Part 2

This first interview between Cæsar and Cleopatra probably extended far into the night. It is certain that, with the earliest dawn, Cæsar sent for Ptolemy, and told him he must be reconciled to his sister and associate her in the government. “In one night,” says Dion Cassius, “Cæsar had become the advocate of her of whom he had erewhile thought himself the judge.” Ptolemy was resisting the thinly disguised commands of the consul, when Cleopatra appearing, the young king, mad with rage, cast his crown at the feet of Cæsar and rushed from the palace uttering the cry: “Treason! treason! to arms!” The mob, excited by his cries, rose and marched on the palace. Cæsar feeling himself too weak to resist (he had but a handful of legionaries about him) ascended one of the terraces and harangued the multitude from a distance. He succeeded in restoring a calm by his promises of satisfying the Egyptians in their demands. Just at this time his legionaries arrived from the camp, surrounded the young prince, separated him from his partisans, and with every mark of respect reinstated him willy-nilly in the palace where he might serve as a hostage for Cæsar. The next day the people were assembled in the public square, and Cæsar, accompanied by Ptolemy and Cleopatra, went thither in great state with his escort of lictors. Every Roman was under arms, ready to suppress the first symptom of sedition. Cæsar read aloud the testament of Ptolemy Auletes, and declared solemnly in the name of the Roman people that he would insist on carrying out the last will of the late king. By this the two elder of his children were to reign conjointly over Egypt. As for the other two children of the king, he, Cæsar, made them a gift of the island of Cyprus, and handed over to them the sovereignty of it.

This scene overawed the Egyptians; nevertheless, Cæsar, fearing an insurrection, hastened to summon to Alexandria the new legions which he had formed in Asia Minor of the wrecks of Pompey’s army. But long before these reënforcements could reach him, the Egyptian army from Pelusium, on secret orders from Pothinus, entered the city to drive out the Romans. At the same time, Arsinoë, the young sister of Cleopatra, assisted by the eunuch Ganymede, made her escape from the palace, and in default of Ptolemy, still Cæsar’s prisoner, was received with acclamations both by the army and people as the daughter of the Lagidæ. This army, commanded by Achillas, amounted to eighteen thousand foot and two thousand horse, and the people of Alexandria made with it common cause against the foreigner.

Cæsar had but four thousand soldiers and the crews of his triremes. He was in extreme peril; occupying with this handful of men the palaces of the Bruchium, he was attacked from the city by the troops of Achillas and the armed populace, and his fleet, which was at anchor in the greater harbor, was virtually captive, since the enemy held the passes of Taurus and Heptastadium. He even feared that this inactive fleet might fall into the hands of the Alexandrians, who would have made use of it to intercept his supplies of men and munitions. Cæsar averted this danger by setting fire to his vessels. The immense conflagration reached the quays and destroyed many houses and edifices, among others the arsenal, the library, and the grain emporium. The Egyptians, exasperated, rushed to the attack, but the legionaries, as good diggers as brave soldiers, had transformed the Bruchium into an impregnable entrenched camp. On all sides were embankments, barricades, lines of earthworks; the theater had become a citadel. The Romans sustained twenty assaults without losing an inch of ground. Cæsar even succeeded in seizing the island of Pharos, which gave him the command of the great harbor.

