Rome was temporarily distracted from Egyptian affairs. In 54 Julia, the only acknowledged child of Julius Caesar and the beloved wife of Pompey, had died, severing the personal link between the two men. The following year Crassus perished in a disastrous campaign fighting the Parthians at Carrhae (modern Harran, Turkey). A wave of unease rippled through the Mediterranean world; it was assumed, quite rightly, that the Parthians would now attempt to take Syria. In late 51 Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus, the new Roman governor of Syria, sent his two sons to Egypt to plead with the Gabinians, Gabinius’s now Egyptianised army, to return home and protect his land against Parthian attack. The Gabinians, however, had grown comfortable serving as a mercenary Ptolemaic army and were reluctant to uproot themselves to fight. Rather than negotiate, they killed the two sons of Bibulus. This left the king and queen of Egypt in a difficult situation. Risking the anger of the Gabinians, Cleopatra and Ptolemy had the murderers arrested and sent in chains to Syria.
In January 49 Caesar and his army of veterans crossed the Rubicon, the official boundary between Italy and Cisalpine Gaul. As Roman law forbade any general from crossing the river with an army, this was treason. The die was cast: Caesar had effectively declared war on Pompey and Rome. Soon after, Gnaeus Pompey, Pompey’s son, arrived in Alexandria to beg for military aid on his father’s behalf. His request could not be honourably refused. Pompey had been Auletes’s host and patron in Rome, and he was entitled to call upon the Ptolemies for support. Egypt supplied Gnaeus with a large quantity of wheat, 500 Gabinians and sixty warships that were to play a key role in his father’s subsequent campaigns. The decision to grant this aid was taken by Ptolemy (or, more likely, his ministers), with Cleopatra’s name recorded second. It was a decision that angered the people of Alexandria, who blamed Cleopatra for the whole affair. Her apparent eagerness to please the Romans, first in the matter of the Bibulus murderers and then by giving arms to Pompey, reminded them too much of her father’s reign. Later there would come a rumour, preserved for us by Plutarch, that the sexually voracious Cleopatra had seduced Gnaeus during his Egyptian sojourn. Much later still, due to a misreading of his sources by William Shakespeare, would come the fiction that Cleopatra had had an affair with Gnaeus’s father.
Cleopatra’s obvious and growing unpopularity in Alexandria may in part explain why Ptolemy’s advisers chose this time to act against his co-regent. In 49 we find the development of a new regnal-year numbering system. ‘Year 1 which is also Year 3’ equates the third year of nominally joint rule following the death of Auletes with a new Year 1; presumably Ptolemy’s first year as a solo king. In the summer of 49 Cleopatra’s name disappears from all official documents and the new ‘Year 1’ dating system is dropped. Ptolemy is backdating his reign, erasing the memory of his sister and retrospectively claiming sole rule from the time of his father’s death. Cleopatra and her supporters had been forced to flee Alexandria, travelling first perhaps south to Thebes – a city notoriously prone to rebellion, but one that may have been inclined to support Auletes’s daughter against the Alexandrians – then eastwards to Syria.9 Here she set to work raising the mercenary army that would allow her to reclaim her throne. Quite how Cleopatra managed to raise an effective army at a time when the Roman civil war was causing massive disruption across the Mediterranean world is nowhere explained; the fact that she was able to achieve this in a very short space of time confirms that, outside Alexandria, she was considered a viable candidate for the Egyptian throne. It is likely that the majority of her troops came from the Philistine coastal city of Ashkelon (near the modern Israeli city of the same name), which owed a long-standing debt of loyalty to the Ptolemies and which issued coins bearing Cleopatra’s image in 50/49 and, perhaps, 49/8. Meanwhile, in Thessalonica (Salonica), the Roman counter-senate recognised Pompey as high commander and, in direct contravention of Auletes’s will, Ptolemy XIII as sole king of Egypt with Pompey as his legal guardian. Ptolemy, like his father before him, had become a ‘friend and ally’ of Rome.
