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History of Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt

by Jacob Abbott · English · Gutenberg #40205 · 368,887 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: History of Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt

Author: Jacob Abbott


        
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                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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[Illustration: SCENE OF CLEOPATRA'S HISTORY]


HISTORY OF CLEOPATRA, QUEEN OF EGYPT.

by

JACOB ABBOTT.

With Engravings.







New York:
Harper & Brothers, Publishers.
1854.

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year one thousand eight
hundred and fifty-one, by
Harper & Brothers,
in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Southern District of
New York.




PREFACE.


In selecting the subjects for the successive volumes of this series, it
has been the object of the author to look for the names of those great
personages whose histories constitute useful, and not merely entertaining,
knowledge. There are certain names which are familiar, as names, to all
mankind; and every person who seeks for any degree of mental cultivation,
feels desirous of informing himself of the leading outlines of their
history, that he may know, in brief, what it was in their characters or
their doings which has given them so widely-extended a fame. This
knowledge, which it seems incumbent on every one to obtain in respect to
such personages as Hannibal, Alexander, Cæsar, Cleopatra, Darius, Xerxes,
Alfred, William the Conqueror, Queen Elizabeth, and Mary, queen of Scots,
it is the design and object of these volumes to communicate, in a
faithful, and, at the same time, if possible, in an attractive manner.
Consequently, great historical names alone are selected; and it has been
the writer's aim to present the prominent and leading traits in their
characters, and all the important events in their lives, in a bold and
free manner, and yet in the plain and simple language which is so
obviously required in works which aim at permanent and practical
usefulness.




CONTENTS.


  Chapter                                Page

     I. THE VALLEY OF THE NILE             13

    II. THE PTOLEMIES                      35

   III. ALEXANDRIA                         61

    IV. CLEOPATRA'S FATHER                 87

     V. ACCESSION TO THE THRONE           112

    VI. CLEOPATRA AND CÆSAR               132

   VII. THE ALEXANDRINE WAR               157

  VIII. CLEOPATRA A QUEEN                 181

    IX. THE BATTLE OF PHILIPPI            200

     X. CLEOPATRA AND ANTONY              225

    XI. THE BATTLE OF ACTIUM              256

   XII. THE END OF CLEOPATRA              286




ENGRAVINGS.


                                                    Page

  MAP, SCENE OF CLEOPATRA'S HISTORY      _Frontispiece._

  MAP, THE RAINLESS REGION                            21

  MAP, THE DELTA OF THE NILE                          29

  THE BIRTH-DAY PRESENT                               50

  ANTONY CROSSING THE DESERT                         107

  CLEOPATRA ENTERING THE PALACE OF CÆSAR             135

  VIEW OF ALEXANDRIA                                 162

  CLEOPATRA'S SISTER IN THE TRIUMPHAL PROCESSION     190

  THE ENTERTAINMENTS AT TARSUS                       242

  THE RAISING OF ANTONY TO THE UPPER WINDOW OF
  THE TOMB                                           303




CLEOPATRA.




CHAPTER I.

THE VALLEY OF THE NILE.


The story of Cleopatra is a story of crime. It is a narrative of the
course and the consequences of unlawful love. In her strange and romantic
history we see this passion portrayed with the most complete and graphic
fidelity in all its influences and effects; its uncontrollable impulses,
its intoxicating joys, its reckless and mad career, and the dreadful
remorse and ultimate despair and ruin in which it always and inevitably
ends.

       *       *       *       *       *

Cleopatra was by birth an Egyptian; by ancestry and descent she was a
Greek. Thus, while Alexandria and the delta of the Nile formed the scene
of the most important events and incidents of her history, it was the
blood of Macedon which flowed in her veins. Her character and action are
marked by the genius, the courage, the originality, and the impulsiveness
pertaining to the stock from which she sprung. The events of her history,
on the other hand, and the peculiar character of her adventures, her
sufferings, and her sins, were determined by the circumstances with which
she was surrounded, and the influences which were brought to bear upon her
in the soft and voluptuous clime where the scenes of her early life were
laid.

Egypt has always been considered as physically the most remarkable country
on the globe. It is a long and narrow valley of verdure and fruitfulness,
completely insulated from the rest of the habitable world. It is more
completely insulated, in fact, than any literal island could be, inasmuch
as deserts are more impassable than seas. The very existence of Egypt is a
most extraordinary phenomenon. If we could but soar with the wings of an
eagle into the air, and look down upon the scene, so as to observe the
operation of that grand and yet simple process by which this long and
wonderful valley, teeming so profusely with animal and vegetable life, has
been formed, and is annually revivified and renewed, in the midst of
surrounding wastes of silence, desolation, and death, we should gaze upon
it with never-ceasing admiration and pleasure. We have not the wings of
the eagle, but the generalizations of science furnish us with a sort of
substitute for them. The long series of patient, careful, and sagacious
observations, which have been continued now for two thousand years, bring
us results, by means of which, through our powers of mental conception, we
may take a comprehensive survey of the whole scene, analogous, in some
respects, to that which direct and actual vision would afford us, if we
could look down upon it from the eagle's point of view. It is, however,
somewhat humiliating to our pride of intellect to reflect that
long-continued philosophical investigations and learned scientific
research are, in such a case as this, after all, in some sense, only a
sort of substitute for wings. A human mind connected with a pair of
eagle's wings would have solved the mystery of Egypt in a week; whereas
science, philosophy, and research, confined to the surface of the ground,
have been occupied for twenty centuries in accomplishing the undertaking.

It is found at last that both the existence of Egypt itself, and its
strange insulation in the midst of boundless tracts of dry and barren
sand, depend upon certain remarkable results of the general laws of rain.
The water which is taken up by the atmosphere from the surface of the sea
and of the land by evaporation, falls again, under certain circumstances,
in showers of rain, the frequency and copiousness of which vary very much
in different portions of the earth. As a general principle, rains are much
more frequent and abundant near the equator than in temperate climes, and
they grow less and less so as we approach the poles. This might naturally
have been expected; for, under the burning sun of the equator, the
evaporation of water must necessarily go on with immensely greater
rapidity than in the colder zones, and all the water which is taken up
must, of course, again come down.

It is not, however, wholly by the latitude of the region in which the
evaporation takes place that the quantity of rain which falls from the
atmosphere is determined; for the condition on which the falling back, in
rain, of the water which has been taken up by evaporation mainly depends,
is the cooling of the atmospheric stratum which contains it; and this
effect is produced in very various ways, and many different causes operate
to modify it. Sometimes the stratum is cooled by being wafted over ranges
of mountains; sometimes by encountering and becoming mingled with cooler
currents of air; and sometimes, again, by being driven in winds toward a
higher, and, consequently, cooler latitude. If, on the other hand, air
moves from cold mountains toward warm and sunny plains, or from higher
latitudes to lower, or if, among the various currents into which it falls,
it becomes mixed with air warmer than itself, its capacity for containing
vapor in solution is increased, and, consequently, instead of releasing
its hold upon the waters which it has already in possession, it becomes
thirsty for more. It moves over a country, under these circumstances, as a
warm and drying wind. Under a reverse of circumstances it would have
formed drifting mists, or, perhaps, even copious showers of rain.

