THE DIVINE HISTORY OF JESUS CHRIST

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF CLEOPATRA, QUEEN OF EGYPT

PART I.

CLEOPATRA AND CAESAR

CHAPTER VIII.

CLEOPATRA AND CAESAR IN ROME.

Caesar’s movements during the year after his departure from Egypt do not, for the purpose of this narrative, require to be recorded in detail. From Alexandria, which he may have left at about the middle of the first week in July, he sailed in a fast-going galley across the 500 miles of open sea to Antioch, arriving at that city a few days before the middle of that month. There he spent a day or two in regulating the affairs of the country, and presently sailed on to Ephesus, some 600 miles from Antioch, which he probably reached at the end of the third week of July. At Antioch he heard that one of his generals, Domitius Calvinus, had been defeated by Pharnakes, the son of Mithridates the Great, and had been driven out of Pontus, and it seems that he at once sent three legions to the aid of the beaten troops with orders to await in north-western Galatia or Cappadocia for his coming. After a day or two at Ephesus, Caesar travelled with extreme rapidity to the rendezvous, taking with him only a thousand cavalry; and arriving at Zela, 500 miles from Ephesus, on or before August 2nd, at once defeated the rebels. It had been his custom in Gaul to travel by himself at the rate of a hundred miles a day, and even with a heavily laden army he covered over forty miles a day, as for example in his march from Rome to Spain, which he accomplished in twenty-seven days, and he may thus have joined his main army and commenced his preparations for the battle of Zela as early as the last days of July. The crushing defeat which he inflicted on the enemy so shortly after taking over the command was thus a feat of which he might justly be proud, and it so tickled his vanity that in writing to a friend of his in Rome, named Amantius, he described the campaign in the three famous words, Veni, vidi, vici, “I came, I saw, I conquered,” which so clearly indicate that he was beginning to regard himself as a sort of swift-footed, irresistible demigod.

Thence he sailed at last for Italy, and reached Rome at the end of September, almost exactly a year after his arrival in Egypt. He remained in Rome not more than two and a half months, and about the middle of December he set out for North Africa, where Cato, Scipio, and other fugitive friends of Pompey had established a provisional government with the assistance of Juba, King of Numidia, and were gathering their forces. Arriving at Hadrumetum on December 28th, he at once began the war, which soon ended in the entire defeat and extermination of the enemy at Thapsus on April 6th. Of the famous Pompeian leaders, Faustus Sulla, Lucius Africanus, and Lucius Julius Caesar were put to death; and Lucius Manlius Torquatus, Marcus Petreius, Scipio, and Cato committed suicide; while, according to Plutarch, some fifty thousand men were slain in the rout. Arriving once more in Rome on July 25th, BC 46, Caesar at once began to prepare for his Triumph which was to take place in the following month; and it would seem that he had already sent messengers to Cleopatra, who had spent a quiet year of maternal interests in Alexandria, to tell her to come with their baby to Rome.

According to Dion, the Queen arrived shortly after the Triumph, but several modern writers are of opinion that she reached the capital in time for that event. I am disposed to think that she made the journey to Italy in company with the Egyptian prisoners who were to be displayed in the procession, Princess Arsinoe, the eunuch Ganymedes, and others, whom Caesar probably sent for in the late spring of this year soon after the battle of Thapsus. Cleopatra could not have been averse to witnessing the Triumph, for she must have regarded the late warfare in Alexandria not so much as a Roman campaign against the Egyptians as an Egypto-Roman suppression of an Alexandrian insurrection. The serious part of the campaign could be interpreted as having been waged by Caesar on behalf of herself and her brother, Ptolemy XIV, against the rebels Achillas and Ganymedes, and later against this same Ptolemy who had gone over to the enemy; and the victory might thus be celebrated both by her and by her Roman champion. It would therefore be fitting that she should be a spectator of the degradation of Arsinoe and Ganymedes; and her presence in Rome at this time would obviously be desirable to her as indicating that she and her country had suffered no defeat. Caesar, on his part, must have desired her presence that she might witness the dramatic demonstration of his power and popularity. He had just been made Dictator for the third time, and this appointment no doubt led him to feel the security of his position and the imminence of that rise to monarchical power in which Cleopatra and their son were to play so essential a part. He was beginning to regard himself as above criticism; and his two great victories, in Pontus and Numidia, following upon his nine months of regal life in Egypt, had somewhat turned his head, so that he no longer considered the advisability of delaying his future consort’s introduction to the people of Rome. He had yet much to accomplish before he could ascend with her the throne of the world, but there can be no question whatsoever that he now desired Cleopatra to begin to make herself known in the capital; and, this being so, it seems to me to be highly probable that he would wish her to refute, by her presence as a witness of his Triumph, any suggestion that she herself was to be included in that conquered Egypt about which he was so continuously boasting.