On 9 August, 48 armies loyal to Pompey and Caesar met at Pharsalus in Thessaly, central mainland Greece. Pompey had the advantage of numbers – his 47,000 men outnumbered Caesar’s by two to one – but he was the weaker general, his advisers were inexperienced, and Caesar had Mars, god of war, and Venus, his divine ancestress, on his side. Caesar won the battle and, magnanimous in victory, pardoned his enemies, including Marcus Junius Brutus, the son of his long-term mistress Servilia. Defeated but by no means inclined to give up the fight, Pompey fled with the remnants of his army to the island of Lesbos, where he was reunited with his younger son, Sextus, and his fifth wife, Cornelia, the widowed daughter-in-law of Crassus. From Lesbos Pompey sailed to Cilicia, thence to Cyprus and finally, after some hesitation, to his old ally, Egypt. Confident of a warm welcome from Auletes’s son, he sailed to Pelusium and dropped anchor in sight of the beach. The ‘eyewitness’ accounts of what happened next are provided by Plutarch and Dio; neither, of course, a true witness, but both capable of telling a moving story calculated to touch even the most stony of hearts.10
Having established camp outside Pelusium, in the foothills of Mount Casius (Ras Baron), Ptolemy and his army of Gabinians were nervously awaiting Cleopatra’s army, which was known to be marching from the east. Messengers came to announce Pompey’s arrival and to ask for an audience with the king. Panicking, Pothinos called a meeting of Ptolemy’s most trusted advisers so that each could suggest a course of action. Some argued that Pompey should be welcomed as an honoured guest; others that he was a troublemaker who should be driven away from the shore. But Theodotos could see flaws in both arguments, and he argued his case with all the skills of an experienced teacher. If Pompey was welcomed as a friend, Caesar would automatically become Egypt’s enemy. But if Pompey was driven away, he would become Egypt’s enemy and Caesar would blame Ptolemy for allowing him to escape. Furthermore, Pompey already had links with Cleopatra through his son Gnaeus; it was more than likely that he would support the queen in her battle for the throne. It seemed to Theodotos, perhaps correctly, that Pompey’s cause was already irretrievably lost. Wishing to ingratiate his king with Caesar, and worried that Egypt might become Rome’s battleground, he argued that the vulnerable Pompey should be killed before he landed. After all, as everyone knew, ‘A dead man does not bite.’
It was agreed. Ptolemy’s army marched to the beach and formed themselves in ranks facing the sea. Commandeering a fishing boat, Achillas rowed out to Pompey’s flagship with two of the Gabinians, the tribune Lucius Septimus and the centurion Salvius. Pompey’s followers, worried that a lone, undignified fishing boat was an inappropriate vessel for their master, urged him not to leave the safety of his ship. Indeed, they argued, it might be prudent to row away from the shore, at least until they were out of missile range. But Septimus, speaking in Latin, gave Pompey a courteous welcome: ‘Hail, Imperator [commander]’. And Achillas, speaking in Greek, explained that the undignified transport was an unfortunate necessity, the harbour at Pelusium being too shallow to accommodate Pompey’s fine ship. Reassured, Pompey embraced his wife and transferred to the fishing boat with two bodyguards, his freedman Philip and a slave. Once on board he busied himself reading through the speech he meant to make to King Ptolemy.
As the boat bumped on the beach Pompey held out his hand so that Philip might help him to rise with dignity. Then, far too late, he realised his danger. ‘He uttered not a word and made no complaint, but as soon as he perceived their plot and recognised that he would not be able to ward them off or escape, he veiled his face.’ Cornelia, watching from the ship, screamed as the treacherous Septimus ran her husband through with a sword, and Salvius and Achillas stabbed him in the back with their daggers. Pompey’s head was hacked from his body, his corpse thrown into the sea. It was the day before his fifty-eighth birthday. Ptolemy, sitting on his throne on the shore, turned a blind eye to the murder of his father’s friend. For this callousness Dante would consign him to circle nine, the circle
reserved for those who betray their guests, in his Inferno.11
The loyal Philip retrieved Pompey’s body from the sea and cremated him on a pyre of discarded ship’s timbers on the beach. His ashes were eventually returned to the grieving Cornelia, who buried him in Italy. A few weeks later Egypt experienced the lowest Nile flooding ever recorded and the already depleted food supplies became perilously low. Divine retribution, some said, for the murder of Pompey.
