Cleopatra it was recognised as the greatest trading centre in the world. Here East and West met in the busy market-places; and at the time with which we are dealing the eyes of all men were beginning to be turned to this city as being the terminus of the new trade-route to India, along which such rich merchandise was already being conveyed.

It was at the same time the chief seat of Greek learning, and regarded itself also as the leading authority on matters of art—a point which must have been open to dispute. The great figure of Nilus, of which an illustration is given in this volume, is generally considered to be an example of Alexandrian art. The famous “Alexandrian School,” celebrated for its scientific work and its poetry, had existed for more than two hundred years, and was now in its decline, though it still attempted to continue the old Hellenic culture.[12] The school of philosophy, which succeeded it in celebrity, was just beginning to come into prominence. Thus the eyes of all merchants, all scientists, all men of letters, all scholars, and all statesmen, were turned in these days to Alexandria; and the Ptolemaic court, in spite of the degeneracy of its sovereigns, was held in the highest esteem.

CHAPTER III.
THE BIRTH AND EARLY YEARS OF CLEOPATRA.

Cleopatra was the last of the regnant Ptolemaic sovereigns of Egypt, and was the seventh Egyptian Queen of her name,[13] in her person all the rights and privileges of that extraordinary line of Pharaohs being vested. The Ptolemaic Dynasty was founded in the first years of the third century before Christ by Ptolemy, the son of Lagus, one of the Macedonian generals of Alexander the Great, who, on his master’s death, seized the province of Egypt, and, a few years later, made himself King of that country, establishing himself at the newly-founded city of Alexandria on the sea-coast. For two and a half centuries the dynasty presided over the destinies of Egypt, at first with solicitous care, and later with startling nonchalance, until, with the death of the great Cleopatra and her son Ptolemy XVI. (Cæsarion), the royal line came to an end.

For the right understanding of Cleopatra’s character it must be clearly recognised that the Ptolemies were in no way Egyptians. They were Macedonians, as I have already said, in whose veins flowed not one drop of Egyptian blood. Their capital city of Alexandria was, in the main, a Mediterranean colony set down upon the sea-coast of Egypt, but having no connection with the Delta and the Nile Valley other than the purely commercial and official relationship which of necessity existed between the maritime seat of Government and the provinces. The city was Greek in character; the temples and public buildings were constructed in the Greek manner; the art of the period was Greek; the life of the upper classes was lived according to Greek habits; the dress of the court and of the aristocracy was Greek; the language spoken by them was Greek, pronounced, it is said, with the broad Macedonian accent. It is probable that no one of the Ptolemies ever wore Egyptian costume, except possibly for ceremonial purposes; and, in passing, it may be remarked that the modern conventional representation of the great Cleopatra walking about her palace clothed in splendid Egyptian robes and wearing the vulture-headdress of the ancient queens has no justification.[14] It is true that she is said to have attired herself on certain occasions in a dress designed to simulate that which was supposed by the priests of the time to have been worn by the mother-deity Isis; but contemporaneous representations of Isis generally show her clad in the Greek and not the Egyptian manner. And if she ever wore the ancient dress of the Egyptian queens, it must have been only at great religious festivals or on occasions where conformity to obsolete habits was required by the ritual.

The relationship of the royal house to the people was very similar to that existing at the present day between the Khedivial dynasty and the provincial natives of Egypt. The modern Khedivial princes are Albanians, who cannot record in their genealogy a single Egyptian ancestor. They live in the European manner, and dress according to the dictates of Paris and London. Similarly the Ptolemies retained their Macedonian nationality, and Plutarch tells us that not one of them even troubled to learn the Egyptian language. On the other hand the Egyptians, constrained by the force of circumstances, accepted the dynasty as the legal successor of the ancient Pharaonic line, and assigned to the Ptolemies all the titles and dignities of their great Pharaohs.

These Greek sovereigns, Cleopatra no less than her predecessors, were given the titles which had been so proudly borne by Rameses the Great and the mighty Thutmosis the Third, a thousand years and more before their day. They were named, “Living Image of the God Amon,” “Child of the Sun,” and “Chosen of Ptah,” just as the great Memnon and the conquering Sesostris had been named when Egypt was the first power in the world. In the temples throughout the land, with the exception of those of importance at Alexandria, these Macedonian monarchs were pictorially represented in the guise of the ancient Pharaohs, crowned with the tall crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt, the horns and feathers of Amon upon their heads, and the royal serpent at their foreheads. There they were seen worshipping the old gods of Egypt, prostrating themselves in the presence of the cow Hathor, bowing before the crocodile Sobk, burning incense at the shrine of the cat Bast, and performing all the magical ceremonies hallowed by the usage of four thousand years. They were shown enthroned with the gods, embraced by Isis, saluted by Osiris, and kissed by Mout, the Mother of Heaven. Yet it is doubtful whether in actual fact any Ptolemy at any time identified himself in this manner with the traditional character of a Pharaoh.

Very occasionally one of these Greek sovereigns left his city of Alexandria to visit Egypt proper, and to travel up the Nile. At certain cities he honoured the local temple with a visit and performed in a perfunctory manner the prescribed ceremonies, just as a modern sovereign lays a foundation-stone or launches a battleship. But there is nothing to show that any member of the royal house regarded himself as an Egyptian in the traditional sense of the word. They were careful as a rule to placate the priesthood, and to allow them a free use of their funds in the building and decoration of the temples; and Egyptian national life was fostered to a very considerable extent. But in Alexandria one might hardly have believed oneself to be in the land of the Pharaohs, and the court was almost entirely European in character.

The Ptolemies as a family were extraordinarily callous in their estimate of the value of human life, and the history of the dynasty is marked throughout its whole length by a series of villainous murders. In this respect they showed their non-Egyptian blood; for the people of the Nile were, and now are, a kindly, pleasant folk, not predisposed to the arts of the assassin and not by any means regardless of the rights of their fellow-men. It may be of interest to record here some of the murders for which the Ptolemies are responsible. Ptolemy III., according to Justin, was murdered by his son Ptolemy IV., who also seems to have planned at one time and another the murders of his brother Magas, his uncle Lysimachus, his mother Berenice, and his wife Arsinoe. Ptolemy V. is described as a cruel and violent monarch, who seems to have indulged the habit of murdering those who offended him. Ptolemy VII. is said by Polybius to have had the Egyptian vice of riotousness, although on the whole averse to shedding blood. Ptolemy VIII. murdered his young nephew, the heir to the throne, and married the dead boy’s mother, the widowed queen Cleopatra II., who shortly afterwards presented him with a baby, Memphites, whose paternal parentage is doubtful. Ptolemy later, according to some accounts, murdered this child and sent his body in pieces to the mother. He then married his niece, Cleopatra III.; and she, on being left a widow, appears to have murdered Cleopatra II. This Cleopatra III. bore a son who later ascended the throne as Ptolemy XI., whom she afterwards attempted to murder, but the tables being turned she was murdered by him. Ptolemy X. was driven from the throne by his mother, who installed Ptolemy XI. in his place, and was promptly murdered by the new king for her pains. Ptolemy XII., having married his stepmother, murdered her, and himself was murdered shortly afterwards. Ptolemy XIII., the father of the great Cleopatra, murdered his daughter Berenice and also several other persons.

The women of this family were even more violent than the men. Mahaffy describes their characteristics in the following words: “Great power and wealth, which makes an alliance with them imply the command of large resources in men and money; mutual hatred; disregard of all ties of family and affection; the dearest object fratricide—such pictures of depravity as make any reasonable man pause and ask whether human nature had deserted these women and the Hyrcanian tiger of the poet taken its place.” In many other ways also this murderous family of kings possessed an unenviable reputation. The first three Ptolemies were endowed with many sterling qualities, and were conspicuous for their talents; but the remaining monarchs of the dynasty were, for the most part, degenerate and debauched. They were, however, patrons of the arts and sciences, and indeed they did more for them than did almost any other royal house in the world. Ptolemaic Alexandria was to some extent the birthplace of the sciences of anatomy, geometry, conic sections, hydrostatics, geography, and astronomy, while its position in the artistic world was most important. The splendour and luxury of the palace was far-famed, and the sovereign lived in a chronic condition of repletion which surpassed that of any other court. When Scipio Africanus visited Egypt he found our Cleopatra’s great-grandfather, Ptolemy IX., who was nicknamed Physkon, “the Bloated,” fat, puffing, and thoroughly over-fed. As Scipio walked to the palace with the King, who, in too transparent robes, breathed heavily by his side, he whispered to a friend that Alexandria had derived at least one benefit from his visit—it had seen its sovereign taking a walk. Ptolemy X., Cleopatra’s grandfather, obtained the nickname “Lathyros,” owing, it is said, to the resemblance of his nose to a vetch or some such flowery and leguminous plant: a fact which certainly suggests that the King was not a man of temperate habits. Ptolemy XI. was so bloated by gluttony and vice that he seldom walked without crutches, though, under the influence of wine, he was able to skip about the room freely enough with his drunken comrades. Ptolemy XIII., Cleopatra’s father, had such an objection to temperance that once he threatened to put the philosopher Demetrius to death for not being intoxicated at one of his feasts; and the unfortunate man was obliged the next day publicly to drink himself silly in order to save his life. Such glimpses as these show us the Ptolemies at their worst, and we are constrained to ask how it is possible that Cleopatra, who brought the line to a termination, could have failed to be a thoroughly bad woman. Yet, as will presently become apparent, there is no great reason to suppose that her sins were either many or scarlet.

Cleopatra’s father, Ptolemy XIII., who went by the nickname of Auletes, “the Piper,” was a degenerate little man, who passes across Egypt’s political stage in a condition of almost continuous inebriety. We watch his drunken antics as he directs the Bacchic orgies in the palace; we see him stupidly plotting and scheming to hold his tottering throne; we hear him playing the livelong hours away upon his flute; and we feel that his deeds would be hardly worth recording were it not for the fact that in his reign is seen the critical development of the political relationship between Rome and Egypt, which, towards the end of the Ptolemaic dynasty, came to have such a complicated bearing upon the history of both countries. After the battle of Pydna (B.C. 167) Rome had obtained almost absolute control of the Hellenistic world, and she soon began to lay her hands on all the commerce of the eastern Mediterranean. Towards the close of the Ptolemaic period the great Republic turned eager eyes towards Egypt, watching for an opportunity to seize that wealthy land for her own enrichment.

Reference to the genealogy at the end of this volume will show the reader that the main line of the Lagidæ came to an end on the assassination (after a reign of nineteen days) of Ptolemy XII. (Alexander II.), who had been raised to the throne by Roman help. The only legitimate child of Ptolemy X. (Soter II.) was Berenice III., the cousin of Ptolemy XII., who had been married to him, the union, however, producing no heir to the throne. Ptolemy X. had two sons, the half-brothers of Berenice III., but they were both illegitimate, the name and status of their mother being now unknown. It is possible that they were the children of Cleopatra IV., who was divorced from their father at his accession; or it is possible that the lady was not of royal blood. On the death of Ptolemy XII. one of these two young men proclaimed himself Pharaoh of Egypt, being known to us as Ptolemy XIII., and the other announced himself as King of Cyprus, also under the name of Ptolemy. The people of Alexandria at once accepted Ptolemy XIII. as their king, for, whether illegitimate or not, he was the eldest male descendant of the line, and their refusal to accept his rule would have brought the dynasty to a close, thereby insuring an immediate Roman occupation. Cicero speaks of the new monarch as nec regio genere ortus, which implies that whoever his mother might be, she was not a reigning queen at the time of his birth; but the Alexandrian populace were in no mood to raise scruples in regard to his origin, when it was apparent that he alone stood between their liberty and the stern domination of Rome.

Alexandria Museum.]

SERAPIS.

THE CHIEF GOD OF ALEXANDRIA.

No sooner had he ascended the throne, however, with the title of Ptolemy (XIII.) Neos Dionysos, than the discovery was made that Ptolemy XII., under his name of Alexander, had in his will appointed the Roman Republic his heir, thus voluntarily bringing his dynasty to a close. Such a course of action was not novel. It had already been followed in the case of Pergamum, Cyrene, and Bithynia, and it seems likely that Ptolemy XII. had taken this step in order to obtain the financial or moral support of the Romans in regard to his accession, or for some equally urgent reason. The Senate acknowledged the authenticity of the will, which, of course, the party of Ptolemy XIII. had denied. It had been suggested that the testator was not Ptolemy XII. at all, but another Alexander, Ptolemy XI. (Alexander I.), or an obscure person sometimes referred to as Alexander III. There is little question, however, that the will was genuine enough; but there is considerable doubt as to whether it was legally valid. In the first place, it was probably written before Ptolemy XII. succeeded to the kingdom; and, in the second place, such a will would only be valid were there no heir to the throne; but the people of Alexandria had accepted Ptolemy XIII. as the rightful heir. At all events the Senate, while seizing, by virtue of the document, as much of the private fortune of the testator as they could lay hands on, took no steps to dethrone the two new kings, either of Egypt or Cyprus, though, on the other hand, they did not officially recognise them.

In this attitude they were influenced also by the fact that a large party in Rome did not wish to see the Republic further involved in Oriental affairs, nor did they feel at the moment inclined to place in the hands of any one man such power as would accrue to the official who should be appointed as Governor of the new province. Egypt was regarded as a very wealthy and important country, second only to Rome in the extent of its power. It held the keys to the rich lands of the south, and to Arabia and India it seemed to be one of the main gateways. The revenues of the palace of Alexandria were quite equal to the public income of Rome at this time; and, indeed, even at a later date, after Pompey had so greatly augmented the yearly sum in the Treasury, the wealth of the Egyptian Court was not far short of this increased total.[15] Alexandria had succeeded Athens as the seat of culture and learning, and it was now regarded as the second city of the world. It was therefore felt that the armies and the generals sent over the sea to this distant land might well run the risk of being absorbed into the life of the country which they were holding, and might as it were inevitably set up an Eastern Empire which would be a menace, and even a terror, to Rome.

The new King of Egypt, whom we may now call by his nickname Auletes, was much disturbed by the existence of this will, and throughout his reign he was constantly making efforts to buy off the expected interference of Rome. He was an unhappy and unfortunate man. All he asked was to be allowed to enjoy the royal wealth in drunken peace, and not to be bothered by the haunting fear that he might be turned out of his kingdom. He was a keen enjoyer of good living, and there was nothing that pleased him so much as the participation in one of the orgies of Dionysos. He played the pipes with some proficiency, and, when he was sober, it would seem that he spent many a contented hour piping pleasantly in the sun. Yet his reign was continuously overshadowed by this knowledge that the Romans might at any moment dethrone him; and one pictures him often giving vent to an evening melancholy by blowing from his little flute one of those wailing dirges of his native land, which flutter upon the ears like the notes of a night-bird, and drift at last upon a half-tone into silence.

In the fifth year of his reign, that is to say in B.C. 75, his kinswoman, Selene, sent her two sons to Rome with the object of obtaining the thrones of Egypt, Cyprus, and Syria; and Auletes must have watched with anxiety their attempts to oust him. He knew that they were giving bribes right and left to the Senators, in order to effect their purpose, and he was aware that in this manner alone the heart of the Roman Republic could be touched; yet for the time being he avoided these methods of expending his country’s revenue, and, after a while, he had the satisfaction of hearing that Selene had abandoned her efforts to obtain recognition. In the thirteenth year of his reign Pompey sent a fleet under Lentulus Marcellinus to clear the Egyptian coast of pirates, and when Lentulus was made consul he caused the Ptolemaic eagle and thunderbolt to be displayed upon his coins to mark the fact that he had exercised an act of sovereignty in connection with that country. Three years later another Roman fleet was sent to Alexandria to impose the will of the Senate in regard to certain disputed questions; and once more Auletes must have suffered from the terrors of imminent dethronement.

In B.C. 65 he was again disturbed from his bibulous ease by the news that the Romans were thinking of sending Crassus or Julius Cæsar to annex his kingdom; but the scheme came to naught, and for a time Auletes was left in peace. In B.C. 63 Pompey annexed Syria to the Roman dominions, and thereupon Auletes sent him a large present of money and military supplies in order to purchase his friendship. At the same time he invited him to come to Egypt upon a friendly visit, but Pompey, while accepting the King’s money, did not think it necessary to make use of his hospitality.

At last, in B.C. 59, Auletes decided to go himself to Rome, in the hope of obtaining, through the good offices of Pompey, or of Cæsar, who was Consul in that year, the official recognition by the Senate of his right to the Egyptian throne. Being so degenerate and so worthless a personage, there was no likelihood that the Romans would confirm him in his kingdom unless they were well paid to do so, and he therefore took with him all the money he could lay his hands upon. In Rome, as Mommsen says, “men had forgotten what honesty was. A person who refused a bribe was regarded not as an upright man, but as a personal foe.” Auletes, therefore, when he had arrived, gave huge bribes to various Senators in order to obtain their support, and he appears to have been most systematically fleeced by the acute magnates of Rome. When for the moment his Egyptian resources were exhausted, he borrowed a large sum from the great financier, Rabirius Postumus, who persuaded some of his friends also to lend the King money. These men formed a kind of syndicate to finance Auletes, on the understanding that if he were confirmed in his heritage, they should each receive in return a sum vastly greater than that which they had put in.

The visit of Auletes to Rome was made in the nick of time. The Pirate and the Third Mithridatic wars had left the Republic in pressing need of money, and there was much talk in regard to the advantages of an immediate annexation of Egypt. Crassus, the tribune Rullus, and Julius Cæsar had shown themselves anxious to take the country without delay; and the unfortunate King of Egypt thus found himself in a most desperate position. At last, however, a bribe of 6000 talents (about a million and a half sterling) induced the nearly bankrupt Cæsar to give Auletes the desired recognition, and the disgraceful transaction came to a temporary conclusion with Cæsar’s violent forcing of his “Julian Law concerning the King of Egypt” through the Senate, whereby Ptolemy was named the “ally and friend of the Roman people.”

In the next year, B.C. 58, the Romans, still in need of money, prepared to annex Cyprus, over which Ptolemy, the brother of Auletes, was reigning. The annexation had been proposed by Publius Clodius, a scoundrelly politician, who bore a grudge against the Cyprian Ptolemy owing to the fact that once when Clodius was captured by pirates Ptolemy had only offered two talents for his ransom. Ptolemy would not now buy off the invaders as his brother had done, and in consequence Cato landed on the island and converted it into part of the Roman province of Cilicia. Ptolemy, with a certain royal dignity, at once poisoned himself, preferring to die than to suffer the humiliation of banishment from the throne which he had usurped. His treasure of 7000 talents (some £1,700,000) fell into the hands of Cato, who having, no doubt, helped himself to a portion of the booty,[16] handed the remainder over to the benign Senate.

No sooner had Auletes obtained the support of Rome, however, than his own people of Alexandria, incensed by the increase of taxation necessary for paying off his debts, and angry also at the King’s refusal to seize Cyprus from the Romans, rose in rebellion and drove him out of Egypt. While the wretched man was on his way to Rome, he put in at Rhodes, where he had heard that Cato was staying, in order to obtain some help from this celebrated Senator; and, having had few personal dealings with Romans, he sent a royal invitation or command to Cato to come to him. The Senator, however, who that day was suffering from a bilious attack, and had just swallowed a dose of medicine, was in no mind to wait upon drunken kings. He therefore sent a message to Auletes stating that if he wished to see him he had better come to his lodgings in the town; and the King of Egypt was thus obliged to humble himself and to find his way to the Senator’s house. Cato did not even rise from his seat when Auletes was ushered in; but straightway bidding the King be seated, gave him a severe lecture on the folly of going to Rome to plead his cause. All Egypt turned into silver, he declared, would hardly satisfy the greed of the Romans whom he would have to bribe, and he strongly urged him to return to Egypt and to make his peace with his subjects. The Senator’s bilious attack, however, seems to have cut short the interview, and Auletes, unconvinced, set sail for Italy.

Meanwhile the King’s daughter, Berenice IV., had seized the Egyptian throne, and was reigning serenely in her father’s place. This princess and her sister, Cleopatra VI., who died soon afterwards, were the only two children of Auletes’ first marriage—namely, with Cleopatra V. There were four young children in the Palace nurseries who were born of a second marriage, but who their mother was, or whether she was at this time alive or dead, history does not record. Of these four children, two afterwards succeeded to the throne as Ptolemy XIV. and Ptolemy XV., a third was the unfortunate Princess Arsinoe, and the fourth was the great Cleopatra VII., the heroine of the present volume, at this time about eleven years of age, having been born in the winter of B.C. 69–68.

Auletes having fled to Rome, approached the Senate in the manner of one who had been unjustly evicted from an estate which he had purchased from them. Again he bribed the leading statesmen, and again borrowed money on all sides, though now it is probable that his Roman creditors were less sanguine than on the previous occasion. Cæsar was absent in Gaul at this time, and therefore was not able to be bribed. Pompey, curiously enough, does not appear to have accepted the King’s money, though he offered him the hospitality of his villa in the Alban district, a fact which suggests that the idea of restoring Auletes to his throne had made a strong appeal to the imagination of this impressionable Roman. He had already made himself a kind of patron of the Egyptian Court, and there can be little doubt that he hoped to obtain from Auletes, in return for his favours, the freedom to make use of the wealth and resources of that monarch’s enormously valuable dominion.

The people of Alexandria, who were eagerly desirous that Auletes should not be reinstated, now sent an embassy of a hundred persons to Rome to lay before the Senate their case against the King; but the banished monarch, driven by despair to any lengths, hired assassins and caused the embassy to be attacked near Puteoli, the modern Pozzuoli, many of them being slain. Those who survived were heavily bribed, and thus the crime was hushed up. The leader of the deputation, the philosopher Dion, escaped on this occasion, but was poisoned by Auletes as soon as he arrived in Rome; and thereupon the desperate King was able to breathe once more in peace. All might now have gone well with his cause, and a Roman army might have been placed at his disposal had not some political opponent discovered in the Sibylline Books an oracle which stated that if the King of Egypt were to come begging for help he should be aided with friendship but not with arms. Thereat, in despair, the unfortunate Auletes quitted Rome, and took up his residence at Ephesus, leaving in the capital an agent named Ammonios to keep him in touch with events.

Three years later, in January B.C. 55, the King’s interests were still being discussed, and Pompey was trying, in a desultory manner, to assist him back to his throne; but so great were the fears of the Senate at placing the task in the hands of any one man, that no decision could be arrived at. It was suggested that Lentulus Spinther, the Governor of Cilicia, should evade the Sibylline decree by leaving Auletes at Ptolemais (Acre) and going himself to Egypt at the head of an army; but the King no doubt saw in this an attempt by the wily Romans simply to seize his country, and he appears to have opposed the plan with understandable vehemence. It was then proposed that Lentulus should take no army, but should trust to the might of the Roman name for his purpose, thereby following the advice of the prophetic Books.

At last, however, Auletes offered the huge bribe of 10,000 talents (nearly two and a half millions sterling) for the repurchase of his kingdom; and, as a consequence, the Governor of Syria, Aulus Gabinius, himself a bankrupt in sore need of money, arranged to invade Egypt and to place Auletes upon the throne in spite of the Sibylline warnings. Gabinius, being so deeply in debt, and knowing that a large portion of the promised sum would pass to him, was extremely eager to undertake the war, though it is said that he feared the possibility of disaster. He therefore pushed forward the arrangements for the campaign with all despatch, and soon was prepared to set out across the desert to Egypt.