It will be evident, from these considerations, that the frequency of the
showers, and the quantity of the rain which will fall, in the various
regions respectively which the surface of the earth presents, must depend
on the combined influence of many causes, such as the warmth of the
climate, the proximity and the direction of mountains and of seas, the
character of the prevailing winds, and the reflecting qualities of the
soil. These and other similar causes, it is found, do, in fact, produce a
vast difference in the quantity of rain which falls in different regions.
In the northern part of South America, where the land is bordered on every
hand by vast tropical seas, which load the hot and thirsty air with vapor,
and where the mighty Cordillera of the Andes rears its icy summits to
chill and precipitate the vapors again, a quantity of rain amounting to
more than ten feet in perpendicular height falls in a year. At St.
Petersburg, on the other hand, the quantity thus falling in a year is but
little more than one foot. The immense deluge which pours down from the
clouds in South America would, if the water were to remain where it fell,
wholly submerge and inundate the country. As it is, in flowing off through
the valleys to the sea, the united torrents form the greatest river on the
globe--the Amazon; and the vegetation, stimulated by the heat, and
nourished by the abundant and incessant supplies of moisture, becomes so
rank, and loads the earth with such an entangled and matted mass of
trunks, and stems, and twining wreaths and vines, that man is almost
excluded from the scene. The boundless forests become a vast and almost
impenetrable jungle, abandoned to wild beasts, noxious reptiles, and huge
and ferocious birds of prey.

Of course, the district of St. Petersburg, with its icy winter, its low
and powerless sun, and its twelve inches of annual rain, must necessarily
present, in all its phenomena of vegetable and animal life, a striking
contrast to the exuberant prolificness of New Grenada. It is, however,
after all, not absolutely the opposite extreme. There are certain regions
on the surface of the earth that are actually rainless; and it is these
which present us with the true and real contrast to the luxuriant
vegetation and teeming life of the country of the Amazon. In these
rainless regions all is necessarily silence, desolation, and death. No
plant can grow; no animal can live. Man, too, is forever and hopelessly
excluded. If the exuberant abundance of animal and vegetable life shut him
out, in some measure, from regions which an excess of heat and moisture
render too prolific, the total absence of them still more effectually
forbids him a home in these. They become, therefore, vast wastes of dry
and barren sands in which no root can find nourishment, and of dreary
rocks to which not even a lichen can cling.

The most extensive and remarkable rainless region on the earth is a vast
tract extending through the interior and northern part of Africa, and the
southwestern part of Asia. The Red Sea penetrates into this tract from the
south, and thus breaks the outline and continuity of its form, without,
however, altering, or essentially modifying its character. It divides it,
however, and to the different portions which this division forms,
different names have been given. The Asiatic portion is called Arabia
Deserta; the African tract has received the name of Sahara; while between
these two, in the neighborhood of Egypt, the barren region is called
simply _the desert_. The whole tract is marked, however, throughout, with
one all-pervading character: the absence of vegetable, and, consequently,
of animal life, on account of the absence of rain. The rising of a range
of lofty mountains in the center of it, to produce a precipitation of
moisture from the air, would probably transform the whole of the vast
waste into as verdant, and fertile, and populous a region I as any on the
globe.

[Illustration: VALLEY OF THE NILE]

As it is, there are no such mountains. The whole tract is nearly level,
and so little elevated above the sea, that, at the distance of many
hundred miles in the interior, the land rises only to the height of a few
hundred feet above the surface of the Mediterranean; whereas in New
Grenada, at less than one hundred miles from the sea, the chain of the
Andes rises to elevations of from ten to fifteen thousand feet. Such an
ascent as that of a few hundred feet in hundreds of miles would be wholly
imperceptible to any ordinary mode of observation; and the great rainless
region, accordingly, of Africa and Asia is, as it appears to the traveler,
one vast plain, a thousand miles wide and five thousand miles long, with
only one considerable interruption to the dead monotony which reigns, with
that exception, every where over the immense expanse of silence and
solitude. The single interval of fruitfulness and life is the valley of
the Nile.

There are, however, in fact, three interruptions to the continuity of this
plain, though only one of them constitutes any considerable interruption
to its barrenness. They are all of them valleys, extending from north to
south, and lying side by side. The most easterly of these valleys is so
deep that the waters of the ocean flow into it from the south, forming a
long and narrow inlet called the Red Sea. As this inlet communicates
freely with the ocean, it is always nearly of the same level, and as the
evaporation from it is not sufficient to produce rain, it does not even
fertilize its own shores. Its presence varies the dreary scenery of the
landscape, it is true, by giving us surging waters to look upon instead of
driving sands; but this is all. With the exception of the spectacle of an
English steamer passing, at weary intervals, over its dreary expanse, and
some moldering remains of ancient cities on its eastern shore, it affords
scarcely any indications of life. It does very little, therefore, to
relieve the monotonous aspect of solitude and desolation which reigns
over the region into which it has intruded.

The most westerly of the three valleys to which we have alluded is only a
slight depression of the surface of the land marked by a line of _oases_.
The depression is not sufficient to admit the waters of the Mediterranean,
nor are there any rains over any portion of the valley which it forms
sufficient to make it the bed of a stream. Springs issue, however, here
and there, in several places, from the ground, and, percolating through
the sands along the valley, give fertility to little dells, long and
narrow, which, by the contrast that they form with the surrounding
desolation, seem to the traveler to possess the verdure and beauty of
Paradise. There is a line of these oases extending along this westerly
depression, and some of them are of considerable extent. The oasis of
Siweh, on which stood the far-famed temple of Jupiter Ammon, was many
miles in extent, and was said to have contained in ancient times a
population of eight thousand souls. Thus, while the most easterly of the
three valleys which we have named was sunk so low as to admit the ocean to
flow freely into it, the most westerly was so slightly depressed that it
gained only a circumscribed and limited fertility through the springs,
which, in the lowest portions of it, oozed from the ground. The third
valley--the central one--remains now to be described.

The reader will observe, by referring once more to the map, that south of
the great rainless region of which we are speaking, there lie groups and
ranges of mountains in Abyssinia, called the Mountains of the Moon. These
mountains are near the equator, and the relation which they sustain to the
surrounding seas, and to currents of wind which blow in that quarter of
the world, is such, that they bring down from the atmosphere, especially
in certain seasons of the year, vast and continual torrents of rain. The
water which thus falls drenches the mountain sides and deluges the
valleys. There is a great portion of it which can not flow to the
southward or eastward toward the sea, as the whole country consists, in
those directions, of continuous tracts of elevated land. The rush of water
thus turns to the northward, and, pressing on across the desert through
the great central valley which we have referred to above, it finds an
outlet, at last, in the Mediterranean, at a point two thousand miles
distant from the place where the immense condenser drew it from the
skies. The river thus created is the Nile. It is formed, in a word, by the
surplus waters of a district inundated with rains, in their progress
across a rainless desert, seeking the sea.