The Queen of Egypt’s arrival in Rome must have caused something of a sensation. Cartloads of baggage, and numerous agitated eunuchs and slaves doubtless heralded her approach and followed in her train. Her little brother, Ptolemy XV, now eleven or twelve years of age, whom she had probably feared to leave alone in Alexandria lest he should follow the family tradition and declare himself sole monarch, had been forced to accompany her, and now added considerably to the commotion of her arrival. The one-year-old heir of the Caesars and of the Ptolemies, surrounded by guards and fussing nurses, must, however, have been the cynosure of all eyes; for every Roman guessed its parentage, knowing as they did the peculiarities of their Dictator. Cleopatra and her suite were accommodated in Caesar’s transtiberini horti, where a charming house stood amidst beautiful gardens on the right bank of the Tiber, near the site of the modern Villa Panfili; and it is to be presumed that his legal wife Calpurnia was left as mistress of another establishment within the city.

Caesar’s attitude towards Cleopatra at this time is not easily defined. It is not to be presumed that he was still very deeply in love with her; for natures such as his are totally incapable of continued devotion. During his residence in North Africa in the winter or early spring, he had been much attracted by Eunoe, the wife of Bogud, King of Mauretania, and had consoled himself for the temporary loss of Cleopatra by making her his mistress. Yet the Queen of Egypt still exercised a very considerable influence over him; and when she came to Rome it may be supposed that in his transpontine villa they resumed with some satisfaction the intimate life which they had enjoyed in the Alexandrian Palace. The first infatuation was over, however, and both Caesar and Cleopatra must have felt that the basis of their relationship was now a business agreement designed for their mutual benefit. In all but name they were married, and it was the fixed intention of both that their marriage should presently be recognised in Rome as it already had been in Egypt. Caesar, I suppose, took keen pleasure in the company of the witty, vivacious, and regal girl; and he was extremely happy to see her lodged in his villa, whither he could repair at any time of the day or night to enjoy her brilliant and refreshing society. Their baby son, too, was a source of interest and enjoyment to him. He was now fourteen months old, and his likeness to Caesar, so pronounced in after years, must already have been apparent. Suetonius states that the boy came to resemble his father very closely, and both in looks and in manners, notably in his walk, showed very clearly his origin. These resemblances, already able to be observed, must have delighted Caesar, who took such careful pride in his own appearance and personality; and they must have formed a bond between himself and Cleopatra as nearly permanent as anything could be in his progressive and impatient nature. The Queen, on her part, probably still took extreme pleasure in the companionship of the great Dictator, who represented an ideal both of manhood and of social charm. She must have loved the fertility of his mind, the autocratic power of his will, and the energy of his personality; and though premature age and ill-health were beginning to diminish his aptitude for the role of ardent swain, she found in him, no doubt, a lovable friend and husband, and one with whom the intimacies of daily comradeship were a cause of genuine happiness. They were as well suited to one another as two ambitious characters could be; and, moreover, they were irrevocably bound to one another by the memory of past passion not yet altogether in abeyance, by the sympathy of mutual understanding, by the identity of their worldly interests, and by the responsibilities of correlative parentage.

