CLEOPATRA OF EGYPT, THE MAKING OF A QUEEN

 

EGYPT AND ROME

 

Nearly two thousand years ago, on one of those bright and clear days which mark the presence of Spring in Lower Egypt, before the hot wind from the desert begins to blow, there took place in the city of Alexandria the first meeting between two persons who were destined to become the hero and heroine of what those writers who lived near to it in time felt to be the most enthralling romance of antiquity, devoting to it so much attention that the outlines of the story have been familiar throughout all subsequent ages to people taking little or no interest generally in the history of the ancient world.

The man was a young Roman cavalry officer, who up to the age of twenty-eight had done little to distinguish himself from a great number of his countrymen in the same station of life as himself. Gifted with courage and considerable military ability, he had spent his time, apart from his career in the army, in such a manner as to gain himself small credit. He was very heavily in debt, and notorious for his dissipations and the evil character of his associates. He was of powerful build, suggesting to his bitter enemy Cicero a gladiator by his jaws, his flanks, and his frame in general. At the same time he was undeniably handsome. In the words of Plutarch, he had a noble dignity of person, and his well-grown beard, broad forehead, and hooked nose recalled that Herakles from whom his family traced their descent through Anton, a son of the demigod.

Such was Marcus Antonius, the commander of the cavalry in a Roman expeditionary force which had restored to the throne of Egypt the thirteenth of the royal house which reigned over the land since its conquest by Alexander the Great. King Ptolemy was back in his vast Graeco-Egyptian palace in the royal quarter of Alexandria, and re-united to what remained to him of the family whom he deserted three years before to fly to Rome.

The girl who was to play heroine to Antony’s hero was the Princess of Egypt, now at fourteen years of age the eldest surviving child of Ptolemy XIII, and therefore by the old Egyptian custom, to which the Macedonian conquerors had in the course of generations bowed without directly acknowledging, heiress to the crown. Hitherto overshadowed by the existence of an elder sister, who had on her father’s return paid with her life the penalty for daring to assume his power during his absence, Cleopatra had become a person of high importance, and as such was not secluded from the gaze of the foreign officers through whose agency she was Crown Princess and her father once more King. There being no Egyptian record of the restoration of Ptolemy XIII, we have to rely upon the statement of one classical author* that Antony and Cleopatra met now in Alexandria and that the Roman cavalryman was already attracted by her who was one day to bring about his ruin and death. As Cleopatra was of a race, and more particularly of a family, where the women always matured early, there is no improbability in Appian’s second assertion. At the beginning of his brilliant sketch of Cleopatra M. Henry Houssaye speaks of Egypt, “after forty or fifty centuries of existence, slowly dying under the influence of the oeil de jettatore of the Roman people.” If we may trust the only extant reference to this meeting at Alexandria, one of the most celebrated of all Romans now in his turn fell under the influence of the Evil Eye of the last of the queens of Egypt.

 In order to understand the situation of affairs when Cleopatra the Great makes her first appearance in the world’s history, it is necessary to go back now, some twenty-five years, to a particularly crime-stained period in the disgraceful annals of the later descendants of Ptolemy, the son of Lagos. King Ptolemy X, nicknamed “Lathyros ” (from the resemblance of the end of his nose to a vetch, it is said), had died about 81 BC after a much-troubled and interrupted reign, leaving no legitimate issue except a daughter Berenice, third of that name in the dynasty. Berenice was not younger than thirty and not older than forty when her father died, and was the widow of her uncle, Ptolemy Alexander the Elder. As has been said, the Macedonian rulers had come with time to accept the Egyptian theory of succession to the throne, a. which gave daughters equal rights with sons. It is held by many of the authorities that inheritance in Egypt originally- was through the woman, man only receiving his property and position through the rights of his mother and his wife, and that under the early Pharaohs the throne descended in the female line. Records of a woman’s sole rule date from about 3000 BC, under the queen commonly known as Nitocris. Side by side with the law of female ' inheritance went the idea of the sanctity of the royal race, descendants of the Sun God Amon-Ra, leading to the strange and repulsive custom of marriage between the closest relatives, including brother and sister. This custom, too, the Ptolemies had accepted, unions between those very close of kin not being so unfamiliar to them, as Macedonians, as to other Greeks.

As a husband for Berenice, therefore, there was no objection to Ptolemy Alexander the Younger, although he was son of Alexander I by his first wife, and consequently stepson as well as cousin of the heiress princess. The young man was a client of that brutal Roman genius, the Dictator Sulla, who received him after his escape from captivity in the hands of Mithridates the Great in 83 BC and had taken him to Rome with him. He was still under thirty years of age when, on his uncle’s death, Sulla put him on the throne of Egypt without consulting the people of Alexandria, usually in times of trouble and dispute the king-makers of the country. Alexander’s accession to the throne, however, combined with his marriage with the heiress, was quite in accord with precedent and would have provoked no stir, had it not been for his own conduct. He was practically unknown to the Alexandrians before Sulla imposed him on them, except as being the son of the bad king Ptolemy Alexander I, who finished up his usurping reign with the murder of bis mother, according to the belief of his contemporaries. Berenice, on the other hand, was the daughter of Lathyros, who, on his return from the exile into which his mother and brother had driven him, was welcomed with the name Potheinos, “the Desired One”; and she was herself beloved and popular, on the testimony of a fragment of a speech by Cicero on Egyptian affairs. The new king, nevertheless, had the hardihood to commence his reign as his father had ended his, with the murder of the woman to whom all his subjects looked as the chief representative of the dynasty. Berenice’s death was soon avenged, for, after ruling only nineteen days, Sulla’s client was dragged by the Alexandrians from the Palace to the great park known as the Gymnasium and there slain, leaving behind him only an evil memory and a will which put his country at the mercy of his friends the Romans.

After the violent deaths of Berenice and Alexander there remained but one legitimate offshoot of the house of Lagos, a princess of the name of Selene, second sister of Ptolemy Lathyros. Her mother, Cleopatra III, probably the worst woman in the family history, had first compelled Lathyros to marry Selene, and then taken her away from him, driving him out to give the throne to his brother. Selene had proceeded to marry in turn three Syrian princes, all named Antiochus, and all pretenders to the crown of Syria. She later laid claim, on behalf of her children, to Egypt and its appanage Cyprus, as well as to Syria, but does not seem to have put forward these pretensions yet.

Ptolemy Lathyros had left two illegitimate sons, who were being brought up in Syria at the time of his death. After the revolution which ended the brief reign of his nephew, the Alexandrians sent for these boys, of whom the elder was about fifteen, and divided between them Egypt and Cyprus. The elder, who was destined to be the father of the most celebrated woman of antiquity, took Egypt, and is known as Ptolemy (XIII) Neos Dionysos, or, more commonly, by his nickname of Auletes, “the Flute-player.” The younger is known simply as Ptolemy the Cyprian. As both Egypt and Cyprus accepted their new rulers without a protest, it may be presumed that there was no doubt entertained as to their being genuine sons of the Tenth Ptolemy.