If the surplus of water upon the Abyssinian mountains had been constant
and uniform, the stream, in its passage across the desert, would have
communicated very little fertility to the barren sands which it traversed.
The immediate banks of the river would have, perhaps, been fringed with
verdure, but the influence of the irrigation would have extended no
further than the water itself could have reached, by percolation through
the sand. But the flow of the water is not thus uniform and steady. In a
certain season of the year the rains are incessant, and they descend with
such abundance and profusion as almost to inundate the districts where
they fall. Immense torrents stream down the mountain sides; the valleys
are deluged; plains turn into morasses, and morasses into lakes. In a
word, the country becomes half submerged, and the accumulated mass of
waters would rush with great force and violence down the central valley of
the desert, which forms their only outlet, if the passage were narrow, and
if it made any considerable descent in its course to the sea. It is,
however, not narrow, and the descent is very small. The depression in the
surface of the desert, through which the water flows, is from five to ten
miles wide, and, though it is nearly two thousand miles from the rainy
district across the desert to the sea, the country for the whole distance
is almost level. There is only sufficient descent, especially for the last
thousand miles, to determine a very gentle current to the northward in the
waters of the stream.

Under these circumstances, the immense quantity of water which falls in
the rainy district in these inundating tropical showers, expands over the
whole valley, and forms for a time an immense lake, extending in length
across the whole breadth of the desert. This lake is, of course, from five
to ten miles wide, and a thousand miles long. The water in it is shallow
and turbid, and it has a gentle current toward the north. The rains, at
length, in a great measure cease; but it requires some months for the
water to run off and leave the valley dry. As soon as it is gone, there
springs up from the whole surface of the ground which has been thus
submerged a most rank and luxuriant vegetation.

This vegetation, now wholly regulated and controlled by the hand of man,
must have been, in its original and primeval state, of a very peculiar
character. It must have consisted of such plants only as could exist under
the condition of having the soil in which they grew laid, for a quarter of
the year, wholly under water. This circumstance, probably, prevented the
valley of the Nile from having been, like other fertile tracts of land,
encumbered, in its native state, with forests. For the same reason, wild
beasts could never have haunted it. There were no forests to shelter them,
and no refuge or retreat for them but the dry and barren desert, during
the period of the annual inundations. This most extraordinary valley seems
thus to have been formed and preserved by Nature herself for the special
possession of man. She herself seems to have held it in reserve for him
from the very morning of creation, refusing admission into it to every
plant and every animal that might hinder or disturb his occupancy and
control. And if he were to abandon it now for a thousand years, and then
return to it once more, he would find it just as he left it, ready for his
immediate possession. There would be no wild beasts that he must first
expel, and no tangled forests would have sprung up, that his ax must
first remove. Nature is the husbandman who keeps this garden of the world
in order, and the means and machinery by which she operates are the grand
evaporating surfaces of the seas, the beams of the tropical sun, the lofty
summits of the Abyssinian mountains, and, as the product and result of all
this instrumentality, great periodical inundations of summer rain.

For these or some other reasons Egypt has been occupied by man from the
most remote antiquity. The oldest records of the human race, made three
thousand years ago, speak of Egypt as ancient then, when they were
written. Not only is Tradition silent, but even Fable herself does not
attempt to tell the story of the origin of her population. Here stand the
oldest and most enduring monuments that human power has ever been able to
raise. It is, however, somewhat humiliating to the pride of the race to
reflect that the loftiest and proudest, as well as the most permanent and
stable of all the works which man has ever accomplished, are but the
incidents and adjuncts of a thin stratum of alluvial fertility, left upon
the sands by the subsiding waters of summer showers.

The most important portion of the alluvion of the Nile is the northern
portion, where the valley widens and opens toward the sea, forming a
triangular plain of about one hundred miles in length on each of the
sides, over which the waters of the river flow in a great number of
separate creeks and channels. The whole area forms a vast meadow,
intersected every where with slow-flowing streams of water, and presenting
on its surface the most enchanting pictures of fertility, abundance, and
beauty. This region is called the Delta of the Nile.

[Illustration: DELTA OF THE NILE]

The sea upon the coast is shallow, and the fertile country formed by the
deposits of the river seems to have projected somewhat beyond the line of
the coast; although, as the land has not advanced perceptibly for the last
eighteen hundred years, it may be somewhat doubtful whether the whole of
the apparent protrusion is not due to the natural conformation of the
coast, rather than to any changes made by the action of the river.

The Delta of the Nile is so level itself, and so little raised above the
level of the Mediterranean, that the land seems almost a continuation of
the same surface with the sea, only, instead of blue waters topped with
white-crested waves, we have broad tracts of waving grain, and gentle
swells of land crowned with hamlets and villages. In approaching the
coast, the navigator has no distant view of all this verdure and beauty.
It lies so low that it continues beneath the horizon until the ship is
close upon the shore. The first landmarks, in fact, which the seaman
makes, are the tops of trees growing apparently out of the water, or the
summit of an obelisk, or the capital of a pillar, marking the site of some
ancient and dilapidated city.

The most easterly of the channels by which the waters of the river find
their way through the Delta to the sea, is called, as it will be seen
marked upon the map, the Pelusiac branch. It forms almost the boundary of
the fertile region of the Delta on the eastern side. There was an ancient
city named Pelusium near the mouth of it. This was, of course, the first
Egyptian city reached by those who arrived by land from the eastward,
traveling along the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. On account of its
thus marking the eastern frontier of the country, it became a point of
great importance, and is often mentioned in the histories of ancient
times.

The westernmost mouth of the Nile, on the other hand, was called the
Canopic mouth. The distance along the coast from the Canopic mouth to
Pelusium was about a hundred miles. The outline of the coast was formerly,
as it still continues to be, very irregular, and the water shallow.
Extended banks of sand protruded into the sea, and the sea itself, as if
in retaliation, formed innumerable creeks, and inlets, and lagoons in the
land. Along this irregular and uncertain boundary the waters of the Nile
and the surges of the Mediterranean kept up an eternal war, with energies
so nearly equal, that now, after the lapse of eighteen hundred years
since the state of the contest began to be recorded, neither side has been
found to have gained any perceptible advantage over the other. The river
brings the sands down, and the sea drives them incessantly back, keeping
the whole line of the shore in such a condition as to make it extremely
dangerous and difficult of access to man.

