THE DIVINE HISTORY OF JESUS CHRIST

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF CLEOPATRA, QUEEN OF EGYPT

PART I.

CLEOPATRA AND CAESAR

CHAPTER III.

THE BIRTH AND EARLY YEARS OF CLEOPATRA.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The women of this family were even more violent than the men. Mahaffy describes their characteristics in the following words: Great power and wealth, which makes an alliance with them imply the command of large resources in men and money; mutual hatred; disregard of all ties of family and affection; the dearest object fratricide—such pictures of depravity as make any reasonable man pause and ask whether human nature had deserted these women and the Hyrcanian tiger of the poet taken its place.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER IV.

THE DEATH OF POMPEY AND THE ARRIVAL OF CAESAR IN EGYPT.