The Egyptians imagined that victory would be theirs if, instead of a woman, they could have Ptolemy to lead them. They therefore sent word to Cæsar that they made war on him only because he kept their king a prisoner, and that as soon as he should be restored to liberty hostilities would cease. Cæsar, who knew the fickleness of the Alexandrians, yielded—he gave them back Ptolemy. As for his accustomed counsellor Pothinus, Cæsar had intercepted letters from him to Achillas, and had delivered him over to the lictors. No sooner had Ptolemy rejoined the Egyptian army than the war, far from ceasing, was renewed with increased vigor. Just then the first reënforcement, the thirty-seventh legion, reached Cæsar by sea. The war was carried on without any decided advantage till the beginning of the spring of 47 B. C. Then it was learned that Pelusium had been taken by assault by an army that was coming to the relief of Cæsar; it was a body of auxiliaries from Syria, led by Mithridates of Pergamos. The Egyptians, fearing to be shut in between two enemies if they remained in Alexandria to await the coming of Mithridates, marched to meet him. The first battle, which was indecisive, took place near Memphis; but, a few days later, Cæsar, who had also quitted Alexandria, succeeded in joining the troops of Mithridates and a second battle was fought. The Egyptians were broken and cut to pieces, and King Ptolemy drowned himself in the Nile. Cæsar returned with his victorious army to Alexandria, now humbled; the turbulent populace of the great city, henceforth, knowing the power of the Roman steel, received the consul with loud acclaims. Thus ended the War of Alexandria, which should rather be styled the _War of Cleopatra_, since this war, adding nothing to Cæsar’s fame, injurious to his interests, useless to his country, and to which he nearly sacrificed both his life and his glory, had been maintained by him for the love of Cleopatra.

III.

Eighteen years previous to these events, Cæsar, being ædile, had endeavored to have voted by a plebiscit the execution of the will of Alexander II., who had bequeathed Egypt to the Roman people. Now, Egypt was subjugated and Cæsar had but to say the word for this vast and rich country to become a Roman province. But in the year 63 Cleopatra was only just born; in the year 65 Cæsar had not felt the bite of the “Serpent of the Nile,” as Shakspeare calls her—the consul took good care not to remember the propositions of the ædile. The first act of Cæsar on reëntering Alexandria was solemnly to recognize Cleopatra as Queen of Egypt. In order, however, to humor the ideas of the Egyptians he determined that she should espouse her second brother, Ptolemy Neoteras, and share the sovereignty with him. As, however, Dion remarks, this union and this sharing were equally visionary; the young prince, who was only fifteen, could be neither king nor even husband to the queen; apparently Cleopatra was the wife of her brother, and his partner on the throne; in reality she reigned solely, and continued the mistress of Cæsar.

During the eight months of the Alexandrian struggle Cæsar, shut up in the palace, had scarcely quitted Cleopatra, except for the fight, and this long honeymoon had seemed short to him. He loved the beautiful queen as fondly, and perhaps more so, than in the early days, and he could not resolve to leave her. In vain the gravest interests called him to Rome, where disorder reigned and blood was flowing, and where, since the December of the preceding year, not a letter had been received from him;[1] in vain, in Asia, Pharnaces, the conquerer of the royal allies of Rome and of the legions of Domitius, has seized on Pontus, Cappadocia, and Armenia; in vain, in Africa, Cato and the last adherents of Pompey have concentrated at Utica an immense army—fourteen legions, ten thousand Numidian horsemen, and one hundred and twenty elephants of war; in vain, in Spain, all minds are excited and revolt is brewing. Duty, interest, ambition, danger—Cæsar forgets everything in the arms of Cleopatra. Truly he is preparing to leave Alexandria, but it is to accompany the beautiful queen on a pleasure excursion up the Nile. By the orders of Cleopatra, one of those immense flat-bottomed pleasure vessels has been prepared, such as were used by the Lagidæ for sailing on the river, and called thalamegos (pleasure pinnace). It was a veritable floating palace, half a stadium long and forty cubits high above the water-line. The stories rose one above the other, surrounded by porticos and open galleries, and surmounted by belvederes sheltered from the sun by purple awnings. Within were numerous apartments, furnished with every convenience and every luxurious refinement of Greco-Egyptian civilization, vast saloons surrounded by colonnades, a banqueting-hall provided with thirteen couches, with a ceiling arched like a grotto, and sparkling with a rock-work of jasper, lapis lazuli, cornelian, alabaster, amethyst, aquamarine, and topaz. The vessel was built of cedar and cypress, the sails were of byssus, the ropes were dyed purple. Throughout, carved by skillful hands, were the opening chalices of the lotus, wound the volutes of the acanthus, twined garlands of bean-leaves and flowers of the date palm. On all sides shone facings of marble, of thyia, ivory, onyx, capitals and architraves of bronze. Mimes, acrobats, troops of dancing-girls, and flutists were on board to cheer the austere solitude of the Thebaīd with the diversions and luxuries of Alexandria.