It will be obvious, from this description of the valley of the Nile, that
it formed a country which was in ancient times isolated and secluded, in a
very striking manner, from all the rest of the world. It was wholly shut
in by deserts, on every side, by land; and the shoals, and sand-bars, and
other dangers of navigation which marked the line of the coast, seemed to
forbid approach by sea. Here it remained for many ages, under the rule of
its own native ancient kings. Its population was peaceful and industrious.
Its scholars were famed throughout the world for their learning, their
science, and their philosophy. It was in these ages, before other nations
had intruded upon its peaceful seclusion, that the Pyramids were built,
and the enormous monoliths carved, and those vast temples reared whose
ruined columns are now the wonder of mankind. During these remote ages,
too, Egypt was, as now, the land of perpetual fertility and abundance.
There would always be corn in Egypt, wherever else famine might rage. The
neighboring nations and tribes in Arabia, Palestine, and Syria, found
their way to it, accordingly, across the deserts on the eastern side, when
driven by want, and thus opened a way of communication. At length the
Persian monarchs, after extending their empire westward to the
Mediterranean, found access by the same road to Pelusium, and thence
overran and conquered the country. At last, about two hundred and fifty
years before the time of Cleopatra, Alexander the Great, when he subverted
the Persian empire, took possession of Egypt, and annexed it, among the
other Persian provinces, to his own dominions. At the division of
Alexander's empire, after his death, Egypt fell to one of his generals,
named Ptolemy. Ptolemy made it his kingdom, and left it, at his death, to
his heirs. A long line of sovereigns succeeded him, known in history as
the dynasty of the Ptolemies--Greek princes, reigning over an Egyptian
realm. Cleopatra was the daughter of the eleventh in the line.

The capital of the Ptolemies was Alexandria. Until the time of Alexander's
conquest, Egypt had no sea-port. There were several landing-places along
the coast, but no proper harbor. In fact, Egypt had then so little
commercial intercourse with the rest of the world, that she scarcely
needed any. Alexander's engineers, however, in exploring the shore, found
a point not far from the Canopic mouth of the Nile where the water was
deep, and where there was an anchorage ground protected by an island.
Alexander founded a city there, which he called by his own name. He
perfected the harbor by artificial excavations and embankments. A lofty
light-house was reared, which formed a landmark by day, and exhibited a
blazing star by night to guide the galleys of the Mediterranean in. A
canal was made to connect the port with the Nile, and warehouses were
erected to contain the stores of merchandise. In a word, Alexandria became
at once a great commercial capital. It was the seat, for several
centuries, of the magnificent government of the Ptolemies; and so well was
its situation chosen for the purposes intended, that it still continues,
after the lapse of twenty centuries of revolution and change, one of the
principal emporiums of the commerce of the East.




CHAPTER II.

THE PTOLEMIES.


The founder of the dynasty of the Ptolemies--the ruler into whose hands
the kingdom of Egypt fell, as has already been stated, at the death of
Alexander the Great--was a Macedonian general in Alexander's army. The
circumstances of his birth, and the events which led to his entering into
the service of Alexander, were somewhat peculiar. His mother, whose name
was Arsinoë, was a personal favorite and companion of Philip, king of
Macedon, the father of Alexander. Philip at length gave Arsinoë in
marriage to a certain man of his court named Lagus. A very short time
after the marriage, Ptolemy was born. Philip treated the child with the
same consideration and favor that he had evinced toward the mother. The
boy was called the son of Lagus, but his position in the royal court of
Macedon was as high and honorable, and the attentions which he received
were as great, as he could have expected to enjoy if he had been in
reality a son of the king. As he grew up, he attained to official
stations of considerable responsibility and power.

In the course of time, a certain transaction occurred, by means of which
Ptolemy involved himself in serious difficulty with Philip, though by the
same means he made Alexander very strongly his friend. There was a
province of the Persian empire called Caria, situated in the southwestern
part of Asia Minor. The governor of this province had offered his daughter
to Philip as the wife of one of his sons named Aridæus, the half brother
of Alexander. Alexander's mother, who was not the mother of Aridæus, was
jealous of this proposed marriage. She thought that it was part of a
scheme for bringing Aridæus forward into public notice, and finally making
him the heir to Philip's throne; whereas she was very earnest that this
splendid inheritance should be reserved for her own son. Accordingly, she
proposed to Alexander that they should send a secret embassage to the
Persian governor, and represent to him that it would be much better, both
for him and for his daughter, that she should have Alexander instead of
Aridæus for a husband, and induce him, if possible, to demand of Philip
that he should make the change.

Alexander entered readily into this scheme, and various courtiers, Ptolemy
among the rest, undertook to aid him in the accomplishment of it. The
embassy was sent. The governor of Caria was very much pleased with the
change which they proposed to him. In fact, the whole plan seemed to be
going on very successfully toward its accomplishment, when, by some means
or other, Philip discovered the intrigue. He went immediately into
Alexander's apartment, highly excited with resentment and anger. He had
never intended to make Aridæus, whose birth on the mother's side was
obscure and ignoble, the heir to his throne, and he reproached Alexander
in the bitterest terms for being of so debased and degenerate a spirit as
to desire to marry the daughter of a Persian governor; a man who was, in
fact, the mere slave, as he said, of a barbarian king.

Alexander's scheme was thus totally defeated; and so displeased was his
father with the officers who had undertaken to aid him in the execution of
it, that he banished them all from the kingdom. Ptolemy, in consequence of
this decree, wandered about an exile from his country for some years,
until at length the death of Philip enabled Alexander to recall him.
Alexander succeeded his father as King of Macedon, and immediately made
Ptolemy one of his principal generals. Ptolemy rose, in fact, to a very
high command in the Macedonian army, and distinguished himself very
greatly in all the celebrated conqueror's subsequent campaigns. In the
Persian invasion, Ptolemy commanded one of the three grand divisions of
the army, and he rendered repeatedly the most signal services to the cause
of his master. He was employed on the most distant and dangerous
enterprises, and was often intrusted with the management of affairs of the
utmost importance. He was very successful in all his undertakings. He
conquered armies, reduced fortresses, negotiated treaties, and evinced, in
a word, the highest degree of military energy and skill. He once saved
Alexander's life by discovering and revealing a dangerous conspiracy which
had been formed against the king. Alexander had the opportunity to requite
this favor, through a divine interposition vouchsafed to him, it was said,
for the express purpose of enabling him to evince his gratitude. Ptolemy
had been wounded by a poisoned arrow, and when all the remedies and
antidotes of the physicians had failed, and the patient was apparently
about to die, an effectual means of cure was revealed to Alexander in a
dream, and Ptolemy, in his turn, was saved.

At the great rejoicings at Susa, when Alexander's conquests were
completed, Ptolemy was honored with a golden crown, and he was married,
with great pomp and ceremony, to Artacama, the daughter of one of the most
distinguished Persian generals.

At length Alexander died suddenly, after a night of drinking and carousal
at Babylon. He had no son old enough to succeed him, and his immense
empire was divided among his generals. Ptolemy obtained Egypt for his
share. He repaired immediately to Alexandria, with a great army, and a
great number of Greek attendants and followers, and there commenced a
reign which continued, in great prosperity and splendor, for forty years.
The native Egyptians were reduced, of course, to subjection and bondage.
All the offices in the army, and all stations of trust and responsibility
in civil life, were filled by Greeks. Alexandria was a Greek city, and it
became at once one of the most important commercial centers in all those
seas. Greek and Roman travelers found now a language spoken in Egypt which
they could understand, and philosophers and scholars could gratify the
curiosity which they had so long felt, in respect to the institutions, and
monuments, and wonderful physical characteristics of the country, with
safety and pleasure. In a word, the organization of a Greek government
over the ancient kingdom, and the establishment of the great commercial
relations of the city of Alexandria, conspired to bring Egypt out from its
concealment and seclusion, and to open it in some measure to the
intercourse, as well as to bring it more fully under the observation, of
the rest of mankind.