Ptolemy XIII, having become King of Egypt, it remained to find a wife for him who should help him to carry on the succession. It was not quite unknown that one of the Lagidae should marry outside his own family, even since the Fourth Ptolemy had conformed to Egyptian custom by taking as his bride his sister Arsinoe; for Ptolemy Epiphanes had married the Seleucid princess Cleopatra of Syria. So now there seems to have been an idea of a union between the two sons of Lathyros and two daughters of Mithridates, King of Pontus, the great enemy of Rome. But these two girls, Mithridatis and Nyssa, were as yet infants, and nothing came of the proposal to make them queens of Egypt and of Cyprus. In 78 BC, we find the Egyptian Ptolemy married to a Cleopatra Tryphaena, the two together being named in a demotic papyrus of the third year of his reign “the Gods Philopatores Philadelphoi”, in true Ptolemaic fashion. Who was this Cleopatra Tryphaena? It is not known. According to the regular Egyptian formula she is spoken of as her husband’s “sister-wife”; but this does not prove (though it is probable) that she was a daughter of Ptolemy Lathyros. The old practice of supplying a wife of the requisite divine blood from among the priestesses of the Sun—“the harem of Amon-Ra,” as they have been called—having died out before the Macedonian invasion of Egypt, the only way of increasing the purity of the royal blood was by discovering the princess most nearly akin to the king. It seems almost certain, therefore, that, if Ptolemy XIII had a sister, she was this same Cleopatra Tryphaena. The question is difficult, but is of very little importance, except in connection with the other question alluded to later on, as to who was the mother of Cleopatra the Great.

The task which confronted Ptolemy Auletes at the beginning of his reign was hard. Even if he was able to fortify his position in Egypt generally by some marriage which gratified his people’s desire for purity of the Solar blood, he had still to deal with his non-Egyptian subjects, in Alexandria chiefly, and with the Romans who had set his predecessor upon the throne. Alexandrian hostility to him, which was to make him an exile later, does not seem to have been manifested during his first few years of rule. But the Roman problem faced him in the very beginning. The late king, Ptolemy Alexander II, had left a will or at least the Romans declared that there was a will, by which he bequeathed his kingdom to them after his death. If he did so, he was only following the example of his own kinsman, Ptolemy Apion, illegitimate son of Ptolemy IX, who bequeathed his realm, the former Egyptian province of Cyrenaica, to the Roman people in 96 BC.

Whether the “will of Alexander” was genuine or not, the Romans took no immediate steps to enforce the reputed provisions. They had not yet taken up their legacy in Cyrenaica, nor did they do so until 75. With regard to Egypt and Cyprus, they suffered the sons of Lathyros to ascend the two thrones without a protest. They did not, however, in any way recognise the accessions. Auletes saw that, until he obtained a formal recognition from Rome, his situation was most precarious. But how was he to obtain it?

As modern historians of Rome have pointed out, nothing suited the Roman Senate better than that Egypt’s fate should remain in suspense. If they acted upon the terms of the will it would be necessary to set about the organisation of Egypt into a Roman province. But they were afraid to put into the hands of any one administrator the wealthiest land in the world of that day. They could expect only one result—a breaking out afresh of the civil wars which had so recently ceased to devastate Italy and the Empire. On the other hand, Egypt was already marked out as their prey, and the existence of the will, claimed by them to be genuine, enabled them to bleed the country slowly to death. The king was encouraged to hope that he might buy recognition, if he could gain it by no other means. It can readily be understood that this meant a heavy expense to Ptolemy, dealing with a city in which the Numidian Jugurtha had many years before declared all for sale.

Such a policy as Ptolemy Auletes pursued was sure to prove unprofitable until he should discover the price of some man powerful enough to wrest for him from the Senate what he desired. And while he still remained unrecognised the danger of losing his country entirely seemed to be growing greater. His kinswoman Selene, in 75, began to urge her children’s claims to Egypt and Cyprus, as well as to Syria, then in the hands of the Armenian Tigranes, sending her two boys (by which of her Syrian husbands it is not certain) to Rome, provided with the proper means of urging their suit in such a place. In the same year, or the following, the Romans took over the government of Cyrenaica, which had been waiting for them eleven years. But with regard to Egypt they persisted in procrastinating. Selene’s embassy left Rome in despair of effecting anything by a longer stay; and still Auletes failed to get any assurance from the Senate, which contented itself with checking the attempts of the democrats at Rome to get entrusted to one of their party the task of converting Egypt into a Roman province. Thus in 65 the proposal of some of the tribunes of the people to send Julius Caesar to the land where he was one day to imperil both his life and his reputation was met by the usual device of inducing other tribunes to use the power of veto against their colleagues. A more serious effort was made by the democrats at the end of the following year, when, probably instigated by the bankrupt _A Caesar himself, the tribune Rullus tried to bring in an Agrarian Law which would have divided up Egypt, together with all other domains acquired by Rome since the joint consulship of Sulla and Pompey in 88 BC.

Auletes was driven by his fears to dangerous expedients. The great Pompey himself was out in the East, and in 63 annexed to Rome Syria, which had been evacuated by its Armenian invaders in 69, the year of Cleopatra’s birth. With the annexation of Syria, once a portion of the Egyptian Empire, there only remained One independent state in the Hellenic East—Egypt itself, with Cyprus, still under the brother of Auletes. The King of Egypt, unable to get any satisfaction from the Senate, and alarmed at the attitude of his Alexandrian subjects, who were provoked by his subservience to Rome, despatched an invitation to Pompey to come to Egypt, sending him at the same time presents of money and clothing for his troops, which, according to Appian, Pompey accepted, while showing no desire to visit Egypt. Perhaps it was well for the independence of the country that he did not come, although he, unlike most of his Roman contemporaries, was not in desperate need of money. Anyhow, in 61 Pompey returned to Rome, leaving Auletes still in suspense.

The consular elections at the end of the next year decided the harassed king to do what it would have been cheaper for him to have done before, had he only realised it. Julius Caesar was one of the two consuls chosen for the year 59. This was a man of whom Auletes knew little, except that he had twice already threatened to seize Egypt in order to meet his debts and give himself a fresh start. He saw, however, that he was worth buying, and offered him six thousand talents, which was about half a year’s revenue of Egypt at that time, according to one reckoning; a whole year’s revenue, according to another. With this sum Auletes purchased Rome’s recognition of the kingship which he had held on sufferance for more than twenty years. Caesar, now in league with Pompey and with the financier Crassus, proposed his “ Julian Law concerning the King of Egypt,” and carried it by violence, in spite of the fierce opposition of the aristocracy. Ptolemy Auletes was recognised as “ally and friend of the Roman People,” and settled down, as he hoped, to enjoy the results of his long and expensive struggle with the greed of Rome. In another year’s time he was an exile from his kingdom.