The arrival of Cleopatra in Rome of course caused a scandal, to which Caesar showed his usual nonchalant indifference. People were sorry for the Dictator’s legal wife Calpurnia, who, since her marriage in BC 59, had been left so much alone by her husband; and they were shocked by the open manner in which the members of the Caesarian party paid court to the Queen. I find no evidence to justify the modern belief¹ that Roman society was at the time annoyed at the introduction of an eastern lady into its midst; for everybody must have known that Cleopatra had not one drop of Egyptian blood in her veins, and must have realised that she was a pure Macedonian Greek, ruling over a city which was the centre of Greek culture and civilisation. But at the same time there is evidence to show that the Romans did not like her. Cicero wrote that he detested her; and Dion says that the people pitied Princess Arsinoe, her sister, whose degradation was a consequence of Cleopatra’s success with Caesar. On the whole, however, her advent did not cause as much stir as might have been expected, for she seems to have acted with tactful moderation in the capital, and to have avoided all ostentation.

The Triumph which Caesar celebrated in August for the amusement of Rome and for his own enjoyment was fourfold in character, and lasted for four days. Upon the first day Caesar passed through the streets of Rome in the role of conqueror of Gaul, and when darkness had fallen ascended the Capitol by torchlight, forty elephants carrying numerous torch-bearers to right and left of his chariot. The unfortunate Vercingetorix, who had been held prisoner for six miserable years, was executed at the conclusion of this impressive parade—an act of cold-blooded cruelty to an honourable foe (who had voluntarily surrendered to Caesar to save his countrymen from further punishment) which, at the time, may have been excused on the ground that such executions were customary at the end of a Triumph. Upon the second day the conquest of the Dictator’s Egyptian enemies was celebrated, and the Princess Arsinoe was led through the streets in chains, together, it would seem, with Ganymedes, the latter perhaps being executed at the close of the performance, and the former being spared as a sort of compliment to Cleopatra’s royal house. In this procession images of Achillas and Potheinos were carried along, and were greeted by the populace with pleasant jeers; while a statue representing the famous old Nilus, and a model of Pharos, the wonder of the world, reminded the spectators of the importance of the country now under Roman protection. African animals strange to Rome, such as the giraffe, were led along in the procession, and other wonders from Egypt and Ethiopia were displayed for the delight of the populace. On the third day the conquest of Pontus was demonstrated, and a large tablet with the arrogant words Veni, Vidi, Vici painted upon it was carried before the conqueror. Finally, on the fourth day the victories in North Africa were celebrated. In this last procession Caesar caused some offence by exhibiting captured Roman arms; for the campaign had been fought against Romans of the Pompeian party, a fact which at first he had attempted to disguise by stating that the Triumph was celebrated over King Juba of Numidia, who had sided with the enemy. Still graver offence was caused, however, when it was seen that vulgar caricatures of Cato and other of Caesar’s personal enemies were exhibited in the procession; and the populace must have questioned whether such a jest at the expense of honourable Romans whose bodies were hardly yet cold in their graves was in perfect taste. It would seem indeed that Caesar’s judgment in such matters had become somewhat warped during this last year of military and administrative success, and that he had begun to despise those who were opposed to him as though they could be but misguided fools. In this attitude one sees, perhaps, something of that same quality which led him blandly to accept in Egypt a sort of divinity as by personal right, and which persuaded him to aim always towards absolutism; for a man is in no wise normal who considers himself a being meet for worship and his enemy an object fit only for derision.

