THE DIVINE HISTORY OF JESUS CHRIST

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF CLEOPATRA, QUEEN OF EGYPT

PART I.

CLEOPATRA AND CAESAR

CHAPTER VI.

CLEOPATRA AND CAESAR IN THE BESIEGED PALACE AT ALEXANDRIA.

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

Before the end of that eventful night Caesar seems to have determined to excite the passionate love of that wild and irresponsible girl, whose personality and political importance made a doubly powerful appeal to him ; and ere the light of dawn had entered the room his decision to restore her to the throne, and to place her brother in the far background, had been irrevocably made. As the sun rose he sent for King Ptolemy, who, on entering Caesar’s presence, must have been dismayed to be confronted with his sister whom he had driven into exile and against whom he had so recently been fighting at Pelusium. It would appear that Caesar treated him with sternness, asking him how he had dared to go against the wishes of his father, who had entrusted their fulfilment to the Roman people, and demanding that he should at once make his peace with Cleopatra. At this the young man lost his temper, and, rushing from the room, cried out to his friends and attendants who were waiting outside that he had been betrayed and that his cause was lost. Snatching the royal diadem from his head in his boyish rage and chagrin, he dashed it upon the ground, and, no doubt, burst into tears. Thereupon an uproar arose, and the numerous Alexandrians who still remained within the Roman lines at once gathering round their King, nearly succeeded in communicating their excitement to the royal troops in the city, and arousing them to a concerted attack upon the Palace by land and sea. Caesar, however, hurried out and addressed the crowd, promising to arrange matters to their satisfaction; and thereupon he called a meeting at which Ptolemy and Cleopatra were both induced to attend, and he read out  to them their father’s will wherein it was emphatically stated that they were to reign together. He reiterated his right, as representative of the Roman people, to adjust the dispute; and at last he appears to have effected a reconciliation between the brother and sister.

The unfortunate Ptolemy must have realised that from that moment his ambitions and hopes were become dust and ashes, for he would now always remain under the scrutiny of his elder sister; and the liberty of action for which he and his ministers had plotted and schemed was for ever gone. According to Dion Cassius, he could already see plainly that there was an understanding between Caesar and his sister; and Cleopatra’s manner doubtless betrayed to him her elation. She must have been intensely excited. A few hours previously she had been an exile, creeping back to her own city in imminent danger of her life; now, not only was she Queen of Egypt once more, but she had won the esteem and, so it seemed, the heart also of the Autocrat of the world, whose word was absolute law to the nations. One may almost picture her making faces at her brother as they sat opposite one another in Caesar’s improvised court of justice, and the unhappy boy’s distress must have been acute.

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

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

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

He was not much troubled by the situation. It is said that he was obliged more than once to keep awake all night in order to protect himself against assassination ; but such a contingency did not interfere to any great extent with his enjoyments of the life in the Alexandrian Palace. From early youth he must have been accustomed to the thought of the assassin’s knife.

His many love-affairs had made imminent each day the possibility of sudden death, and his political and administrative career also laid him open at all times to a murderous attack. The jealousy of the husbands whose wives he had stolen, the vengeance of the survivors of the massacres instigated by him, the resentment of the politicians whose ambitions he had thwarted, and the hatred of innumerable persons whom, in one way or another, he had offended, placed his life in continuous jeopardy. The machinations of Potheinos, therefore, left him undismayed, and he was able to prosecute what was, in plain language, the seduction of the Queen of Egypt with an undistracted mind.

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

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

The gaiety of the life in the besieged Palace, and the progress of the romance which was there being enacted, were rudely disturbed by two consecutive events which led at once to the outbreak of really serious hostilities. 

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

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

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

So confident now was he in his strength that he next sailed round the island, and attacked the Egyptian fleet in its own harbour beyond the Heptastadium, inflicting heavy losses upon them. He then landed on the western end of Pharos, which was still held by the enemy, carried the forts by storm, and effected a junction with his own men who were stationed around the lighthouse at the eastern end. His plan was to advance across the Heptastadium, and thus, by holding both the island and the mole, to obtain possession of the western Harbour of the Happy Return and ultimately to strike a wedge into the city upon that side. But here he suffered a dangerous reverse. While he was leading in person the attack upon the south or city end of the Heptastadium, and his men were crowding on to it from the island and from the vessels in the Great Harbour, the Egyptians made a spirited attack upon its northern end, thus hemming the Romans in upon the narrow causeway, to the consternation of those who watched the battle from the Lochias

Promontory. Fortunately vessels were at hand to take off the survivors of this sanguinary engagement, as the enemy drove them back from either end of the causeway; and presently they had all scrambled aboard and were rowing at full speed across the Great Harbour. Such numbers, however, jumped on to the deck of the vessel into which Caesar had entered that it capsized, and we are then presented with the dramatic picture of the ruler of the world swimming for his life through the quiet waters of the harbour, holding aloft in one hand a bundle of important papers which he happened to be carrying at the moment of the catastrophe, dragging his scarlet military cloak along by his teeth, and at the same time constantly ducking his rather bald head under the water to avoid the missiles which were hurled at him by the victorious Egyptians, who must have been capering about upon the recaptured mole, all talking and shouting at once. He was, however, soon picked up by one of his ships; and thus he returned to the Palace, very cold and dripping wet, and having in the end lost the cloak which was the cherished mark of his rank. Four hundred legionaries and a number of seamen perished in this engagement, most of them being drowned; and now, perhaps for the first time, it began to appear to Caesar that the warfare which he was waging was not the amusing game he had thought it. For at least four months he had entertained himself in the Palace, spending his days in pottering around his perfectly secure defences and his nights in enjoying the company of Cleopatra. Up till now he must have been in constant receipt of news from Rome, where his affairs were being managed by Antony, his boisterous but fairly reliable lieutenant, and it is evident that nothing had occurred there to necessitate his return. Far from being hemmed in within the Palace and obliged to fight for his life, as is generally supposed to have been the case, it seems to me that his position at all times was as open as it was secure. He could have travelled across the Mediterranean at any moment; and, had he thought it desirable, he could have sailed over to Italy for a few weeks and returned to Alexandria without any great risk. His fleet had shown itself quite capable of defending him from danger upon the high seas, as, for example, when he had sailed out to meet the Thirty-seventh Legion; and, as on that occasion, his troops could have been left in security in their fortified position. Supplies from Syria were plentiful, and the Rhodian sailors, after escorting him as far as Cyprus, could have returned to their duties at Alexandria in order to ensure the safe and continuous arrival of these stores and provisions.

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER VII.

THE BIRTH OF CAESARION AND CAESAR’S DEPARTURE FROM EGYPT.