It is impossible to withhold all sympathy from Auletes, wretched though be the figure which he cuts in history. He succeeded in holding off the hands of Rome from his country by the sole means in his power, only to find himself repudiated by his subjects, or at least by that section of them whose opinion carried weight. He was reduced to the desperate strait of debasing the national coinage in order to supplement the money which he raised by extra taxes and confiscation to meet the enormous liabilities which he had incurred. This alone might not have sufficed to rouse Alexandria against him, for the bulk of the taxation fell upon the more docile native Egyptians, accustomed by centuries of Pharaohs, and a dozen generations of Ptolemies, even more skilful than the Pharaohs at exploiting their subjects, to submit to a system of taxation which left them with little to call their own. But the Roman seizure of Cyprus, the last remaining possession of Egypt, stirred up a wave of indignation against the “ally and friend of the Roman People.” The brother of Auletes, Ptolemy the Cyprian, had declined to spend his money to purchase recognition from Rome, and, in consequence, saw himself in 58 robbed of his kingdom. Publius Clodius, most blackguardly of all Romans of his day, proposed the annexation, having a personal grudge against the Cyprian, it was said, because he had nine years earlier refused to offer more than two talents to ransom Clodius from some pirates into whose hands he had fallen. Clodius took an ample revenge for this refusal of a larger sum, for the Romans accepted readily his charge against the king that he was plotting against them, and decreed the annexation of the island; whereon Ptolemy committed suicide, leaving his treasure to fall into the hands of his oppressors.

According to the historian Dion Cassius, the people of Alexandria now insisted that Ptolemy Auletes should demand back Cyprus from Rome as a possession of Egypt, on the penalty of breaking off friendship with them if they refused. Failing to pacify the Alexandrians, Auletes left the city for Rome, where he complained that he had been expelled. “He applied,” as Mommsen remarks, “ as if on account of his eviction from the estate which he had purchased, to those who had sold it.” He found the Romans willing to see him restored, but unable to agree who should restore him. The Senate was still afraid to entrust the Egyptian business to any one man.

Auletes recommenced therefore his campaign of bribery which had brought him success before. Only, whereas before he had the actual revenues of Egypt in his hands, now he could only mortgage his expectations. Nothing daunted, he began to borrow from the money-lenders on the security of his kingdom, in order to spread the money among the politicians. The Senate was largely bought by him, according to the rumours current a little later. But still corruption failed to do its work while the king contented himself with buying numbers of small men rather than one big man. It is true that a suitable big man was hard to find. Caesar, his former profitable if expensive investment, was now away on his famous campaigns in Gaul. Pompey was in Rome, and received the king favourably, lodging him in his fine villa in the Alban district, where many of the aristocracy had country-houses. But Pompey with his curious stiffness and pride united an integrity of character which was indeed rare in Rome, and the “honest countenance” for which he was noted was not belied by his conduct in matters of finance. The gifts of Auletes had not bought him in Syria in 62, and we hear of no action on his part now beyond the extension of hospitality to the exiled king. As appeared later, he was by no means unwilling to accept the commission of taking his guest back to Alexandria. But, now as always, he refused to take steps himself to secure an appointment which it would have been hard for his fellow-countrymen to refuse him.

Delay, little as he could avoid it, threatened grave dangers to Auletes. Not long after he had reached Rome, a deputation of one hundred Alexandrian citizens arrived in Italy to support the claims of the government which had been set up in Egypt after the king’s flight. To fight them, Auletes had recourse to the other chief weapon of such men as him, and supplemented bribery with assassination. The deputation was ambushed at Puteoli, the modern Pozzuoli, by ruffians hired by the king, and a number of them were slain. The others were bribed to keep silent. All appeared to be going well for Auletes, when, late in the year 57, a proposal was brought forward in the Senate that the consul, Publius Cornelius Lentulus Spinther, who was to be governor of Cilicia in the following year, should be commissioned to restore the king. Opposition broke out, and one of the tribunes of the people, by name Favonius, drew attention to the assassination of the Alexandrian ambassadors. The remainder of the deputation were still in Rome, and the Senate summoned the chief man, Dion, to appear before it and give evidence. After first bribing Dion to stay away, Auletes decided that it would be safer to have him more effectually silenced, and, since there was no difficulty in hiring cutthroats in Rome, Dion disappeared. The crime was later laid to the charge of one Caelius, who was acquitted with the assistance of Cicero— never very particular about the moral characters of his clients, for he had supported the cause of Auletes himself in the Senate when the proposal for his restoration to Egypt was under discussion.

The removal of Dion, however, was felt even by the king to be rather a bold step, and he judged it prudent to leave Rome and retire to Ephesus to wait until Lentulus Spinther should come east to take up his province of Cilicia. He left behind him in Rome an agent called Ammonios, who was supplied with money and instructed to support the proposal to give Pompey the task of restoration. Thus there was no cessation of the intrigues after the departure of Auletes. The aristocratic party continued to fear that the Egyptian commission would put too much power into one man’s hands, and a convenient oracle was discovered in the Sibylline Books. “ If the King of Egypt,” ran the sacred message, “ comes begging for any help, refuse him not your friendship ; nevertheless, ye shall not aid him with a multitude. If ye do, ye shall have troubles and dangers.”

A grave discussion followed as to what could be done. If King Ptolemy was not to be “aided with a multitude,” how could he be restored? It was suggested that Lentulus Spinther should still be entrusted with the task, but that he should only take with him two lictors, confiding in the majesty of the Roman name to overawe the Alexandrians. Others wished Pompey to undertake the duty, similarly escorted. It was suspected, however, that Pompey would not care for the commission, stripped of all its accompaniments of material power.

So we find the question still being debated in the Roman Senate in January 55, nearly three years after Auletes had fled from Alexandria, with Cicero supporting Lentulus Spinther, Clodius attacking Pompey, and the aristocratic party endeavouring to gain time by the use of all the resources of religion, unlucky days, holidays, etcetera, which could be twisted to make ridiculous interruptions of public business in Rome. We find also Lentulus in Cilicia hesitating to accept the advice which Cicero had given him in the previous July to settle the matter by putting the king in Ptolemais (Acre), while proceeding himself with his fleet and army to Alexandria. Cicero’s plan, which he claimed to be welcome to Pompey, would have got over the difficulty raised by the Sibylline oracle. But Lentulus could not bring himself to adopt it. Possibly there was no offer of gold from Auletes to bring about his restoration by a man whom he wished to see replaced by Pompey.

In the spring of 55 the comedy, which must have been a weary performance for the exiled king, came to an abrupt end. As one result of the famous conference at Luca the previous year, when Julius Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus agreed to form a triumvirate to divide the spoils of Rome between them, Aulus Gabinius, the proconsular governor of Syria, received permission to set Auletes on his throne again. Only one formality remained to complete the business. Auletes, still in Ephesus, promised Gabinius a bribe of ten thousand talents.  “Gabinius,” remarks Plutarch, “was somewhat afraid of the war, but was hugely taken by the ten thousand talents.” The proconsul, indeed, was bankrupt, like so many Roman nobles of his time. Like so many of them, too, he was a brave soldier, a good speaker, and an utter profligate. “ A Semiramis ” is Cicero’s contemptuous description of him. With his instructions from the triumvirs, of whom Pompey and Crassus were now consuls for the year, and the promise of ten thousand talents, Gabinius could not hesitate. He had no scruples about inventing a pretext for attacking the existing government of Egypt, and began his march to the frontier, sending Antony and his cavalry in advance of the main army to secure the Isthmus of Suez.