There seems, in fact, little doubt that Caesar was not now in a normal condition of mind. For some years he had been subject to epileptic seizures, and now the distressing malady was growing more pronounced and the seizures were of more frequent occurrence. At the battle of Thapsus he is said to have been taken ill in this manner; and on other occasions he was attacked while in discharge of his duties. Such a physical condition may be accountable for much of his growing eccentricity, and, particularly, one may attribute to it his increasing faith in his semi-divine powers. Lombroso goes so far as to say that epilepsy is almost an essential factor in the personality of one who believes himself to be a Son of God or Messenger of the Deity. Akhnaton, the great religious reformer of Ancient Egypt, suffered from epilepsy; the Prophet Mohammed, to put it bluntly, had fits; and many other religious reformers suffered in like manner. One cannot tell what hallucinations and strange manifestations were experienced by Caesar under the influence of this malady; but one may be sure that to Cleopatra they were clear indications of his close relationship to the gods, and that in explanation she did not fail to remind him both of his divine descent and her own inherited divinity, in which, as her consort, he participated.

Towards the end of September Caesar caused a sensation in Rome by an act which shows clearly enough his attitude in this regard. He consecrated a magnificent temple in honour of Venus Genetrix, his divine ancestress; and there, in the splendour of its marble sanctuary, he placed a statue of Cleopatra, which had been executed during the previous weeks by the famous Roman sculptor, Archesilaus. The significance of this act has been overlooked by modern historians. In placing in this shrine of Venus, at the time of its inauguration, a figure of the Queen of Egypt, who in her own country was the representative of Isis-Aphrodite upon earth, Caesar was demonstrating the divinity of Cleopatra, and was telling the people, as it were in everlasting phrases of stone, that the royal girl who now honoured his villa on the banks of the Tiber was no less than a manifestation of Venus herself. It will presently be seen how, in after years, Cleopatra went to meet Antony decked in the character of Venus, and how she was then and on other occasions hailed by the crowd as the goddess come down to earth; and we shall see how her mausoleum actually formed part of the temple of that goddess. Both at this date and in later times she was identified indiscriminately with Isis, with Venus-Hathor, and with Venus-Aphrodite; and even after her death the tradition so far survived that one of her famous pearl earrings was cut into two parts, and, in this form, ultimately ornamented the ears of the statue of Venus in the Pantheon at Rome. Coins dating from this period have been found upon which Cleopatra is represented as Aphrodite, carrying in her arms the baby Caesarion, who is supposed to be Eros. Caesar was always boasting about the connection of his house with this goddess; and now the placing of this statue of Cleopatra in his new temple is, I think, to be interpreted as signifying that he wished the Roman people to regard the Queen as a “young goddess,” which was the title given to her by the Greeks and Egyptians in her own country.

It is not altogether certain that Caesar himself was actually beginning to regard Cleopatra in this light, though the increasing frequency of his epileptic attacks, and his consequent hallucinations, may have now made such an attitude possible even in the case of so hardened a sceptic as was the Dictator in former years. It seems more reasonable to suppose that he was at this time attempting to appeal to the imagination of the people in anticipation of the great coup which he was about to execute; and that, with this object in view, he allowed himself to be carried along by a kind of enthusiastic self-deception. He applied no serious analysis to his opinions in this regard; but, by means of a thoughtless vanity, he seems to have given rein to an undefined conviction, very suitable to his great purpose, that he himself was more than human, and that Cleopatra was not altogether a woman of mortal flesh and blood. Even so Alexander the Great had partially deluded himself when, on the one hand, he named himself the son of Jupiter-Ammon, and, on the other, was careful, once when wounded, to point out that ordinary mortal blood flowed from his veins. And so, too, Napoleon Bonaparte, during his invasion of Egypt, declared that he was the Prophet of God, and, in after years, was willing to describe to a friend, as it were in jest, his vision of himself as the founder of a new Faith.