Meanwhile the Alexandrians had married Berenice IV. to Archelaus, the High Priest of Komana in Cappadocia, an ambitious man of great influence and authority, a protégé of Pompey the Great, who had been raised to the High Priesthood by him in B.C. 64, and who at once attempted, but without success, to obtain through him the support of Rome. Gabinius was not long in declaring war against Archelaus, under the pretext that he was encouraging piracy along the North African coast, and also that he was building a fleet which might be regarded as a menace to Rome; and soon his army was marching across the desert from Gaza to Pelusium. The cavalry, which was sent in advance of the main army, was commanded by Marcus Antonius, at this time a smart young soldier whose future lay all golden before him. The frontier fortress of Pelusium fell to his brilliant generalship, and soon the Roman legions were marching on Alexandria. The palace soldiery now joined the invaders, Archelaus was killed, and the city fell.

Auletes was at once restored to his throne, and Berenice IV. was put to death. A large number of Roman infantry and Celtic and German cavalry, of whom we shall hear again, were left in the city to preserve order, and it would seem that for a short time Anthony remained in Alexandria. The young Princess Cleopatra was now a girl of some fourteen years of age, and already she is said to have attracted the Roman cavalry leader by her youthful beauty and charm. At the east end of the Mediterranean a girl of fourteen years is already mature, and has long arrived at what is called a marriageable age. There is probably little importance to be attached to this meeting, but it is not without interest as an earnest of future events.

The Romans now began to demand payment of the various sums promised to them by Auletes. Rabirius Postumus appears to have been one of the largest creditors, and the only way in which the King could pay him back was by making him Chancellor of the Exchequer, so that all taxes might pass through his hands. Rabirius also represented the interests of the importunate Julius Cæsar, and probably those of Gabinius. The situation was thus not unlike that which was found in Egypt in the ’seventies, when a European Commission was appointed to handle all public funds in order that the ruler’s private debts might be paid off. In the case of Auletes, however, it was the leading Romans who were his creditors, and hence we find the shadow of the great Republic hanging over the Alexandrian court, and Rome is seen to be inextricably mixed up with Egyptian affairs. Roman money had been lent and had to be regained; Roman officials handled all the taxes; a Roman army occupied the city, and the King reigned by permission of the Roman Senate to whom his kingdom had been bequeathed.

In B.C. 54 the Alexandrians made an attempt to shake off the incubus, and drove Rabirius out of Egypt. Roman attention was at once fixed upon Alexandria, and it is probable that the country would have been annexed at once had not the appalling Parthian catastrophe in the following year, when Crassus was defeated and killed, diverted their minds to other channels. Auletes, however, did not live long to enjoy his dearly-bought immunity; for in the summer of B.C. 51 he passed away, leaving behind him the four children born to him of his second marriage with the unknown lady who was now probably dead. The famous Cleopatra, the seventh of the name, was the eldest of this family, being, at her father’s death, about eighteen years of age. Her sister Arsinoe, whom she heartily disliked, was a few years younger. The third child was a boy of ten or eleven years of age, afterwards known as Ptolemy XIV.; and lastly, there was the child who later became Ptolemy XV., now a boy of seven or eight.[17] Auletes, warned by his own bitter experiences, had taken the precaution to write an explicit will in which he stated clearly his wishes in regard to the succession. One copy of the will was kept at Alexandria, and a second copy, duly attested and sealed, was placed in the hands of Pompey at Rome, who had befriended the King when he was in that city, with the request that it should be deposited in the ærarium. In this will Auletes decreed that his eldest surviving daughter and eldest surviving son should reign jointly; and he called upon the Roman people in the name of all their gods and in view of all their treaties made with him, to see that the terms of his testament were carried out. He further asked the Roman people to act as guardian to the new King, as though fearing that the boy might be suppressed, or even put out of the way by his co-regnant sister. At the same time he carefully urged them to make no change in the succession, and his words have been thought to suggest that he feared lest Cleopatra, in like manner, might be removed in favour of Arsinoe. In a court such as that of the Ptolemies the fact that two sons and two daughters were living at the palace at the King’s death boded ill for the prospects of peace; and it would seem that Auletes’ knowledge that Cleopatra and Arsinoe were not on the best of terms gave rise in his mind to the greatest apprehension. Being aware of the domestic history of his family, and knowing that his own hands were stained with the blood of his daughter Berenice, whom he had murdered on his return from exile, he must have been fully alive to the possibilities of internecine warfare amongst his surviving children; and, being in his old age sick of bloodshed and desiring only a bibulous peace for himself and his descendants, he took every means in his power to secure for them that pleasant inertia which had been denied so often to himself.

His wish that his eighteen-year-old daughter should reign with his ten-year-old son involved, as a matter of course, the marriage of the sister and brother, for the Ptolomies had conformed to ancient Egyptian customs to the extent of perpetrating when necessary a royal marriage between a brother and sister in this manner. The custom was of very ancient establishment in Egypt, and was based originally on the law of female succession, which made the monarch’s eldest daughter the heiress of the kingdom. The son who had been selected by his father to succeed to the throne, or who aspired to the sovereignty either by right or by might, obtained his legal warrant to the kingdom by marriage with this heiress. When such an heiress did not exist, or when the male claimant to the throne had no serious rivals, this rule often seems to have been set aside; but there are few instances of its disuse when circumstances demanded a solidification of the royal claim to the throne.

When, therefore, according to the terms of the will of Auletes, his eldest daughter and eldest son succeeded jointly to the throne as Cleopatra VII. and Ptolemy XIV., their formal marriage was contemplated as a matter of course. There is no evidence of this marriage, and one may suppose that it was postponed by Cleopatra’s desire, on the grounds of the extreme youth of the King. Marriages at the age of eleven or twelve years were not uncommon in ancient Egypt, but they were not altogether acceptable to Greek minds; and the Queen could not have found much difficulty in making this her justification for holding the power in her own hands. The young Ptolemy XIV. was placed in the care of the eunuch Potheinos, a man who appears to have been typical of that class of palace intriguers with whom the historian becomes tediously familiar. The royal tutor, Theodotos, an objectionable Greek rhetorician, also exercised considerable influence in the court, and a third intimate of the King was an unscrupulous soldier of Egyptian nationality named Achillas, who commanded the troops in the palace. These three men very soon obtained considerable power, and, acting in the name of their young master, they managed to take a large portion of the government into their own hands. Cleopatra, meanwhile, seems to have suffered something of an eclipse. She was still only a young girl, and her advisers appear to have been men of less strength of purpose than those surrounding her brother’s person. The King being still a minor, the bulk of the formal business of the State was performed by the Queen; but it would seem that the real rulers of the country were Potheinos and his friends.

Some two or three years after the death of Auletes, Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus,[18] the pro-consular Governor of Syria, sent his two sons to Alexandria to order the Roman troops stationed in that city to join his army in his contemplated campaign against the Parthians. These Alexandrian troops constituted the Army of Occupation, which had been left in Egypt by Gabinius in B.C. 55 as a protection to Auletes. They were for the most part, as has been said, Gallic and German cavalry, rough men whose rude habits and bulky forms must have caused them to be the wonder and terror of the city. These Gabiniani milites had by this time settled down in their new home, and had taken wives to themselves from the Greek and Egyptian families of Alexandria. In spite of the presence amongst them of a considerable body of Roman infantry veterans who had fought under Pompey, the discipline of the army was already much relaxed; and when the Governor of Syria’s orders were received there was an immediate mutiny, the two unfortunate sons of Bibulus being promptly murdered by the angry and probably drunken soldiers. When the affair was reported to the palace, Cleopatra issued orders for the immediate arrest of the murderers; and the army, realising that their position as mutinous troops was untenable, handed over the ringleaders apparently without further trouble. The prisoners were then sent by the Queen in chains to Bibulus; but he, being possessed of the best spirit of the old Roman aristocracy, sent back these murderers of his two sons to her with the message that the right of inflicting punishment in such cases belonged only to the Senate. History does not tell us what was the ultimate fate of these men, and the incident is not of great importance except in so far as it shows the first recorded act of Cleopatra’s reign as being one of tactful deliberation and fair dealing with her Roman neighbours.

Shortly after this, in the year B.C. 49, Pompey sent his son, Cnæus Pompeius, to Egypt to procure ships and men in preparation for the civil war which now seemed inevitable; and the Gabinian troops, feeling that a war against Julius Cæsar offered more favourable possibilities than a campaign against the ferocious Parthians, cheerfully responded to the call. Fifty warships and a force of 500 men left Alexandria with Cnæus, and eventually attached themselves to the command of Bibulus, who was now Pompey’s admiral in the Adriatic. It is said that Cnæus Pompeius was much attracted by Cleopatra’s beauty and charm, and that he managed to place himself upon terms of intimacy with her; but there is absolutely nothing to justify the suggestion that there was any sort of serious intrigue. I am of opinion that the stories of this nature which passed into circulation were due to the fact that the possibility of a marriage between Cleopatra and the young Roman had been contemplated by Alexandrian politicians. The great Pompey was master of the Roman world, and a union with his son, on the analogy of that between Berenice and the High Priest of Komana, was greatly to be desired. The proposal, however, does not seem to have obtained much support, and the matter was presently dropped.

In the following year, B.C. 48, when Cleopatra was twenty-one years of age and her co-regnant brother fourteen, important events occurred in Alexandria of which history has left us no direct record. It would appear that the brother and sister quarrelled, and that the palace divided itself into two opposing parties. The young Ptolemy, backed by the eunuch Potheinos, the rhetorician Theodotos, and the soldier Achillas, set himself up as sole sovereign of Egypt; and Cleopatra was obliged to fly for her life into Syria. We have no knowledge of these momentous events: the struggle in the palace, the days in which the young queen walked in deadly peril, the adventurous escape, and the flight from Egypt. We know only that when the curtain is raised once more upon the royal drama, the young Ptolemy is King of Egypt, and, with his army, is stationed on the eastern frontier to prevent the incursion of his exiled sister, who has raised an expeditionary force in Syria and is marching back to her native land to seize again the throne which she had lost. There is something which appeals very greatly to the imagination in the thought of this spirited young Queen’s rapid return to the perilous scenes from which she had so recently escaped; and the historian feels at once that he is dealing with a powerful character in this woman who could so speedily raise an army of mercenaries, and could dare to march back in battle array across the desert towards the land which had cast her out.

CHAPTER IV.
THE DEATH OF POMPEY AND THE ARRIVAL OF CÆSAR IN EGYPT.

The fortress of Pelusium, near which the opposing armies of Ptolemy and Cleopatra were arrayed, stood on low desert ground overlooking the sea, not far east of the modern Port Said. It was the most easterly port and stronghold of the Delta; and, being built upon the much-frequented highroad which skirted the coast between Egypt and Syria, it formed the Asiatic gateway of the Ptolemaic kingdom. The young Ptolemy XIV. had stationed himself, with his advisers and his soldiers, in this fortress, in order to oppose the entrance of his sister Cleopatra, who, as we have already seen, had marched with a strong army back to Egypt from Syria, whither she had fled. On September 28th, B.C. 48, when Cleopatra’s forces, having arrived at Pelusium, were preparing to attack the fortress, and were encamped upon the sea-coast a few miles to the east of the town, an event occurred which was destined to change the whole course of Egyptian history. Round the barren headland to the west of the little port a Seleucian galley hove into sight, and cast anchor a short distance from the shore. Upon the deck of this vessel stood the defeated Pompey the Great and Cornelia his wife, who, flying from the rout of Pharsalia, had come to claim the hospitality of the Egyptian King. The young monarch appears to have been warned of his approach, for Pompey had touched at Alexandria, and there hearing that Ptolemy had gone to Pelusium, had probably sent a messenger to him overland and himself had sailed round by sea. The greatest flurry had been caused in the royal camp by the news, and for the moment the invasion of Cleopatra and the impending battle with her forces were quite forgotten in the excitement of the arrival of the man who for so long had been the mighty patron of the Ptolemaic Court.

ÆGYPTUS

William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh

W. & A. K. Johnston, Limited, Edinburgh & London

Rome.]

[Photograph by Anderson

POMPEY THE GREAT

Egypt, like all the rest of the world, had been watching with deep interest the warfare waged between the two Roman giants, Pompey and Cæsar, confident in the success of the former; and the messenger of the defeated general must have brought the first authentic news of the result of the eagerly awaited battle. The sympathies of the Alexandrians were all on the side of the Pompeians, for the fugitive, who now asked a return of his former favours, had always been to them the gigantic representative of Roman patronage. They knew little, if anything, about Cæsar, who had spent so many years in the far north-west; but Pompey was Rome itself to them, and had always shown himself particularly desirous of acting, when occasion arose, in their behalf. For many years he had been, admittedly, the most powerful personage in Rome, and the civilised world had grovelled at his feet. Then came the inevitable quarrel with Julius Cæsar, a man who could not tolerate the presence of a rival. Civil war broke out, and the two armies met on the plains of Pharsalia. It is not necessary to record here how Pompey’s patrician cavalry, in whom he confidently trusted, was defeated by Cæsar’s hardened legions; how the foreign allies were awed into inactivity by the spectacle of the superb contest between Romans and Romans; how the debonnaire Pompey, realising his defeat, passed, dazed, to his pavilion and sat there staring in front of him, until the enemy had penetrated to his very door, when, uttering the despairing cry, “What! even into the camp?” he galloped from the field; and how Cæsar’s men found the enemy’s tents decked in readiness for the celebration of their anticipated victory, the doorways hung with garlands of myrtle, the floors spread with rich carpets, and the tables covered with goblets of wine and dishes of food. Pompey had fled to Larissa and thence to the sea, where he boarded a merchantman and set sail for Mitylene. Here picking up his wife Cornelia, he made his way to Cyprus, where he transhipped to the galley in which he crossed to Egypt. He had expected, very naturally, to be received with courtesy by Ptolemy, who was to be regarded as his political protégé; and he had some undefined but cogent plans of gathering his forces together again and giving battle a second time to his enemies. At Pharsalia he had thought his power irrevocably destroyed, but on his way to Egypt he learnt that Cato had rallied a considerable number of his troops, and that his fleet, which had not come into action, was still loyal; and he therefore hoped that with Ptolemy’s expected help he might yet regain the mastery of the Roman world.

As soon as his approach was reported to the Egyptian King, a council of ministers was called, in order to decide the manner in which they should receive the fallen general. There were present at this meeting the three scoundrelly advisers of the youthful monarch whom we have already met: Potheinos, the eunuch, who was a kind of prime minister; Achillas, the Egyptian, who commanded the King’s troops; and Theodotos of Chios, the professional master of rhetoric, and tutor to Ptolemy. These three men appear to have organised the plot by which Cleopatra had been driven from Egypt; and, having the boy Ptolemy well under their thumbs, they seem to have been acting with zeal in his name for the advancement of their own fortunes. “It was, indeed, a miserable thing,” says Plutarch, “that the fate of the great Pompey should be left to the determinations of these three men; and that he, riding at anchor at a distance from the shore, should be forced to wait the sentence of this tribunal.”

Some of the councillors suggested that he should be politely requested to seek refuge in some other country, for it was obvious that Cæsar might deal harshly with them if they were to befriend him. Others proposed that they should receive him and cast in their lot with him, for it was to be supposed, and indeed such was the fact, that he still had a very good chance of recovering from the fiasco of Pharsalia; and there was the danger that, if they did not do so, he might accept the assistance of their enemy Cleopatra. Theodotos, however, pointing out, in a carefully reasoned speech, that both these courses were fraught with danger to themselves, proposed that they should curry favour with Cæsar by murdering their former patron, thus bringing the contest to a close, and thereby avoiding any risk of backing the wrong horse; “and,” he added with a smile, “a dead man cannot bite.” The councillors readily approved this method of dealing with the difficult situation, and they committed its execution to Achillas, who thereupon engaged the services of a certain Roman officer named Septimius, who had once held a command under Pompey, and another Roman centurion named Salvius. The three men, with a few attendants, then boarded a small boat and set out towards the galley.

When they had come alongside Septimius stood up and saluted Pompey by his military title; and Achillas thereupon invited him to come ashore in the smaller vessel, saying that the large galley could not make the harbour owing to the shallow water. It was now seen that a number of Egyptian battleships were cruising at no great distance, and that the sandy shore was alive with troops; and Pompey, whose suspicions were aroused, realised that he could not now turn back, but must needs place himself in the hands of the surly-looking men who had come out to meet him. His wife Cornelia was distraught with fears for his safety, but he, bidding her to await events without anxiety, lowered himself into the boat, taking with him two centurions, a freedman named Philip, and a slave called Scythes. As he bade farewell to Cornelia he quoted to her a couple of lines from Sophocles—

“He that once enters at a tyrant’s door
Becomes a slave, though he were free before;”

and so saying, he set out towards the shore. A deep silence fell upon the little company as the boat passed over the murky water, which at this time of year is beginning to be discoloured by the Nile mud brought down by the first rush of the annual floods;[19] and in the damp heat of an Egyptian summer day the dreary little town and the barren colourless shore must have appeared peculiarly uninviting. In order to break the oppressive silence Pompey turned to Septimius, and, looking earnestly upon him, said: “Surely I am not mistaken in believing you to have been formerly my fellow-soldier?” Septimius made no reply, but silently nodded his head; whereupon Pompey, opening a little book, began to read, and so continued until they had reached the shore. As he was about to leave the boat he took hold of the hand of his freedman Philip; but even as he did so Septimius drew his sword and stabbed him in the back, whereupon both Salvius and Achillas attacked him. Pompey spoke no word, but, groaning a little, hid his face with his mantle, and fell into the bottom of the vessel, where he was speedily done to death.

Cornelia, standing upon the deck of the galley, witnessed the murder, and uttered so great a cry that it was heard upon the shore. Then, seeing the murderers stoop over the body and rise again with the severed head held aloft, she called to her ship’s captain to weigh anchor, and in a few moments the galley was making for the open sea and was speedily out of the range of pursuit. Pompey’s decapitated body, stripped of all clothing, was now bundled into the water, and a short time afterwards was washed up by the breakers upon the sands of the beach, where it was soon surrounded by a crowd of idlers. Meanwhile Achillas and his accomplices carried the head up to the royal camp.

The freedman Philip was not molested, and, presently making his way to the beach, wandered to and fro along the desolate shore until all had retired to the town. Then, going over to the body and kneeling down beside it, he washed it with sea-water and wrapped it in his own shirt for want of a winding-sheet. As he was searching for wood wherewith to make some sort of funeral pyre, he met with an old Roman soldier who had once served under the murdered general; and together these two men carried down to the water’s edge such pieces of wreckage and fragments of rotten wood as they could find, and placing the body upon the pile set fire to it.

Upon the next morning one of the Pompeian generals, Lucius Lentulus, who was bringing up the two thousand soldiers whom Pompey had gathered together as a bodyguard, arrived in a second galley before Pelusium; and as he was being rowed ashore he observed the still smoking remains of the pyre. “Who is this that has found his end here?” he said, being still in ignorance of the tragedy, and added with a sigh, “Possibly even thou, Pompeius Magnus!” And upon stepping ashore, he too was promptly murdered.

A few days later, on October 2nd, Julius Cæsar, in hot pursuit, arrived at Alexandria, where he heard with genuine disgust of the miserable death of his great enemy. Shortly afterwards Theodotos presented himself to the conqueror, carrying with him Pompey’s head and signet-ring; but Cæsar turned in distress from the gruesome head, and taking only the ring in his hand, was for a moment moved to tears.[20] He then appears to have dismissed the astonished Theodotos from his presence like an offending slave: and it was not long before that disillusioned personage fled for his life from Egypt. For some years, it may be mentioned, he wandered as a vagabond through Syria and Asia Minor; but at last, after the death of Cæsar, he was recognised by Marcus Brutus, and, as a punishment for having instigated the murder of the great Pompey, was crucified with every possible ignominy. Cæsar seems to have arranged that the ashes of his rival should be sent to his wife Cornelia, by whom they were ultimately deposited at his country house near Alba; and he also gave orders that the piteous head should be buried near the sea, in the grove of Nemesis, outside the eastern walls of Alexandria, where, in the shade of the trees, a monument was set up to him and the ground around it laid out. Cæsar then offered his protection and friendship to all those partisans of Pompey whom the Egyptians had imprisoned, and he expressed his great satisfaction at being able thus to save the lives of his fellow-countrymen.

It is not difficult to appreciate the consternation caused by Cæsar’s attitude. Potheinos and Achillas at once realised that the disgrace of Theodotos awaited them unless they acted with the utmost circumspection, biding their time until, as was expected, Cæsar should take his speedy departure, or until they might deal with this new disturber of their peace in the same manner in which they had disposed of the old. But Cæsar had no intention of leaving Egypt in any haste, nor did he give them the desired opportunity of anticipating the Ides of March. With that audacious nonchalance which so often baffled his observers, he quietly decided to take up his residence in the Palace upon the Lochias Promontory at Alexandria, at that moment occupied by only two members of the Royal Family, the younger Ptolemy and his sister Arsinoe; and, as soon as sufficient troops had arrived to support him, he left his galley and landed at the steps of the imposing quay. Two amalgamated legions, 3200 strong, and 800 Celtic and German cavalry, disembarked with him, this small force having been considered by Cæsar sufficient for the rounding up of the Pompeian fugitives, and for the secondary purposes for which he had come to Egypt.[21]

Cæsar’s object in hastening across the Mediterranean had been, primarily, the capture of Pompey and his colleagues, and the prevention of a rally under the shelter of the King of Egypt’s not inconsiderable armaments. It appears to have been his opinion that speed of pursuit would be more effective than strength of arms, and that his undelayed appearance at Alexandria would more simply discourage the undetermined Egyptians from rendering assistance to their former friend than a display of force at a later date. Fresh from the triumph of Pharsalia, with the memory of that astounding victory to warm his spirits, he did not anticipate any great difficulty in subjecting the Ptolemaic Court to his will, nor in demonstrating to them that he himself, and not the defeated Pompey, represented the authentic might of Rome. It would seem that he expected speedily to frustrate any further resort to arms, and to manifest his authority by acting ostentatiously in the name of the Roman people. He himself should assume the prerogatives lately held by Pompey, and should play the part of benevolent patron to the court of Alexandria so admirably sustained by his fallen rival for so many years. There were several outstanding matters in Egypt which, on behalf of his home government, he could regulate and adjust: and there is little doubt that he hoped by so doing to establish a despotic reputation in that important country which would retain for him, as apparent autocrat of Rome, a personal control of its affairs for many years to come. In spite of all that has been said to the contrary, I am of opinion that his return to Rome was not urgent; indeed it seems to me that it could be postponed for a short time with advantage. Pompey had been a great favourite with the Italians, and it was just as well that the turmoil caused by his defeat and death should be allowed to subside, and that the bitter memories of a sanguinary war, which had so palpably been brought about by personal rivalry, should be somewhat forgotten before the victor made his spectacular entry into Rome. At this time he was not at all popular in the capital, and indeed, six months previously he had been generally regarded as a criminal and adventurer; while, on the other hand, Pompey had been the people’s darling, and it would take some time for public opinion to be reversed.