 

Cleopatra’s father

 

When Ptolemy Auletes quitted Alexandria in the year 58, either driven out or else flying in alarm at the indignation of his subjects over the annexation of Cyprus by his Roman friends, he left behind him his entire family, six in number. So far all the authorities, ancient and modern, are in agreement. They agree also as to the identity of five out of the six persons in that family. There were three daughters, Berenice, Cleopatra, and Arsinoe ; and two infant sons, both named Ptolemy according to the custom of the family. The sixth person was a woman named Cleopatra Tryphaena, who is described by some as the king’s eldest daughter, by others as his wife. The existence of a daughter of this name is guaranteed only by a fragment of Porphyry, a writer of the third century AD.; yet it has been accepted by most modern historians in spite of its being unknown to Dion Cassius and Strabo and unmentioned by any other ancient author. That Ptolemy’s wife was named Cleopatra Tryphaena is disputed by none; but Egyptologists, influenced by the fact that her name disappears from public documents and from all inscriptions (except one on the pylon and colonnade of the forecourt of the temple at Edfu) after the year 69, have for the most part concluded that she died in that year, and that the Cleopatra Tryphaena who was alive in 58 must have been someone else, namely, the daughter mentioned by Porphyry.

Another point arises out of this question of the death of Ptolemy’s queen. Berenice is universally admitted to be the daughter of the Cleopatra Tryphaena whom Ptolemy married near the beginning of his reign. If her mother died in 69, another mother must be found for the four children, Cleopatra, Arsinoe, and the two little Ptolemies. The four would then become only half-sisters and half-brothers to Berenice, and have been even stigmatised as “illegitimate” children of Ptolemy Auletes, for which there is no evidence whatever. As we do not know that the queen-mother Cleopatra Tryphaena died in 69, as we do know that a Cleopatra Tryphaena began to rule with Berenice after the expulsion or flight of Auletes, and as we know that Auletes recognised his daughter Cleopatra and his son Ptolemy XIV in his will as legitimate heirs to the throne, it seems best to hold the view, until distinct disproof is forthcoming, that the Cleopatra Tryphaena left behind him by Auletes in 58 was his “sister-wife,” and that all five children were hers.

The uncertainty as to the mother of the children of Auletes extends also to their ages. Berenice cannot well have been more than eighteen in 58, and may have, been younger. Cleopatra’s birth-year is usually assigned to 69 or 68, making her about eleven at the time of her father’s exile. Arsinoe may have been born between 68 and 65, the elder Ptolemy in 62 or 61, and the younger not later than 59 BC.

As it was necessary to replace the absent Ptolemy XIII (whose disappearance, according to some writers, caused his subjects to imagine him dead), the Alexandrians took the natural step of putting the queen-mother at the head of affairs. After a very brief reign she died. It is a curious fact that the one inscription which has been found bearing her name with that of Ptolemy later than 59 is certainly incorrect, for in December 57 she was no longer alive. But the building of great temples, like that at Edfu, begun under the Third Ptolemy and finished under the Thirteenth, went on irrespective of the lives and deaths of kings; and no doubt it took a long time for news to travel from Alexandria through the country, so that the writer of the inscriptions at Edfu may not have known of the queen’s death when he was at work.

On her mother’s death the Princess Berenice mounted the throne, to which her claims were undoubtedly strengthened by her position as only adult among the royal children. There seems to have been no protest against her accession, and endeavours were made to consolidate her power. A deputation was sent to Italy, with what result we have seen. It was impossible for Berenice, though aided by her councillors, to compete with her father at Rome. Perhaps hopes were entertained, however, that the Romans would hesitate to disturb Egypt if they saw it settling down under the peaceful and popularly recognised government of a national princess and her consort. It remained to find the consort. The two little Ptolemies, to whom Egyptian royal custom pointed, were far too young, the elder being no more than five. There being no other Lagidae, it was natural to look to the Syrian family of the Seleucids, which had several times intermarried with the Lagidae in the past. Berenice’s advisers, after two unsuccessful offers to undoubted scions of the family, at last discovered a Seleucos who claimed to be of the Syrian blood royal, and may have been a younger brother of Antiochos XIII, the last King of Syria, dispossessed of his realm by the Roman annexation. He was brought to Alexandria, where he pleased neither Berenice nor her subjects. The Alexandrians, who were as prompt in inventing nicknames as the modem Parisians (not unlike them in this respect alone), for some reason called him Kybiosaktes, “the Saltfish Peddler.” Berenice, who resembled all the princesses of the house of Lagos in possessing a strong will and the ability to act promptly, showed her dislike in still more pronounced fashion. If we may believe Strabo, a few days’ experience of the low and ignoble manners of Seleucos disgusted her so much that she had him strangled. At any rate, he disappeared, and a successor was looked for to sit beside Berenice on the throne of Egypt.

There was in the city of Komana in Pontus a celebrated temple of the goddess Ma, the Tauric Artemis, the high priest of which was a young man of the name of Archelaos. His father, of the same name, was a general of Mithridates the Great, and a very fine soldier, who had passed over to the side of Sulla before the beginning of Rome’s second war with Mithridates. Archelaos the younger was a friend and protege of Pompey, who had given him his priestly post, one little inferior to any of the Asiatic princedoms. He possibly claimed to be a son of Mithridates himself (the number of that king’s illegitimate children being large), and his ambitions were by no means limited to the priesthood. Paying a visit to the headquarters of Gabinius in Syria, Archelaos struck up a friendship with the young cavalry officer Antony. Then, while still in Syria, he attracted the attention of the match-makers of Alexandria, and, probably without asking leave from Gabinius—for the Roman governor had already forbidden one of the Seleucids to accept the offer of Berenice’s hand—he took his departure for Alexandria toward the end of the year 56. On his arrival he pleased the Princess Berenice, was accepted by her as a bridegroom, and began a brief reign of six months at her side.

It has already been said that Gabinius had no difficulty in inventing a pretext for attacking Egypt as soon as he had made up his mind to do so. The Egyptians appear to have been making additions to their fleet, which was a natural proceeding for a largely maritime and commercial nation. Gabinius, however, brought an accusation against Archelaos of plotting to combine with Rome’s old enemies, the Pirates, who still remained the terror of the Mediterranean, in spite of the way in which Pompey had swept them off the seas in 67 BC, acting upon the extraordinary commission which the same Gabinius, then tribune of the people, had procured for him. Archelaos was given no opportunity of answering the accusation or justifying his shipbuilding before the advance of the Roman army against him began.

The march from the Syrian town of Gaza to the Egyptian frontier was always accounted very difficult, but it did not prove so difficult to the Romans now as many invading armies had found it, owing to the admirable way in which Antony pushed ahead with his cavalry and occupied the Isthmus of Suez. The frontier was guarded by the town and fortress of Pelusium (the Sin of the Old Testament), lying on the right bank of the easternmost mouth of the Nile. The fortress was occupied by a Jewish garrison in Egyptian pay, who yielded now to the temptations of their fellow-countryman Antipater, father of Herod the Great, attached to the invading army in that capacity of purveyor in which men of his race have so often made their fortunes. The stronghold was handed over to the Romans without a struggle. An atrocious sequel was narrowly averted by what Plutarch calls Antony’s “love of distinction, proving advantageous even to his enemies.” “For when Ptolemy entered Pelusium,” he says, “and was moved by his passion and hatred to massacre the Egyptians, Antony stood in his way and stopped him.”