The inauguration of Caesar’s new temple, which was, one may say, the shrine of Cleopatra, was accompanied by amazing festivities, and the excitable population of this great city seemed, so to speak, to go mad with enthusiasm. Great gladiatorial shows were organised, and a miniature sea-fight upon an artificial lake was enacted for the public entertainment The majority of the mob was ready enough to accept without comment the exalted position of the statue of Cleopatra. At this time in Rome they were very partial to new and foreign deities, celestial or in the flesh; and actually the worship of the Egyptian goddess Isis, with whom Cleopatra, as Venus, was so closely connected, had taken firm hold of their imagination. For the last few years the religion of Isis had been extremely popular with the lower classes in Rome; and when, in BC 58, a law which had been made forbidding foreign temples to be located within a certain area of the city, necessitated the destruction of a temple of Isis, not one man could be found who would touch the sacred building, and at last the Consul, Lucius Paullus, was obliged to tuck up his toga and set to work upon the demolition of the edifice with his own hands. Thus, this inaugural ceremony, so lavishly organised by Caesar, was a marked success; and in spite of the indignation of Cicero, the statue of Cleopatra took its permanent place, with popular consent, in the sanctuary of Venus. No expense was spared on this or on any other occasion to please the people; and at one time twenty-two thousand persons partook of a sumptuous meal at Caesar’s expense. Such a courting of the people was, indeed, necessary at this time; for although the Dictator was; at the moment practically omnipotent, and though there was talk of securing him in his office for a term of ten years, his party had not that solidity which was to be desired of it. Antony, the right-hand man of the Caesarians, was, at the time, in some disgrace owing to a quarrel with his master; and there were rumours that he wished to revenge himself by assassinating Caesar. It was already becoming clear that the Pompeian party, in spite of Pharsalia and Thapsus, was not yet dead, and still waited to receive its death-blow. Some of the Dictator’s actions had given considerable offence, and there were certain people in Rome who made use of every opportunity to denounce him, and to offer their praise to the memory of his enemy Cato, whose tragic death after the battle of Thapsus, and the vilification of whose memory in the recent Triumph, had caused such a painful impression. Cicero wrote an encomium upon this unfortunate man, to which Caesar, in self-defence, replied by publishing his Anti-Cato, which was marked by a tone of bitter and even venomous animosity. All manner of unpleasant remarks were being made in better class circles in regard to Cleopatra; and when the Dictator publicly admitted the parentage of their child, and authorised him to bear the name of Caesar, it began to be whispered that his legal marriage to the Queen was imminent.

The mixed population of Rome delighted in political strife, and though Caesar’s position seemed unassailable, there were always large numbers of persons ready to make sporadic attacks upon it. There was at this time constant rioting in the Forum, and an almost continuous restlessness was to be observed in the streets and public places. In the theatres topical allusions were received with frantic applause, and even in the Senate disturbances were not infrequent. The people had always to be humoured, and Caesar was obliged at all times to play to the gallery. Fortunately for him he possessed in the highest degree the art of self-advertisement; and his charm of manner, together with his striking and handsome appearance, made the desired appeal to the popular fancy. His relationship to Cleopatra stood, on the whole, in his favour amongst the lower classes, who had hailed him with coarse delight as the terror of the women of Gaul; and the fact that she was a foreigner mattered not in the least to the heterogeneous population of Rome. They themselves were largely a composition of the nations of the earth; and that Caesar’s mistress, and probable future wife, was a Greek, was to them in no wise a matter for comment. In any theatre in Rome at that date one might sit amidst an audience of foreigners to hear a drama given (at Caesar’s expense, by the way) in language such as Greek, Phoenician, Hebrew, Syrian, or Spanish. To them Cleopatra must have appeared as a wonderful woman, closely related to the gods, come from a famous city across the waters to enjoy the society of their own half-godlike Dictator; and they were quite prepared to accept her as a pleasant and romantic adjunct to the political situation.