When, therefore, Cæsar heard that the treacherous deeds of the Egyptian ministers had rendered his primary action unnecessary, he determined to enter Alexandria with some show of state, to take up his residence there for a few weeks, and to interfere in its internal affairs for his own advancement and for the consolidation of his power.

With this object in view his four thousand troops were landed, and he set out in procession towards the Royal Palace, the lictors carrying the fasces and axes before him as in the consular promenades at Rome.[22] No sooner, however, were these ominous symbols observed by the mob than a rush was made towards them; and for a time the attitude of the crowd became ugly and menacing. The young King and his Court were still at Pelusium, where his army was defending the frontier from the expected attack of Cleopatra’s invading forces; but there were in Alexandria a certain number of troops which had been left there as a garrison, and both amongst these men and amongst the heterogeneous townspeople there must have been many who realised the significance of the fasces. The city was full of Roman outlaws and renegades, to whom this reminder of the length of her arm could but bring foreboding and terror. To them Cæsar’s formal entry meant the establishment of that law from which they had fled; while to many a merry member of the crowd the stately procession appeared to bring to Egypt at last that dismal shadow of Rome[23] by which it had so long been menaced. On all sides it was declared that this state entry into the Egyptian capital was an insult to the King’s majesty; and so, indeed, it was, though little did that trouble Cæsar, who was well aware now of his unassailable position in the councils of Rome.

The city was in a ferment, and for some days after Cæsar had taken up his quarters at the Palace rioting continued in the streets, a number of his soldiers being killed in different parts of the town. He therefore sent post-haste to Asia Minor for reinforcements, and took such steps as were necessary for securing his position from attack. It is probable that he did not suppose the Alexandrians would have the audacity to make war upon him, or attempt to drive him from the city; but at the same time he desired to take no risks, for he seems at the moment to have been heartily sick of warfare and slaughter. The Palace and royal barracks in which his troops were quartered, being built mainly upon the Lochias Promontory, were easily able to be defended from attack by land—for, no doubt, in so turbulent a city, the royal quarter was protected by massive walls; and at the same time the position commanded the eastern half of the Great Harbour and the one side of its entrance over against the Pharos Lighthouse. His ships lay moored under the walls of the Palace; and a means of escape was thus kept open which, if the worst came to the worst, might be used with comparative safety upon any dark night. I think the turbulence of the mob, therefore, did not much trouble him, and he was able to set about the task which he desired to perform with a certain degree of quietude. The Civil War had been a very great strain upon his nerves, and he must have looked forward to a few weeks of actual holiday here in the luxurious royal apartments which he had so casually appropriated. Summer at Alexandria is in many ways a delightful time of year; and one may therefore picture Cæsar, at all times fond of luxury and opulence, now heartily enjoying these warm breezy days upon the beautiful Lochias Promontory. The crisis of his life had been passed; he was now absolute master of the Roman world; and his triumphant entry into the capital, when, in a few weeks’ time, the passions of the mob had cooled, was an anticipation pleasant enough to set his restless heart at ease, while he applied himself to the agreeable little task of regulating the affairs in Egypt. He had sent a courier to Rome announcing the death of Pompey, but it does not seem that this messenger was told to proceed with any great rapidity, for he did not arrive in the capital until near the middle of November.[24]

His first action was to send messengers to Pelusium strongly urging both Ptolemy and Cleopatra to cease their warfare, and to come to Alexandria in order to lay their respective cases before him. He chose to regard the settlement of the quarrel between the two sovereigns as a particular obligation upon himself, for it was during his previous consulship that the late monarch, Auletes, had entrusted his children to the Roman people and had made the Republic the executors of his will; and, moreover, that will had been confided to the care of Pompey, whose position as patron of the Egyptian Court Cæsar was now anxious to fill. In response to the summons Ptolemy came promptly to Alexandria, with his minister Potheinos, arriving, I suppose, on about October 5th, in order to ascertain what on earth Cæsar was doing in the Palace; and meanwhile Achillas was left in command of the army at Pelusium. On reaching Alexandria they seem to have been invited by Cæsar to take up their residence in the Palace into which he had intruded, and which was now patrolled by his Roman troops; and, apparently upon the advice of the unctuous Potheinos, the two of them made themselves as pleasant as possible to their new patron. Cæsar at once asked Ptolemy to disband his army, but to this Potheinos would not agree, and immediately sent word to Achillas to bring his forces to Alexandria. Cæsar, hearing of this, obliged the young King to despatch two officers, Dioscorides and Serapion, to order Achillas to remain at that place. These messengers, however, were intercepted by the agents of Potheinos, one being killed and the other wounded; and two or three days later Achillas arrived at the capital at the head of the first batch of his army of some twenty thousand foot and two thousand horse,[25] taking up his residence in that part of the city unoccupied by the Romans. Cæsar thereupon fortified his position, deciding to hold as much of the city as his small force could defend—namely, the Palace and the Royal Area behind it, including the Theatre, the Forum, and probably a portion of the Street of Canopus. The Egyptian army presented a pugnacious but not extremely formidable array,[26] consisting as it did of the Gabinian troops, who had now become entirely expatriated, and had assumed to some extent the habits and liberties of their adopted country; a number of criminals and outlaws from Italy who had been enrolled as mercenary troops; a horde of Syrian and Cilician pirates and brigands; and, probably, a few native levies. But as Cæsar now had with him in the Palace King Ptolemy, the little Prince Ptolemy, the Princess Arsinoe, and the minister Potheinos, who could be regarded as hostages for his safety, and four thousand of his war-hardened veterans, ensconced in a fortified position and supported by a business-like little fleet of galleys, I cannot see that he had any cause at the moment for alarm. One serious difficulty, however, presented itself. Immediately on arriving in Egypt he had sent orders to Cleopatra to repair to the Palace; and his task as arbiter in the royal dispute could not be performed until she arrived, nor could he expect to assert his authority until her presence completed the group of interested persons under his enforced protection. Yet she could not dare to place herself in the hands of Achillas, nor rely upon him for a safe escort through the lines; and thus Cæsar found himself in a dilemma.

The situation, however, was relieved by the pluck and audacity of the young Queen. Realising that her only hope of regaining her kingdom lay in a personal presentation of her case to the Roman arbiter, she determined, by hook or by crook, to make her entry into the Palace. Taking ship from Pelusium to Alexandria, probably at the end of the first week of October, she entered a small boat when still some distance from the city, and thus, about nightfall, slipped into the Great Harbour, accompanied only by one friend, Apollodorus the Sicilian. She seems to have been aware that her brother and Potheinos were in residence at the Palace, together with a goodly number of their own attendants and servants; but there were no means of telling how far Cæsar controlled the situation. Being unaccustomed to the presence of a power more autocratic than that of her own royal house, she does not seem to have realised that Cæsar was in absolute command of the Lochias, and that not he but Ptolemy was the guarded guest; and she felt that in landing at the Palace quays she was running the gravest risk of falling into the hands of her brother’s party and of being murdered before she could reach Cæsar’s presence. This fear indeed may well have been justified, for there is no doubt that Ptolemy and Potheinos had considerable liberty of action within the precincts of the Palace; and, if the rumour had spread that Cleopatra was come, neither of them would have hesitated to put a dagger into her ribs in the first dark corridor through which she had to pass. Waiting, therefore, upon the still water under the walls of the Palace until darkness had fallen, she instructed Apollodorus to roll her up in the blankets and bedding which he had brought for her in the boat as a protection against the night air, and around the bundle she told him to tie a piece of rope which, I suppose, they found in the boat. She was a very small woman, and Apollodorus apparently experienced no difficulty in shouldering the burden as he stepped ashore. Bundles of this kind were then, as they are now, the usual baggage of a common man in Egypt, and were not likely to attract notice. An Alexandrian native at the present day thus carries his worldly goods tied up in his bedding, the mat or piece of carpet which serves him for a bedstead being wrapped around the bundle and fastened with a rope, and in ancient times the custom was doubtless identical. Apollodorus, who must have been a powerful man, thus walked through the gates of the Palace with the Queen of Egypt upon his shoulders, bearing himself as though she were no heavier than the pots, pans, and clothing which were usually tied up in this manner; and when challenged by the sentries he probably replied that he was carrying the baggage to one of the soldiers of Cæsar’s guard, and asked to be directed to his apartments.

Cæsar’s astonishment when the bundle was untied in his presence, revealing the dishevelled little Queen, must have been unbounded; and Plutarch tells us that he was at once “captivated by this proof of Cleopatra’s bold wit.” One pictures her bursting with laughter at her adventure, and speedily winning the admiration of the susceptible Roman, who delighted almost as keenly in deeds of daring as he did in feminine beauty. All night long they were closeted together, she relating to him her adventures since she was driven from her kingdom, and he listening with growing interest, and already perhaps with awakening love. And here it will be as well to leave them while some description is given of the appearance and character of the man who now found himself looking forward to the ensuing days of his holiday in Alexandria with an eagerness which it must have been difficult for him to conceal.

CHAPTER V.
CAIUS JULIUS CÆSAR.

When Cæsar thus made the acquaintance of the adventurous young Queen of Egypt he was a man of advanced middle age. He had already celebrated his fifty-fourth birthday, having been born on July 12, B.C. 102, and time was beginning to mark him down. The appalling dissipations of his youth to some extent may have added to the burden of his years; and, though he was still active and keen beyond the common measure, his face was heavily lined and seamed, and his muscles, I suppose, showed something of that tension to which the suppleness of early manhood gives place. Yet he remained graceful and full of the quality of youth, and he carried himself with the air of one conscious of his supremacy in the physical activities of life. He was a lightly-built man, of an aristocratic type which is to be found indiscriminately throughout Europe, and which nowadays, by a convention of thought, is usually associated in the mind with the cavalry barracks or the polo-ground. He appeared to be, and was, a perfect horseman. It is related of him that in Gaul he bred and rode a horse which no other man in the army dared mount; and it was his habit to demonstrate the firmness of his seat by clasping his hands behind his back and setting the horse at full gallop. Though by no means a small man, he must have scaled under ten stone, and in other days and other climes he might have been mistaken for a gentleman jockey. He was an extremely active soldier, a clever, graceful swordsman, a powerful swimmer, and an excellent athlete. In battle he had proved himself brave, gallant, and cool-headed; and in his earlier years he had been regarded as a dashing young officer who was neither restrained in the performance of striking deeds of bravery nor averse to receiving a gallery cheer for his pains. Already at the age of twenty-one he had won the civic crown, the Victoria Cross of that period, for saving a soldier’s life at the storming of Mytelene. In action he exposed himself bare-headed amongst his men, cheering them and encouraging them by his own fine spirits; and it is related how once he laid hands on a distraught standard-bearer who was running to cover, turned him round, and suggested to him that he had mistaken the direction of the enemy.

His thin, clean-shaven face, his keen dark eyes, his clear-cut features, his hard, firm mouth with its whimsical expression, and his somewhat pale and liverish complexion, gave him at first sight the appearance of one who, being by nature a sportsman and a man of the world, a fearless rider and a keen soldier, had enjoyed every moment of an adventurous life. He was particularly well groomed and scrupulously clean, and his scanty hair was carefully arranged over his fine, broad head. His toga was ornamented with an unusually broad purple stripe, and was edged with a long fringe. He loved jewellery, and on one occasion bought a single pearl for £60,000, which he afterwards gave to a lady of his acquaintance. Indeed, it is said that he only invaded Britain because he had heard that fine pearls were to be obtained there. There was thus a certain foppishness in his appearance, and a slight suggestion of conceit and personal vanity marked his manner, which gave the impression that he was not unaware of his good looks, nor desirous of concealing the fact of his disreputable successes with the fair sex. Yet he was at this time by no means an old roué. His great head, the penetration of his dark eyes, and the occasional sternness of his expression were a speedy indication that much lay behind these inoffensive airs and graces; and all those who came into his presence must have felt the power of his will and brain, even though direct observation did not convey to them more than the pleasing outlines of an elderly cavalier’s figure. Regarded in certain lights and on certain occasions, the expression of his furrowed face showed the imagination, the romantic vision, and the artistic culture of his mind; but usually the qualities which were impressed upon a visitor who conversed with him at close quarters were those of keenness, determination, and, particularly, gentlemanliness, combined with the rather charming confidence of a man of fashion. His manner at all times was quiet and gracious; yet there was a certain fire, a controlled vivacity in his movements, which revealed the creative soldier and administrator behind the ideal aristocrat. His voice though high, and sometimes shrill, was occasionally very pleasant to the ear; but notwithstanding the fact that he was a wonderful orator, there was a correctness in his choice of words which was occasionally almost pedantic. His manner of speech was direct and straightforward, and his honesty of purpose and loftiness of principle were not doubted save by those who chanced to be aware of his little regard for moral integrity.

Cæsar was, in fact, an extremely unscrupulous man. I do not find it possible to accept the opinion of his character held by most historians, or to suppose him to have been an heroic figure who lived and died for his lofty and patriotic principles. There was immense good in him, and he had the unquestionable merit of being a great man with vast ambitions for the orderly governance of the nations of the earth; but when he threw himself with such enthusiasm into the task of winning the heart of the harum-scarum young Queen of Egypt, it seems to me that he was very well qualified to deceive her, and to play upon her emotions with all the known arts and wiles of a wicked world. So notorious was his habit of leading women astray, that when he returned to Rome from his Gallic Wars his soldiers sang a marching song in which the citizens were warned to protect their ladies from him lest he should treat them as he had treated all the women of Gaul. “Urbani, servate uxores,” they sang; “Calvum moechum adducimus.”

He had no particular religion, not much honour, and few high principles; and in this regard all that can be said in his favour is that he was perfectly free from cant, never pretended to be virtuous, nor attempted to hide from his contemporaries the multitude of his sins. As a young man he indulged in every kind of vice, and so scandalous was his reputation for licentiousness that it was a matter of blank astonishment to his Roman friends when, nevertheless, he proved himself so brave and strenuous a soldier. His relationship with the mother of Brutus, who was thought to be his own son, shows that he prosecuted love intrigues while yet a boy. At one time he passed through a phase of extreme effeminacy, with its attendant horrors; and there was a period when he used to spend long hours each day in the practice of the mysteries of the toilet, being scented and curled and painted in the manner prescribed by the most degenerate young men of the aristocratic classes. Indeed so effeminate was he, that after staying with his friend Nicomedes, the King of Bithynia, he was jestingly called Queen of Bithynia; and on another occasion in Rome a certain wag named Octavius saluted Pompey as King and Cæsar as Queen of Rome. His intrigues with the wives of his friends had been as frequent as they were notorious. No good-looking woman was safe from him, least of all those whom he had the opportunity of seeing frequently, owing to his friendship for their husbands or other male relatives. Not even political considerations checked his amorous inclinations, as may be judged from the fact that he made a victim of Mucia, the wife of Pompey, whose friendship he most eagerly desired at that time. “He was the inevitable co-respondent in every fashionable divorce,” writes Oman; “and when we look at the list of the ladies whose names are linked with his, we can only wonder at the state of society in Rome which permitted him to survive unscathed to middle age. The marvel is that he did not end in some dark corner, with a dagger between his ribs, long before he attained the age of thirty.” Being a brilliant opportunist he made use of his success with women to promote his own interests, and at one time he is said to have conducted love intrigues with the wives of Pompey, Crassus, and Gabinius, all leaders of his political party. Even the knowledge of the habits of the young fops of the period, which he had acquired while emulating their mode of life, was turned to good account by him in after years. At the battle of Pharsalia, which had been fought but a few weeks before his arrival in Egypt, he had told his troops who were to receive the charges of the enemy’s patrician cavalry that they should not attempt to hamstring the horses or strike at their legs, but should aim their blows at the riders’ faces, “in the hopes,” as Plutarch says, “that young gentlemen who had not known much of battles and wounds, but came, wearing their hair long, in the flower of their age and height of their beauty, would be more apprehensive of such blows and not care for hazarding both a danger at present and a blemish for the future. And so it proved, for they turned about, and covered their faces to safeguard them.”

In regard to money matters Cæsar was entirely without principle. In his early years he borrowed vast sums on all sides, spent them recklessly, and seldom paid his debts save with further borrowed money. While still a young man he owed his creditors the sum of £280,000; and though most of this had now been paid off by means of the loot from the Gallic Wars, there had been times in his life when ruin stared him in the face. Most of his debts were incurred in the first place in buying for himself a high position in Roman political life, and in the second place in paying the electioneering expenses of candidates for office who would be likely to advance his power. He engaged the favour of the people by giving enormous public feasts, and on one occasion twenty-two thousand persons were entertained at his expense at a single meal. While he was ædile he paid for three hundred and twenty gladiatorial combats; and innumerable fêtes and shows were given by him throughout his life, and were paid for by the tears and anguish of his conquered enemies.

British Museum.]

JULIUS CÆSAR.

He was one of the most ambitious men who have ever walked the stage of life, his devouring passion for absolute power being at all times abnormal; and he cared not one jot in what manner he obtained or expended money so long as his career was advanced by that means. He could not brook the thought of playing a secondary part in the world’s affairs, and nothing short of absolute autocracy satisfied his aspirations. While crossing the Alps on one occasion the poverty of a small mountain village was pointed out to him, and he was heard to remark that he would rather be first man in that little community than second man in Rome. On another occasion he was seen to burst into tears while reading the life of Alexander the Great, for the thought was intolerable to him that another man should have conquered the world at an age when he himself had done nothing of the kind. This restless “passion after honour,” as Plutarch terms it, was not apparent in his manner and was not noticed save by those who knew him well. He was too gentlemanly, too well dressed, too beautifully groomed, to give the impression of one who was seeking indefatigably for his own advancement, and at whose heart the demons of insatiate ambition were so continuously gnawing. “When I see his hair so carefully arranged,” said Cicero, “and observe him adjusting it with one finger, I cannot imagine it should enter such a man’s thoughts to subvert the Roman State.” Yet this elegant soldier, whose manners were so quietly aristocratic, whose charm was so delectable, would sink to any depths of moral depravity, whether financial or otherwise, in order to convert the world into his footstool. When he and Catullus were rival candidates for the office of Pontifex Maximus, the latter offered him a huge sum of money to retire from the contest; but Cæsar, spurning the proffered bribe with indignation, replied that he was about to borrow a larger sum than that in order to buy the votes for himself. At another period of his amazing career he desired to effect the downfall of Cicero, who was much in his way, and circumstances so fell out that this could best be accomplished by the appointment of a certain young scamp named Clodius as tribune. Now Clodius was the paramour of Cæsar’s wife Pompeia, whom the Dictator had made co-respondent in the action for divorce which he had brought against that lady; yet, since it served his ambitious purpose, he did not now hesitate to obtain the appointment of this amorous rogue and use him for his infamous purposes. The story need not here be related of how Clodius had disguised himself as a woman, and had thus obtained admission to certain secret female rites at which Pompeia was officiating; how he had been discovered; how he had only escaped the death penalty for his sacrilege owing to the fact that the judges were afraid to condemn him since he was a favourite with the mob, and afraid to acquit him for fear of offending the nobility, and had therefore written their verdicts so illegibly that nobody could read them; and how Pompeia had been divorced by her husband, who had then made the famous remark that “Cæsar’s wife must be above suspicion”; but it will be apparent that Plutarch is justified in regarding the man’s appointment to the tribuneship as one of the most disgraceful episodes in the Dictator’s career.

Cæsar’s first wife was named Cossutia, and was a wealthy heiress whom he had married for her money’s sake. Having, however, fallen in love with Cornelia, the daughter of Cinna, he divorced Cossutia, and wedded the woman of his heart, pluckily refusing to part with her when ordered to do so for political reasons by the terrible Sulla. Cornelia died in B.C. 68, and in the following year he married Pompeia, of whom we have just heard, in order to strengthen his alliance with Pompey, to whom she was related.

Cæsar’s marriage to Calpurnia, after the dismissal of Pompeia, again showed his indifference to the moral aspect of political life. Calpurnia was the daughter of Calpurnius Piso, the pupil and disciple of Philodemus the Epicurean, a man whose verses in the Greek Anthology, and whose habits of life, were as vicious and poisonous as any in that licentious age. Cæsar at once obtained the consulship for his disreputable father-in-law, thereby causing Cato to protest that it was intolerable that the government should be prostituted by such marriages, and that persons should advance one another to the highest offices in the land by means of women. Cæsar went so far as to propose, shortly after this, that he should divorce Calpurnia and marry Pompey’s daughter, who would have to be divorced from her husband, Faustus Sulla, for the purpose; and that Pompey should marry Octavia, Cæsar’s niece, although she was at that time married to C. Marcellus, and also would have to be divorced.

There was a startling nonchalance in Cæsar’s behaviour, a studied callousness, which was not less apparent to his contemporaries than to us. His wonderful ability to squander other people’s money, his total disregard of principle, his undisguised satisfaction in political and domestic intrigue, revealed an unconcern which must inspire for all time the admiration of the criminal classes, and which, in certain instances, must appeal very forcibly to the imagination of all high-spirited persons. Who can resist the charm of the story of his behaviour to the pirates of Pharmacusa? For thirty-eight days he was held prisoner at that place by a band of most ferocious and bloodthirsty Cilicians, and during that time he treated his captors with a degree of reckless insouciance unmatched in the history of the world. When they asked him for a ransom of twenty talents (£5000) he laughed in their faces, and said that he was worth at least fifty (£12,500), which sum he ultimately paid over to them. He insisted upon joining in their games, jeered at them for their barbarous habits, and ordered them about as though they were his slaves. When he wished to sleep he demanded that they should keep absolute silence as they sat over their camp-fires; or, when the mood pleased him, he took part in their sing-songs, read them his atrocious Latin verses (for he was ever a poor poet), and abused them soundly if they did not applaud. A hundred times a day he told them that he would have them all hanged as soon as he was free, a pleasantry at which the pirates laughed heartily, thinking it a merry jest; but no sooner was he released than he raised a small force, attacked his former captors, and, taking most of them prisoners, had them all crucified. Crucifixion is a form of death by torture, the prolonged and frightful agony of which is not fully appreciated at the present day, owing to a complacent familiarity with the most notorious case of its application; but Cæsar being, on occasion, with all his indifference, a kind-hearted man, decided at the last moment mercifully to put an end to the agonies of his disillusioned victims, and with a sort of considerate nonchalance he therefore quietly cut their throats.

He was not by any means consistently a cruel man, and his kindness and magnanimity were often demonstrated. He shed tears, it will be remembered, upon seeing the signet-ring of his murdered enemy, Pompey; and in Rome he ordered that unfortunate soldier’s statues to be replaced upon the pedestals from which they had been thrown. In warfare, however, he was often ruthless, and had recourse to wholesale massacres which could hardly be regarded as necessary measures. At Uxellodunum and elsewhere he caused thousands of prisoners to be maimed by the hacking off of their right hands; and his slaughter of the members of the Senate of the Veneti seems to have been an unnecessary piece of brutality. His behaviour in regard to the Usipetes and Tencteri will always remain the chief stain upon his military reputation. After concluding peace with these unfortunate peoples, he attacked them when they were disarmed, and killed 430,000 of them—men, women, and children. For this barbarity Cato proposed that he should be put in chains and delivered over to the remnant of the massacred tribes, that they might wreak their vengeance upon him.

