When Caesar saw Pompey’s troops begin to deploy he made his own arrangements with his customary speed, decision and tactical awareness. He placed Antony in command on the left. Antony had so distinguished himself previously in the campaign that, according to Plutarch, his reputation “next to Caesar’s was the greatest in the army,” and Caesar himself thought him his most capable officer. He himself took not the center but the right, with his favored Tenth Legion, opposite where he thought Pompey would be. He realized that he was deficient in cavalry and took what measures he could to counteract this. Knowing that most of Pompey’s cavalry were young sprigs of nobility, “young dandies,” in his own words, “unused to battles and wounds, bedecked with flowers and long hair” and anxious to protect their handsome faces, not liking “the glint of steel shining in their eyes,” he urged his men to thrust not at the cavalrymen’s bodies but directly into their faces.
Pompey’s inexperienced young cavalry were indeed intimidated by the fierce upward thrust of Caesar’s infantry’s spears, “turning their heads and covering them with their hands to protect their faces.” They soon fled, followed swiftly by the rest of Pompey’s forces, whose positions the cavalry men exposed by their flight. When Caesar’s victorious legionaries reached the enemy camp they found many signs of fatal complacency—tents crowned with shiny green myrtle leaves ready to celebrate an anticipated victory, silver platters laid out for the 62 victory feast. As so often reported in the history of victorious commanders,
Caesar is said to have eaten the meal prepared for Pompey. The latter fled, discarding his insignia of rank and disguising himself as he went.
Caesar was determined to draw the conflict to a speedy conclusion. As he had done throughout the civil war, he ordered clemency to be shown to his captured enemies and, as he had done throughout his military career, the immediate close pursuit of those who were retreating—a task that on this occasion he entrusted to Antony. Walking through the bodies on the battlefield that night (Caesar’s estimate was 15,000 Pompeian dead against only 230 of his own men, but later historians put the figures at 6,000 and 1,200 respectively), Caesar is said to have soliloquized in self-justification, “It was all their own doing. Despite all my achievements I, Gaius Caesar, would have been condemned had I not appealed to my army for help.”
In reality it had been nothing like as simple. Caesar, Crassus and even Pompey had at times felt themselves sufficiently above the traditions of the elders and indeed Rome’s laws to disregard them. Intransigent republicans such as Cato, who was absent from Pharsalus, had resisted any compromises or adaptations to changed circumstances. The strife between the republican and popular parties would not end for some years and even this civil war would continue. The republicans had strong forces still in the east and Africa, and Pompey determined to join them. Stopping only for a tearful reunion with his young wife, Cornelia, he took ship with her and his younger son, Sextus, then in his early teens, for Egypt via Cyprus, accompanied by a small fleet. Some fifty days after Pharsalus, his vessel anchored off the sandbanks and mudflats of the Nile delta.
PART III
Queen of Egypt, Mistress of Rome
CHAPTER 6
Like a Virgin
WHEN HE SIGHTED EGYPT, Pompey was sure that its rulers would help him—after all, Ptolemy XIII had responded to his request for aid earlier in his struggle against Caesar by sending him men, ships and corn. As a consequence, Pompey’s grateful supporters in the Senate had decreed that he should be the young king’s guardian as a mark of particular favor to the Egyptian monarch and his supporters. Why should Ptolemy refuse to aid him now? Pompey had his trireme anchored on the bobbing swell within sight of the camp at Mount Casius where Ptolemy’s army was preparing to give battle to Cleopatra’s forces. From here Pompey dispatched a messenger and confidently awaited an answer.
Pompey’s arrival, however, caused consternation to Ptolemy’s regency council of Pothinus the eunuch, Achillas the military commander, and Theodotus the king’s tutor. According to Plutarch, the last sealed Pompey’s fate, arguing that “if they took him in they would have Caesar as their enemy and Pompey as their master, and if they sent him packing they would incur Pompey’s anger for expelling him and Caesar’s for not holding on to him.” The solution, Theodotus insisted, was to kill Pompey. That way Caesar would be grateful and Pompey would no longer be a threat. “And then it is said, he added with a smile, ‘Dead men don’t bite.’ ”
And so on September 28, 48, the Egyptians summoned Pompey to his death. The treacherous task was entrusted to Achillas, who with a former Roman officer called Septimius who had once served under Pompey, a centurion named Salvius and a few henchmen sailed out toward Pompey’s vessel. Pompey’s companions, anxiously scanning the shore, sensed something was wrong. Why were there no preparations for the magnificent reception that should greet a great Roman general? All they could see, as Plutarch put it, was “a few men sailing towards them in a single fishing-boat.” They warned Pompey to put out to sea at once.