Ptolemy, in fact, made it a special object of his policy to accomplish
these ends. He invited Greek scholars, philosophers, poets, and artists,
in great numbers, to come to Alexandria, and to make his capital their
abode. He collected an immense library, which subsequently, under the name
of the Alexandrian library, became one of the most celebrated collections
of books and manuscripts that was ever made. We shall have occasion to
refer more particularly to this library in the next chapter.

Besides prosecuting these splendid schemes for the aggrandizement of
Egypt, King Ptolemy was engaged, during almost the whole period of his
reign, in waging incessant wars with the surrounding nations. He engaged
in these wars, in part, for the purpose of extending the boundaries of his
empire, and in part for self-defense against the aggressions and
encroachments of other powers. He finally succeeded in establishing his
kingdom on the most stable and permanent basis, and then, when he was
drawing toward the close of his life, being in fact over eighty years of
age, he abdicated his throne in favor of his youngest son, whose name was
also Ptolemy. Ptolemy the father, the founder of the dynasty, is known
commonly in history by the name of Ptolemy Soter. His son is called
Ptolemy Philadelphus. This son, though the youngest, was preferred to his
brothers as heir to the throne on account of his being the son of the most
favored and beloved of the monarch's wives. The determination of Soter to
abdicate the throne himself arose from his wish to put this favorite son
in secure possession of it before his death, in order to prevent the older
brothers from disputing the succession. The coronation of Philadelphus was
made one of the most magnificent and imposing ceremonies that royal pomp
and parade ever arranged. Two years afterward Ptolemy the father died,
and was buried by his son with a magnificence almost equal to that of his
own coronation. His body was deposited in a splendid mausoleum, which had
been built for the remains of Alexander; and so high was the veneration
which was felt by mankind for the greatness of his exploits and the
splendor of his reign, that divine honors were paid to his memory. Such
was the origin of the great dynasty of the Ptolemies.

Some of the early sovereigns of the line followed in some degree the
honorable example set them by the distinguished founder of it; but this
example was soon lost, and was succeeded by the most extreme degeneracy
and debasement. The successive sovereigns began soon to live and to reign
solely for the gratification of their own sensual propensities and
passions. Sensuality begins sometimes with kindness, but it ends always in
the most reckless and intolerable cruelty. The Ptolemies became, in the
end, the most abominable and terrible tyrants that the principle of
absolute and irresponsible power ever produced. There was one vice in
particular, a vice which they seem to have adopted from the Asiatic
nations of the Persian empire, that resulted in the most awful
consequences. This vice was incest.

The law of God, proclaimed not only in the Scriptures, but in the native
instincts of the human soul, forbids intermarriages among those connected
by close ties of consanguinity. The necessity for such a law rests on
considerations which can not here be fully explained. They are
considerations, however, which arise from causes inherent in the very
nature of man as a social being, and which are of universal, perpetual,
and insurmountable force. To guard his creatures against the deplorable
consequences, both physical and moral, which result from the practice of
such marriages, the great Author of Nature has implanted in every mind an
instinctive sense of their criminality, powerful enough to give effectual
warning of the danger, and so universal as to cause a distinct
condemnation of them to be recorded in almost every code of written law
that has ever been promulgated among mankind. The Persian sovereigns were,
however, above all law, and every species of incestuous marriage was
practiced by them without shame. The Ptolemies followed their example.

One of the most striking exhibitions of the nature of incestuous domestic
life which is afforded by the whole dismal panorama of pagan vice and
crime, is presented in the history of the great-grandfather of the
Cleopatra who is the principal subject of this narrative. He was
Ptolemy Physcon, the seventh in the line. It is necessary to give some
particulars of his history and that of his family, in order to explain the
circumstances under which Cleopatra herself came upon the stage. The name
Physcon, which afterward became his historical designation, was originally
given him in contempt and derision. He was very small of stature in
respect to height, but his gluttony and sensuality had made him immensely
corpulent in body, so that he looked more like a monster than a man. The
term Physcon was a Greek word, which denoted opprobriously the ridiculous
figure that he made.

The circumstances of Ptolemy Physcon's accession to the throne afford not
only a striking illustration of his character, but a very faithful though
terrible picture of the manners and morals of the times. He had been
engaged in a long and cruel war with his brother, who was king before him,
in which war he had perpetrated all imaginable atrocities, when at length
his brother died, leaving as his survivors his wife, who was also his
sister, and a son who was yet a child. This son was properly the heir to
the crown. Physcon himself, being a brother, had no claim, as against a
son. The name of the queen was Cleopatra. This was, in fact, a very common
name among the princesses of the Ptolemaic line. Cleopatra, besides her
son, had a daughter, who was at this time a young and beautiful girl. Her
name was also Cleopatra. She was, of course, the niece, as her mother was
the sister, of Physcon.

The plan of Cleopatra the mother, after her husband's death, was to make
her son the king of Egypt, and to govern herself, as regent, until he
should become of age. The friends and adherents of Physcon, however,
formed a strong party in _his_ favor. They sent for him to come to
Alexandria to assert his claims to the throne. He came, and a new civil
war was on the point of breaking out between the brother and sister, when
at length the dispute was settled by a treaty, in which it was stipulated
that Physcon should marry Cleopatra, and be king; but that he should make
the son of Cleopatra by her former husband his heir. This treaty was
carried into effect so far as the celebration of the marriage with the
mother was concerned, and the establishment of Physcon upon the throne.
But the perfidious monster, instead of keeping his faith in respect to the
boy, determined to murder him; and so open and brutal were his habits of
violence and cruelty, that he undertook to perpetrate the deed himself, in
open day. The boy fled shrieking to the mother's arms for protection, and
Physcon stabbed and killed him there, exhibiting the spectacle of a
newly-married husband murdering the son of his wife in her very arms!

It is easy to conceive what sort of affection would exist between a
husband and a wife after such transactions as these. In fact, there had
been no love between them from the beginning. The marriage had been solely
a political arrangement. Physcon hated his wife, and had murdered her son,
and then, as if to complete the exhibition of the brutal lawlessness and
capriciousness of his passions, he ended with falling in love with her
daughter. The beautiful girl looked upon this heartless monster, as ugly
and deformed in body as he was in mind, with absolute horror. But she was
wholly in his power. He compelled her, by violence, to submit to his will.
He repudiated the mother, and forced the daughter to become his wife.