During his ten years’ campaigning in Gaul he took 800 towns by storm, subdued 300 states, killed a million men, and sent another million into slavery.[27] His cold-blooded execution of the brave Vercingetorix, after six years of captivity, seems more cruel to us, perhaps, than it did to his contemporaries; and it may be said in his favour that he treated the terrified remnant of the conquered peoples with justice and moderation. In spite of a kindly and even affable manner, his wit was caustic and his words often terribly biting. When a certain young man named Metellus, at that time tribune, had persistently questioned whether Cæsar had a right to appropriate treasury funds in the prosecution of his wars, Cæsar threatened to put him to death if any more was heard of his dissent. “And this you know, young man,” said he, “is more disagreeable for me to say than to do.” He associated freely with all manner of persons, and although so obviously an aristocrat, he was noted for his friendliness and tact in dealing with the lower classes. During his campaigns he shared all hardships with his men, and, consequently, was much beloved by them, in spite of their occasional objection to the heavy work or strenuous manœuvres which he required them to undertake. He was wont to travel in time of war at the rate of a hundred miles a day; and when a river or stream obstructed his progress he did not hesitate to dive straightway into the water and swim to the opposite shore. On the march he himself usually slept in his litter, or curled up on the floor of his chariot, and his food was of the coarsest description. At no time, indeed, was he a gourmet; and it is related how once he ate without a murmur some asparagus which had been treated with something very much like an ointment in mistake for sauce. In later life he drank no wine of any kind, an abstemiousness which was probably forced upon him by ill-health; and he who, in his early years, had been notorious for his dissipations and luxurious living, was, at the time with which we are now dealing, famous for his abstinence.

When Cæsar arrived in Alexandria he was come direct from his great victory over Pompey at Pharsalia, and was now absolute master of the Roman world. His brilliant campaigns in Gaul had raised him to the highest position in the Republic, and now that Pompey was dead he was without any appreciable rival. He carried himself with careful dignity, and presumed—quite correctly—that all eyes were turned upon him. He had, as Mommsen says, “a pleasing consciousness of his own manly beauty”; and the thought of his many brilliant victories and successful surmounting of all obstacles gave him the liveliest satisfaction. No longer was his elegant frame shaken with sobs at the envious thought of the exploits of Alexander the Great; but, since his insatiable ambition still urged him to make use of his opportunities, he was for the moment content to indulge his passion for conquest by attempting to win the affections of the charming, omnipotent, and fabulously wealthy Queen of Egypt.

CHAPTER VI.
CLEOPATRA AND CÆSAR IN THE BESIEGED PALACE AT ALEXANDRIA.

There can be little doubt that Cæsar’s all-night interview with Cleopatra put an entirely new complexion upon his conception of the situation. Until the Queen’s dramatic entry into the Palace, his main object in remaining for a short time at Alexandria, after he had been shown the severed head of the murdered Pompey, had been to assert his authority in that city of unrivalled commercial opulence, and at the same time to make full use of a favourable opportunity to rest his weary mind and body in the luxury of its royal residence and the perfection of its sun-bathed summer days, while Rome should be quieted down and made ready for his coming. But now a new factor had introduced itself. He had found that the Queen of this desirable and important country was a young woman after his own heart: a dare-devil girl, whose manners and beauty had fired his imagination, and whose apparent admiration for him had set him thinking of the uses to which he might put the devotion he confidently expected to arouse. She seems to have laid her case before him with frankness and sincerity. She had shown him how her brother had driven her from the throne, in direct opposition to the will of her father, who had so earnestly desired the two of them to reign jointly and in harmony. And while she had talked to him through the long hours of the night he had found himself most willingly carried away by the desire to obtain her love, both for the pleasure which it might be expected to afford him and for the political advantage which would accrue from such an intercourse. Here was a simple means of bringing Egypt under his control—Egypt which was the granary of the world, the most important commercial market of the Mediterranean, the most powerful factor in eastern politics, and the gateway of the unconquered kingdoms of the Orient. He had made himself lord of the West; Greece and Asia Minor were, since the late war, at his feet; and now Alexandria, so long the support of Pompey’s faction, should come to him with the devotion of its Queen. I do not hold with those who suppose him to have been led like a lamb to the slaughter by the wiles of Cleopatra, and to have succumbed to her charms in the manner of one whose passions have confused his brain, causing him to forget all things save only his desire. In consideration of the fact that the young Queen was at that time, so far as we know, a woman of blameless character, and that he, on the contrary, was a man of the very worst possible reputation in regard to the opposite sex, it seems, to say the least, unfair that the burden of the blame for the subsequent events should have been assigned for all these centuries to Cleopatra.

Before the end of that eventful night Cæsar seems to have determined to excite the passionate love of that wild and irresponsible girl, whose personality and political importance made a doubly powerful appeal to him; and ere the light of dawn had entered the room his decision to restore her to the throne, and to place her brother in the far background, had been irrevocably made. As the sun rose he sent for King Ptolemy, who, on entering Cæsar’s presence, must have been dismayed to be confronted with his sister whom he had driven into exile and against whom he had so recently been fighting at Pelusium. It would appear that Cæsar treated him with sternness, asking him how he had dared to go against the wishes of his father, who had entrusted their fulfilment to the Roman people, and demanding that he should at once make his peace with Cleopatra. At this the young man lost his temper, and, rushing from the room, cried out to his friends and attendants who were waiting outside that he had been betrayed and that his cause was lost. Snatching the royal diadem from his head in his boyish rage and chagrin, he dashed it upon the ground, and, no doubt, burst into tears. Thereupon an uproar arose, and the numerous Alexandrians who still remained within the Roman lines at once gathering round their King, nearly succeeded in communicating their excitement to the royal troops in the city, and arousing them to a concerted attack upon the Palace by land and sea. Cæsar, however, hurried out and addressed the crowd, promising to arrange matters to their satisfaction; and thereupon he called a meeting at which Ptolemy and Cleopatra were both induced to attend, and he read out to them their father’s will wherein it was emphatically stated that they were to reign together. He reiterated his right, as representative of the Roman people, to adjust the dispute; and at last he appears to have effected a reconciliation between the brother and sister. The unfortunate Ptolemy must have realised that from that moment his ambitions and hopes were become dust and ashes, for he would now always remain under the scrutiny of his elder sister; and the liberty of action for which he and his ministers had plotted and schemed was for ever gone. According to Dion Cassius, he could already see plainly that there was an understanding between Cæsar and his sister; and Cleopatra’s manner doubtless betrayed to him her elation. She must have been intensely excited. A few hours previously she had been an exile, creeping back to her own city in imminent danger of her life; now, not only was she Queen of Egypt once more, but she had won the esteem and, so it seemed, the heart also of the Autocrat of the world, whose word was absolute law to the nations. One may almost picture her making faces at her brother as they sat opposite one another in Cæsar’s improvised court of justice, and the unhappy boy’s distress must have been acute.

Cæsar’s dominant idea now was to control the politics of Egypt by means of a skilled play upon the heart of Cleopatra. He did not much care what happened to King Ptolemy or to his minister Potheinos, for they had forfeited their right to consideration by their attempt to set aside the wishes of Auletes, and by their disgusting behaviour to Pompey, who, though Cæsar’s enemy, had yet been his mighty fellow-countryman; but it was his wish as soon as possible to placate the mob, and to endear the people of Alexandria to him, so that in three or four weeks’ time he might leave the country in undisturbed quiet. Now the control of Cyprus was one of the most fervent aspirations of the city, and it seems to have occurred to Cæsar that the presentation of the island to their royal house would be keenly appreciated by them, and would go a long way to appease their hostile excitement. When the Romans annexed Cyprus in B.C. 58, the Alexandrians had risen in revolt against Auletes largely because he had made no attempt to claim the country for himself. It had been more or less continuously an appendage of the Egyptian crown, and its possession was still the people’s dearest wish. Now, therefore, according to Dion, Cæsar made a present of the island to Egypt in the names of the two younger members of the royal house, Prince Ptolemy and Princess Arsinoe; and though we have no records definitely to show that they ever assumed control of their new possession, or that it ceased, at any rate for a year or two, to be regarded as a part of the Roman province of Cilicia, it is certain that a few years later, in B.C. 42, it had become an Egyptian dominion and was administered by a viceroy of that country.[28]

Having thus relieved the situation, Cæsar turned his attention to other matters. While Auletes was in Rome, in B.C. 59, he had incurred enormous debts in his efforts to buy the support of the Roman Senate in re-establishing himself upon the Ptolemaic throne, and in this fact Cæsar now saw a means both of showing his benevolence towards the Egyptians, and of making them pay for the upkeep of his small fleet and army at Alexandria. His claim on behalf of the creditors of Auletes he fixed at the very moderate sum of ten million denarii (£400,000), although it must have been realised by all that the original debts amounted to a much higher figure than this. At the same time he made no attempt to demand a war contribution from the Egyptians, although their original advocacy of the cause of Pompey would have justified him in doing so.[29] In this manner, and by the gift of Cyprus, he made a bid for the goodwill of the Alexandrians; but, unfortunately, his efforts in this direction were entirely frustrated by the intrigues of Potheinos. There probably need not have been any difficulty in the raising of £400,000; but Potheinos chose to order the King’s golden dishes and the rich vessels in the temples to be melted down and converted into money. He furnished the King’s own table with wooden or earthenware plates and bowls, and caused the fact to be made known to the townspeople, in order that they should be shown the straits to which Cæsar’s cupidity had reduced them. Meanwhile, he supplied the Roman soldiers with a very poor quality of corn, and told them, in reply to their complaints, that they ought to be grateful that they received any at all, since they had no right to it. Nor did he hesitate to tell Cæsar that he ought not to waste his time in Alexandria, or concern himself with the insignificant affairs of Egypt, when urgent business should be calling him back to Rome. His manner towards the Dictator was consistently rude and hostile, and there seems little doubt that he was plotting against him and was keeping in touch with Achillas.

Hostilities of a more or less sporadic nature soon broke out, and it was not long before Cæsar made his first hit at the enemy. Hearing that they were attempting to man their imprisoned ships, which lay still in the western portion of the Great Harbour, and knowing that he was not strong enough either to hold or to utilise more than a few of them, he sent out a little force which succeeded in setting fire to, and destroying, the whole fleet, consisting of the fifty men-o’-war which, during the late hostilities, had been lent to Pompey, twenty-two guardships, and thirty-eight other craft, thus leaving in their possession only those vessels which lay in the Harbour of the Happy Return, beyond the Heptastadium. In this conflagration some of the buildings on the quay near the harbour appear to have been burnt, and it would seem that some portion of the famous Alexandrian library was destroyed; but the silence of contemporary writers upon this literary catastrophe indicates that the loss was not great, and, to my mind, puts out of account the statement of later authors that the burning of the entire library occurred on that occasion. Cæsar’s next move was to seize the Pharos Lighthouse and the eastern end of the island upon which it was built, thus securing the entrance to the Great Harbour, and making the passage of his ships to the open sea a manœuvre which could be employed at any moment. At the same time he threw up the strongest fortifications at all the vulnerable points in his land defences, and thereby rendered himself absolutely secure from direct assault.

He was not much troubled by the situation. It is said that he was obliged more than once to keep awake all night in order to protect himself against assassination; but such a contingency did not interfere to any great extent with his enjoyments of the life in the Alexandrian Palace. From early youth he must have been accustomed to the thought of the assassin’s knife. His many love-affairs had made imminent each day the possibility of sudden death, and his political and administrative career also laid him open at all times to a murderous attack. The jealousy of the husbands whose wives he had stolen, the vengeance of the survivors of the massacres instigated by him, the resentment of the politicians whose ambitions he had thwarted, and the hatred of innumerable persons whom, in one way or another, he had offended, placed his life in continuous jeopardy. The machinations of Potheinos, therefore, left him undismayed, and he was able to prosecute what was, in plain language, the seduction of the Queen of Egypt with an undistracted mind.

Cleopatra appears to have been as strongly attracted to Cæsar as he was to her; and although at the outset each realised the advantage of winning the other’s heart, and regulated their actions accordingly, there seems little doubt that, after a day or two of close companionship, a romantic attachment of a very genuine nature had been formed between them. In the case of Cleopatra, no doubt, her love held all the sweetness of the first serious affair of her life, and on the part of Cæsar there is apparent the passionate delight of a man past his prime in the vivacity and charm of a beautiful young girl. Though elderly, Cæsar was what a romanticist would call an ideal lover. His keen, handsome face, his athletic and graceful figure, the fascination of his manners, and the wonder of the deeds which he had performed, might be calculated to win the heart of any woman; and to Cleopatra he must have made a special appeal by reason of his reputation for bravery and reliability on all occasions, and his present display of sang-froid and light-heartedness.

Cæsar was, at this time, in holiday mood, and the life he led at the Palace was of the gayest description. He had cast from him the cares of state with an ease which came of frequent practice in the art of throwing off responsibilities; and when about October 25th he received news from Rome that he had been made Dictator for the whole of the coming year, 47, he was able to feel that there was no cause for anxiety. While the unfortunate young Ptolemy sulked in the background, Cæsar and Cleopatra openly sought one another’s company and made merry together, it would seem, for a large part of every day. With such a man as Cæsar, the result of this intimacy was inevitable; nor was it to be expected that the happy-go-lucky and impetuous girl of but twenty years of age would act with much caution or propriety under the peculiar and exciting circumstances. It is possible that she had already gone through the form of marriage with her co-regnant brother, as was the custom of the Egyptian Court; but it is highly unlikely that this was anything more than the emptiest formality, and there is no reason to doubt that in actual fact she was, when she met Cæsar, still unwedded. The child which in due course she presented to the Dictator was her first-born; but had there been a previous marriage of more than a formal nature, it is at least probable, in view of her subsequent productivity, that she would already have been in enjoyment of the privileges of motherhood.

The gaiety of the life in the besieged Palace, and the progress of the romance which was there being enacted, were rudely disturbed by two consecutive events which led at once to the outbreak of really serious hostilities. The little Princess Arsinoe, who, like all the women of this family, must have been endowed with great spirit and pluck, suddenly made her escape from the Roman lines, accompanied by her nutritius Ganymedes,[30] and joined the Egyptian forces under Achillas. The plot, organised no doubt by Ganymedes, had for its object the raising of the Princess to the throne, while Cleopatra and her two brothers were imprisoned in the Lochias, and no sooner had they reached the Egyptian headquarters than they began freely to bribe all officers and officials of importance in order to accomplish their purpose. Achillas, however, who had his own game to play, thought it wiser to remain loyal to his sovereign, and to attempt to rescue him from Cæsar’s clutches. It was not long before a quarrel arose between Ganymedes and Achillas, which ended in the prompt assassination of the latter, whose functions were at once assumed by his murderer, the war being thereupon prosecuted with renewed vigour. Previous to the death of Achillas, Potheinos had been in secret communication with him, apparently in regard to the possibility of murdering Cæsar and effecting the escape of King Ptolemy and himself from the Palace ere Arsinoe and Ganymedes obtained control of affairs. Information of the plot was given to Cæsar by his barber, “a busy, listening fellow, whose excessive timidity made him inquisitive into everything”;[31] and, at a feast held to celebrate the reconciliation between Ptolemy and Cleopatra, Potheinos was arrested and immediately beheaded, a death which the poet Lucan considers to have been very much too good for him, since it was that by which he had caused the great Pompey to die. So far as one can now tell, Cæsar was entirely justified in putting this wretched eunuch out of the way of further worldly mischief. He belonged to that class of court functionary which is met with throughout the history of the Orient, and which invariably calls forth the denunciation of the more moral West; but it is to be remembered in his favour that, so far as we know, he schemed as eagerly for the fortunes of his young sovereign Ptolemy as he did for his own advancement, and his treacherous manœuvres were directed against the menacing intrusion of a power which was relentlessly crushing the life out of the royal houses of the accessible world. His crime against fallen Pompey was no more dastardly than were many other of the recorded acts of the Court he served; and the fact that he, like his two fellow-conspirators, Achillas and Theodotos, paid in blood and tears for the riches of the moment, goes far to exonerate him, at this remote date, from further execration.

The first act of the war which caused Cæsar any misgivings was the pollution of his water supply by the enemy, and the consequent nervousness of his men. The Royal Area obtained its drinking water through subterranean channels communicating with the lake at the back of the city; and no sooner had Cæsar realised that these channels might be tampered with than he attempted to cut his way southwards, probably along the broad street[32] which led to the Gate of the Sun and to the Lake Harbour. Here, however, he met with a stubborn resistance, and the loss of life might have been very great had he persisted in his endeavour. Fortunately, however, the sinking of trial shafts within the besieged territory led to the discovery of an abundance of good water, the existence of which had not been suspected; and thus he was saved from the ignominy of being ousted from the city which he had entered in such solemn pomp, and of being forced to retire across the Mediterranean, his self-imposed task left uncompleted, and his ambitions for the future of Cleopatra unfulfilled.

Not long after this the welcome news was brought to him that the Thirty-seventh Legion had crossed from Asia Minor with food supplies, arms, and siege-instruments, and was anchored off the Egyptian coast, being for the moment unable to reach him owing to contrary winds. Cæsar at once sailed out to meet them, with his entire fleet, the ships being manned only by their Rhodian crews, all the troops having been left to hold the land defences. Effecting a junction with these reinforcements, he returned to the harbour, easily defeated the Egyptian vessels which had collected to the north of the Island of Pharos, and sailed triumphantly back to his moorings below the Palace.

So confident now was he in his strength that he next sailed round the island, and attacked the Egyptian fleet in its own harbour beyond the Heptastadium, inflicting heavy losses upon them. He then landed on the western end of Pharos, which was still held by the enemy, carried the forts by storm, and effected a junction with his own men who were stationed around the lighthouse at the eastern end. His plan was to advance across the Heptastadium, and thus, by holding both the island and the mole, to obtain possession of the western Harbour of the Happy Return and ultimately to strike a wedge into the city upon that side. But here he suffered a dangerous reverse. While he was leading in person the attack upon the south or city end of the Heptastadium, and his men were crowding on to it from the island and from the vessels in the Great Harbour, the Egyptians made a spirited attack upon its northern end, thus hemming the Romans in upon the narrow causeway, to the consternation of those who watched the battle from the Lochias Promontory. Fortunately vessels were at hand to take off the survivors of this sanguinary engagement, as the enemy drove them back from either end of the causeway; and presently they had all scrambled aboard and were rowing at full speed across the Great Harbour. Such numbers, however, jumped on to the deck of the vessel into which Cæsar had entered that it capsized, and we are then presented with the dramatic picture of the ruler of the world swimming for his life through the quiet waters of the harbour, holding aloft in one hand a bundle of important papers which he happened to be carrying at the moment of the catastrophe, dragging his scarlet military cloak along by his teeth, and at the same time constantly ducking his rather bald head under the water to avoid the missiles which were hurled at him by the victorious Egyptians, who must have been capering about upon the recaptured mole, all talking and shouting at once. He was, however, soon picked up by one of his ships; and thus he returned to the Palace, very cold and dripping wet, and having in the end lost the cloak which was the cherished mark of his rank. Four hundred legionaries and a number of seamen perished in this engagement, most of them being drowned; and now, perhaps for the first time, it began to appear to Cæsar that the warfare which he was waging was not the amusing game he had thought it. For at least four months he had entertained himself in the Palace, spending his days in pottering around his perfectly secure defences and his nights in enjoying the company of Cleopatra. Up till now he must have been in constant receipt of news from Rome, where his affairs were being managed by Antony, his boisterous but fairly reliable lieutenant, and it is evident that nothing had occurred there to necessitate his return. Far from being hemmed in within the Palace and obliged to fight for his life, as is generally supposed to have been the case, it seems to me that his position at all times was as open as it was secure. He could have travelled across the Mediterranean at any moment; and, had he thought it desirable, he could have sailed over to Italy for a few weeks and returned to Alexandria without any great risk. His fleet had shown itself quite capable of defending him from danger upon the high seas, as, for example, when he had sailed out to meet the Thirty-seventh Legion;[33] and, as on that occasion, his troops could have been left in security in their fortified position. Supplies from Syria were plentiful, and the Rhodian sailors, after escorting him as far as Cyprus, could have returned to their duties at Alexandria in order to ensure the safe and continuous arrival of these stores and provisions.

It is thus very apparent that he had no wish to abandon the enjoyments of his winter in the Egyptian capital, where he had become thoroughly absorbed both in the little Queen of that country and in the problems which were represented to him by her. He was an elderly man, and the weight of his years caused him to feel a temporary distaste for the restless anxieties which awaited him in Rome. His ambitions in the Occident had been attained; and now, finding himself engaged in what, I would suggest, was an easily managed and not at all dangerous war, he was determined to carry the struggle through to its inevitable end, and to find in this quite interesting and occasionally exciting task an excuse for remaining by the side of the woman who, for the time being, absorbed the attention of his wayward affections. Already he was beginning to realise that the subjection of Egypt to his will was a matter of very great political importance, as will be explained hereafter; and he felt the keenest objection to abandoning the Queen to her own devices, both on this account and by reason of the hold which she had obtained upon his heart. In after years he did not look back upon the fighting with an interest sufficient to induce him to record its history, as he had done that of other campaigns, but he caused an official account to be written by one of his comrades; and this author has been at pains to show that the struggle was severe in character. Such an interpretation of the war, however, though now unanimously accepted, is to be received with caution, and need not be taken more seriously than the statement that, in the first instance, Cæsar’s prolonged stay at Alexandria was due to the Etesian winds which made it difficult for his ships to leave the harbour. These annual winds from the north might have delayed his return for a week or two; but it is obvious that he had no desire to set sail; and the author of De Bello Alexandrino was doubtless permitted to cover Cæsar’s apparent negligence of important Roman affairs by thus attributing his lengthy absence to the strength of the enemy and to the inclemency of the Fates.

Now, however, after the ignominious defeat upon the Heptastadium, Cæsar appears to have become fully determined to punish the Alexandrians and to prosecute the campaign with more energy. He seems soon to have received news that a large army was marching across the desert from Syria to his relief, under the joint leadership of Mithridates of Pergamum, a natural son of Mithridates the Great, the Jewish Antipater, father of Herod, and Iamblichus, son of Sampsiceramus, a famous Arab chieftain from Hemesa. With the advent of these forces he knew that he would be able to crush all resistance and to impose his will upon Egypt; and he now, therefore, took a step which clearly shows his determination to handle affairs with sternness and ruthlessness, in such a manner that Cleopatra should speedily become sole ruler of the country, and thus should be in a position to lay all the might of her kingdom in his hands.