Antony won further credit for himself during the Roman advance from Pelusium to Alexandria, handling his cavalry in such a manner as to take the enemy in the rear and secure the victory for the infantry of Gabinius. Archelaos was not without some of the courage which had marked his father; but the Egyptians, or rather the heterogeneous army which fought under the Egyptian flag, were no match for the Romans. It was impossible to check the invasion, which was probably facilitated by desertions to the cause of Ptolemy as he drew nearer to Alexandria. Dion Cassius represents Archelaos as being put to death by Gabinius after the entry into Alexandria. Plutarch says that he was slain in battle, and that Antony, finding the body of his former friend, “interred it with all honours and in kingly fashion.” The Egyptian capital fell quickly after this, for the troops of Archelaos had refused to throw up entrenchments, saying that such work was suitable for labourers, not for soldiers.

Early in April, Ptolemy Auletes was once more King of Egypt, signalising his return by massacres which he would have begun at Pelusium but for Antony’s intervention. The unfortunate young queen Berenice was one of the first to suffer at her father’s hands, and was put to death after a reign of about two years. The rest of Ptolemy’s family, being too young to be implicated in the revolt against his rule, were spared to carry on the succession to the throne for which he had fought so hard with all the weapons which a man of his character could handle. It was now that the fourteen-year-old Cleopatra first met the Roman on whose career she was destined to exercise so disastrous an influence ; and, if we may believe Appian, she now already attracted the attention of the very susceptible soldier.

Ptolemy lived to enjoy his power for another four years. Records of him at this period are scanty, being confined to allusions in the Greek and Latin writers. His chief occupation was the raising of money to pay off the enormous liabilities which he had incurred toward his restorers. As it was obvious that he could never be anything but an unpopular ruler, it was necessary for the Romans to see that he was kept on the throne to which they had brought him back. Gabinius, therefore, when he evacuated Egypt, left behind him some troops as a bodyguard to the king, to take the place of the Macedonian household troops of the earlier Ptolemies. These Gabiniani milites, whom Julius Caesar was later to find so troublesome, were chiefly Gallic and German mounted auxiliaries, but included also some Roman infantry who had fought under the command of Pompey. They took readily to their new duties and developed all the manners of Praetorians. Seven years later Caesar finds them grown accustomed to the life and licence of Alexandria, oblivious of the name and discipline of Rome, and provided with wives from their adopted country. Reinforced by the mercenaries whom Egypt collected under her standard, they were, according to his description, in the habit of “demanding the death of friends of the king, of pillaging private property to supplement their pay, and of exiling and recalling whom they pleased, following the old tradition of the Alexandrian army”—that is to say, the former Macedonian household troops.

Relying on the protection afforded by this bodyguard, Ptolemy set about collecting the money to meet his debts, including the ten thousand talents paid to Gabinius. This sum had nominally been borrowed by the king from a Roman money-lender named Rabirius Postumus, but the real lender appears to have been Julius Caesar, whose appointment in Gaul had freed him from bankruptcy. Cicero in his defence of Rabirius makes great capital of “the incredible generosity” toward his client of Caesar; and, as will be seen later, when Caesar came to Alexandria he claimed repayment of the 17,500,000 drachmae lent to Ptolemy Auletes. For the present, unable to pay Rabirius in cash, Ptolemy made him Controller of Taxes, in order that he might himself see to the collection of what was owing to him. The money-lender made himself so unpopular in his post that at length he was compelled to fly for his life, leaving behind him even his clothes. He had not found his connection with the Egyptian monarch profitable. Having already lent money to him in 59, when Ptolemy was buying Rome’s recognition of his title to the throne, Rabirius had increased his risk later for fear of not getting back his original loan. Now he returned from Egypt to his infuriated countrymen, who reviled him for having worn the uniform of his Egyptian office—“un-Roman dress,” they called it—and proceeded to prosecute him together with Gabinius for their behaviour. Gabinius got off on the charge of “violation of law and impiety in invading Egypt without a decree of the Senate and contrary to the Sibylline Books,” as Appian puts it, but was condemned, on the charge of malversation, to pay a fine of ten thousand talents, the amount which he had received from Ptolemy. Rabirius was also condemned, Cicero being counsel for the defence both in his case and in the second affair of Gabinius. The orator took up these cases, no doubt, to please the triumvirs, but was unfortunate in, meeting a wave of indignation against the way in which the Roman name had been soiled in Egypt.

While Gabinius and Rabirius went into exile to lament their dealings with Ptolemy Auletes, the king, finding it impossible to extract from exhausted Egypt the money to cover his liabilities, left a great part of his debts, with his kingdom, to his children. In the summer of 51 he died, having drawn up a will in which he named as heirs his elder living daughter Cleopatra and his elder son Ptolemy, the fourteenth of the name. He made the Roman people his executors; and, as we are told by the author of the book on the Alexandrian War included in the works of Caesar, called on them to see that his heirs were not changed. One copy of this will he had kept in Alexandria. The other he had sent to Rome to be deposited in the Aerarium, or treasury of the Temple of Saturn; but, owing to the disturbed condition of affairs at Rome, it was sent instead to the house of his friend Pompey.

Cleopatra’s father is commonly recognised as one of the most disreputable of the Ptolemies. There is no recorded act of his which calls for praise, unless it be his solicitude on account of his younger children—which is a small set-oft against his execution of his eldest daughter. He managed to keep on good terms with the native priesthood, and temple-construction and decoration went on during his reign. But the building of temples in Egypt was no more a proof of virtue than the building of churches in the Middle Ages. The Pharaohs of every dynasty, down to those of Mendes and Sebennytos, between the Persian and Macedonian conquests of Egypt, inherited a taste for building with the throne itself; and the Ptolemies imitated the example of their predecessors in this as in so many other respects. Such work as Ptolemy XIII has left behind him at Edfu (where he followed among others one of the worst of his ancestors, Ptolemy VII), Philae, Kom Ombo, and elsewhere, testifies only to the family prudence in conciliating native religious sentiment.

On the other hand, Ptolemy XIII has with seeming justice been accused of most of the crimes and vices in the long catalogue of those which disgraced the characters of his ancestors, while he failed to redeem his lack of morals by any such artistic taste as was displayed, for example, by Ptolemy IV, author of a play called “Adonis,” and builder of a memorial chapel to Homer. His only known polite accomplishment was that which gained him his nickname of Auletes. He was very proud of his skill on the flute, and is said to have entered for public competitions, thus anticipating the conduct of Nero, the Imperial singer. The name of Auletes has clung to him in history, but the titles which he assumed himself were Philopator, Philadelphos, both of them commonly assumed separately by the Lagidae, and Neos Dionysos. Ptolemy IV had already called himself Dionysos. Both kings appear to have attempted to deserve the name by their indulgence in wine. Lucian tells a story illustrative of the Thirteenth Ptolemy’s enthusiasm for his patron god. In his reign the Dionysiac festival was celebrated with great orgies. On one occasion the Platonic philosopher Demetrios, who was a water-drinker, was the only man in Egypt who did not wear the women’s clothes prescribed for men during the rather indecorous festival. He was denounced to the king, and only saved his life by getting drunk early in the morning, putting on effeminate Tarentine robes, and dancing in public to the sound of cymbals. This display of religious fervour appeased the New Dionysos.