Among the many reforms which Caesar now introduced there was one which was the direct outcome of his visit to Egypt. For some time the irregularities of the calendar had been causing much inconvenience, and the Dictator, very probably at the Queen of Egypt’s suggestion, now decided to invite some of Cleopatra’s court astronomers to Rome in order that they might establish a new system based upon the Egyptian calendar of Eudoxus. Sosigenes was at that time the most celebrated astronomer in Alexandria, and it was to him, perhaps at Cleopatra’s advice, that Caesar now turned. After very careful study it was decided that the present year, BC 46, should be extended to fifteen months, or 445 days, in order that the nominal date might be brought round to correspond with the actual season. The so-called Julian calendar, which was thus established, is that upon which our present system is based; and it is not without interest to recollect that but for Cleopatra some entirely different set of months would now be used throughout the world.

Caesar’s mind at this time was full of his plans for the conquest of the East. In BC 65 Pompey had brought to Rome many details regarding the overland route to the Orient. This route started from the Port of Phasis on the Black Sea, ascended the river of that name to its source in Iberia, passed over to the valley of the river Cyrus (Kur), and so came to the coast of the Caspian Sea. Crossing the water the route thence led along the river Oxus, which at that time flowed into the Caspian, to its source, and thus through Cashmir into India. 

There must then have been some talk of carrying the eagles along this highway to the Orient; and while Caesar was in Egypt it seems probable, as we have seen, that he had studied the question of leading Roman arms thither by the great Egyptian trade route. Though this latter road to the wonderful Orient, however, must have seemed to him, after consideration, to be very suitable as a channel for the despatch of reinforcements, he appears to have favoured the land route across Asia for his original invasion. This approach to the East was blocked by the Parthians, and Caesar now announced his intention of conducting a campaign against these people. There is no evidence to show that he desired to follow Alexander’s steps beyond Parthia into India, but I am of opinion that such was his intention. In view of the facts that the exploits of Alexander the Great had been studied by him, that he publicly declared his wish to rival them, that he must have heard from Pompey of the overland route to India with which the Romans had become acquainted during the war against Mithridates, that his love of distant conquest and exploration was inordinate, that he had spent some months in studying conditions in Egypt—a country which was in those days full of talk of India and of the new trade with the Orient, that after leaving Egypt he began at once to prepare for a campaign against the one nation which obstructed the overland route to the East, that no other part of the known world, save poverty-stricken Germania, remained to be brought by conquest under Roman sway, that India offered possibilities of untold wealth, and that Cleopatra herself ultimately made an attempt to reach those far countries,—the inference seems to me to be clear that Caesar’s designs upon Parthia were only preliminary to a contemplated invasion of the East. The riches of those distant lands were already the talk of the age, and within the lifetime of young men of this period streams of Indian merchandise, comprising diamonds, precious stones, silks, spices, and scents, began to pour into Rome and were sold each year, according to the somewhat exaggerated account of Pliny, for some forty million pounds sterling. Could Caesar, the world’s greatest spendthrift, the world’s most eager plunderer, have resisted the temptation of making a bid for the loot which lay behind Parthia? Does the fact that he said nothing of such an intention preclude the possibility that thoughts of this kind now filled his mind, and formed a topic of conversation between him and the adventurous Cleopatra, the Ruler of the gateway of the Orient, who herself sent Caesar’s son to India, as we shall see in due course? Napoleon, when he invaded Egypt in 1798, said very little about his contemplated attack upon India; but it was none the less dominant in his mind for that. Egypt and Parthia in conjunction formed the basis of any attempt to capture the Orient: Egypt with its route across the seas, and Parthia with its highroad overland. Are we really to suppose that Caesar did waste his time in Egypt, or was he then studying the same problem which now directed his attention to Parthia? By means of his partnership with Cleopatra he had secured one of the routes to India; and the merchants of Alexandria, if not his own great imagination, must have made clear to him the value of his possession in that regard; for ever since the discovery of the over-sea route to the East that value has been recognised. The Venetian Sanuto in later years told his compatriots of the effect on India which would follow from the conquest of the Nile Valley; the Comte Daru said that the possession of Egypt meant the opening up of India; Leibnitz told Louis XIV of France that an invasion of Egypt would result in the capture of the Indian highroad; the Duc de Choiseul made a similar declaration to Louis XV; Napoleon stated in his Memoirs that his object in attacking Egypt was to lead an army of 60,000 men to India; and at the present day England holds the Nile Valley as being the gateway of her distant possessions. On the other side of the picture we see at the present time the attempts of Russia to establish her power in Northern Persia and Afghanistan, where once the Parthians of old held sway, in order to be ready for that day when English power in India shall decline. Was Caesar, then, straining every nerve only for the possession of the two gateways of the Orient, or did his gaze penetrate through those gateways to the vast wealth of the kingdoms beyond? I am disposed to see him walking with Cleopatra in the gardens of the villa by the Tiber, just as Napoleon paced the parks of Passeriano, “frequently betraying by his exclamations the gigantic thoughts of his unlimited ambition,” as Lacroix tells us of the French conqueror.