Four days later Caesar, chasing Pompey with a small fleet of ten warships and some 4,000 men, arrived in the great harbour of Alexandria. Pothinos and Theodotos hurried from Pelusium to meet him, eager to tell their tale before Caesar heard it from others less sympathetic to their cause. They took with them, as macabre greeting gifts, Pompey’s severed (and in some accounts pickled) head and his signet ring. Caesar must have had mixed feelings when viewing these grizzly trophies. In many ways Ptolemy and his advisers had done him a huge favour: it was far better that the disruptive Pompey be killed by foreigners than by a fellow Roman. But the manner of his death was appalling, and Caesar could not be seen to condone the murder of a Roman citizen conducted so blatantly before so many witnesses. He therefore averted his eyes from Pompey’s head and wept ostentatious tears over his ring. Then he donned his purple-edged toga and left his ship to process with his twelve lictors carrying the fasces – the bundle of rods and an axe bound with red tape and laurel, which signified his office – through the city. The people of Alexandria watched this miniature Roman invasion with incredulity and a well-vocalised resentment that soon turned to rioting. By nightfall Caesar had commandeered the royal palace, and there had been several deaths.
Although Pompey was dead, the Roman civil war was far from over and Caesar’s own position was far from secure. The bulk of his army was still stationed in Greece. Nevertheless, he chose to make an extended stay in hostile Alexandria, where, or so he tells us, he soon found himself stranded by adverse northerly winds. This curious decision is nowhere explained. Authors of a romantic disposition have suggested that Caesar lingered in Egypt because of his deep love for Cleopatra, but he had not yet met the queen, who was still camped with her army to the east of Pelusium. It seems instead that Caesar stayed for the most practical of reasons: he wished to tax the wealthy Alexandrians in order to recover some of the money lent by Rabirius to Auletes. Settling in for a long visit, and turning a blind eye to the local resentment, Caesar sent for reinforcements and spent his days writing his memoirs and sightseeing. He was particularly impressed by a visit to the tomb of his great hero Alexander the Great.
Egypt was a land trembling on the brink of civil war. Perhaps Caesar calculated that increased stability would bring increased wealth, and that increased wealth would allow increased taxation. Perhaps he understood that a grateful Egyptian king and/or queen might be of some use to him in the future. Maybe he was simply bored. Whatever his reasoning, Caesar took it upon himself to settle the dispute between Cleopatra and Ptolemy, and he ordered both to appear before him at Alexandria. Ptolemy did as he was bidden, leaving his troops at Pelusium under the command of Achillas. In Alexandria he moved into the palace district with Pothinos, who, acting as a negotiator between the Romans and the Alexandrians, did all he could to foster bad feeling between the two sides. Thanks to Pothinos, the Romans were fed rotten grain while Ptolemy’s supporters were misfed information, and dined off crude pottery under the mistaken impression that the Romans had confiscated the valuable royal plate. No one was happy and the city was fast approaching boiling point.
Superficially, Ptolemy held all the cards. He had the military support of the Gabinians and the vocal support of the people of Alexandria. He was here, on the spot, in Alexandria. Caesar’s easiest, most obvious option was surely to award him the crown, with Arsinoë replacing her sister as queen. But Cleopatra, too, had something to offer. That she was older and more experienced was obvious: Ptolemy, still only thirteen years old, was controlled by a clique of advisers and had, as yet, made no independent decisions. That she had the support of the native Egyptians was perhaps an irrelevance; far more important was the fact that she could display an impressive track record of loyalty to Rome. If Caesar was hoping to recover Rabirius’s debt, Cleopatra might be inclined to help him. But this was not necessarily an argument that Cleopatra wanted to plead in a public meeting in Alexandria. A preliminary, private meeting with Caesar would better suit her needs.