For this Ptolemy’s morals and the way in which he governed his country it is impossible to find any excuse. But there is some for his attitude toward Rome. He was a weak vassal king dealing with a powerful and greedy suzerain, and had, as has already been said, only one means of keeping that suzerain’s hands off his kingdom. It is hard to imagine how a virtuous Ptolemy would have dealt with Rome. If Cleopatra showed herself something of a stateswoman in her attitude toward the lords of the world, we cannot deny her father all credit for diplomatic talent. His enormous expenditure of money, leading to the impoverishment of a naturally wealthy country, doubtless had as its first object the preservation of his own worthless life and rule; but it also temporarily prolonged the existence of Egypt as an independent state. Dr. Mahaffy goes so far as to see in the will of Ptolemy XIII evidence of “a strong feeling for his family and perhaps even for his country.” This is assuredly to give the Devil no less than his due. The chief impression left on the mind by the last ruling King of Egypt is that of a pitiful blackguard and debauchee.

 

CLEOPATRA AND PTOLEMY XIV

 

“Queen, Lady of the Two Lands, Divine Daughter, her Father loving.” Such is the title under which, in the hieroglyphic inscriptions of her own country, appears the woman known in the history of the world as Cleopatra the Great. Unhappily it is almost true to say that the Egyptian records of her reign give us very little more about her than this title. Were it not for the historians of the Roman Empire, writing in Greek or in Latin, her memory would long ago have been forgotten by all save archaeologists.

In the two preceding chapters there may be found all that can be ascertained about Cleopatra’s childhood; which reduces itself to Appian’s statement that she was at Alexandria and was seen by Marcus Antonius at the time of her father’s restoration in 55 BC. We know also that she was born about 69 or 68 BC, probably in 69. Beyond this, all concerning her early days must necessarily be a matter of deduction or conjecture. Her birth took place in the twelfth year of her father’s reign. When she was about ten, he succeeded in obtaining Rome’s recognition of himself as King of Egypt, but almost immediately he was forced by popular outcry to leave Alexandria, abandoning his family with his kingdom. At his restoration the four youngest members of the family were still alive, Cleopatra, the eldest, being about fourteen years old. The greater part of her fourteen years must have been spent in the vast palace at Alexandria, a regular fortress as well as a dwelling-place, like all the palaces of the Pharaohs who preceded the Macedonian dynasty in Egypt. The harem-life here was, like almost everything else under the Ptolemies, a blend of Greek and Egyptian. The conditions no longer prevailed which had made Ramses II, for instance, the father of two hundred children. But the apartments of the “Secluded” continued to deserve their name; and thanks to an institution of the Fourth Ptolemy, whom the early historians made out to have been the most criminally worthless of his whole family, life in them had one feature usually associated with Oriental despotism which had been lacking under the Pharaohs. The royal princes in the old days had been brought up in the Great House of the “Good God,” their father, under the care of high Court officials known by the curious name of their “nurses.” Ptolemy IV introduced the custom of giving the children eunuchs to look after them, and we find these eunuchs called by the classical writers nutritii, which recalls the old name. The eunuchs of her brother Ptolemy XIV and her sister Arsinoe, Potheinos and Ganymedes, figure in history ; but we hear of no such nutritius in the case of Cleopatra, doubtless because she emancipated herself early from such control.

That Cleopatra received what is called a good general education might be gathered from the fact that she acquired such an ascendancy over Julius Caesar and Antony, one a man of genuine, the other of superficial, culture. She was undoubtedly a remarkable linguist, even if modern writers are justified in suspecting the ancients of exaggerating her skill. “As she could easily turn her tongue, like a many-stringed instrument, to any language that she pleased,” says Plutarch, she had very seldom need of an interpreter for her converse with barbarous peoples. She could herself speak to most, such as Ethiopians, Troglodytes, Hebrews, Arabs, Syrians, Medes, Parthians. She is said also to have learnt the language of many other peoples, although the kings her predecessors had not even taken the pains to learn the Egyptian language, and some of them had even forgotten the Macedonian dialect.”

Plutarch’s testimony to the appearance of Cleopatra, and the nature of her fascination, has been received in modern days with less suspicion than what he says about her gift of tongues. Whereas Dion Cassius describes her as “most exceedingly beautiful of women,” the older historian writes in the passage immediately preceding that quoted above: “Her beauty, it is said, was not altogether beyond comparison, nor such that no one could look on her without being struck by it. But familiarity with her had an irresistible charm, and the^- attraction of her person, combined with her persuasive manner of speech, and with the peculiar character which was evident in all that she said or did, was something bewitching. There was a sweetness also in the mere sound of her voice.”

Concerning her general character, there will be an opportunity to speak later on; but it may be remarked here that, if the Court of Alexandria and the house of the Lagidae at this period in their history had been able to produce a good woman, it would have been a miracle. Constant in-breeding, while not impairing the strength, seems to have eliminated whatever good there was originally in this Macedonian family. The day has passed when it was necessary to insist upon the non-Egyptian, and purely Greek, blood of the Lagidae. Cleopatra’s father was an illegitimate son of the Tenth Ptolemy, whose father, Ptolemy IX, was fifth in descent from Ptolemy the son of Lagos, the prudent and amiable general of Alexander the Great. Apart from the fact that the mother of Ptolemy Auletes is unknown, and from the doubt entertained by some as to the mother of the four younger children of Auletes, there can be no hesitation in describing Cleopatra as wholly Macedonian-Greek by race. Those who would look for traces of Semitic blood in her have nothing to rely upon except the fantastic argument drawn from the length of her nose. The only intruder into the Lagid house since its foundation was a Syrian princess; but she was the Fifth Ptolemy’s wife, Cleopatra I, daughter of Antiochos the Great, and therefore as Greek as her husband’s family.

In this genealogy numbering so many Ptolemies, Cleopatras, Berenices, and Arsinoes, there was a vastly preponderating majority of bad people over good. After the first of the family, the son of Lagos (though the scandal of his time would make him really son of Philip Amyntas, King of Macedon), there were only two Ptolemies, the Third and the Seventh, to whom, as Sharpe says, “history can point with pleasure.” Among the women the Syrian Cleopatra alone stands out as admirable. On the other hand, to look only at the direct ancestors of our Cleopatra and to neglect all crimes but family murders, the Second Ptolemy had slain two brothers; the Fourth his brother, his uncle, and possibly his mother ; the Ninth, nicknamed Physkon or “the Bloated,” his son and his infant nephew; while Auletes, as we have seen, killed his daughter Berenice. Cleopatra III, grandmother of Auletes, is accused of having killed her mother before she was herself put to death by her younger son, Ptolemy Alexander, with some irony called Philometor, “loving his Mother.” Ordinary murders, massacres, cruel misgovernment and tyranny, and general morality of a kind which almost defies description, may perhaps seem venial in comparison with such treatment of kindred. It must be remembered, of course, that hardly one of the Lagidae lacked enemies only too eager to heap the worst accusations upon him or her, and that those in particular who were not friendly to the Jews have suffered through the undue importance attached until recently to the writings of Josephus, to whose good opinion the only passport was favour shown to the men of his race. Yet a careful sifting of the evidence leaves little good to be said for the character of the Ptolemies, outwardly splendid though their dominion over Egypt appeared.