The Princess Arsinoe had failed to make herself Queen of Egypt in spite of the efforts of Ganymedes, and the royal army was still endeavouring to rescue King Ptolemy and to fight under his banner. Cæsar, therefore, determined to hand the young man over to them, knowing, as the historian of the war admits, that there was little probability of such an action leading to a cessation of hostilities. His avowed object in taking this step was to give Ptolemy the opportunity of arranging terms of peace for him; but he did not hesitate to record officially his opinion that, in the event of a continuation of the war, it would be far more honourable for him to be fighting against a king than against “a crowd of sweepings of the earth and renegades.” The truth of the matter, however, seems to me to be that Cæsar wished to rid himself of the boy, who stood in the way of the accomplishment of his schemes in regard to the sole sovereignty of Cleopatra; and by handing him over to the enemy at the moment when the news of the arrival of the army from Syria made the Egyptian downfall absolutely certain, he insured the young man’s inevitable death or degradation. The miserable Ptolemy must have realised this, for when Cæsar instructed him to go over to his friends beyond the Roman lines, he burst into tears and begged to be allowed to remain in the Palace. He knew quite well that the Egyptians had not a chance of victory—that when once he had taken up his residence with his own people their conqueror would treat him as an enemy and punish him accordingly. Cæsar, however, on his part, was aware that if in the hour of Roman victory Ptolemy was still under his protection, it would be difficult not to carry out the terms of the will of Auletes by making him joint-sovereign with Cleopatra. The King’s tears and paradoxical protestations of devotion were therefore ignored; and forthwith he was pushed out of the Palace into the welcoming arms of the Alexandrians, the younger brother, whom Cæsar had designed for the safely distant throne of Cyprus, being left in the custody of the Romans alone with Cleopatra.

The relieving army from Syria soon arrived at the eastern frontier of Egypt, and, taking Pelusium by storm, gave battle to the King’s forces not far from the Canopic mouth of the Nile. The Egyptians were easily defeated, and the invaders marched along the eastern edge of the Delta towards Memphis (near the modern Cairo), just below which they crossed the Nile to the western bank. The young Ptolemy thereupon, expecting no mercy at Cæsar’s hands, put himself boldly at the head of such troops as could be spared from the siege of the Palace at Alexandria, and marched across the Delta to measure swords with Mithridates and his allies. No sooner was he gone from the city than Cæsar, leaving a small garrison in the Palace, sailed out of the harbour with as many men as he could crowd into the ships at his disposal, and moved off eastwards as though making for Canopus or Pelusium. Under cover of darkness, however, he turned in the opposite direction, and before dawn disembarked upon the deserted shore some miles to the west of Alexandria. He thus out-manœuvred the Egyptian fleet with ease, and, incidentally, demonstrated that he had been throughout the siege perfectly free to come and go across the water as he chose. Marching along the western border of the desert, as his friends had marched along the eastern, he effected a junction with them at the apex of the Delta, not far north of Memphis, and immediately turned to attack the approaching Egyptian army. Ptolemy, on learning of their advance, fortified himself in a strong position at the foot of a tell, or mound, the Nile being upon one flank, a marsh upon the other, and a canal in front of him; but the allies, after a two-days’ battle, turned the position and gained a complete victory. The turning movement had been entrusted to a certain Carfulenus, who afterwards fell at Mutina fighting against Antony, and this officer managed to penetrate into the Egyptian camp. At his approach Ptolemy appears to have jumped into one of the boats which lay moored upon the Nile; but the weight of the numbers of fugitives who followed his example sank the vessel, and the young king was never seen alive again. It is said that his dead body was recognised afterwards by the golden corselet which he wore, and which, no doubt, had caused by its weight his rapid death. His tragic end, at the age of fifteen, relieved Cæsar of the embarrassing necessity either of pardoning him and making him joint-sovereign with Cleopatra, according to the terms of his father’s will, or of carrying him captive to Rome and putting him to death in the customary manner at the close of his triumph. The boy had foreseen the fate which would be chosen for him, when he had begged with tears to be allowed to remain in the Palace; and his sudden submersion in the muddy waters of the Nile must have terminated a life which of late had been intolerably overshadowed by the knowledge that his existence was an obstacle to Cæsar’s relentless ambitions, and by the horror of the certainty of speedy death.

On March 27th, B.C. 47,[34] Cæsar, who had ridden on with his cavalry, entered Alexandria in triumph, its gates being now thrown open to him. The inhabitants dressed themselves in mourning garments, sending deputations to him to beg for his mercy and forgiveness, and bringing out to him the statues of their gods as a token of their entire submission. Princess Arsinoe and Ganymedes were handed over to him as prisoners: and in pomp he rode through the city to the Palace, where as a conquering hero and saviour he was received into the arms of Cleopatra.

CHAPTER VII.
THE BIRTH OF CÆSARION AND CÆSAR’S DEPARTURE FROM EGYPT.

The death of Ptolemy and the submission of Alexandria brought the war to a definite close; and Cæsar, once more in comfortable residence at the Palace, was enabled at last to carry out his plans for the regulation of Egyptian affairs, with the execution of which the campaign had so long interfered. Cleopatra’s little brother, the younger Ptolemy, was a boy of only eleven years of age, who does not seem to have shown such signs of marked intelligence or strong character as would cause him to be a nuisance either to Cæsar or to his sister; and therefore it was arranged that he should be raised to the throne in place of his deceased brother, as nominal King and consort of Cleopatra. Cæsar, it will be remembered, had given Cyprus to this youth and to his sister Arsinoe; but now, since the latter was a prisoner in disgrace and the former was not old enough to cause trouble in Egypt, the island kingdom was not pressed upon them. To the Alexandrians, whose campaign against him had entertained him so admirably while he had pursued his intrigue with Cleopatra, Cæsar showed no desire to be other than lenient, and he preferred to regard the great havoc wrought in certain parts of their city as sufficient punishment for their misdeeds. He granted to the Jews, however, equal rights with the Greeks, in consideration of their assistance in the late war, a step which must have been somewhat irritating to the majority of the townsfolk. He then constituted a regular Roman Army of Occupation, for the purpose of supporting Cleopatra and her little brother upon the throne,[35] and to keep order in Alexandria and throughout the country. This army consisted of the two legions which had been besieged with him in the Palace, together with a third which presently arrived from Syria; and to the command of this force Cæsar appointed an able officer named Rufinus, who had risen by his personal merit from the ranks, being originally one of Cæsar’s own freedmen. It is usually stated that in handing over the command to a man of this standing and not to a person belonging to the Senate, Cæsar was showing his disdain for Egypt; but I am of opinion that the step was taken deliberately to retain the control of the country entirely in his own hands, Rufinus being, no doubt, absolutely Cæsar’s man. We do not hear what became of the Gabinian troops who had fought against Cæsar, but it is probable that they were drafted to legions stationed in other parts of the world.

It was now April,[36] and Cæsar had been in Egypt for more than six months. He had originally intended to return to Rome, it would seem, in the previous November; but his defiance by the Alexandrians, and later the siege of the Palace, had given him a reasonable excuse for remaining with Cleopatra. Being by nature an opportunist, he had come during these months to interest himself keenly in Egyptian affairs, and, as we have seen, both they and his passion for the Queen had fully occupied his attention. The close of the war, however, did not mean to him the termination of these interests, but rather the beginning of the opportunity for putting his schemes into execution. He must have been deeply impressed by the possibilities of expansive exploitation which Egypt offered. Cleopatra, no doubt, had told him much concerning the wonders of the land, wonders which she herself had never yet found occasion to verify. He had heard from her, and had received visible proof, of the wealth of the Nile Valley; and his march through the Delta must have revealed to him the richness of the country. No man could fail to be impressed by the spectacle of the miles upon miles of grain fields which are to be seen in Lower Egypt; and reports had doubtless reached him of the splendours of the upper reaches of the Nile, where a peaceful and law-abiding population found time both to reap three crops a year from the fertile earth, and to build huge temples for their gods and palaces for their nobles. The yearly tax upon corn alone in Egypt, which was paid in kind, must have amounted to some twenty millions of bushels, the figure at which it stood in the reign of Augustus; and this fact, if no other, must have given Cæsar cause for much covetousness.

He had probably heard, too, of the trade with India, which was already beginning to flourish, and which, a few years later, came to be of the utmost importance;[37] and he had doubtless been told of the almost fabulous lands of Ethiopia, to which Egypt was the threshold, whence came the waters of the Nile. Egypt has always been a land of speculation, attracting alike the interest of the financier and the enthusiasm of the conqueror; and Cæsar’s imagination must have been stimulated by those ambitious schemes which have fired the brains of so many of her conquerors, just as that of the great Alexander had been inspired three centuries before. Feeling that his work in Gaul and the north-west was more or less completed, he may, perhaps, have considered the expediency of carrying Roman arms into the uttermost parts of Ethiopia; of crossing the Red Sea into Arabia; or of penetrating, like Alexander, to India and to the marvellous kingdoms of the East. Even so, eighteen hundred years later, Napoleon Bonaparte dreamed of marching his army through Egypt to the lands of Hindustan; and so also England, striving to hold her beloved India (as the prophetic Kinglake wrote in 1844), fixed her gaze upon the Nile Valley, until, as though by the passive force of her desire, it fell into her hands. For long the Greeks had thought that the Nile came from the east and rose in the hills of India; and even in the days with which we are now dealing Egypt was regarded as the gateway of those lands. The trade-route from Alexandria to India was yearly growing in fame. The merchants journeyed up the Nile to the city of Koptos, and thence travelled by caravan across the desert to the seaport of Berenice, whence they sailed with the trade wind to Muziris, on the west coast of India, near the modern Calicut and Mysore. It is possible that Cæsar had succumbed to the fascination of distant conquest and exploration with which Egypt, by reason of her geographical situation, has inspired so many minds, and that he was allowing his thoughts to travel with the merchants along the great routes to the East. He must always have felt that the unconquered Parthians would cause a march across Asia to India to be a most difficult and hazardous undertaking, and there was some doubt whether he would be able to repeat the exploits of Alexander the Great along that route; but here through Egypt lay a road to the Orient which might be followed without grave risk. The merchants were wont to leave Berenice, on the Egyptian coast, about the middle of July, when the Dog-star rose with the Sun, reaching the west coast of India about the middle of September;[38] and it would be strange indeed if Cæsar had not given some consideration to the possibility of carrying his army by that route to the lands which Alexander, of whose exploits he loved to read, had conquered.

Abundant possibilities such as these must have filled his mind, and may have been the partial cause of his desire to stay yet a little while longer in this fascinating country; but there was another and a more poignant reason which urged him to wait for a few weeks more in Egypt. Cleopatra was about to become a mother. Seven months had passed since those days in October when Cæsar had applied himself so eagerly to the task of winning the love of the Queen, and of procuring her surrender to his wishes; and now, in another few weeks, the child of their romance would be placed in his arms. Old profligate though he was, it seems that he saw something in the present situation different from those in which he had found himself before. Cleopatra, by her brilliant wit, her good spirits, her peculiar charm of manner, her continuous courage, and her boundless optimism, had managed to retain his love throughout these months of their close proximity; and an appeal had been made to the more tender side of his nature which could not be resisted. He wished to be near her in her hour of trial; and, moreover (for in Cæsar’s actions there was always a practical as well as a sentimental motive), it is probable that he entertained high hopes of receiving from Cleopatra an heir to his worldly wealth and position, who should be in due course fully legitimised. His long intercourse with the Queen had much altered his point of view; and I think there can be little doubt that his mind was eagerly feeling forward to new developments and revolutionary changes in his life.

At Cleopatra’s wish he was now allowing himself to be recognised by the Egyptians as the divine consort of the Queen, an impersonation of the god Jupiter-Amon upon earth. Some form of marriage had taken place between them, or, at any rate, the Egyptian people, if not the cynical Alexandrians, had been constrained to recognise their legal union. The approaching birth of the child had made it necessary for Cleopatra to disclose her relationship with Cæsar, and at the same time to prove to her subjects that she, their Queen, was not merely the mistress of an adventurous Roman. As soon, therefore, as her brother and formal husband Ptolemy XIV. had died, she had begun to circulate the belief that Julius Cæsar was the great god of Egypt himself come to earth, and that the child which was about to make its appearance was the offspring of a divine union. Upon the walls of the temples of Egypt, notably at Hermonthis, near Thebes, bas-reliefs were afterwards sculptured in which Cleopatra was represented in converse with the god Amon, who appears in human form, and in which the gods are shown assisting at the celestial birth of the child. A mythological fiction of a similar nature had been employed in ancient Egypt in reference to the births of earlier sovereigns, those of Hatshepsut (B.C. 1500) and of Amenophis III. (B.C. 1400) being two particular instances. In the known occasions of its use, the royal parentage of the child had been open to question, this being the reason why the story of the divine intercourse was introduced; and thus in the case of Cleopatra the myth had become familiar, by frequent use, to the priest-ridden minds of the Egyptians, and was not in any way startling or original. In the later years of the Queen’s reign events were dated as from this supernatural occurrence, and there is preserved to us an epitaph inscribed in the “twentieth year of (or after) the union of Cleopatra with Amon.”

Cæsar was quite willing thus to be reckoned in Egypt as a divinity. His hero Alexander the Great in like manner had been regarded as a deity, and had proclaimed himself the son of Amon, causing himself to be portrayed with the ram’s horns of that god projecting from the sides of his head. Though his belief in the gods was conspicuously absent, Cæsar had always boasted of his divine descent, his family tracing their genealogy to Iulus, the son of Æneas, the son of Anchises and the goddess Venus; and there is every reason to suppose that Cleopatra had attempted to encourage him to think of himself as being in very truth a god upon earth. She herself ruled Egypt by divine right, and deemed it no matter for doubt that she was the representative of the Sun-god here below, the mediator between man and his creator. The Egyptians, if not the Alexandrians, fell flat upon their faces when they saw her, and hailed her as god, in the manner in which their fathers had hailed the ancient Pharaohs. From earliest childhood she had been called a divinity, and she was named an immortal in the temples of Egypt as by undoubted right. Those who came into contact with her partook of the divine affluence, and her companions were holy in the sight of her Egyptian subjects. Cæsar, as her consort, thus became a god; and as soon as her connection with him was made public, he assumed ex officio the nature of a divine being. We shall see presently how, even in Rome, he came to regard himself as more than mortal, and how, setting aside in his own favour his disbelief in the immortals, before he died he had publicly called himself god upon earth. At the present period of his life, however, these startling assumptions were not clearly defined; and it is probable that he really did not know what to think about himself. Cleopatra had fed his mind with strange thoughts, and had so flattered his vanity, though probably without intention, that if he could but acknowledge the existence of a better world, he was quite prepared to believe himself in some sort of manner come from it. She knew that she herself was supposed to be divine; she loved Cæsar and had made him her equal; she was aware that he, too, was said to be descended from the gods: and thus, by a tacit assumption, it seems to me that she gradually forced upon him a sense of his divinity which, in the succeeding years, developed into a fixed belief.

This appreciation of his divine nature, which we see growing in Cæsar’s mind, carried with it, of course, a feeling of monarchical power, a desire to assume the prerogatives of kingship. Cleopatra seems now to have been naming him her consort, and in Egypt, as we have said, he must have been recognised as her legal husband. He was already, in a manner of speaking, King of Egypt; and the fact that he was not officially crowned as Pharaoh must have been due entirely to his own objection to such a proceeding. The Egyptians must now have been perfectly willing to offer to him the throne of the Ptolemies, just as they had accepted Archelaus, the High Priest of Komana, as consort of Berenice IV., Cleopatra’s half-sister;[39] and in these days when their young Queen was so soon to become a mother there must have been a genuine and eager desire to regularise the situation by such a marriage with Cæsar and his elevation to the throne. Nothing could be more happy politically than the Queen’s marriage to the greatest man in Rome, and we have already seen how there was some idea of a union with Cnæus Pompeius in the days when that man’s father was the ruler of the Republic. To the Egyptian mind the fact that Cæsar was already a married man, with a wife living in Rome, was no real objection. She had borne him no son, and therefore might be divorced in favour of a more fruitful vine. Cleopatra herself must have been keenly desirous to share her Egyptian throne with Cæsar, for no doubt she saw clearly enough that, since he was already autocrat and actual Dictator of Rome, it would not be long before they became sovereigns of the whole Roman world. If she could persuade him, like Archelaus of Komana, to accept the crown of the Pharaohs, there was good reason to suppose that he would try to induce Rome to offer him the sovereignty of his own country. The tendency towards monarchical rule in the Roman capital, thanks largely to Pompey, was already very apparent; and both Cæsar and Cleopatra must have realised that, if they played their game with skill, a throne awaited them in that city at no very distant date.

Cleopatra was a keen patriot, or rather she was deeply concerned in the advancement of her own and her dynasty’s fortunes; and it must have been a matter of the utmost satisfaction to her to observe the direction in which events were moving. The man whom she loved, and who loved her, might at any moment become actual sovereign of Rome and its dominions; and the child with which she was about to present him, if it were a boy, would be the heir of the entire world. For years her dynasty had feared that Rome would crush them out of existence and absorb her kingdom into the Republic; but now there was a possibility that Egypt, and the lands to which the Nile Valley was the gateway, would become the equal of Rome at the head of the great amalgamation of the nations of the earth. Egypt, it must be remembered, was still unconquered by Rome, and was, at the time, the most wealthy and important nation outside the Republic. All Alexandrians and Egyptians believed themselves to be the foremost people in the world; and thus to Cleopatra the dream that Egypt might play the leading part in an Egypto-Roman empire was in no wise fantastic.

Her policy, then, was obvious. She must attempt to retain Cæsar’s affection, and at the same time must nurse with care the growing aspirations towards monarchy which were developing in his mind. She must bind him to her so that, when the time came, she might ascend the throne of the world by his side; and she must make apparent to him, and keep ever present to his imagination, the fact of her own puissance and the splendour of her royal status, so that there should be no doubt in Cæsar’s mind that her flesh and blood, and hers alone, were fitted to blend with his in the foundation of that single royal line which was to rule the whole Earth.

Approaching motherhood, it would seem, had much sobered her wild nature, and the glory of her ambitions had raised her thoughts to a level from which she must have contemplated with disdain her early struggles with the drowned Ptolemy, the decapitated Potheinos, the murdered Achillas, and the outlawed Theodotos. She, Cleopatra, was the daughter of the Sun, the sister of the Moon, and the kinswoman of the heavenly beings; she was mated to the descendant of Venus and the Olympian gods, and the unborn offspring of their union would be in very truth King of Earth and Heaven.

Historians both ancient and modern are agreed that Cleopatra was a woman of exceptional mental power. Her character, so often wayward in expression, was as dominant as her personality was strong; and she must have found no difficulty in making her appeal to the soaring ambitions of the great Roman. When occasion demanded she carried herself with dignity befitting the descendant of an ancient line of kings, and even in her escapades the royalty of her person was at all times apparent. The impression which she has left upon the world is that of a woman who was always significant of the splendour of monarchy; and her influence upon Cæsar in this regard is not to be overlooked. A man such as he could not live for six months in close contact with a queen without feeling to some extent the glamour of royalty. She represented monarchy in its most absolute form, and in Egypt her word was law. The very tone of her royal mode of life must have constituted new matter for Cæsar’s mind to ruminate upon; and that trait in his character which led him to abhor the thought of subordination to any living man, must have caused him to watch the actions of an autocratic queen with frank admiration and restless envy. Tales of the Kings of Alexandria and stories of the ancient Pharaohs without doubt were narrated, and without doubt took some place in Cæsar’s brain. Cleopatra’s point of view, that of the most royal of the world’s royal houses, must, by its very unfamiliarity, have impressed itself upon his thoughts.

Thus, little by little, under the influence of the Egyptian Queen and in the power of his own sleepless ambitions, Cæsar began to give serious thought to the possibilities of creating a world-empire over which he should rule as king, founding a royal line which should sit upon the supreme earthly throne for ages to come. Obviously it must have occurred to him that kings must rule by right of royal blood, and that his own blood, though noble and though said to be of divine origin, was not such as would give his descendants unquestionable command over the loyalty of their subjects. A man who is the descendant of many kings has a right to royalty which the son of a conqueror, however honourable his origin, does not possess. So thought Napoleon when he married the Austrian princess, founding a royal house in his country by using the royal blood of another land for the purpose. Looking around him with this thought in view, Cæsar could not well have chosen anybody but Cleopatra as the foundress of his line. There was no Roman royal house extant, and therefore a Greek was the best, if not the only, possible alternative; and the Ptolemaic Kings of Egypt were pure Macedonians, deriving their descent, by popular belief, if not in actual fact, from the royal house of Cæsar’s hero, Alexander the Great. He may well, then, have contemplated with enthusiasm the thought of the future monarchs of Rome sitting by inherited right upon the ancient throne of Macedonian Egypt; and Cleopatra on her part was no doubt inspired by the idea of future Pharaohs, blood of her blood and bone of her bone, ruling Rome by hereditary authority.

Cleopatra of necessity had to find a husband. Already she had postponed her marriage beyond the age at which such an event should take place; and any union with her co-regnant brother could but be of a formal nature. Cæsar now had come into her life, capturing her youthful affections and causing himself to be the parent of her child; and it is but natural to suppose that she would endeavour by every means in her power to make him her lifelong consort, thus adding to her own royal stock the worthiest blood of Rome. There can be no doubt that whether or not she might succeed in making Cæsar himself Pharaoh of Egypt, she intended to hand on the Egyptian throne to her child and his, adding to the name of Ptolemy that of the family of the Cæsars. Thus it may be said, though my assumption at first seems startling, that the Roman Empire to a large extent owes its existence to the Egyptian Queen, for the monarchy was in many respects the child of the union of Cæsar and Cleopatra.

These as yet undefined ambitions and hopes found a very real and material expression in Cæsar’s eagerness to know whether the expected babe would be a girl, or a son and heir; and it seems likely that his determination to remain in Egypt was largely due to his unwillingness to depart before that question was answered. This, and the paternal responsibility which perhaps for the first time in his sordid life he had ever felt, led him to postpone his return to Rome. He seems to have entertained feelings of the greatest tenderness towards the Queen, whom he was beginning to regard as his wife; and he was, no doubt, anxious to be near her during the ordeal through which the young and delicately-built girl had, for the first time, to pass. It has been the custom for historians to attribute Cæsar’s prolonged residence in Egypt, after the termination of the war and the settlement of Egyptian affairs, to the sensuous allurements of Cleopatra, who is supposed to have held him captive by the arts of love and by the voluptuous attractions of her person; but here a natural fact of life has been overlooked. A woman who is about to render to mankind the great service of her sex, has neither the ability nor the desire to arouse the feverish emotions of her lover. Her condition calls forth from him the more gentle aspects of his affection. His responsibility is expressed in consideration, in interest, in sympathy, and in a kind of gratitude; but it is palpably absurd to suppose that a mere passion, such as that by which Cæsar is thought to have been animated, could at this time have influenced his actions. If love of any kind held him in Egypt, it was the love of a husband for his wife, the devotion of a man who was about to become a parent to the woman who would presently pay toll to Nature in response to his incitement. Actually, as we have seen, there was something more than love to keep him in Egypt; there was ambition, headlong aspiration, the intoxication of a conqueror turning his mind to new conquests, and the supreme interest of a would-be king constructing a throne which should be occupied not only by himself but by the descendants of his own flesh and blood for all time.[40]

British Museum.]

[Photograph by Macbeth.

CLEOPATRA.