While Pompey hesitated, the fishing boat drew nearer. Septimius got unsteadily to his feet and hailed Pompey in Latin as “imperator,” “commander.” Achillas added his voice, greeting Pompey in Greek and inviting him to board the fishing boat because, he said, the numerous shoals and sandbanks would prevent Pompey’s trireme from coming closer in to shore. Pompey’s young wife, Cornelia, was already in tears, “weeping in anticipation of his death” as her husband bade her and Sextus good-bye and with two centurions, a freedman called Philippus and a slave clambered down into the fishing boat, whose rowers at once began making for the shore.
The silence was disturbing. Looking closely at the men into whose hands he had entrusted his life, Pompey recognized Septimius as an old comrade in arms but the man simply nodded in brief and curt acknowledgment. Cornelia, watching anxiously from the ship, saw the fishing boat at last reach the shore. Pompey was trying to stand up in the rocking boat, clutching at the hand of his freedman for support, when Septimius ran him through from behind with his sword. Salvius and Achillas also drew their daggers. Pompey collapsed into the bottom of the vessel, where, dragging his toga over his head as the blows fell, he died, according to Plutarch, “with nothing more than a gasp, without saying or doing anything to betray his dignity.” It was the day after his fifty-eighth birthday.
While the distraught Cornelia struggled to take in what she had just witnessed, others on the trireme, seeing that ships from Ptolemy’s fleet were preparing to sail out and intercept them, hastily weighed anchor and made for the open sea, where a strong wind aided their flight. On shore, Pompey’s assassins hacked his head roughly from his body, which they stripped and left “exposed as a ghastly spectacle for anyone to see who wanted to.” Philippus remained loyally by the mutilated corpse until, eventually, the crowd of sightseers who had swarmed eagerly around the body grew bored and drifted off. Then he rinsed off the clotting blood with seawater, dressed Pompey’s body in one of his own togas and searched the shore for timber to build a funeral pyre for his erstwhile master.
Four days later, on October 2, 48, Caesar sailed into the harbor of Alexandria with four thousand troops and thirty-five warships. If Ptolemy and his council anticipated Caesar’s thanks, they were disappointed. Whatever his personal feelings at being rid of his rival—and he must have been relieved—the manner of it shocked him. When Theodotus proudly handed him Pompey’s pickled head and heavy gold signet ring with its device of a lion brandishing a sword, Caesar recoiled “as if from a polluted murderer.”*
The governing clique around the king watched in growing dismay as the Roman they had assumed would gratefully confirm Ptolemy on the Egyptian throne and consign Cleopatra to exile showed no sign of being so accommodating. Caesar made clear from the start that Pompey’s murderers could take nothing for granted, coming ashore with the full dignity of a Roman consul, his lictors bearing the fasces before him as the symbols of his authority. His justification for appearing in official r
egalia was that the will entrusted to Rome by Cleopatra’s father had appointed Cleopatra and Ptolemy as co-rulers of Egypt. With brother and sister on the cusp of war, the will was plainly not being honored, giving him the legal right to intervene.
While Caesar’s magisterial attitude was a stroke of good luck for Cleopatra, waiting anxiously beyond Egypt’s borders, it galled Alexandria’s excitable population. All they saw was an arrogant Roman strutting ashore as if Egypt were already a Roman province. Soldiers and citizens alike began rioting and in the days that followed mobs killed several of Caesar’s men strolling unwisely around the city. Caesar began to realize that his own position was precarious. The seasonal north winds gusting boisterously in across the Mediterranean and flecking the seas with foam made it difficult simply to sail away. On the other hand, he had relatively few men to defend him in this volatile, populous, alien city.