The culture of the Macedonian kings was better than their morals, two of them, Ptolemy II Philadelphos and Ptolemy IV Philopator, to some extent redeeming very bad reputations by their love of Greek learning, while Ptolemy III Euergetes appealed alike to Greek savants and to Egyptian priests, and at the same time comes down to history a virtuous man owing to the absence of scandalous stories about his private life. For the most part the literary and artistic sympathies of the Lagidae remained Hellenic. The Macedonian rulers at Alexandria became Egyptianised more slowly than the Manchu rulers at Peking, who furnish the nearest modern parallel to them, have become Chinese. Few of the Lagidae even learnt the Egyptian tongue; and Cleopatra, acquainted with Egyptian in addition to the languages of some of the neighbouring peoples, is a striking exception in her family. They adopted the Egyptian royal custom of marriage between brother and sister in order to preserve the purity of “the children of Amon-Ra,” which they had become, like previous dynasties of Pharaohs, by mounting the throne of Egypt. From the time of Ptolemy V Epiphanes they had restored the old custom of coronation at Memphis with native ceremonies, being crowned, after the proper ablutions, in the Hall of the Royal Diadem, with the white conical cap of the King of the South and the red crown of the King of the North, and thereafter going in solemn procession to the temple of their father Ra to receive the divine influence shed by him on his successors and representatives.

The principal way in which the Ptolemies submitted to Egyptian influence was in the adoption of the gods of the country, as in the case of Ra the Sun-god at the coronation ceremony. As far as possible the Egyptian divinities were identified with those of Greece, a process which Alexander the Great had begun with the equation of Zeus and Amon, Osiris and Dionysos. Thus there had sprung into existence a whole “bastard pantheon,” in whose temples, built in many cases by the worshippers themselves, the Ptolemies religiously officiated, if only through the medium of a priestly proxy; for it is disputed whether they ever performed the offices in person except at the coronation and on such occasions as the dedication of a temple. In any case we need not inquire how much belief the Macedonian kings of Egypt put into their worship. If Henri of Navarre found Paris worth a mass and other royal personages have since found it possible to accept a creed with a crown, we may excuse the Ptolemies for putting on with the white and red diadems of Upper and Lower Egypt an attitude of devotion toward Amon-Ra, their “divine ancestor,” toward Osiris, Isis, and a host of other deities. With Cleopatra the case was the same as with her family before her. Her forefathers had built temples to the Egyptian gods, while remaining, for the most part, unprincipled Greeks and not troubling their heads as to what lay behind the curious and often grotesque symbolism of their adopted religion. Cleopatra’s life shows her acting no differently.

When she came to the throne about June, 51 BC, Cleopatra was either eighteen or in her eighteenth year. According to the terms of her father’s will she was to reign jointly with her brother Ptolemy Dionysos, who was at most eleven years old, and was to marry him in accordance with custom. In making the Roman people his executors Auletes had been careful to request them to see that the succession was not changed. It has been very plausibly suggested that the cause of this request was that the unpopularity of the young Princess Cleopatra in Alexandria, which became marked later on, had already shown itself and that her father feared an attempt on the part of the Alexandrians to substitute her sister Arsinoe for her. This would indeed explain the violent hatred which Cleopatra subsequently manifested for Arsinoe. But we know of no reason why Cleopatra should have been already unpopular in Alexandria.

Anyhow there was apparently no protest against her accession, either at Alexandria or at Rome. The precaution taken by Auletes to have copies of his will in both places safeguarded his daughter. A revolt at Alexandria would have been imprudent in the absence of any indication how the suzerain Power regarded the new reign ; and Cleopatra’s advisers did not hasten to send news to Rome of her father’s death until she was first established on the throne of Egypt.

What happened at the beginning of the joint rule of Cleopatra and Ptolemy XIV is obscure; for, although Latin and Greek writers soon afterwards begin to pay close attention to Egyptian affairs, the native sources of information have already failed almost entirely. It may be gathered from the subsequent course of events that the queen asserted herself very early. It was in the blood of the women of the Lagid family to grasp at power, and Cleopatra at the age of eleven had seen her sister Berenice, possibly eight years her senior, taking a prominent part in the affairs of State. With her masterful disposition she can have wanted no inducement to follow Berenice’s example. Now, the native Egyptians were not the people to quarrel with the idea of rule by a woman. Nitocris and the queen of whom we have heard much in recent years, Hatshepsut, were only two out of a number of powerful women who had governed the country. The Ptolemies had done much to countenance the idea of equality of the sexes in the matter of inheritance, and the women of the family accustomed Egypt to the sight of their intervention in public affairs. As for Alexandria, in spite of its Macedonian-Greek origin, the city had felt the power of Egypt, the often-conquered land, to absorb its conquerors; and its inhabitants, while developing a character of their own, had grown in many ways more Egyptian than Greek.

The opposition to Cleopatra’s predominance, however, arose in Alexandria, within the walls of the palace itself. The young Ptolemy XIV remained under the care of his eunuch nutritius, Potheinos, a man of unscrupulous ambition. With Potheinos were associated Achillas, described by Plutarch as an Egyptian, who commanded the troops in Alexandria, or at least those troops attached to the person of the king; and Theodotos, a Greek rhetorician from Samos, one of the many miserable pedagogues of the period. Theodotos was Ptolemy’s tutor, Achillas his military adviser, and Potheinos his treasurer and counsellor in general. These men were determined in taking advantage of the king’s minority to rule Egypt in his name. Between them and Cleopatra, equally bent on ruling Egypt herself, there could be no friendship, and but little provocation was wanted to bring about open strife.

It was not until the third year of the joint reign, however, that the rival parties came to blows. The little information which we have of these years shows a troublous state of affairs at Alexandria. The soldiers originally left by Gabinius as a bodyguard to Ptolemy Auletes were completely out of the control of their nominal masters. In the first year of Cleopatra and her brother it occurred to Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus, Julius Caesar’s aristocratic colleague in the consulship of 59, and now proconsular governor of Syria, to send to Alexandria an order for these men to rejoin the Roman ranks and take part in the war which he was contemplating against the Parthians. He entrusted the message to two of his sons. The “Gabinians” had no mind to give up their pleasant position in Egypt and, enraged at the attempt of Bibulus, killed the two envoys. Cleopatra, who had good reasons for not quarrelling with Rome, seized the ringleaders and sent them in chains to Bibulus. The proconsul, quite in the style of the old Roman noble, returned the prisoners to her, saying that the right of inflicting punishment belonged not to him, but to the Senate. And here, strangely, the matter seems to have ended.

The second occasion on which we hear of the affairs of Egypt during the years 51-49 BC is also connected partly with the Gabinians. A breach had begun to open between Julius Caesar and Pompey immediately after the death of Julia, daughter of the former and wife of the latter (though her husband was older than her father), and early in 49 it was past healing. In preparation for the inevitable war Pompey sent his elder son Cnaeus, destined to die fighting against Caesar in Spain, to procure corn, men, and ships from Egypt. Pompey being regarded as the patron of the Lagid dynasty, his son was well received in Alexandria. From an allusion in Plutarch’s Life of Antony, it is gathered that the young queen had an intrigue with Cnaeus Pompeius during his visit to Egypt. Had this piece of scandal been found in any of the other classical writers about Cleopatra, it might have been regarded as part of the usual abuse of the enemy of Rome; and, as it is, we have no knowledge of whence Plutarch derived his information.