Cæsar and Cleopatra anticipate with rapture this voyage of enchantments; they will carry their young loves amid the old cities of Egypt, along the “Golden Nile,” which they will ascend as far as the mysterious land of Ethiopia. But on the very eve of their departure the legionaries become indignant, they murmur, they rebel; their officers cry aloud to the consul, and Cæsar returns to reason. For an instant he contemplates carrying Cleopatra away with him to Rome, but that project must be deferred. It is in Armenia that the danger is most pressing; it is to Armenia that he will first repair. He leaves two legions with Cleopatra—a faithful and formidable guard, which will secure the tranquility of Alexandria, and sets sail for Antioch.

During the campaigns of Cæsar in Armenia and Africa (from July, 47, to June, 46, B. C.) Cleopatra remained in Alexandria, where a few months after the departure of the dictator she gave birth to a son. She named him Ptolemy-Cæsarion, thus proclaiming her intimate relations with Cæsar, which, however, were no secret to the Alexandrians.

When Cæsar, the army of Cato under Thapsus being crushed, was about to return to Rome, he wrote to Cleopatra to meet him there. Probably she arrived there about midsummer of the year 46, at the period of the celebration of Cæsar’s four triumphs. In the second, the triumph of Egypt, Cleopatra must have beheld, at the head of the train of captives, her sister Arsinoë, who at the breaking out of the war of Alexandria had joined her enemies. The queen had brought with her her son Cæsarion, her pseudo-husband the young Ptolemy, and a numerous train of courtiers and officers. Cæsar gave up his superb villa on the right bank of the Tiber as a residence for Cleopatra and her court.

Officially, if we may thus use this very new word to express a very old thing, Cleopatra was well received in Rome. She was the queen of a great country, the ally of the Republic, and she was the guest of Cæsar, then all-powerful; but, beneath the homage offered, lurked contempt and hatred. Not that Roman society took offence at her intrigue with Cæsar; for more than half a century, republican Rome had strangely changed its chaste morals and severe principles. Public morality, private morality,—were utterly transformed. Electors sold their votes, and the elected made use of their offices to re-imburse themselves for their election expenses and to provide means for their reëlection; they sold alliances, prevaricated, plundered, took ransoms, having an understanding with the publicans (tax-gatherers) to grind down the provinces. In the latter times of the Republic in Rome politics became the school of crime; the theater, where, contrary to the custom of the Greeks, women might take part in the comedies and in the obscene games of the mimes and mountebanks, became the school of debauchery. The favorite poet is the licentious Catullus; the mold of fashion, and at the same time the pupil, client, and friend of Cicero is Cœlius, a man of unscrupulous ambition and unbridled libertinism. Assassination became a means of government, poison a way to an inheritance. From the time of the proscriptions of Sylla, the hold on life seemed very precarious; one must make the most of it. “Let us live and love,” says Catullus. “Suns may set and rise again, but we, when our brief day is ended, must sleep a night that has no morrow.” The time was past when the Roman matron lived quietly at home and spun with her maidens. She sought adventures, plotted, gave or sold herself. Greek libertinism and Oriental voluptuousness had reached Rome and been transformed into a gross sensuality. The multiplicity of divorces “annihilated the sacredness of the family”; the love of luxury, ambition, and extravagant passions ruined its honor, and the noblest of the patrician ladies were the foremost in this race of debauchery. Among them were Valeria, the sister of Hortensius; Sempronia, wife of Junius Brutus; Claudia, wife of Lucullus, and the other Claudia, wife of Quintus Metellus Celer. Again there was Junia, the wife of Lepidus; Posthumia, the wife of Sulpicius; Lollia, the wife of Gabinius; Tertullia, the wife of Crassus; Mucia, the wife of the great Pompey; Servilia, the mother of Brutus, and many others.