Alexandria had once far outshone Caesar’s Rome. Arrian, Alexander’s ancient biographer, recorded that on his way down the Nile from Memphis, where he was crowned pharaoh, Alexander reached a point to the west of the delta and between Lake Mareotis and the sea when “it seemed to him that the site was the very best on which to found a city and it would prosper . . . A longing for the task seized him and he personally established the main points of the city.” Legend says that when marking out the foundations, Alexander and his men swiftly ran out of chalk. Instead, they trickled out barley meal from the workmen’s food supplies as marker lines. Suddenly “birds infinite in numbers” appeared and devoured the meal. “Even Alexander was greatly disturbed at the omen. However, the seers exhorted him to be of good cheer since the city to be founded here would have most abundant and helpful resources and be a nursing mother for men of every nation.”
By the time of Caesar’s visit it certainly seemed the seers were correct. Alexandria was still the ancient world’s second-largest city after Rome with a population of around half a million, about a sixth of Egypt’s total. Rectangular in shape, it was about three miles long and planned on a grid system. One visitor described how “the city is as a whole intersected by streets practicable for horse-riding and chariot-driving and by two that are very wide, around a hundred feet across.” Another recalled how “entering by the Gate of the Sun, I was instantly struck by the splendid beauty. I tried to cast my eyes down every street but my gaze was still unsatisfied . . . In one quarter . . . the splendor of the town was cut into squares for there was a row of columns crossed by another as long at right angles.” The streets, many of which were shaded by green awnings, were angled to catch the cooling breezes blowing off the Mediterranean. Ancient obelisks and sphinxes brought downstream from Heliopolis, Memphis and other cities of the pharaohs stood in public spaces and dotted the colonnaded streets, giving an exotic and ancient air to the new foundation.
The city’s temples, shrines and public buildings were brilliantly colored. From the time of the pharaohs it had become a tradition to leave not a single inch undecorated. Artists had long been pounding lapis lazuli for its rich deep blue, malachite for its subtle green, ochre for its earth colors and charcoal for its dense black. They applied the results to turn carved pillars into palm trees and breathe life into the carved reliefs of kings and queens, gods and goddesses and their spectacular imagined worlds depicted on walls and ceilings.
Alexandria had two main harbors, a western one and a great or eastern harbor. The western harbor was known as the “Harbor of Good Fortune” and had an inner dock built around the entrance to a canal leading to Lake Mareotis and then onward to the Canopic branch of the Nile. The eastern harbor was, according to visitors, divided into subsidiary harbors and numerous quays and was so deep that even the largest ships could berth. The geographer Strabo, writing just after Cleopatra’s death, called Alexandria “the greatest emporium in the inhabited world.” Among the warehouses full of grain, Egypt’s major export, was a great customs house. It also served as a place of noisy trade where the produce of the saffron crocus from Cyrenaica and spices such as cinnamon and pepper, transhipped from Africa, India and beyond, were bought and sold, as were rolls of linen, bags of Egyptian soda—used across the Mediterranean for laundering clothes—and carefully packed crates of engraved Egyptian drinking glasses appreciated by Rome’s rich for their fragility.
Heaps of gold-skinned dates from Thebes were considered especially juicy by connoisseurs, while Egyptian gum arabic, made from the acacia thorn, was particularly useful as a fixative for the face paints beloved of Roman matrons. The latter were also interested in the by-product of a more dangerous cargo—crocodiles. The reptiles had first been shipped to Rome in 58 when five were exhibited in a specially built pool with a hippo at one of the regular Roman Games. Subsequently more and more had arrived to be butchered in contests with gladiators. Roman women thought that the creatures’ dung would remove facial blemishes and redden their cheeks. Another export for which the demand of Rome’s increasing empire was inexhaustible was papyrus to record triumphs, laws and tax takes.