While waiting for the desired event Cæsar could not remain inactive in the Palace at Alexandria. He desired to ascertain for himself the resources of the land which was to be considered as his wife’s dowry; and he therefore determined to conduct a peaceful expedition up the Nile with this subject in view. The royal dahabiyeh or house-boat was therefore made ready for himself and Cleopatra, whose condition might be expected to benefit by the idle and yet interesting life upon the river; and orders were given both to his own legionaries and to a considerable number of Cleopatra’s troops to prepare themselves for embarkation upon a fleet of four hundred Nile vessels. The number of ships suggests that there were several thousand soldiers employed in the expedition; and it appears to have been Cæsar’s intention to penetrate far into the Sudan.[41] The royal vessel, or thalamegos, as it was called by the Greeks, was of immense size, and was propelled by many banks of oars.[42] It contained colonnaded courts, banqueting saloons, sitting-rooms, bedrooms, shrines dedicated to Venus and to Dionysos, and a grotto or “winter garden.” The wood employed was cedar and cypress, and the decorations were executed in paint and gold-leaf. The furniture was Greek, with the exception of that in one dining-hall, which was decorated in the Egyptian style.[43] The rest of the fleet consisted, no doubt, of galleys and ordinary native transports and store-ships.

From the city of Alexandria the fleet passed into the nearest branch of the Nile, and so travelled southwards to Memphis, where Cleopatra perhaps obtained her first sight of the great Pyramids and the Sphinx. Thebes, the ancient capital, at that period much fallen into decay, was probably reached in about three weeks’ time; and Cæsar must have been duly impressed by the splendid temples and monuments upon both banks of the Nile. Possibly it was at his suggestion that Cleopatra caused the great obelisk of one of her distant predecessors to be moved from the temple of Luxor at Thebes and to be transported down to Alexandria, where it was erected not far from the Forum,[44] an inscription recording its re-erection being engraved at the base. The journey was continued probably as far as Aswan and the First Cataract, which may have been reached some four or five weeks after the departure from Alexandria; and it would seem that Cæsar here turned his face to the north once more. Suetonius states that he was anxious to proceed farther up the Nile, but that his troops were restive and inclined to be mutinous, a fact which is not surprising, since the labour of dragging the vessels up the cataract would have been immense, and the hot south winds which often blow in the spring would have added considerably to the difficulties. The temperature at this time of year may rise suddenly from the pleasant degree of an Egyptian winter to that of the height of intolerable summer, and so remain for four or five days.

Be this as it may, Cæsar turned about, having satisfied himself as to the wealth and fertility of the country, and, no doubt, having obtained as much information as possible from the natives in regard to the trade-routes which led from the Nile to Berenice and India, or to Meroe, Napata, and the Kingdom of Ethiopia. The expedition arrived at Alexandria probably some nine or ten weeks after its departure from that city—that is to say, at the end of the month of June; and it would seem that in the first week of July Cleopatra’s confinement took place.

The child proved to be a boy; and the delighted father thus found himself the parent of a son and heir who was at once accepted by the Egyptians as the legitimate child of the union of their Queen with the god Amon, who had appeared in the form of Cæsar. He was named Cæsar, or more familiarly Cæsarion, a Greek diminutive of the same word; but officially, of course, he was known also as Ptolemy, and ultimately was the sixteenth and last of that name. A bilingual inscription now preserved at Turin refers to him as “Ptolemy, who is also called Cæsar,” this being often seen in Egyptian inscriptions in the words Ptolemys zed nef Kysares, “Ptolemy called Cæsar.”

The Dictator waited no longer in Egypt. For the last few months he had put Roman politics from his thoughts and had not even troubled to write any despatches to the home Government.[45] But now he had to create the world-monarchy of which his winter with Cleopatra had led him to dream; and first there were campaigns to be fought on the borders of the Mediterranean; there was Parthia to be subdued; and finally India was to be invaded and conquered. Then, when all the known world had become dependent upon him, and only Egypt and her tributaries were still outside Roman dominion, he would, by one bold stroke, announce his marriage to the Queen of that country, incorporate her lands and her vast wealth with those of Rome, and declare himself sole monarch of the earth. It was a splendid ambition, worthy of a great man; and, as we shall presently see, there can be very little question that these glorious dreams would have been converted into actual realities had not his enemies murdered him on the eve of their realisation. Modern historians are unanimous in declaring that Cæsar had wasted his time in Egypt, and had devoted to a love intrigue the weeks and months which ought to have been spent in regulating the affairs of the world. Actually, however, these nine months, far from being wasted, were spent in the very creation of the Roman Empire. True, Cæsar’s schemes were frustrated by the knives of his assassins; but, as will be seen in the sequel, his plans were carried on by Cleopatra with the assistance of Antony, and finally were put into execution by Octavian.

As Cæsar sailed out of the Great Harbour of Alexandria he must have turned his keen grey eyes with peculiar interest upon the splendid buildings of the Palace, which towered in front of the city, upon the Lochias Promontory; and that quiet, whimsical expression must have played around his close-shut lips as he thought of the change that had been wrought in his mental attitude by the months spent amidst its royal luxuries. Enthusiasm for the work which lay before him must have burnt like a fire within him; but stamped upon his brain there must have been the picture of a darkened room in which the wild, happy-go-lucky, little Queen of Egypt, now so subdued and so gentle, lay clasping to her breast the new-born Cæsar, the sole heir to the kingdom of the whole world.

CHAPTER VIII.
CLEOPATRA AND CÆSAR IN ROME.

Cæsar’s movements during the year after his departure from Egypt do not, for the purpose of this narrative, require to be recorded in detail. From Alexandria, which he may have left at about the middle of the first week in July, he sailed in a fast-going galley across the 500 miles of open sea to Antioch, arriving at that city a few days before the middle of that month.[46] There he spent a day or two in regulating the affairs of the country, and presently sailed on to Ephesus, some 600 miles from Antioch, which he probably reached at the end of the third week of July. At Antioch he heard that one of his generals, Domitius Calvinus, had been defeated by Pharnakes, the son of Mithridates the Great, and had been driven out of Pontus, and it seems that he at once sent three legions to the aid of the beaten troops with orders to await in north-western Galatia or Cappadocia for his coming. After a day or two at Ephesus, Cæsar travelled with extreme rapidity to the rendezvous, taking with him only a thousand cavalry; and arriving at Zela, 500 miles from Ephesus, on or before August 2nd, at once defeated the rebels. It had been his custom in Gaul to travel by himself at the rate of a hundred miles a day, and even with a heavily laden army he covered over forty miles a day, as for example in his march from Rome to Spain, which he accomplished in twenty-seven days, and he may thus have joined his main army and commenced his preparations for the battle of Zela as early as the last days of July. The crushing defeat which he inflicted on the enemy so shortly after taking over the command was thus a feat of which he might justly be proud, and it so tickled his vanity that in writing to a friend of his in Rome, named Amantius, he described the campaign in the three famous words, Veni, vidi, vici, “I came, I saw, I conquered,” which so clearly indicate that he was beginning to regard himself as a sort of swift-footed, irresistible demigod.

Thence he sailed at last for Italy, and reached Rome at the end of September, almost exactly a year after his arrival in Egypt. He remained in Rome not more than two and a half months, and about the middle of December he set out for North Africa, where Cato, Scipio, and other fugitive friends of Pompey had established a provisional government with the assistance of Juba, King of Numidia, and were gathering their forces. Arriving at Hadrumetum on December 28th, he at once began the war, which soon ended in the entire defeat and extermination of the enemy at Thapsus on April 6th. Of the famous Pompeian leaders, Faustus Sulla, Lucius Africanus, and Lucius Julius Cæsar were put to death; and Lucius Manlius Torquatus, Marcus Petreius, Scipio, and Cato committed suicide; while, according to Plutarch, some fifty thousand men were slain in the rout. Arriving once more in Rome on July 25th, B.C. 46, Cæsar at once began to prepare for his Triumph which was to take place in the following month; and it would seem that he had already sent messengers to Cleopatra, who had spent a quiet year of maternal interests in Alexandria, to tell her to come with their baby to Rome.

According to Dion, the Queen arrived shortly after the Triumph, but several modern writers[47] are of opinion that she reached the capital in time for that event. I am disposed to think that she made the journey to Italy in company with the Egyptian prisoners who were to be displayed in the procession, Princess Arsinoe, the eunuch Ganymedes,[48] and others, whom Cæsar probably sent for in the late spring of this year soon after the battle of Thapsus. Cleopatra could not have been averse to witnessing the Triumph, for she must have regarded the late warfare in Alexandria not so much as a Roman campaign against the Egyptians as an Egypto-Roman suppression of an Alexandrian insurrection. The serious part of the campaign could be interpreted as having been waged by Cæsar on behalf of herself and her brother, Ptolemy XIV., against the rebels Achillas and Ganymedes, and later against this same Ptolemy who had gone over to the enemy; and the victory might thus be celebrated both by her and by her Roman champion. It would therefore be fitting that she should be a spectator of the degradation of Arsinoe and Ganymedes; and her presence in Rome at this time would obviously be desirable to her as indicating that she and her country had suffered no defeat. Cæsar, on his part, must have desired her presence that she might witness the dramatic demonstration of his power and popularity. He had just been made Dictator for the third time, and this appointment no doubt led him to feel the security of his position and the imminence of that rise to monarchical power in which Cleopatra and their son were to play so essential a part. He was beginning to regard himself as above criticism; and his two great victories, in Pontus and Numidia, following upon his nine months of regal life in Egypt, had somewhat turned his head, so that he no longer considered the advisability of delaying his future consort’s introduction to the people of Rome. He had yet much to accomplish before he could ascend with her the throne of the world, but there can be no question whatsoever that he now desired Cleopatra to begin to make herself known in the capital; and, this being so, it seems to me to be highly probable that he would wish her to refute, by her presence as a witness of his Triumph, any suggestion that she herself was to be included in that conquered Egypt[49] about which he was so continuously boasting.

The Queen of Egypt’s arrival in Rome must have caused something of a sensation. Cartloads of baggage, and numerous agitated eunuchs and slaves doubtless heralded her approach and followed in her train. Her little brother, Ptolemy XV., now eleven or twelve years of age, whom she had probably feared to leave alone in Alexandria lest he should follow the family tradition and declare himself sole monarch, had been forced to accompany her, and now added considerably to the commotion of her arrival. The one-year-old heir of the Cæsars and of the Ptolemies, surrounded by guards and fussing nurses, must, however, have been the cynosure of all eyes; for every Roman guessed its parentage, knowing as they did the peculiarities of their Dictator. Cleopatra and her suite were accommodated in Cæsar’s transtiberini horti, where a charming house stood amidst beautiful gardens on the right bank of the Tiber, near the site of the modern Villa Panfili; and it is to be presumed that his legal wife Calpurnia was left as mistress of another establishment within the city.

Cæsar’s attitude towards Cleopatra at this time is not easily defined. It is not to be presumed that he was still very deeply in love with her; for natures such as his are totally incapable of continued devotion. During his residence in North Africa in the winter or early spring, he had been much attracted by Eunoe, the wife of Bogud, King of Mauretania, and had consoled himself for the temporary loss of Cleopatra by making her his mistress. Yet the Queen of Egypt still exercised a very considerable influence over him; and when she came to Rome it may be supposed that in his transpontine villa they resumed with some satisfaction the intimate life which they had enjoyed in the Alexandrian Palace. The first infatuation was over, however, and both Cæsar and Cleopatra must have felt that the basis of their relationship was now a business agreement designed for their mutual benefit. In all but name they were married, and it was the fixed intention of both that their marriage should presently be recognised in Rome as it already had been in Egypt. Cæsar, I suppose, took keen pleasure in the company of the witty, vivacious, and regal girl; and he was extremely happy to see her lodged in his villa, whither he could repair at any time of the day or night to enjoy her brilliant and refreshing society. Their baby son, too, was a source of interest and enjoyment to him. He was now fourteen months old, and his likeness to Cæsar, so pronounced in after years, must already have been apparent. Suetonius states that the boy came to resemble his father very closely, and both in looks and in manners, notably in his walk, showed very clearly his origin. These resemblances, already able to be observed, must have delighted Cæsar, who took such careful pride in his own appearance and personality; and they must have formed a bond between himself and Cleopatra as nearly permanent as anything could be in his progressive and impatient nature. The Queen, on her part, probably still took extreme pleasure in the companionship of the great Dictator, who represented an ideal both of manhood and of social charm. She must have loved the fertility of his mind, the autocratic power of his will, and the energy of his personality; and though premature age and ill-health were beginning to diminish his aptitude for the rôle of ardent swain, she found in him, no doubt, a lovable friend and husband, and one with whom the intimacies of daily comradeship were a cause of genuine happiness. They were as well suited to one another as two ambitious characters could be; and, moreover, they were irrevocably bound to one another by the memory of past passion not yet altogether in abeyance, by the sympathy of mutual understanding, by the identity of their worldly interests, and by the responsibilities of correlative parentage.

The arrival of Cleopatra in Rome of course caused a scandal, to which Cæsar showed his usual nonchalant indifference. People were sorry for the Dictator’s legal wife Calpurnia, who, since her marriage in B.C. 59, had been left so much alone by her husband; and they were shocked by the open manner in which the members of the Cæsarian party paid court to the Queen. I find no evidence to justify the modern belief[50] that Roman society was at the time annoyed at the introduction of an eastern lady into its midst;[51] for everybody must have known that Cleopatra had not one drop of Egyptian blood in her veins, and must have realised that she was a pure Macedonian Greek, ruling over a city which was the centre of Greek culture and civilisation. But at the same time there is evidence to show that the Romans did not like her. Cicero wrote that he detested her;[52] and Dion says that the people pitied Princess Arsinoe, her sister, whose degradation was a consequence of Cleopatra’s success with Cæsar. On the whole, however, her advent did not cause as much stir as might have been expected, for she seems to have acted with tactful moderation in the capital, and to have avoided all ostentation.

The Triumph which Cæsar celebrated in August for the amusement of Rome and for his own enjoyment was fourfold in character, and lasted for four days. Upon the first day Cæsar passed through the streets of Rome in the rôle of conqueror of Gaul, and when darkness had fallen ascended the Capitol by torchlight, forty elephants carrying numerous torch-bearers to right and left of his chariot. The unfortunate Vercingetorix, who had been held prisoner for six miserable years, was executed at the conclusion of this impressive parade—an act of cold-blooded cruelty to an honourable foe (who had voluntarily surrendered to Cæsar to save his countrymen from further punishment) which, at the time, may have been excused on the ground that such executions were customary at the end of a Triumph. Upon the second day the conquest of the Dictator’s Egyptian enemies was celebrated, and the Princess Arsinoe was led through the streets in chains, together, it would seem, with Ganymedes, the latter perhaps being executed at the close of the performance, and the former being spared as a sort of compliment to Cleopatra’s royal house. In this procession images of Achillas and Potheinos were carried along, and were greeted by the populace with pleasant jeers; while a statue representing the famous old Nilus, and a model of Pharos, the wonder of the world, reminded the spectators of the importance of the country now under Roman protection. African animals strange to Rome, such as the giraffe, were led along in the procession, and other wonders from Egypt and Ethiopia were displayed for the delight of the populace. On the third day the conquest of Pontus was demonstrated, and a large tablet with the arrogant words Veni, Vidi, Vici painted upon it was carried before the conqueror. Finally, on the fourth day the victories in North Africa were celebrated. In this last procession Cæsar caused some offence by exhibiting captured Roman arms; for the campaign had been fought against Romans of the Pompeian party, a fact which at first he had attempted to disguise by stating that the Triumph was celebrated over King Juba of Numidia, who had sided with the enemy. Still graver offence was caused, however, when it was seen that vulgar caricatures of Cato and other of Cæsar’s personal enemies were exhibited in the procession; and the populace must have questioned whether such a jest at the expense of honourable Romans whose bodies were hardly yet cold in their graves was in perfect taste. It would seem indeed that Cæsar’s judgment in such matters had become somewhat warped during this last year of military and administrative success, and that he had begun to despise those who were opposed to him as though they could be but misguided fools. In this attitude one sees, perhaps, something of that same quality which led him blandly to accept in Egypt a sort of divinity as by personal right, and which persuaded him to aim always towards absolutism; for a man is in no wise normal who considers himself a being meet for worship and his enemy an object fit only for derision.

There seems, in fact, little doubt that Cæsar was not now in a normal condition of mind. For some years he had been subject to epileptic seizures, and now the distressing malady was growing more pronounced and the seizures were of more frequent occurrence. At the battle of Thapsus he is said to have been taken ill in this manner; and on other occasions he was attacked while in discharge of his duties. Such a physical condition may be accountable for much of his growing eccentricity, and, particularly, one may attribute to it his increasing faith in his semi-divine powers. Lombroso goes so far as to say that epilepsy is almost an essential factor in the personality of one who believes himself to be a Son of God or Messenger of the Deity. Akhnaton, the great religious reformer of Ancient Egypt, suffered from epilepsy; the Prophet Mohammed, to put it bluntly, had fits; and many other religious reformers suffered in like manner. One cannot tell what hallucinations and strange manifestations were experienced by Cæsar under the influence of this malady; but one may be sure that to Cleopatra they were clear indications of his close relationship to the gods, and that in explanation she did not fail to remind him both of his divine descent and her own inherited divinity, in which, as her consort, he participated.

Towards the end of September Cæsar caused a sensation in Rome by an act which shows clearly enough his attitude in this regard. He consecrated a magnificent temple in honour of Venus Genetrix, his divine ancestress; and there, in the splendour of its marble sanctuary, he placed a statue of Cleopatra, which had been executed during the previous weeks by the famous Roman sculptor, Archesilaus.[53] The significance of this act has been overlooked by modern historians. In placing in this shrine of Venus, at the time of its inauguration, a figure of the Queen of Egypt, who in her own country was the representative of Isis-Aphrodite upon earth,[54] Cæsar was demonstrating the divinity of Cleopatra, and was telling the people, as it were in everlasting phrases of stone, that the royal girl who now honoured his villa on the banks of the Tiber was no less than a manifestation of Venus herself. It will presently be seen how, in after years, Cleopatra went to meet Antony decked in the character of Venus, and how she was then and on other occasions hailed by the crowd as the goddess come down to earth; and we shall see how her mausoleum actually formed part of the temple of that goddess. Both at this date and in later times she was identified indiscriminately with Isis, with Venus-Hathor, and with Venus-Aphrodite; and even after her death the tradition so far survived that one of her famous pearl earrings was cut into two parts, and, in this form, ultimately ornamented the ears of the statue of Venus in the Pantheon at Rome. Coins dating from this period have been found upon which Cleopatra is represented as Aphrodite, carrying in her arms the baby Cæsarion, who is supposed to be Eros. Cæsar was always boasting about the connection of his house with this goddess; and now the placing of this statue of Cleopatra in his new temple is, I think, to be interpreted as signifying that he wished the Roman people to regard the Queen as a “young goddess,” which was the title given to her by the Greeks and Egyptians in her own country.

It is not altogether certain that Cæsar himself was actually beginning to regard Cleopatra in this light, though the increasing frequency of his epileptic attacks, and his consequent hallucinations, may have now made such an attitude possible even in the case of so hardened a sceptic as was the Dictator in former years. It seems more reasonable to suppose that he was at this time attempting to appeal to the imagination of the people in anticipation of the great coup which he was about to execute; and that, with this object in view, he allowed himself to be carried along by a kind of enthusiastic self-deception. He applied no serious analysis to his opinions in this regard; but, by means of a thoughtless vanity, he seems to have given rein to an undefined conviction, very suitable to his great purpose, that he himself was more than human, and that Cleopatra was not altogether a woman of mortal flesh and blood. Even so Alexander the Great had partially deluded himself when, on the one hand, he named himself the son of Jupiter-Ammon, and, on the other, was careful, once when wounded, to point out that ordinary mortal blood flowed from his veins. And so, too, Napoleon Bonaparte, during his invasion of Egypt, declared that he was the Prophet of God, and, in after years, was willing to describe to a friend, as it were in jest, his vision of himself as the founder of a new Faith.

The inauguration of Cæsar’s new temple, which was, one may say, the shrine of Cleopatra, was accompanied by amazing festivities, and the excitable population of this great city seemed, so to speak, to go mad with enthusiasm. Great gladiatorial shows were organised, and a miniature sea-fight upon an artificial lake was enacted for the public entertainment. The majority of the mob was ready enough to accept without comment the exalted position of the statue of Cleopatra. At this time in Rome they were very partial to new and foreign deities, celestial or in the flesh; and actually the worship of the Egyptian goddess Isis, with whom Cleopatra, as Venus, was so closely connected, had taken firm hold of their imagination. For the last few years the religion of Isis had been extremely popular with the lower classes in Rome; and when, in B.C. 58, a law which had been made forbidding foreign temples to be located within a certain area of the city, necessitated the destruction of a temple of Isis, not one man could be found who would touch the sacred building, and at last the Consul, Lucius Paullus, was obliged to tuck up his toga and set to work upon the demolition of the edifice with his own hands. Thus, this inaugural ceremony, so lavishly organised by Cæsar, was a marked success; and in spite of the indignation of Cicero, the statue of Cleopatra took its permanent place, with popular consent, in the sanctuary of Venus. No expense was spared on this or on any other occasion to please the people; and at one time twenty-two thousand persons partook of a sumptuous meal at Cæsar’s expense. Such a courting of the people was, indeed, necessary at this time; for although the Dictator was at the moment practically omnipotent, and though there was talk of securing him in his office for a term of ten years, his party had not that solidity which was to be desired of it. Antony, the right-hand man of the Cæsarians, was, at the time, in some disgrace owing to a quarrel with his master; and there were rumours that he wished to revenge himself by assassinating Cæsar. It was already becoming clear that the Pompeian party, in spite of Pharsalia and Thapsus, was not yet dead, and still waited to receive its death-blow. Some of the Dictator’s actions had given considerable offence, and there were certain people in Rome who made use of every opportunity to denounce him, and to offer their praise to the memory of his enemy Cato, whose tragic death after the battle of Thapsus, and the vilification of whose memory in the recent Triumph, had caused such a painful impression. Cicero wrote an encomium upon this unfortunate man, to which Cæsar, in self-defence, replied by publishing his Anti-Cato, which was marked by a tone of bitter and even venomous animosity. All manner of unpleasant remarks were being made in better-class circles in regard to Cleopatra; and when the Dictator publicly admitted the parentage of their child, and authorised him to bear the name of Cæsar, it began to be whispered that his legal marriage to the Queen was imminent.

The mixed population of Rome delighted in political strife, and though Cæsar’s position seemed unassailable, there were always large numbers of persons ready to make sporadic attacks upon it. There was at this time constant rioting in the Forum, and an almost continuous restlessness was to be observed in the streets and public places. In the theatres topical allusions were received with frantic applause;[55] and even in the Senate disturbances were not infrequent. The people had always to be humoured, and Cæsar was obliged at all times to play to the gallery. Fortunately for him he possessed in the highest degree the art of self-advertisement;[56] and his charm of manner, together with his striking and handsome appearance, made the desired appeal to the popular fancy. His relationship to Cleopatra stood, on the whole, in his favour amongst the lower classes, who had hailed him with coarse delight as the terror of the women of Gaul; and the fact that she was a foreigner mattered not in the least to the heterogeneous population of Rome. They themselves were largely a composition of the nations of the earth; and that Cæsar’s mistress, and probable future wife, was a Greek, was to them in no wise a matter for comment. In any theatre in Rome at that date one might sit amidst an audience of foreigners to hear a drama given (at Cæsar’s expense, by the way) in language such as Greek, Phœnician, Hebrew, Syrian, or Spanish. To them Cleopatra must have appeared as a wonderful woman, closely related to the gods, come from a famous city across the waters to enjoy the society of their own half-godlike Dictator; and they were quite prepared to accept her as a pleasant and romantic adjunct to the political situation.