In so dissolute and adulterous a city, it could shock no one that Cæsar should be false to his wife with one mistress or even with several; but in the midst of her debaucheries, and even though Rome had lost many of her ancient virtues, she still preserved the pride of the Roman name. These conquerors of the world looked upon other nations as of servile race and inferior humanity. Little did they care for the transient loves of Cæsar and Ennoah, queen of Mauritania, nor would they have cared any more had Cleopatra served merely to beguile his leisure during the war of Alexandria; but in bringing this woman to the seven-hilled city, in publicly acknowledging her as his mistress, in forcing on all the spectacle of a Roman citizen, five times consul and thrice dictator, as the lover of an Egyptian woman, Cæsar seemed, according to the ideas of the time, to insult all Rome. As Merivale justly observes: “If one can imagine the effect that would have been produced in the fifteenth century by the marriage of a peer of England or of a grandee of Spain with a Jewess some idea may be formed of the impression made on the Roman people by the intrigue of Cæsar and Cleopatra.”

Cæsar had received supreme power and had been deified. He was created dictator for ten years, and in the city his statue bore this inscription: “Cæsari semideo”—To Cæsar the demigod. He might believe himself sufficiently powerful to despise Roman prejudices; for the rest, during the last two years of his life, Cæsar, till then so prudent, so cautious in humoring the sentiments of the plebeians, so skillful in using them for his own designs, pretended in his public life to despise and brave public opinion. It was the same in his private life; far from dismissing Cleopatra, he visited her more frequently than ever at the villa on the Tiber, talked incessantly of the queen, and allowed her publicly to call her son Cæsarion.

He went further still; he erected in the temple of Venus the golden statue of Cleopatra, thus adding to the insult to the Roman people the outrage to the Roman gods. It was not enough that Cæsar for love of Cleopatra had not reduced Egypt to a Roman province; not enough that he had installed this foreigner in Rome, in his villa on the banks of the Tiber, and that he lavished on her every mark of honor and every testimony of love;—now he dedicated, in the temple of a national divinity, the statue of this prostitute of Alexandria, this barbarous queen of the land of magicians, of thaumaturgy [wonder-working], of eunuchs, of servile dwellers by the Nile, these worshipers of stuffed birds and gods with the heads of beasts. Men asked each other where the infatuation of Cæsar would end. It was reported that the dictator was preparing to propose, by the tribune Helvius Cinna, a law which would permit him to espouse as many wives as he desired in order to beget children by them. It was said that he was about to recognize the son of Cleopatra as his heir, and still further, that after having exhausted Italy in levies of men and money he would leave the government of Rome in the hands of his creatures and transfer the seat of empire to Alexandria. These rumors aroused all minds against Cæsar, and, if we may credit Dion, tended _to arm his assassins against him_ (to furnish the dagger to slay him).[2] Notwithstanding this hostility, Cleopatra was not deserted in the villa on the Tiber. To please the divine Julius, to approach him more intimately, the Cæsarians controlled their antipathy and frequently visited the beautiful queen. To this court of Egypt transported to the banks of the Tiber came Mark Antony, Dolabella, Lepidus, then general-of-horse; Oppius Curio, Cornelius Balbus, Helvius Cinna, Matius, the prætor Vendidius, Trebonius, and others. Side by side with the partisans of Cæsar were also some of his secret enemies, such as Atticus, a celebrated silver merchant with great interests in Egypt, and others whom he had won over, like Cicero. The latter while making his peace with Cæsar did not forget his master-passion, love of books and of curiosities. An insatiable collector, he thought to enrich his library at Tusculum without loosing his purse-strings, and requested Cleopatra to send for him to Alexandria, where such treasures abounded, for a few Greek manuscripts and Egyptian antiquities. The queen promised willingly, and one of her officers, Aumonius, who, formerly an ambassador of Ptolemy Auletes to Rome, had there known Cicero, undertook the commission; but whether through forgetfulness or negligence the promised gifts came not, and Cicero preserved so deep an enmity to the queen in consequence that he afterwards wrote to Atticus, “I hate the queen (odi reginam),” giving as his only reason for this aversion the failure of the royal promise. The former consul had also received an affront from Sarapion, one of Cleopatra’s officers. This man had gone to his house, and when Cicero asked him what he wished he had replied rudely: “I seek Atticus,” and at once departed. How often does the ill-conduct of upper servants create a prejudice against the great.