Separating the eastern and western harbors was a causeway nearly three quarters of a mile long pierced by two arches that gave access from one harbor to the other while breaking the force of the prevailing western current and thus providing added protection to the great harbor. At the end of the breakwater was a flat natural island with stout seawalls called Pharos. At its eastern extremity was built the seventh wonder of the ancient world—the lighthouse of Alexandria. Completed in about 283, the Pharos, as it became known, stood for seventeen centuries until after a series of earthquakes it was finally demolished.* Coins, drawings and recent underwater archaeology suggest that the lighthouse was probably nearly four hundred feet high—the height of a thirty-five-story building—and surrounded at its lower base by large pink granite sphinxes and tall statues of royal Ptolemaic couples dressed as pharaohs to remind those sailing past that they were entering not only a Macedonian city but the capital of the sovereigns of Egypt.
The lighthouse had three tiers and was approached by a long ramp with vaulted arcades. The first tier was rectangular with windows on all sides giving light to service rooms. The second tier was octagonal and the third cylindrical. Here a series of mirrors, perhaps of burnished brass, would have reflected the sunlight out across the Mediterranean during the day and at night or during overcast days the light of a fire of resinous wood. The rays are said to have been visible for more than thirty miles. The lighthouse was built mostly of the polished white limestone quarried locally. It was reinforced at its base with large blocks of granite, some weighing more than thirty tons; in recent years, underwater investigations suggest that some of these foundation blocks were actually recycled from old obelisks and sphinxes cut to size.* The architect who built the Pharos, Sostrates of Cnidus, reputedly employed a novel ruse to mark the work as his own for posterity. He engraved into the stone of the Pharos an inscription stating that he was the constructor, then plastered this over and engraved into the plaster the name of the ruling Ptolemy, knowing full well that over time the plaster would wear away and his own name would be revealed for all to see.
The royal palace complex also lay along the harbor and contained a private, artificial royal harbor. Each of the Ptolemies had built a palace of their own, leaving those of their predecessors intact. The area had thus expanded over time so that, according to Strabo, the palaces occupied “a quarter or even a third” of the space within the walls that confined the city. Strabo described how “on sailing into the harbor one comes on the left to the royal palaces which have groves and numerous buildings painted in various colours.” The palaces too are now sunk below the sea following a series of earthquakes and tidal waves in the fourth and fifth centuries AD. Archaeology has revealed that they and their surrounding gardens were studded with ancient sphinxes and large statues of the gods as well as shrines and works of art. Among the latter were a highly elaborate fountain described in a surviving inscription as made of many kinds of stone, both Greek and Egyptian, and por
traying Queen Arsinoe III and sundry nymphs, and a remarkable coiled statue of the city’s guardian serpent, the Agathos Daemon, which had reputedly appeared at the time of Alexander’s foundation of the city.
Within the palace area also stood the Museon with its covered colonnaded alleys where scholars could pace, think and converse, sheltered from the sun before eating for free in the neighboring refectory. The celebrated library, which by Cleopatra’s time contained around seven hundred thousand scrolls, was probably nearby.*
Strabo described how the royal palaces contained the monument known as the Sema, an edifice containing the tombs of the Ptolemies and of Alexander. After Ptolemy I had hijacked the body of Alexander he had interred it in a golden sarcophagus. The latter had been stolen by a later usurping Ptolemy and subsequently replaced with a sarcophagus made of alabaster where Alexander’s mummified body remained at the time of Caesar’s visit. From the few surviving fragments of descriptions the Sema was a pyramid-like structure with vaults beneath containing the bodies.†
Elsewhere in the city were the Great Theater, the huge colonnaded and porticoed six hundred-foot-long Gymnasium that stood in the center of the city to the south of the royal palaces, and an artificial hill “in the shape of a fir cone” built specifically to give a panoramic view of the great metropolis to residents and visitors alike who climbed up the pathway spiraling around it. Outside the city walls was the racetrack or hippodrome.*
The Alexandrians, as all the Egyptians, were highly skilled in waterworks of every kind. The network of canals around Alexandria was sophisticated and led eventually via the Nile and the Bitter Lakes through another narrow canal to a small port on the Red Sea known as Cleopatris, near the modern city of Suez, so that cargoes could traverse the country from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean by water. Alexandrians had also built an intricate system of interconnecting cisterns and aqueducts to supply fresh water since neither the lake nor canal water was fit to drink. Many of the cisterns were underground and their roofs were often supported by several series of thick stone columns.†
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