Cleopatra too set off for Alexandria. With Achillas and his army blocking her route through Pelusium, and Pothinos guarding the harbour at Alexandria, hers was a secret, undignified journey. Abandoning her troops, she was able to slip past Achillas and make her way in a small boat along the coast. She landed in the Palaces district at nightfall. The story of how Cleopatra had herself smuggled into the palace by the Sicilian merchant Apollodorus, who hid her in a bedroll or a bundle of linen sheets, has grown in the telling so that in modern versions of her tale we find Cleopatra being unrolled from an exotic, anachronistic Persian rug to tumble, alluringly dishevelled and breathless, at Caesar’s feet. This is a romantic story that really does not hold up to detailed scrutiny, and it stems in its entirety from the fluent pen of Plutarch. Was this truly the only means by which Cleopatra could make her way into Caesar’s presence? Having gained the security of the palace, could she not have abandoned her bedroll to make a more conventional entry? It is hard to imagine that Caesar would allow an unknown Sicilian to bring a potentially dangerous package into his suite without having it searched. Was Caesar then expecting Cleopatra’s arrival? Dio tells us that they had already been in correspondence; had Caesar been warned to turn a blind eye to strangers bearing bundles? Or did Cleopatra deliberately plan to arrive as the ultimate gift-wrapped package? Was this in fact a carefully stage-managed production designed to appeal to Caesar’s notoriously susceptible nature? It would certainly be naïve to assume that Cleopatra – whose later history confirms that she shared the Ptolemaic love of elaborate spectacle – was unaware of the impact of her unorthodox arrival. Plutarch for one believed that her entry was well planned:
It was by this device of Cleopatra’s, it is said, that Caesar was first captivated, for she showed herself to be a bold coquette, and succumbing to the charm of further intercourse with her, he reconciled her to her brother …12
What did Caesar see when Apollodorus dropped his bundle and revealed his queen? If we are imagining the scene as described by Plutarch we should probably indulge our wildest fantasies and picture a dark room, flickering torchlight, high stone walls, gilded furniture, a mosaic floor and a dark-haired, olive-skinned young woman dressed in Greek rather than Egyptian garments. Cleopatra is likely to have been short by modern standards and she probably, like almost everyone of her time, suffered from bad teeth. Her coins, unflattering to modern eyes, suggest a prominent nose and chin and a rather thick neck. It is hard for us to be more precise in our imaginings, as we have no real idea what Cleopatra looked like. No contemporary descriptions and few contemporary illustrations have survived.
So much for Cleopatra’s appearance. What did she see when she tumbled from her bedding roll to lie at Caesar’s feet? A man thirty years older than herself. Well built, tall by Roman standards, with dark eyes, a pale, rounded face, receding fair hair and a bad ‘comb-over’: Caesar was notoriously self-conscious about his baldness and insisted that his statues be topped with youthful mops of curly hair. He liked to be well groomed; his biographer, Suetonius, gives us perhaps more information than we would like, telling us:
he was something of a dandy, always keeping his head carefully trimmed and shaved; and has been accused of having certain other hairy parts of his body depilated by tweezers.13
His clothes were the height of fashion: Suetonius mentions wrist-length sleeves with fringes on his striped senatorial robe and a daringly loose belt. Clearly Caesar appreciated luxury. But he was no hedonist. Unusually for a Roman, he drank sparingly, and he ate anything that was put in front of him, seemingly
unable to distinguish good food from bad.
Caesar was the supreme celebrity of his age, known by reputation throughout the civilised world. Cleopatra would have understood that she was facing a man with exceptional drive and ambition. An excellent politician, orator and author, a superb horseman, and an extremely successful though by no means infallible general, Caesar was known to be both good-humoured and amusing. And he had a reputation for sexual excess that his legionaries repeated with awe and pride: he was ‘every woman’s man and every man’s woman’.14 Stories of his same-sex alliances are likely to have been greatly exaggerated, although there was a persistent rumour, potentially politically damaging but impossible to quash, that he had enjoyed a youthful fling with King Nicomedes of Bithynia. Cicero certainly believed that there was no smoke without fire:
Caesar was led by Nicomedes’s attendants to the royal bedchamber, where he lay on a golden couch, dressed in a purple shift … So this descendant of Venus lost his virginity in Bithynia.15
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