Among the many reforms which Cæsar now introduced there was one which was the direct outcome of his visit to Egypt. For some time the irregularities of the calendar had been causing much inconvenience, and the Dictator, very probably at the Queen of Egypt’s suggestion, now decided to invite some of Cleopatra’s court astronomers to Rome in order that they might establish a new system based upon the Egyptian calendar of Eudoxus. Sosigenes was at that time the most celebrated astronomer in Alexandria, and it was to him, perhaps at Cleopatra’s advice, that Cæsar now turned. After very careful study it was decided that the present year, B.C. 46, should be extended to fifteen months, or 445 days, in order that the nominal date might be brought round to correspond with the actual season. The so-called Julian calendar, which was thus established, is that upon which our present system is based; and it is not without interest to recollect that but for Cleopatra some entirely different set of months would now be used throughout the world.

Cæsar’s mind at this time was full of his plans for the conquest of the East. In B.C. 65 Pompey had brought to Rome many details regarding the overland route to the Orient. This route started from the Port of Phasis on the Black Sea, ascended the river of that name to its source in Iberia, passed over to the valley of the river Cyrus (Kur), and so came to the coast of the Caspian Sea. Crossing the water the route thence led along the river Oxus, which at that time flowed into the Caspian, to its source, and thus through Cashmir into India. There must then have been some talk of carrying the eagles along this highway to the Orient; and while Cæsar was in Egypt it seems probable, as we have seen, that he had studied the question of leading Roman arms thither by the great Egyptian trade route. Though this latter road to the wonderful Orient, however, must have seemed to him, after consideration, to be very suitable as a channel for the despatch of reinforcements, he appears to have favoured the land route across Asia for his original invasion. This approach to the East was blocked by the Parthians, and Cæsar now announced his intention of conducting a campaign against these people. There is no evidence to show that he desired to follow Alexander’s steps beyond Parthia into India, but I am of opinion that such was his intention. In view of the facts that the exploits of Alexander the Great had been studied by him, that he publicly declared his wish to rival them, that he must have heard from Pompey of the overland route to India with which the Romans had become acquainted during the war against Mithridates, that his love of distant conquest and exploration was inordinate, that he had spent some months in studying conditions in Egypt—a country which was in those days full of talk of India and of the new trade with the Orient, that after leaving Egypt he began at once to prepare for a campaign against the one nation which obstructed the overland route to the East, that no other part of the known world, save poverty-stricken Germania, remained to be brought by conquest under Roman sway, that India offered possibilities of untold wealth, and that Cleopatra herself ultimately made an attempt to reach those far countries,—the inference seems to me to be clear that Cæsar’s designs upon Parthia were only preliminary to a contemplated invasion of the East. The riches of those distant lands were already the talk of the age, and within the lifetime of young men of this period streams of Indian merchandise, comprising diamonds, precious stones, silks, spices, and scents, began to pour into Rome and were sold each year, according to the somewhat exaggerated account of Pliny, for some forty million pounds sterling.[57] Could Cæsar, the world’s greatest spendthrift, the world’s most eager plunderer, have resisted the temptation of making a bid for the loot which lay behind Parthia? Does the fact that he said nothing of such an intention preclude the possibility that thoughts of this kind now filled his mind, and formed a topic of conversation between him and the adventurous Cleopatra, the Ruler of the gateway of the Orient, who herself sent Cæsar’s son to India, as we shall see in due course? Napoleon, when he invaded Egypt in 1798, said very little about his contemplated attack upon India; but it was none the less dominant in his mind for that. Egypt and Parthia in conjunction formed the basis of any attempt to capture the Orient: Egypt with its route across the seas, and Parthia with its highroad overland. Are we really to suppose that Cæsar did waste his time in Egypt, or was he then studying the same problem which now directed his attention to Parthia? By means of his partnership with Cleopatra he had secured one of the routes to India; and the merchants of Alexandria, if not his own great imagination, must have made clear to him the value of his possession in that regard; for ever since the discovery of the over-sea route to the East that value has been recognised. The Venetian Sanuto in later years told his compatriots of the effect on India which would follow from the conquest of the Nile Valley; the Comte Daru said that the possession of Egypt meant the opening up of India; Leibnitz told Louis XIV. of France that an invasion of Egypt would result in the capture of the Indian highroad; the Duc de Choiseul made a similar declaration to Louis XV.; Napoleon stated in his ‘Memoirs’ that his object in attacking Egypt was to lead an army of 60,000 men to India; and at the present day England holds the Nile Valley as being the gateway of her distant possessions. On the other side of the picture we see at the present time the attempts of Russia to establish her power in Northern Persia and Afghanistan, where once the Parthians of old held sway, in order to be ready for that day when English power in India shall decline. Was Cæsar, then, straining every nerve only for the possession of the two gateways of the Orient, or did his gaze penetrate through those gateways to the vast wealth of the kingdoms beyond? I am disposed to see him walking with Cleopatra in the gardens of the villa by the Tiber, just as Napoleon paced the parks of Passeriano, “frequently betraying by his exclamations the gigantic thoughts of his unlimited ambition,” as Lacroix tells us of the French conqueror.

Such dreams, however, were rudely interrupted by the news that the Pompeian party had gathered its forces in Spain; and Cæsar was obliged to turn his attention to that part of the world. In the winter of B.C. 46, therefore, he set out for the south-west, impatient at the delay which the new campaign necessitated in his great schemes. He was in no mood to brook any opposition in Rome, and before leaving the capital he arranged that he should be made Consul without a colleague for the ensuing year B.C. 45, as well as Dictator, thus giving himself absolutely autocratic power. On his way to Spain he sent a despatch to Rome, appointed eight praefecti urbi with full powers to act in his name, thus establishing a form of cabinet government which should entirely over-ride the wishes of the Senate and of the people; and in this manner he secured the political situation to his own advantage. Naturally there was a very great outcry against this high-handed action; but Cæsar was far too deeply occupied by his vast schemes, and far too annoyed by this Spanish interruption of his course towards the great goal of his ambitions, to pay much attention to the outraged feelings of his political opponents.

The enemy in Spain were led by the two sons of the great Pompey, but at the battle of Munda, fought on March 17, B.C. 45, they were entirely defeated with a loss of some thirty thousand men. The elder of the two leaders, Cnæus Pompeius, who was said to have once been a suitor for Cleopatra’s heart, was killed shortly after the battle, but the younger, Sextus, escaped. Cæsar then returned to Rome, being met outside the capital by Antony, with whom he was reconciled; and in the early summer he celebrated his Triumph. In this he offended a number of persons, owing to the fact that his victory had been won over his fellow-countrymen, whose defeat, therefore, ought not to have been the cause of more than a silent satisfaction. After Pharsalia Cæsar had celebrated no triumph, since Romans had there fought Romans; and, indeed, as Plutarch says, “he had seemed rather to be ashamed of the action than to expect honour from it.” But now he had come to feel that he himself was Rome, and that his enemies were not simply opposed to his party but were in arms against the State.

Knowing now that the Pompeians were at last crushed, Cæsar decided to attempt to appease any ill-feeling directed against himself by the friends of the fallen party; and for this purpose he caused the statues of Pompey the Great, which had been removed from their pedestals, to be replaced; and furthermore, he pardoned, and even gave office to, several leaders of the Pompeian party, notably to Brutus and Cassius, who afterwards were ranked amongst his murderers. He then settled down in Rome to prepare for his campaign in the East, and, in the meantime, to put into execution the many administrative reforms which were maturing in his restless brain. It appears that he lived for the most part of this time in the house of which his wife Calpurnia was mistress; but there can be little doubt that he was a constant visitor at his transpontine villa, and that he spent all his spare hours there in the society of Cleopatra, who remained in Rome until his death.

CHAPTER IX.
THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE EGYPTO-ROMAN MONARCHY.

The people of Rome now began to heap honours upon Cæsar, and the government which he had established did not fail to justify its existence by voting him to a position of irrevocable power. He was made Consul for ten years, and there was talk of decreeing him Dictator for life. The Senate became simply an instrument for the execution of his commands; and so little did the members concern themselves with the framing of new laws at home, or with the details of foreign administration, that Cicero is able to complain that in his official capacity he had received the thanks of Oriental potentates whose names he had never seen before, for their elevation to thrones of kingdoms of which he had never heard. Cæsar’s interests were world-wide, and the Government in Rome carried out his wishes in the manner in which an ignorant Board of Directors of a company with foreign interests follows the advice of its travelling manager. He had lived for such long periods in foreign countries, his campaigns had carried him over so much of the known world’s surface, that Rome appeared to him to be nothing more than the headquarters of his administration, and not a very convenient centre at that. His intimacy with Cleopatra, moreover, had widened his outlook, and had very materially assisted him to become an arbiter of universal interests. Distant cities, such as Alexandria, were no longer to him the capitals of foreign lands, but were the seats of local governments within his own dominions; and the throne towards which he was climbing was set at an elevation from which the nations of the whole earth could be observed.

In accepting as his own business the concerns of so many lands, he was assuming responsibilities the weight of which no man could bear; yet his dislike of receiving advice, and his uncontrolled vanity, led him to resent all interference, nor would he admit that the strain was too great for his weakened physique. Intimate friends of the Dictator, such as Balbus and Oppius, observed that he was daily growing more irritable, more self-opinionated; and the least suggestion of a decentralisation of his powers caused him increasing annoyance. He wished always to hold the threads of the entire world’s concerns in his own hands. Now he was discussing the future of North African Carthage and of Grecian Corinth, to which places he desired to send out Roman colonists; now he was regulating the affairs of Syria and Asia Minor; and now he was absorbed in the agrarian problems of Italy. There were times when the weight of universal affairs pressed so heavily upon him that he would exclaim that he had lived long enough; and in such moods, when his friends warned him of the possibility of his assassination, he would reply that death was not such a terrible matter, nor a disaster which could come to him more than once. The frequency of his epileptic seizures was a cause of constant distress to him, and his gaunt, almost haggard, appearance must have indicated to his friends that the strain was becoming unbearable. Yet ever his ambitions held him to his self-imposed task; and always his piercing eyes were set upon that goal of all his schemes, the monarchy of the earth.

People were now beginning to discuss openly the subject of his elevation to the throne. It was freely stated that he proposed to make himself King and Cleopatra Queen, and, further, that he intended to transfer the seat of his government to Alexandria, or some other eastern city. The site of Rome was not ideal. It was too far from the sea ever to be a first-rate centre of commerce; nor had it any natural sources of wealth in the neighbourhood. The streets, which were narrow and crookedly built, were liable to be flooded at certain seasons by the swift-flowing Tiber.[58] Pestilence and sickness were rife amongst the congested quarters of the city; and in the middle ages, as Mommsen has pointed out, “one German army after another melted away under its walls and left it mysteriously victorious.” After the battle of Actium, Augustus wished to change the capital to some other quarter of the globe, as, for example, to Byzantium; and it is very possible that the idea originated with Cæsar. At the period with which we are now dealing Rome was far less magnificent than it became a few years later, and it must have compared unfavourably with Alexandria and other cities. Its streets ascended and descended, twisted this way and that, in an amazing manner; and so narrow were they that Cæsar was obliged to pass a law prohibiting waggons from being driven along them in the daytime, all porterage being performed by men or beasts of burden. The great public buildings and palaces of the rich rose from amidst the encroaching jumble of small houses like exotic plants hemmed in by a mass of overgrown weeds; and Cæsar must often have given envious thought to Alexandria with its great Street of Canopus and its Royal Area.

Those who study the lives of Cleopatra and Cæsar in conjunction cannot fail to ask themselves how far the Queen influenced the Dictator’s thoughts at this time. During these last years of his life—the years which mark his greatness and give him his unique place in history—Cleopatra was living in the closest intimacy with him; and, so far as we know, there was not another man or woman in the world who had such ample opportunities for playing an influential part in his career. If Cleopatra was interested, as we know she was, in the welfare of her country and her royal house, or in the career of herself and Cæsar, or in the destiny of their son, it is palpably impossible to suppose that she did not discuss matters of statecraft with the man who was, in all but name, her husband. At a future date Cleopatra was strong enough to play one of the big political rôles in history, dealing with kingdoms and armies as the ordinary woman deals with a house and servants; and in the light of the knowledge of her character as it is unfolded to us in the years after the Dictator’s death, it is not reasonable to suppose that in Rome she kept aloof from all his schemes and plans, deeming herself capable of holding the attention of the master of the world’s activities by the entertainments of the boudoir and the arts of the bedchamber. Her individuality does not dominate the last years of the Roman Republic, merely because of the profligacy of her life with Antony and the tragedy of their death, but because her personality was so irresistible that it influenced in no small degree the affairs of the world. I am of opinion that Cleopatra’s name would have been stamped upon the history of this period even though the events which culminated at Actium had never occurred. The romantic tragedy of her connection with Antony has captured the popular taste, and has diverted the attention of historians from the facts of her earlier years. There is a tendency completely to overlook the influence which she exercised in the politics of Rome during the last years of Cæsar’s life.[59] The eyes of historians are concentrated upon the Alexandrian drama, and the tale of Cleopatra’s life in the Dictator’s villa is overlooked. Yet who will be so bold as to state that a Queen, whose fortunes were linked by Cæsar with his own at the height of his power, left no mark upon the events of that time? When Cleopatra came to Rome her outlook upon life must have been in striking contrast to that of the Romans. The republic was still the accepted form of government, and as yet there was no definite movement towards monarchism. The hereditary emperors of the future were hardly dreamed of, and the kings of the far past were nigh forgotten. Now, although it may be supposed that Cleopatra, by contact with the world, had adopted a moderately rational view of her status, yet there can be no doubt that the sense of her royal and divine personality was far from dormant in her. Her education and upbringing, as I have already said, and now the adulation of Cæsar, must have influenced her mind, so that the knowledge of her royalty was at all times almost her predominant characteristic; and it would be strange indeed if the Dictator’s thoughts had been proof against the insinuating influence of this atmosphere in which he chose to spend a great portion of his time. Did Rome herself supply Cæsar’s stimulus, Rome which had not known monarchy for four hundred and fifty years? But admitting that Rome was ripe for monarchy, and that circumstances to some extent forced Cæsar towards that form of government, can we declare that the Dictator would, of his own accord, have embraced sovereignty and even divinity so rapidly had his consort not been a Queen and a goddess?

During the last months of his life—namely, from his return to Rome in the early summer after the Spanish campaign to his assassination in the following March—Cæsar vigorously pressed forward his schemes in regard to the monarchy. Originally, it would seem, he had intended to complete his eastern conquests before making any attempt to obtain the throne; but now the long delay in his preparations for the Parthian campaign had produced a feeling of impatience which could no longer be controlled. Moreover, his attention had been called to an old prophecy which stated that the Parthians would not be conquered until a King of Rome made war upon them; and Cæsar was sufficiently acute, if not sufficiently superstitious, to be influenced to an appreciable extent by such a declaration. Little by little, therefore, he assumed the prerogatives of kingship, daily adding to the royal character of his appearance, and daily assuming more autocratic and monarchical powers.

It was not long before he caused himself to be given the hereditary title of Imperator, a word which meant at that time “Commander-in-chief,” and had no royal significance, though the fact that it was made hereditary gave it a new significance. It is to be observed that the persons who framed the decree must have realised that the son to whom the title would descend would probably be that baby Cæsar who now ruled the nurseries of the villa beside the Tiber; for there can be little doubt that the Dictator’s legitimate marriage to Cleopatra at the first opportune moment was confidently expected by his supporters; and we are thus presented with the novel spectacle of enthusiastic Roman statesmen offering the hereditary office of Imperator to the future King of Egypt. There can surely be no clearer indication than this that the people of Rome took no exception to Cleopatra’s foreign blood,[60] nor thought of her in any way as an Oriental. The attitude of the majority of modern historians suggests that they picture the Dictator at this time as living with some sort of African woman whom he had brought back with him from Egypt; but I must repeat that I am convinced that in actual fact the Romans regarded Cleopatra as a royal Greek lady whose capital city of Alexandria was the rival of the Eternal City in wealth, magnificence, and culture, bearing to Rome, to some extent, the relationship which New York bears to London. It was rumoured at this time that a law was about to be introduced by one of the tribunes of the people which would enable Cæsar, if necessary, to have two wives—Calpurnia and Cleopatra—and that the new wife need not be a Roman. The people could have felt no misgivings at the thought of Cleopatra’s son being Cæsar’s heir; for already they knew well enough that Cæsar was to be King of Rome, and by his marriage with Cleopatra they realised that he was adding to Rome’s dominions without force of arms the one great kingdom of the civilised world which was still independent, and was securing for his heirs upon the Roman throne the honourable appendage of the oldest crown in existence, and the vast fortune which went with it. In later years, when Cleopatra as the consort of Antony had become a public enemy, there was much talk of an East-Mediterranean peril, and the Queen came to represent Oriental splendour as opposed to Occidental simplicity; but at the time with which we are now dealing this attitude was entirely undeveloped, and Cleopatra was regarded as the most suitable mother for that son of Cæsar who should one day inherit his honours and his titles.

Vatican]

[Photograph by Anderson.

JULIUS CÆSAR.

At about this date the baby actually became uncrowned King of Egypt, for Cleopatra’s young brother, Ptolemy XV., mysteriously passes from the records of history, and is heard of no more. Whether Cleopatra and Cæsar caused him to be murdered as standing in the way of their ambitions, or whether he died a natural death, will now never be known. He comes into the story of these eventful days like a shadow, and like a shadow he disappears; and all that we know concerning his end is derived from Josephus,[61] who states that he was poisoned by his sister. Such an accusation, however, is only to be expected, and would certainly have been made had the boy died of a sudden illness. It is therefore not just to Cleopatra to burden her memory with the crime; and all that one may now say is that, while the death of the unfortunate young King may be attributed to Cleopatra without improbability, there is really no reason to suppose that she had anything to do with it.

Cæsar now caused a statue of himself to be erected in the Capitol as the eighth royal figure there, the previous seven being those of the old Kings of Rome. Soon he began to appear in public clad in the embroidered dress of the ancient monarchs of Alba; and he caused his head to appear in true monarchical manner upon the Roman coins. A throne of gold was provided for him to sit upon in his official capacity in the Senate and on his tribunal; and in his hand he now carried a sceptre of ivory, while upon his head was a chaplet of gold in the form of a laurel-wreath. A consecrated chariot, like the sacred chariot of the Kings of Egypt, was provided for his conveyance at public ceremonies, and a kind of royal bodyguard of senators and nobles was offered to him. He was given the right, moreover, of being buried inside the city walls, just as Alexander the Great had been laid to rest within the Royal Area at Alexandria. These marks of kingship, when observed in conjunction with the hereditary title of Imperator which had been conferred upon him, and the lifelong Dictatorship which was about to be offered to him, are indications that the goal was now very near at hand; and both Cæsar and Cleopatra must have lived at the time in a state of continuous excitement and expectation. Everybody knew what was in the air, and Cicero went so far as to write a long letter to Cæsar urging him not to make himself King, but he was advised not to send it. The ex-Consul Lucius Aurelius Cotta inserted the thin edge of the wedge by proposing that Cæsar should be made King of the Roman dominions outside Italy; but the suggestion was not taken up with much enthusiasm. Cæsar himself seems to have been undecided as to whether he should postpone the great event until after the Parthian war or not, and the settlement of this question must have given rise to the most anxious discussions.

There was no longer need for the Dictator to hide his intentions with any great care; and as a preliminary measure he did not hesitate to proclaim to the public his belief in the divinity of his person. He caused his image to be carried in the Pompa circenis amongst those of the immortal gods. A temple dedicated to Jupiter-Julius was decreed, and a statue in his likeness was set up in the temple of Quirinus, inscribed with the words, “To the Immortal God.” A college of priestly Luperci, of whom we shall presently learn more, was established in his honour; and flamines were created as priests of his godhead, an institution which reminds one of the manner in which the Pharaoh of Egypt was worshipped by a body of priests. A bed of state was provided for him within the chief temples of Rome. In the formulæ of the political oaths in which Jupiter and the Penates of the Roman people had been named, the Genius of Cæsar was now called upon, just as in Egypt the Ka, or genius, of the sovereign was invoked. “The old national faith,” says Mommsen, “became the instrument of a Cæsarian papacy”; and indeed it may be said that it became the instrument actually of a supreme Cæsarian deification.

By the end of the year B.C. 45 and the beginning of B.C. 44 there was no longer any doubt in the minds of the Roman people that Cæsar intended presently to ascend the throne; and the only question asked was as to whether the event would take place before or after the Eastern campaign. Some time before February 15th he was made Dictator for life; and this, regarded in conjunction with the homage now paid to his person, and the hereditary nature of his title of Imperator, made the margin between his present status and that of kingship exceedingly narrow. It is probable that Cæsar was not determined to introduce the old title of “King,” although he affected the dress and insignia of those who had been “kings” of Rome. It is more likely that he was seeking some new monarchical title; and when, on one occasion, he declared “I am Cæsar, and no ‘King,’” he may already have decided to elevate his personal name to the significance of the royal title which it ultimately became, and still in this twentieth century continues to be.[62]

His arrogance was daily becoming more pronounced, and his ambition was now “swell’d so much that it did almost stretch the sides o’ the world.”[63] He severely rebuked Pontius Aquila, one of the Tribunes, for not rising when he passed in front of the Tribunician seats; and for some time afterwards he used to qualify any declaration which he made in casual conversation by the sneering words, “By Pontius Aquila’s kind permission.” Once, when a deputation of Senators came to him to confer new honours upon him, he, on the other hand, received them without rising from his seat; and he was now wont to keep his closest friends waiting in an anteroom for an audience, a fact of which Cicero bitterly complains. When his authority was questioned he invariably lost his temper, and would swear in the most horrible manner. “Men ought to look upon what I say as law,” he is reported by Titus Ampius to have said; and, indeed, there were very few persons who had the hardihood not to do so. On a certain occasion it was discovered that some enthusiast had placed a royal diadem upon the head of one of his statues, and, very correctly, the two Tribunes caused it to be removed. This so infuriated Cæsar, who declared the official act to be a deliberate insult, that he determined to punish the two men at the first convenient opportunity. On January 26th of the new year this opportunity presented itself. As he was walking through the streets some persons in the crowd hailed him as King, whereupon these zealous officials ordered them to be arrested and flung into prison. Cæsar at once raised an appalling storm, the result of which was that the two Tribunes were expelled from the Senate.

Cleopatra’s attitude could not well fail to be influenced by that of the Dictator; and it is probable that she gave some offence by an occasional haughtiness of manner. Her Egyptian chamberlains and court officials must also have annoyed the Romans by failing to disguise their Alexandrian vanity; and there can be little doubt that many of Cæsar’s friends began to regard the menage at the transpontine villa with growing dislike. A letter written by Cicero to his friend Atticus is an interesting commentary upon the situation. It seems that the great writer had been favoured by Cleopatra with the promise of a gift suitable to his standing, probably in return for some service which he had rendered her. “I detest the Queen,” he writes, “and the voucher for her promises, Hammonios, knows that I have good cause for saying so. What she promised, indeed, were all things of the learned sort and suitable to my character, such as I could avow even in a public meeting. As for Sara (pion),[64] besides finding him an unprincipled rascal, I also found him inclined to give himself airs towards me. I only saw him once at my house; and when I asked him politely what I could do for him, he said that he had come in hopes of seeing Atticus. The Queen’s insolence, too, when she was living in Cæsar’s trans-tiberine villa,[65] I cannot recall without a pang. So I will not have anything to do with that lot.”