The assassination of Cæsar, which struck Cleopatra like a thunderbolt, would have been the destruction of all her hopes if one could lose hope at twenty-five. Cæsar dead, there was nothing to detain her in Rome, and she did not feel safe in this hostile city amid the bloody scenes of the parricidal days. She prepared to depart, but Antony having entertained for a moment the weak desire of opposing to Octavius as Cæsar’s heir the little Cæsarion, Cleopatra remained in Rome until the middle of April. When the queen perceived that this project was finally abandoned, she hastened to depart from the city where she had experienced so much contempt and which she quitted with rage in her heart.

IV.

Cleopatra reëntered Alexandria without opposition, but the civil war which threatened between the adherents of Cæsar and the republicans made her situation difficult and her crown precarious. The ally of the Roman people, she could not remain neutral in the struggle; but at the risk of the victors’, whoever they might be, making her pay the penalty of her desertion by annexing Egypt to the empire, she inclined to the Triumvirs; for the partisans of Cæsar had been less inimical to her while in Rome, and Antony, through policy indeed, rather than friendship, had spoken in favor of her son’s succession. On the other hand, if the Triumvirs possessed the West, their adversaries were almost the masters of the East, and directly threatened Egypt. At the very commencement of hostilities Cassius, who with eight legions occupied Syria, called upon Cleopatra to send him reënforcements, and almost at the same time one of the lieutenants of Antony, Dolabella, besieged in Laodicea, addressed the same demand to her.

Cassius was seemingly victorious, Dolabella the reverse; prudence would have advised to side with the former, nevertheless Cleopatra remained faithful to her tacit alliance with the Cæsarians. Four Roman legions, two left by Cæsar and two composed of the veterans of Gabinius, were stationed at Alexandria. The queen commanded them to set out for Laodicea, but the envoy of Dolabella, Allienus, who had taken the command of these troops, came upon the army of Cassius in Syria. Whether from pusillanimity or premeditated treachery, Allienus united his legions with those of the enemy against whom he was leading them, and only a single Egyptian squadron, which Cleopatra had also despatched to Laodicea, reached Antony.

Soon after the departure of the legions, 43 B. C., the young king Ptolemy died suddenly. Cleopatra was accused of having him poisoned. This crime, which is far from being authenticated, is by no means improbable. It may be that when Cleopatra by the departure of the Roman soldiers found herself without any reliable troops, she dreaded either a conspiracy in the palace or an insurrection which would drive her from the throne to place on it her brother. Six years previously the same circumstance had resulted to the advantage of her other brother, and Cleopatra had nearly fallen a victim. Immediately on the death of Ptolemy XIII., the queen took as the sharer of the throne her young son Ptolemy-Cæsarion, then four years of age.

Stationed at Cyprus was an Egytian fleet. Cassius sent orders direct to the navarch Sarapion, who commanded it, to unite with the republican fleet, and the latter obeyed without even referring to his sovereign. Not satisfied with the four legions and the squadron which he had already received from Cleopatra, much against her will, indeed, Cassius again sent her word to furnish him new supplies of troops, ships, provisions, and money. The queen, who feared an invasion, which she was without forces to repel, sought to temporize. She expressed her regrets to Cassius that she could not at once send him aid, Egypt being ruined by famine and pestilence. Famine indeed reigned there by reason of an insufficient inundation of the Nile, but Egypt was not ruined for all that, and whilst Cleopatra was evading the demands of Cassius she was preparing a new fleet to assist the Triumvirs. Cassius was not deceived by the diplomacy of Cleopatra’s envoy. He determined to invade Egypt. He had already set out on his march when Brutus, on the approach of the army of Antony, summoned him into Macedonia. Then Cleopatra sent her fleet to join the party of the Cæsarians, but on the way this fleet was dispersed and almost utterly destroyed by a tempest. Throughout this war ill-fortune seemed to pursue Cleopatra—with the best will to second the Triumvirs she had been able to give them almost no assistance; on the contrary, she had furnished reënforcements to the republicans, who, well knowing that these reënforcements had been most unwillingly supplied, desired to take vengeance for her reluctance.