Such dreams, however, were rudely interrupted by the news that the Pompeian party had gathered its forces in Spain; and Caesar was obliged to turn his attention to that part of the world. In the winter of BC 46, therefore, he set out for the south-west, impatient at the delay which the new campaign necessitated in his great schemes. He was in no mood to brook any opposition in Rome, and before leaving the capital he arranged that he should be made Consul without a colleague for the ensuing year BC 45, as well as Dictator, thus giving himself absolutely autocratic power. On his way to Spain he sent a despatch to Rome, appointed eight praefecti urbi with full powers to act in his name, thus establishing a form of cabinet government which should entirely over-ride the wishes of the Senate and of the people; and in this manner he secured the political situation to his own advantage. Naturally there was a very great outcry against this high-handed action; but Caesar was far too deeply occupied by his vast schemes, and far too annoyed by this Spanish interruption of his course towards the great goal of his ambitions, to pay much attention to the outraged feelings of his political opponents.

The enemy in Spain were led by the two sons of the great Pompey, but at the battle of Munda, fought on March 17, BC 45, they were entirely defeated with a loss of some thirty thousand men. The elder of the two leaders, Cnaeus Pompeius, who was said to have once been a suitor for Cleopatra’s heart, was killed shortly after the battle, but the younger, Sextus, escaped. Caesar then returned to Rome, being met outside the capital by Antony, with whom he was reconciled; and in the early summer he celebrated his Triumph. In this he offended a number of persons, owing to the fact that his victory had been won over his fellow-countrymen, whose defeat, therefore, ought not to have been the cause of more than a silent satisfaction. After Pharsalia Caesar had celebrated no triumph, since Romans had there fought Romans; and, indeed, as Plutarch says, “ he had seemed rather to be ashamed of the action than to expect honour from it” But now he had come to feel that he himself was Rome, and that his enemies were not simply opposed to his party but were in arms against the State.

Knowing now that the Pompeians were at last crushed, Caesar decided to attempt to appease any ill-feeling directed against himself by the friends of the fallen party; and for this purpose he caused the statues of Pompey the Great, which had been removed from their pedestals, to be replaced; and furthermore, he pardoned, and even gave office to, several leaders of the Pompeian party, notably to Brutus and Cassius, who afterwards were ranked amongst his murderers. He then settled down in Rome to prepare for his campaign in the East, and, in the meantime, to put into execution the many administrative reforms which were maturing in his restless brain. It appears that he lived for the most part of this time in the house of which his wife Calpurnia was mistress; but there can be little doubt that he was a constant visitor at his transpontine villa, and that he spent all his spare hours there in the society of Cleopatra, who remained in Rome until his death.

CHAPTER IX.

THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE EGYPTO-ROMAN MONARCHY.

Pietro da Cortona, Caesar offers the throne of Egyp to Cleopatra after his victory over Ptolemy XIII