Physcon displayed the same qualities of brutal tyranny and cruelty in the
treatment of his subjects that he manifested in his own domestic
relations. The particulars we can not here give, but can only say that his
atrocities became at length absolutely intolerable, and a revolt so
formidable broke out, that he fled from the country. In fact, he barely
escaped with his life, as the mob had surrounded the palace and were
setting it on fire, intending to burn the tyrant himself and all the
accomplices of his crimes together. Physcon, however, contrived to make
his escape. He fled to the island of Cyprus, taking with him a certain
beautiful boy, his son by the Cleopatra whom he had divorced; for they had
been married long enough, before the divorce, to have a son. The name of
this boy was Memphitis. His mother was very tenderly attached to him, and
Physcon took him away on this very account, to keep him as a hostage for
his mother's good behavior. He fancied that, when he was gone, she might
possibly attempt to resume possession of the throne.

His expectations in this respect were realized. The people of Alexandria
rallied around Cleopatra, and called upon her to take the crown. She did
so, feeling, perhaps, some misgivings in respect to the danger which such
a step might possibly bring upon her absent boy. She quieted herself,
however, by the thought that he was in the hands of his own father, and
that he could not possibly come to harm.

After some little time had elapsed, and Cleopatra was beginning to be well
established in her possession of the supreme power at Alexandria, her
birth-day approached, and arrangements were made for celebrating it in the
most magnificent manner. When the day arrived, the whole city was given up
to festivities and rejoicing. Grand entertainments were given in the
palace, and games, spectacles, and plays in every variety, were exhibited
and performed in all quarters of the city. Cleopatra herself was enjoying
a magnificent entertainment, given to the lords and ladies of the court
and the officers of her army, in one of the royal palaces.

[Illustration: THE BIRTH-DAY PRESENT.]

In the midst of this scene of festivity and pleasure, it was announced to
the queen that a large box had arrived for her. The box was brought into
the apartment. It had the appearance of containing some magnificent
present, sent in at that time by some friend in honor of the occasion. The
curiosity of the queen was excited to know what the mysterious coffer
might contain. She ordered it to be opened; and the guests gathered
around, each eager to obtain the first glimpse of the contents. The lid
was removed, and a cloth beneath it was raised, when, to the unutterable
horror of all who witnessed the spectacle, there was seen the head and
hands of Cleopatra's beautiful boy, lying among masses of human flesh,
which consisted of the rest of his body cut into pieces. The head had been
left entire, that the wretched mother might recognize in the pale and
lifeless features the countenance of her son. Physcon had sent the box to
Alexandria, with orders that it should be retained until the evening of
the birth-day, and then presented publicly to Cleopatra in the midst of
the festivities of the scene. The shrieks and cries with which she filled
the apartments of the palace at the first sight of the dreadful spectacle,
and the agony of long-continued and inconsolable grief which followed,
showed how well the cruel contrivance of the tyrant was fitted to
accomplish its end.

It gives us no pleasure to write, and we are sure it can give our readers
no pleasure to peruse, such shocking stories of bloody cruelty as these.
It is necessary, however, to a just appreciation of the character of the
great subject of this history, that we should understand the nature of
the domestic influences that reigned in the family from which she sprung.
In fact, it is due, as a matter of simple justice to her, that we should
know what these influences were, and what were the examples set before her
in her early life; since the privileges and advantages which the young
enjoy in their early years, and, on the other hand, the evil influences
under which they suffer, are to be taken very seriously into the account
when we are passing judgment upon the follies and sins into which they
subsequently fall.

The monster Physcon lived, it is true, two or three generations before the
great Cleopatra; but the character of the intermediate generations, until
the time of her birth, continued much the same. In fact, the cruelty,
corruption, and vice which reigned in every branch of the royal family
increased rather than diminished. The beautiful niece of Physcon, who, at
the time of her compulsory marriage with him, evinced such an aversion to
the monster, had become, at the period of her husband's death, as great a
monster of ambition, selfishness, and cruelty as he. She had two sons,
Lathyrus and Alexander. Physcon, when he died, left the kingdom of Egypt
to her by will, authorizing her to associate with her in the government
whichever of these two sons she might choose. The oldest was best entitled
to this privilege, by his priority of birth; but she preferred the
youngest, as she thought that her own power would be more absolute in
reigning in conjunction with him, since he would be more completely under
her control. The leading powers, however, in Alexandria, resisted this
plan, and insisted on Cleopatra's associating her oldest son, Lathyrus,
with her in the government of the realm. They compelled her to recall
Lathyrus from the banishment into which she had sent him, and to put him
nominally upon the throne. Cleopatra yielded to this necessity, but she
forced her son to repudiate his wife, and to take, instead, another woman,
whom she fancied she could make more subservient to her will. The mother
and the son went on together for a time, Lathyrus being nominally king,
though her determination that she would rule, and his struggles to resist
her intolerable tyranny, made their wretched household the scene of
terrible and perpetual quarrels. At last Cleopatra seized a number of
Lathyrus's servants, the eunuchs who were employed in various offices
about the palace, and after wounding and mutilating them in a horrible
manner, she exhibited them to the populace, saying that it was Lathyrus
that had inflicted the cruel injuries upon the sufferers, and calling upon
them to arise and punish him for his crimes. In this and in other similar
ways she awakened among the people of the court and of the city such an
animosity against Lathyrus, that they expelled him from the country. There
followed a long series of cruel and bloody wars between the mother and the
son, in the course of which each party perpetrated against the other
almost every imaginable deed of atrocity and crime. Alexander, the
youngest son, was so afraid of his terrible mother, that he did not dare
to remain in Alexandria with her, but went into a sort of banishment of
his own accord. He, however, finally returned to Egypt. His mother
immediately supposed that he was intending to disturb her possession of
power, and resolved to destroy him. He became acquainted with her designs,
and, grown desperate by the long-continued pressure of her intolerable
tyranny, he resolved to bring the anxiety and terror in which he lived to
an end by killing her. This he did, and then fled the country. Lathyrus,
his brother, then returned, and reigned for the rest of his days in a
tolerable degree of quietness and peace. At length Lathyrus died, and left
the kingdom to his son, Ptolemy Auletes, who was the great Cleopatra's
father.

We can not soften the picture which is exhibited to our view in the
history of this celebrated family, by regarding the mother of Auletes, in
the masculine and merciless traits and principles which she displayed so
energetically throughout her terrible career, as an exception to the
general character of the princesses who appeared from time to time in the
line. In ambition, selfishness, unnatural and reckless cruelty, and utter
disregard of every virtuous principle and of every domestic tie, she was
but the type and representative of all the rest.

She had two daughters, for example, who were the consistent and worthy
followers of such a mother. A passage in the lives of these sisters
illustrates very forcibly the kind of sisterly affection which prevailed
in the family of the Ptolemies. The case was this:

There were two princes of Syria, a country lying northeast of the
Mediterranean Sea, and so not very far from Egypt, who, though they were
brothers, were in a state of most deadly hostility to each other. One had
attempted to poison the other, and afterward a war had broken out between
them, and all Syria was suffering from the ravages of their armies. One of
the sisters, of whom we have been speaking, married one of these princes.
Her name was Tryphena. After some time, but yet while the unnatural war
was still raging between the two brothers, Cleopatra, the other
sister--the same Cleopatra, in fact, that had been divorced from Lathyrus
at the instance of his mother--espoused the other brother. Tryphena was
exceedingly incensed against Cleopatra for marrying her husband's mortal
foe, and the implacable hostility and hate of the sisters was thenceforth
added to that which the brothers had before exhibited, to complete the
display of unnatural and parricidal passion which this shameful contest
presented to the world.