The ill-feeling towards Cæsar, which was very decidedly on the increase, is sufficient to account for the growing unpopularity of Cleopatra; but it is possible that it was somewhat accentuated by a slight jealousy which must have been felt by the Romans owing to the Dictator’s partiality for things Egyptian. Not only did it appear to Cæsar’s friends that he was modelling his future throne upon that of the Ptolemies and was asserting his divinity in the Ptolemaic manner; not only had he been thought to desire Alexandria as the capital of the Empire; but also he was employing large numbers of Egyptians in the execution of his schemes. Egyptian astronomers had reformed the Roman calendar; the Roman mint was being improved by Alexandrian coiners; the whole of his financial arrangements, it would seem, were entrusted to Alexandrians;[66] while many of his public entertainments, as, for example, the naval displays enacted at the inauguration of the Temple of Venus, were conducted by Egyptians. Cæsar’s object in thus using Cleopatra’s subjects must have been due, to some extent, to his desire to familiarise his countrymen with those industrious Alexandrians who were to play so important a part in the construction of the new Roman Empire.

The great schemes and projects which were now placed before the Senate by Cæsar must have startled that institution very considerably. Almost every day some new proposal was formulated or some new law drafted. At one time the diverting of the Tiber from its course occupied the Dictator’s attention; at another time he was arranging to cut a canal through the Isthmus of Corinth. Now he was planning the construction of a road over the Apennines; and now he was deep in schemes for the creation of a vast port at Ostia. Plans of great public buildings to be erected at Alexandria or in Rome were being submitted to him; or, again, he was arranging for the establishment of public libraries in various parts of the capital. Meanwhile the preparations for the Parthian war must have occupied the greater part of his time; for the campaign was to be of a vast character. So sure was he that it would last for three years or more that he framed a law by virtue of which the magistrates and public officials for the next three years should be appointed before his departure. He thereby insured the tranquillity of Rome during his prolonged absence in the east, thus leaving himself free to carry his arms into remote lands where communication with the capital might be almost impossible. When we recollect that Cæsar’s recent campaigns had all been of but a few months or weeks duration, and that the words veni, vidi, vici now represented his mature belief in his own capabilities, these plans for a three years’ absence from Rome seem to me to indicate clearly that he had no intention of confining himself to the conquest of Parthia, but desired to follow in Alexander’s footsteps to India, and thence to return to Rome laden with the loot of that vast country. He must have pictured himself entering the capital at the end of the war as the conqueror of the East, and there could have been no doubt in his mind that the delighted populace would then accept with enthusiasm his claim to the throne of the world.

As the weeks went by Cæsar’s plans in regard to the monarchy became more clearly defined. He does not now seem to have considered it very wise to press forward the assumption of the sovereignty previous to the Parthian war, since his long absence immediately following his elevation to the throne might prove prejudicial to the new office. Moreover, a strong feeling had developed against his contemplated assumption of royalty, and Cæsar must have been aware that he could not put his plans into execution without considerable opposition. Plutarch tells us that “his desire of being King had brought upon him the most apparent and mortal hatred,—a fact which proved the most plausible pretence to those who had been his secret enemies all along.” Much adverse comment had been made with reference to his not rising to receive the Senatorial deputation; and indeed he felt it necessary to make excuses for his action, saying that his old illness was upon him at the time. A report was spread that he himself would have been willing to rise, but that Balbus had said to him, “Will you not remember you are Cæsar and claim the honour due to your merit?” and it was further related that when the Dictator had realised the offence he had given, he had bared his throat to his friends, and had told them that he was ready to lay down his life if the public were angry with him. Incidents such as this showed that the time was not yet wholly favourable for his coup; and reluctantly Cæsar was obliged to consider its postponement. On the other hand, there was something to be said in favour of immediate action, and he must have been more or less prepared to accept the kingship if it were urged upon him before he set out for the East. The position of Cleopatra, however, must have caused him some anxiety. Without her and their baby son the creation of an hereditary monarchy would be superfluous. His own wife Calpurnia did not seem able to furnish him with an heir, and there was certainly no other woman in Rome who could be expected to act the part of Queen with any degree of success, even if she were proficient in the production of sons and heirs. Yet how, on the instant, was he to rid himself of Calpurnia and marry Cleopatra without offending public taste? If he were to accept the kingship at once and make Cleopatra his wife, was she capable of sustaining with success the rôle of Queen of Rome in solitude for three years while he was away at the wars? Would it not be much wiser to send her back to Egypt for this period, there to await his return, and then to marry her and to ascend the throne at one and the same instant? During his absence in the East Calpurnia might conveniently meet with a sudden and fatal illness, and no man would dare to attribute her death to his and the apothecary’s ingenuity.

The will which he now made, or confirmed, in view of his departure, shows clearly that his desire for the monarchy was incompatible with his present marital conditions. Without a Queen and a son and heir there could be little point in creating a throne, since already he had been made absolute autocrat for his lifetime; for unless the office was to be handed on without dispute to his son Cæsarion, there was no advantage in striving for an immediate elevation to the kingship. By his will, therefore, which was made in view of his possible death before he had ascended his future throne, he simply divided his property, giving part of it to the nation and part to his relations, his favourite nephew, Octavian, receiving a considerable share. A codicil was added, appointing a large number of guardians for any offspring which might possibly be born to him by Calpurnia after his departure; but so little interest did he take in this remote contingency that he seems to have made no financial provision for such an infant. There was no need to leave money to Cleopatra or to her child, since she herself was fabulously wealthy. This will was, no doubt, intended to be destroyed if he were raised to the throne before his departure, and it was afterwards believed that he actually wrote another testament in favour of Cæsarion, which was to be used if a crown were offered to him; but if, as now seemed probable, that event were postponed until his return, the dividing of his property would be the best settlement for his affairs should he die while away in the East. So long as he remained uncrowned there was no occasion to refer either to Cleopatra or to Cæsarion in his testamentary wishes; for if he died in Parthia or India, still as Dictator, his hopes of founding a dynasty, his plans for his marriage to the Queen of Egypt, his scheme for training up Cæsarion to follow in his footsteps, indeed all his worldly ambitions, would have to be bundled into oblivion. Cæsar was not a man who cared much for the interests of other people; and, in the case of Cleopatra, he was quite prepared to leave her to fight for herself in Egypt, were he himself to be removed to those celestial spheres wherein he would have no further use for her. His passion for her appears now to have cooled; and though he must still have enjoyed her society, and, to a considerable extent, must have been open to her influence, her chief attraction for him in these latter days lay in the recognition of her suitability to ascend the new throne by his side. She, on her part, no doubt retained much of her old affection for him; and, in spite of his increasing irritability and eccentricity, she seems to have offered him the generous devotion of a warm-hearted young woman for a great and heroic old man.

Cæsar, indeed, was old before his time. The famous portrait of him, now preserved in the Louvre, shows him to have been haggard and worn. He was still under sixty years of age, but all semblance of youth had gone from him, and the burden of his years and of his illness weighed heavily upon his spare frame. His indomitable spirit, and the keen enthusiasm of his nature, held him to his appointed tasks; but it is very doubtful whether his constitution could now have borne the hardships of the campaign which lay before him. His ill-health must have caused Cleopatra the gravest anxiety, for all her hopes were centred upon him, and upon that day when he should make her Queen of the Earth. The fact that he was now considering the postponement of the creation of the monarchy until after the Parthian war must have been a heavy blow to her, for there was good reason to fear lest his strength should give out ere his task could be completed. For three years and more she had worked with Cæsar at the laying of the foundations of their throne; and now, partly owing to the undesirability of leaving Rome for so long a period immediately after accepting the crown, partly owing to the difficulty in regard to Calpurnia, and partly owing to the hostility of a large number of prominent persons to the idea of monarchy, Cæsar was postponing for three years that coup which seemed to her not only to mean the realisation of all her personal and dynastic ambitions, but actually to be the only means by which she could save Egypt from absorption into the Roman dominions or preserve a throne of any kind for her son. In the Second Philippic Cicero says of Cæsar that “after planning for many years his way to royal power, with great labour and with many dangers, he had effected his design. By public exhibitions, by monumental buildings, by bribes and by feasts, he had conciliated the unreflecting multitude. He had bound to himself his own friends by favours, his opponents by a show of clemency;” and yet, when in sight of his goal, he hesitated, believing it better to wait to be carried up to the throne by that wave of popular enthusiasm which assuredly would burst over Rome when he should lead back from the East his triumphant, loot-laden legionaries, and should exhibit in golden chains in the streets of the capital the captive kings of the fabulous Orient. The delay must have been almost intolerable to Cleopatra; and it may have been due to some arrangement made by her with the Dictator and Antony, who now must have been a constant visitor at Cæsar’s villa, that an event took place which brought to a head the question of the date of the establishment of the monarchy.

On February 15th the annual festival of the Lupercalia was celebrated in Rome; and upon this day all the populace, patrician and plebeian, were en fête. The Romans of Cæsar’s time do not seem to have known what was the origin of this festival, nor what was the real significance of the rites therein performed. They understood that upon this day they paid their respects to the god Lupercus; and, in a vague manner, they identified this obscure deity with Faunus, or with Pan, in his capacity as a producer of fertility and fecundity in all nature. Two young men were selected from the honourable order known as the College of the Luperci, and upon this day these two men opened the proceedings by sacrificing a goat and a dog. They were then “blooded,” and the ritual prescribed that as soon as this was done they should both laugh. They next cut the skins of the victims into long strips or thongs, known as februa; and, using these as whips, they proceeded to run around the city, striking at every woman with whom they came into contact. A thwack from the februa was believed to produce fertility, and any woman who desired to become a mother would expose herself to the blows which the two men were vigorously delivering on all sides. By reason of this strange old custom the day was known as the Dies februatus;[67] and from this is derived the name of the month of February in which the festival took place.

It seems to me certain that this ceremony was originally related to the Egyptian rites in connection with the god of fecundity, Min-Amon, the Pan of the Nile Valley. This god is usually represented holding in his hand a whip, perhaps consisting originally of jackal-skins tied to a stick;[68] and it has lately been proved that the hieroglyph for the Egyptian word indicating the reproduction of species[69] is composed simply of these three jackal-skins tied together, that is to say the februa. We know practically nothing of the ceremonies performed in Egypt in regard to the februa, but there is no reason to doubt that the rites were fundamentally similar to those of the Roman Lupercalia. The dog which was sacrificed in Rome had probably taken the place of the Egyptian jackal; and the goat is perhaps to be connected with the Egyptian ram which was sacred to Amon or Min-Amon.

Now it is very possible that in Alexandria Cleopatra and also Cæsar had become well acquainted with the Egyptian equivalent of the Roman Lupercalia, and it may be suggested, tentatively, that since Cæsar was regarded in that country as the god Amon who had given fertility to the Queen, he may, in Egypt, have been identified in some sort of manner with these rites. One may certainly imagine Cleopatra pointing out to Cæsar the similarity between the two ceremonies, and suggesting to him that he was, or had acted in the manner of, a kind of Lupercus. He had practically identified Cleopatra with Venus Genetrix, the goddess of fertility; and he may well have attributed to himself the faculties of that corresponding god who carried on in Rome the traditions of the Egyptian Min, to whom already Cæsar had been so closely allied by the priests of the Nile. The Dictator certainly took great interest in the festival of the Lupercalia in Rome, for he reorganised the proceedings, and actually founded an order known as the Luperci Julii, a fact which could be regarded as indicating a definite identification of himself with Lupercus. Indeed, if he was identified with Min-Amon in Egypt, and if, as I have suggested, Min-Amon is originally connected with the Lupercalia celebrations, it may be supposed that Cæsar really assumed by right the position of divine head of this order. Knowing the Dictator to have been so careful an opportunist, one is almost tempted to suggest that he found in this identification an excuse and a justification for his behaviour to the many women to whom he had lost his heart; or perhaps it were better to say that his unscrupulous attitude towards the opposite sex, and the successful manner in which, as with Cleopatra, he had succeeded in reproducing his kind, appeared to fit him constitutionally for this particular godhead.

Whether or no Cæsar, in the intolerable arrogance of his last years, was now actually naming himself the fruitful Lupercus in Rome as he was the fecund Amon in Egypt, it is a fact that upon this occurrence of the festival in the year B.C. 44 he was presiding over the ceremonies, while his lieutenant Antony was enacting the part of one of the two holders of the februa. On this day Cæsar, pale and emaciated, was seated in the Forum upon a golden throne, dressed in a splendid robe, in order to witness the celebrations, when suddenly the burly Antony, hot from his run, bounded into view, striking to right and left with the februa, and indulging, no doubt, in the horse-play which he always so much enjoyed. An excited and boisterous crowd followed him, and it is probable that both he and his companions thereupon did homage to the majestic figure of the Dictator, hailing him as Lupercus and king of the festivities. Profiting by the enthusiasm of the moment, and acting according to arrangements previously made with Cleopatra or with Cæsar himself, Antony now stepped forward and held out to the Dictator a royal diadem wreathed with laurels, at the same time offering him the kingship of Rome. Cæsar, as we have seen, had already been publicly hailed as a god upon earth, and now Antony seems to have addressed him in his Lupercalian character, begging him to accept this terrestrial throne as already he had received the throne of the heavens. No sooner had he spoken than a shout of approval was raised by a number of Cæsarians who had been posted in different parts of the Forum for this purpose; but, to Cæsar’s dismay, the cheers were not taken up by the crowd, who, indeed, appear to have indulged in a little quiet booing; and the Dictator was thus obliged to refuse the proffered crown with a somewhat half-hearted show of disdain. This action was received with general applause, and the temper of the crowd was clearly demonstrated. Again Antony held the diadem towards him, and again the isolated and very artificial cheers of his supporters were heard. Thereupon Cæsar, accepting the situation with as good a grace as possible, definitely refused to receive it; and at this the applause once more broke forth. He then gave orders that the diadem should be carried into the Capitol, and that a note should be inscribed in the official calendar stating that on this day the people had offered him the crown and that he had refused it. It seems probable that Antony, appreciating the false step which had been made, now rounded off the incident in as merry a manner as possible, beginning once more to strike about him with his magical whip, and leading the crowd out of the Forum with the same noise and horse-play with which they had entered it.

The chances now in regard to the immediate assumption of the kingship became more remote. Cæsar intended to set out for Parthia in about a month’s time; and it must have been apparent to him that his hopes of a throne would probably have to be set aside until the coming war was at an end. In regard to Cleopatra nothing remained for him to do, therefore, but to bid her prepare to return to Egypt, there to await until the Orient was conquered; and during the next few weeks it seems that the disappointed and troubled Queen engaged herself in making preparation for her departure. Suetonius tells us that Cæsar loaded her with presents and honours in these last days of their companionship; and doubtless he encouraged her as best he could with the recitation of his great hopes and ambitions for the future. There was still a chance that the monarchy would be created before the war, for there was some talk that Antony and his friends would offer the crown once more to Cæsar upon the Calends of March;[70] but Cleopatra could not have dared to hope too eagerly for this event in view of the failure at the Lupercalia. To the Queen, who had expected by this time to be seated upon the Roman throne, his reassuring words can have been poor comfort; and an atmosphere of gloomy foreboding must have settled upon her as she directed the packing of her goods and chattels and prepared herself and her baby for the long journey across the Mediterranean to her now uneventful kingdom of Egypt.

CHAPTER X.
THE DEATH OF CÆSAR AND THE RETURN OF CLEOPATRA TO EGYPT.

There can be little reason for doubt that Antony, who is to play so important a part in the subsequent pages of this history, saw Cleopatra in Rome on several occasions. After his reconciliation to Cæsar in the early summer of B.C. 45, he must have been a constant visitor at the Dictator’s villa; and, as we shall presently see, his espousal of Cleopatra’s cause in regard to Cæsar’s will suggests that her charm had not been overlooked by him. It is said, as we have seen, that he had met her, and had already been attracted by her, ten years previously, when he entered Alexandria with Gabinius in order to establish her father Auletes upon his rickety throne. He was a man of impulsive and changeable character, and it is difficult to determine his exact attitude towards Cæsar at this time. While the Dictator was in Egypt Antony had been placed in charge of his affairs in Rome, but owing to a quarrel between the two men, Cæsar, on his return from Alexandria, had dismissed him from his service. Very naturally Antony had felt considerable animosity to the Dictator on this account, and it was even rumoured, as has been said, that he desired to assassinate him. After the Spanish war, however, the quarrel was forgotten; and, as we have just seen, it was Antony who had offered him the crown at the festival of the Lupercalia. In spite of this, Cæsar does not seem to have trusted him fully, although he now appears to have been recognised as the most ardent supporter of the Cæsarian party.

Cæsar had never excelled as a judge of men. Although unquestionably a genius and a man of supreme mental powers, the Dictator was ever open to flattery; and he collected around him a number of satellites who had won their way into his favour by blandishments and by countenance of their master’s many eccentricities. Balbus and Oppius, Cæsar’s two most intimate attendants, were men of mediocre standing; and Publius Cornelius Dolabella, who now comes into some prominence, was a young adventurer, whose desire for personal gain must have been concealed with difficulty. This personage, although only five-and-twenty years of age, had been appointed by Cæsar to the consulship which would become vacant upon his own departure for the East, a move that must have given grave offence to Antony; for Dolabella, a few years previously, had fallen in love with Antony’s wife, Antonia, who had consequently been divorced, the outraged husband thereafter finding consolation in the marriage to his present wife Fulvia. The various favours conferred by Cæsar on this young scamp must therefore have caused considerable irritation to Antony; and it is not easy to suppose that the latter’s apparent devotion to the cause of the Dictator was altogether genuine. Indeed, the rumour once more passed into circulation that Antony nursed designs upon Cæsar’s life, this time, strange to say, in conjunction with Dolabella. On hearing this report the Dictator remarked that he “did not fear such fat, luxurious men as these two, but rather the pale, lean fellows.”

Of the latter type was Cassius, a sour, fanatical soldier and politician, who had fought against Cæsar at Pharsalia, and had been freely pardoned by him afterwards. From early youth Cassius entertained a particular hatred of any form of autocracy; and it is related of him that when at school the boy Faustus, the son of the famous Sulla, had boasted of his father’s autocratic powers, Cassius had promptly punched his head. Cæsar’s attempts to obtain the throne excited this man’s ferocity, and he was probably the originator of the plot which terminated the Dictator’s life. The plot was hatched in February B.C. 44, and, when Cassius and his friends had prevailed upon the influential and studious Marcus Brutus to join them, it rapidly developed into a widespread conspiracy. “I don’t like Cassius,” Cæsar was once heard to remark; “he looks so pale. What can he be aiming at?”

For Brutus, however, the Dictator entertained the greatest affection and esteem, and there was a time when he regarded him as his probable successor in office. One cannot view without distress, even after the passage of so many centuries, the devotion of the irritable old autocrat to this scholarly and promising young man who was now plotting against him; for, in spite of his manifold faults, Cæsar ever remains a character which all men esteem and with which all must largely sympathise. On one occasion somebody warned him that Brutus was plotting against him, to which the Dictator replied, “What, do you think Brutus will not wait out the appointed time of this little body of mine?” It is probable that Cæsar thought it not at all unlikely that Brutus was his own son, for his mother, Servilia, as early as the year of his birth, and for long afterwards, had been on such terms of intimacy with Cæsar as would justify this belief. Brutus, on the other hand, thought himself to be the son of Servilia’s legal husband, and through him claimed descent from the famous Junius Brutus who had expelled the Tarquins. Servilia was the sister of Cato, whose suicide had followed his defeat by Cæsar in North Africa, and Porcia, the wife of Brutus, was Cato’s daughter. It might have been supposed, therefore, that Brutus would have felt considerable antipathy towards the Dictator, more especially after the publication of his venomous Anti-Cato. There was, however, equally reasonable cause for Brutus to have sympathised with Cæsar, for his supposed father had been put to death by Pompey, an execution which Cæsar had, as it were, been instrumental in avenging. As a matter of fact, Brutus was a young man who lived upon high principles, as a cow does upon grass; and such family incidents as the seduction of his mother, or the destruction of his mother’s brother and his wife’s father, or the bloodthirsty warfare between his father’s executioner and his father-in-law’s enemy and calumniator, were not permitted to influence his righteous brain. In his early years he had, very naturally, refused on principle to speak to Pompey, but when the civil war broke out he set aside all those petty feelings of dislike which, in memory of his legal father, he had entertained towards the Pompeian faction, and, on principle, he ranged himself upon that side in the conflict, believing it to be the juster cause. Pompey is said to have been so surprised at the arrival of this good young man in his camp, whither nobody had asked him to come, and where nobody particularly desired his presence, that he stood up and embraced him as though he were a lost lamb come back to the fold. Then followed the battle of Pharsalia, and Brutus had been obliged to fly for his life. He need not, however, have feared for his safety, for Cæsar had given the strictest orders that nobody was to hurt him either in the battle or in the subsequent chase of the fugitives. From Larissa, whither he had fled, he wrote, on principle, to Cæsar, stating that he was prepared to surrender; and the Dictator, in memory, it is said, of many a pleasant hour with Servilia, at once pardoned him and heaped honours upon him. Brutus, then, on principle, laid information against Pompey, telling Cæsar whither he had fled; and thus it came about that the Dictator arrived in Egypt on that October morning of which we have read.

Brutus was an intellectual young man, whose writings and orations were filled with maxims and pithy axioms. He had, however, a certain vivacity and fire; and once when Cæsar had listened, a trifle bewildered, to one of his vigorous speeches, the Dictator was heard to remark, “I don’t know what this young man means, but, whatever he means, he means it vehemently.” He believed himself to be, and indeed was, very firm and just, and he had schooled himself to resist flattery, ignoring all requests made to him by such means. He was wont to declare that a man who, in mature years, could not say “no” to his friends, must have been very badly behaved in the flower of his youth. Cassius, who was the brother-in-law of Brutus, deemed it very advisable to introduce this exemplary young man into the conspiracy, and he therefore invited him, as a preliminary measure, to be present in the Senate on the Calends of March, when it was rumoured that Cæsar would be made king. Brutus replied that he would most certainly absent himself on that day. Nothing daunted, Cassius asked him what he would do supposing Cæsar insisted on his being present. “In that case,” said Brutus, in the most approved style, “it will be my business not to keep silent, but to stand up boldly, and die for the liberty of my country.” Such being his views, it was apparent that there would be no difficulty in persuading him, on principle, to assist in the murder of Cæsar, who had, it is true, spared his life in Pharsalia, but who was, nevertheless, an enemy of the People. The conspirators, therefore, dropped pieces of paper on the official chair whereon he sat, inscribed with such words as “Wake up, Brutus,” or “You are not a true Brutus”; and on the statue of Junius Brutus they scribbled sentences, such as “O that we had a Brutus now!” or “O that Brutus were alive!” In this way the young man’s feelings were played upon, and, after a few days of solemn thought, he came to the conclusion that it was his painful duty, on principle, to bring Cæsar’s life to a close.