Whether or not Cnaeus Pompeius made an appeal to the queen in any other capacity than those of son of the benefactor of her house and representative of the Roman Government, he succeeded in his mission. He took with him when he left Alexandria fifty warships, some with three, some with five banks of oars, and a force of five hundred men drawn from the Gabinians. With these he set out to join Bibulus, who was now admiral in command of Pompey’s fleet in the Adriatic.

The next we hear of Cleopatra is in the early autumn of the following year, when she was an exile from Egypt. The course of events in the meanwhile is unknown, and is likely to remain so unless some discovery in Egypt is destined one day to throw light on a period about which no Egyptian record hitherto found has anything to say. As the young Ptolemy attained his majority, at the age of fourteen, in 48, Dr. Mahaffy suggests that his proclamation at Memphis was followed by his assumption of sole control of the kingdom and by the expulsion of Cleopatra. It seems possible that Cleopatra’s unpopularity in Alexandria, whether existing before her accession or due to her ambition to rule without her brother, had been increased by her yielding to the Pompeian requisitions from Egypt. There may have been a fight between her adherents and her brother’s, but we cannot be sure concerning anything except the fact that in the autumn of 48, when she was about twenty-one years of age, Cleopatra was a fugitive across the eastern frontier of Egypt, pursued by the king’s army. Having, like all princesses of the wealthy house of Lagos, ample funds at her disposal, she was able to command the services of mercenaries. But there seems to have been no probability of her restoration to the throne but for the intervention at this point of the Romans.

The representatives of Rome made a tragic entrance upon the scene. On September 28th two Egyptian armies lay opposite one another at the foot of Mount Casius, a height rising near the coast-line on the high-road from Egypt to Syria, and not far from Pelusium. Cleopatra’s forces were stationed to the eastward, Ptolemy’s to the west and close to the sea, barring the way to Pelusium. In the camp of the king an eager debate was in progress. Messengers had just arrived announcing that Pompey the Great, flying after his defeat at Pharsalia, was on his way to seek the hospitality of the king, whose father he had befriended, housed, and helped to restore, and of whose family he had been the patron. While reminding the king of Pompey’s claims upon him, the messengers also recalled to some of the Gabinian troops in his army that they had once fought under Pompey. A royal council was held, at which were present Potheinos the eunuch, Theodotos the rhetorician, and Achillas the Egyptian. “Such was the court whose decision Pompeius awaited, while he thought it beneath him to owe his life to Caesar,” remarks Plutarch, whose admirable narrative of Pompey’s end is one of the most dramatic passages in the work of the most dramatic prose-writer of ancient times. There was a diversity of opinion in the council, but finally Theodotos rose and carried the day by a speech in which he declared that it was unsafe either to receive Pompey or to drive him away. In the first case they would have Caesar as an enemy and Pompey as a master, he argued ; in the second, Pompey as an enemy and Caesar also, if they gave him the trouble of pursuing Pompey. The best course would be to send for Pompey and then to slay him. Thus they would please Caesar and have nothing to fear from Pompey. “ Dead men do not bite,” he concluded with a smile.

Pompey had meanwhile arrived off the coast. After his escape from Greece he had picked up in Lesbos Cornelia, the last of his five wives, and his younger son Sextus, and with them proceeded to Asia Minor. A council of his supporters was held, at which he expressed his desire of taking refuge with one of the foreign kings in order to avoid falling into the hands of Caesar. The names of Orodes of Parthia and Juba the Numidian were suggested. But his Greek friend, Theophanes of Lesbos, “pronounced it madness to pass over Egypt, which was only three days’ sail away, and Ptolemaeus, who was still a boy and was indebted to Pompeius for the friendship and favour which his father had received from him, and to put himself into the hands of the treacherous Parthians.” Pompey took this advice, and decided to entrust himself to those who were to treat him worse than even the treacherous Parthians would have done. He reached the Egyptian coast with a few ships and about two thousand men, having learnt, in Cyprus perhaps, what was the state of affairs in Egypt and where the king was. He waited on board his own ship with his wife, child, and friends, until his messengers should return. They came back with an invitation from Ptolemy to come to his camp, and soon after them a small boat, a mere fishing-smack, was seen setting off from the shore. In it were Achillas, two Roman centurions Septimius and Salvius, of whom the former had once served under Pompey, and three or four slaves. When the boat came alongside Pompey’s ship, Septimius saluted him as “Imperator,” and Achillas, speaking in Greek, invited him to enter the boat, explaining that the water was too shallow to allow a trireme to approach the shore. This was to disarm the Pompeian party’s suspicions, which had indeed been aroused at the smallness of the boat. It seemed too late now, however, to draw back, as Egyptian warships could be seen embarking their crews. The old Roman general therefore embraced his weeping and terrified wife, ordered two of his own centurions, his freedman Philippus, and a slave to get into the boat, and then, as he stepped in himself, turned to Cornelia and Sextus and repeated the words of Sophocles :

Whoever to a tyrant goes

Becomes his slave, though going free.

These were the last words which his friends on the ship heard. In the boat no one spoke to him. Looking at Septimius he said: “Am I mistaken, or have we been together in the wars?” Septimius nodded, but made no reply, so Pompey took up a written speech in Greek, which he intended for Ptolemy’s hearing, and began to read through it. As the boat neared the shore, some of the king’s people were seen collecting as if to meet it at the landing-stage. Pompey took his freedman’s hand to help himself to rise, when Septimius, who was behind him, ran him through, while Salvius and Achillas also drew their swords. Pulling his toga over his head with both hands, Pompey uttered a groan and fell dead.

Thus was murdered, on the day before his fifty-eighth birthday, Cnaeus Pompeius Magnus, bringing to a close a life of consummate good luck with a death which Plutarch has made world-famous, and appealing to our hearts more by his last failure than by the innumerable successes which preceded it. Professor Mommsen, with his usual sweeping severity, saw in Pompey “an example of spurious greatness to which history knows no parallel,” though allowing him, what cannot be denied, the virtues of a good soldier, who was at the same time “ neither a bad nor an incapable man.” Pompey indeed, but for his stiff egotism, his irritating vacillation, and his lack of personal charm, would be a more sympathetic character than most of his distinguished contemporaries; for, unlike the majority of them, he was neither morally vile nor financially corrupt.

It is perhaps fortunate for Cleopatra’s fame that at the time of Pompey’s arrival in Egypt she was in a camp hostile to that of the Egyptian Government, although it is possible that she would have been mercifully inclined toward the father of Cnaeus and the friend of her own father. Still, it would have been a difficult problem for her to know how to deal with the chief of the losing party in the civil struggle of Rome. Ptolemy XIV was doubtless personally innocent of the crime which was committed in his name, being but fourteen years old and under the control of his wretched advisers. But for the dynastic quarrel in Egypt the Court would have been at Alexandria when Pompey arrived, and matters might have taken a different turn. It is unlikely however, that the Alexandrians, who attacked the victorious Caesar when he came with a considerably superior force, would have been afraid to kill the fugitive Pompey, attended by a handful of other fugitives.