In fact, Tryphena from this time seemed to feel a new and highly-excited
interest in the contest, from her eager desire to revenge herself on her
sister. She watched the progress of it, and took an active part in
pressing forward the active prosecution of the war. The party of her
husband, either from this or some other causes, seemed to be gaining the
day. The husband of Cleopatra was driven from one part of the country to
another, and at length, in order to provide for the security of his wife,
he left her in Antioch, a large and strongly-fortified city, where he
supposed that she would be safe, while he himself was engaged in
prosecuting the war in other quarters where his presence seemed to be
required.

On learning that her sister was at Antioch, Tryphena urged her husband to
attack the place. He accordingly advanced with a strong detachment of the
army, and besieged and took the city. Cleopatra would, of course, have
fallen into his hands as a captive; but, to escape this fate, she fled to
a temple for refuge. A temple was considered, in those days, an inviolable
sanctuary. The soldiers accordingly left her there. Tryphena, however,
made a request that her husband would deliver the unhappy fugitive into
her hands. She was determined, she said, to kill her. Her husband
remonstrated with her against this atrocious proposal. "It would be a
wholly useless act of cruelty," said he, "to destroy her life. She can do
us no possible harm in the future progress of the war, while to murder her
under these circumstances will only exasperate her husband and her
friends, and nerve them with new strength for the remainder of the
contest. And then, besides, she has taken refuge in a temple; and if we
violate that sanctuary, we shall incur, by such an act of sacrilege, the
implacable displeasure of heaven. Consider, too, that she is your sister,
and for you to kill her would be to commit an unnatural and wholly
inexcusable crime."

So saying, he commanded Tryphena to say no more upon the subject, for he
would on no account consent that Cleopatra should suffer any injury
whatever.

This refusal on the part of her husband to comply with her request only
inflamed Tryphena's insane resentment and anger the more. In fact, the
earnestness with which he espoused her sister's cause, and the interest
which he seemed to feel in her fate, aroused Tryphena's jealousy. She
believed, or pretended to believe, that her husband was influenced by a
sentiment of love in so warmly defending her. The object of her hate, from
being simply an enemy, became now, in her view, a rival, and she resolved
that, at all hazards, she should be destroyed. She accordingly ordered a
body of desperate soldiers to break into the temple and seize her.
Cleopatra fled in terror to the altar, and clung to it with such
convulsive force that the soldiers cut her hands off before they could
tear her away, and then, maddened by her resistance and the sight of
blood, they stabbed her again and again upon the floor of the temple,
where she fell. The appalling shrieks with which the wretched victim
filled the air in the first moments of her flight and her terror,
subsided, as her life ebbed away, into the most awful imprecations of the
judgments of heaven upon the head of the unnatural sister whose implacable
hate had destroyed her.

       *       *       *       *       *

Notwithstanding the specimens that we have thus given of the character and
action of this extraordinary family, the government of this dynasty,
extending, as it did, through the reigns of thirteen sovereigns and over a
period of nearly three hundred years, has always been considered one of
the most liberal, enlightened, and prosperous of all the governments of
ancient times. We shall have something to say in the next chapter in
respect to the internal condition of the country while these violent men
were upon the throne. In the meantime, we will here only add, that whoever
is inclined, in observing the ambition, the selfishness, the party spirit,
the unworthy intrigues, and the irregularities of moral conduct, which
modern rulers and statesmen sometimes exhibit to mankind in their personal
and political career, to believe in a retrogression and degeneracy of
national character as the world advances in age, will be very effectually
undeceived by reading attentively a full history of this celebrated
dynasty, and reflecting, as he reads, that the narrative presents, on the
whole, a fair and honest exhibition of the general character of the men by
whom, in ancient times, the world was governed.




CHAPTER III.

ALEXANDRIA.


It must not be imagined by the reader that the scenes of vicious
indulgence, and reckless cruelty and crime, which were exhibited with such
dreadful frequency, and carried to such an enormous excess in the palaces
of the Egyptian kings, prevailed to the same extent throughout the mass of
the community during the period of their reign. The internal
administration of government, and the institutions by which the industrial
pursuits of the mass of the people were regulated, and peace and order
preserved, and justice enforced between man and man, were all this time in
the hands of men well qualified, on the whole, for the trusts committed to
their charge, and in a good degree faithful in the performance of their
duties; and thus the ordinary affairs of government, and the general
routine of domestic and social life, went on, notwithstanding the
profligacy of the kings, in a course of very tolerable peace, prosperity,
and happiness. During every one of the three hundred years over which the
history of the Ptolemies extends, the whole length and breadth of the land
of Egypt exhibited, with comparatively few interruptions, one wide-spread
scene of busy industry. The inundations came at their appointed season,
and then regularly retired. The boundless fields which the waters had
fertilized were then every where tilled. The lands were plowed; the seed
was sown; the canals and water-courses, which ramified from the river in
every direction over the ground, were opened or closed, as the case
required, to regulate the irrigation. The inhabitants were busy, and,
consequently, they were virtuous. And as the sky of Egypt is seldom or
never darkened by clouds and storms, the scene presented to the eye the
same unchanging aspect of smiling verdure and beauty, day after day, and
month after month, until the ripened grain was gathered into the
store-houses, and the land was cleared for another inundation.

We say that the people were virtuous because they were busy; for there is
no principle of political economy more fully established than that vice in
the social state is the incident and symptom of idleness. It prevails
always in those classes of every great population who are either released
by the possession of fixed and unchangeable wealth from the necessity, or
excluded by their poverty and degradation from the advantage, of useful
employment. Wealth that is free, and subject to its possessor's control,
so that he can, if he will, occupy himself in the management of it, while
it sometimes may make individuals vicious, does not generally corrupt
classes of men, for it does not make them idle. But wherever the
institutions of a country are such as to create an aristocratic class,
whose incomes depend on entailed estates, or on fixed and permanent
annuities, so that the capital on which they live can not afford them any
mental occupation, they are doomed necessarily to inaction and idleness.
Vicious pleasures and indulgences are, with such a class as a whole, the
inevitable result; for the innocent enjoyments of man are planned and
designed by the Author of nature only for the intervals of rest and repose
in a life of activity. They are always found wholly insufficient to
satisfy one who makes pleasure the whole end and aim of his being.

In the same manner, if, either from the influence of the social
institutions of a country, or from the operation of natural causes which
human power is unable to control, there is a class of men too low, and
degraded, and miserable to be reached by the ordinary inducements to daily
toil, so certain are they to grow corrupt and depraved, that degradation
has become in all languages a term almost synonymous with vice. There are
many exceptions, it is true, to these general laws. Many active men are
very wicked; and there have been frequent instances of the most exalted
virtue among nobles and kings. Still, as a general law, it is
unquestionably true that vice is the incident of idleness; and the sphere
of vice, therefore, is at the top and at the bottom of society--those
being the regions in which idleness reigns. The great remedy, too, for
vice is employment. To make a community virtuous, it is essential that all
ranks and gradations of it, from the highest to the lowest, should have
something to do.

In accordance with these principles, we observe that, while the most
extreme and abominable wickedness seemed to hold continual and absolute
sway in the palaces of the Ptolemies, and among the nobles of their
courts, the working ministers of state, and the men on whom the actual
governmental functions devolved, discharged their duties with wisdom and
fidelity, and throughout all the ordinary ranks and gradations of society
there prevailed generally a very considerable degree of industry,
prosperity, and happiness. This prosperity prevailed not only in the rural
districts of the Delta and along the valley of the Nile, but also among
the merchants, and navigators, and artisans of Alexandria.

Alexandria became, in fact, very soon after it was founded, a very great
and busy city. Many things conspired to make it at once a great commercial
emporium. In the first place, it was the depôt of export for all the
surplus grain and other agricultural produce which was raised in such
abundance along the Egyptian valley. This produce was brought down in
boats to the upper point of the Delta, where the branches of the river
divided, and thence down the Canopic branch to the city. The city was not,
in fact, situated directly upon this branch, but upon a narrow tongue of
land, at a little distance from it, near the sea. It was not easy to enter
the channel directly, on account of the bars and sand-banks at its mouth,
produced by the eternal conflict between the waters of the river and the
surges of the sea. The water was deep, however, as Alexander's engineers
had discovered, at the place where the city was built, and, by
establishing the port there, and then cutting a canal across to the Nile,
they were enabled to bring the river and the sea at once into easy
communication.

The produce of the valley was thus brought down the river and through the
canal to the city. Here immense warehouses and granaries were erected for
its reception, that it might be safely preserved until the ships that came
into the port were ready to take it away. These ships came from Syria,
from all the coasts of Asia Minor, from Greece, and from Rome. They
brought the agricultural productions of their own countries, as well as
articles of manufacture of various kinds; these they sold to the merchants
of Alexandria, and purchased the productions of Egypt in return.

The port of Alexandria presented thus a constant picture of life and
animation. Merchant ships were continually coming and going, or lying at
anchor in the roadstead. Seamen were hoisting sails, or raising anchors,
or rowing their capacious galleys through the water, singing, as they
pulled, to the motion of the oars. Within the city there was the same
ceaseless activity. Here groups of men were unloading the canal boats
which had arrived from the river. There porters were transporting bales of
merchandise or sacks of grain from a warehouse to a pier, or from one
landing to another. The occasional parading of the king's guards, or the
arrival and departure of ships of war to land or to take away bodies of
armed men, were occurrences that sometimes intervened to interrupt, or as
perhaps the people then would have said, to adorn this scene of useful
industry; and now and then, for a brief period, these peaceful avocations
would be wholly suspended and set aside by a revolt or by a civil war,
waged by rival brothers against each other, or instigated by the
conflicting claims of a mother and son. These interruptions, however, were
comparatively few, and, in ordinary cases, not of long continuance. It was
for the interest of all branches of the royal line to do as little injury
as possible to the commercial and agricultural operations of the realm. In
fact, it was on the prosperity of those operations that the revenues
depended. The rulers were well aware of this, and so, however implacably
two rival princes may have hated one another, and however desperately each
party may have struggled to destroy all active combatants whom they should
find in arms against them, they were both under every possible inducement
to spare the private property and the lives of the peaceful population.
This population, in fact, engaged thus in profitable industry,
constituted, with the avails of their labors, the very estate for which
the combatants were contending.

Seeing the subject in this light, the Egyptian sovereigns, especially
Alexander and the earlier Ptolemies, made every effort in their power to
promote the commercial greatness of Alexandria. They built palaces, it is
true, but they also built warehouses. One of the most expensive and
celebrated of all the edifices that they reared was the light-house which
has been already alluded to. This light-house was a lofty tower, built of
white marble. It was situated upon the island of Pharos, opposite to the
city, and at some distance from it. There was a sort of isthmus of shoals
and sand-bars connecting the island with the shore. Over these shallows a
pier or causeway was built, which finally became a broad and inhabited
neck. The principal part of the ancient city, however, was on the main
land.[1]

The curvature of the earth requires that a light-house on a coast should
have a considerable elevation, otherwise its summit would not appear above
the horizon, unless the mariner were very near. To attain this elevation,
the architects usually take advantage of some hill or cliff, or rocky
eminence near the shore. There was, however, no opportunity to do this at
Pharos; for the island was, like the main land, level and low. The
requisite elevation could only be attained, therefore, by the masonry of
an edifice, and the blocks of marble necessary for the work had to be
brought from a great distance. The Alexandrian light-house was reared in
the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus, the second monarch in the line. No pains
or expense were spared in its construction. The edifice, when completed,
was considered one of the seven wonders of the world. It was indebted for
its fame, however, in some degree, undoubtedly to the conspicuousness of
its situation, rising, as it did, at the entrance of the greatest
commercial emporium of its time, and standing there, like a pillar of
cloud by day and of fire by night, to attract the welcome gaze of every
wandering mariner whose ship came within its horizon, and to awaken his
gratitude by tendering him its guidance and dispelling his fears.

The light at the top of the tower was produced by a fire, made of such
combustibles as would emit the brightest flame. This fire burned slowly
through the day, and then was kindled up anew when the sun went down, and
was continually replenished through the night with fresh supplies of fuel.
In modern times, a much more convenient and economical mode is adopted to
produce the requisite illumination. A great blazing lamp burns brilliantly
in the center of the lantern of the tower, and all that part of the
radiation from the flame which would naturally have beamed upward, or
downward, or laterally, or back toward the land, is so turned by a curious
system of reflectors and polyzonal lenses, most ingeniously contrived and
very exactly adjusted, as to be thrown forward in one broad and thin, but
brilliant sheet of light, which shoots out where its radiance is needed,
over the surface of the sea. Before these inventions were perfected, far
the largest portion of the light emitted by the illumination of
light-house towers streamed away wastefully in landward directions, or was
lost among the stars.

Of course, the glory of erecting such an edifice as the Pharos of
Alexandria, and of maintaining it in the performance of its functions,
was very great; the question might, however, very naturally arise whether
this glory was justly due to the architect through whose scientific skill
the work was actually accomplished, or to the monarch by whose power and
resources the architect was sustained. The name of the architect was
Sostratus. He was a Greek. The monarch was, as has already been stated,
the second Ptolemy, called commonly Ptolemy Philadelphus. Ptolemy ordered
that, in completing the tower, a marble tablet should be built into the
wall, at a suitable place near the summit, and that a proper inscription
should be carved upon it, with his name as the builder of the edifice
conspicuous thereon. Sostratus preferred inserting his own name. He
accordingly made the tablet and set it in its place. He cut the
inscription upon the face of it, in Greek characters, with his own name as
the author of the work. He did this secretly, and then covered the face of
the tablet with an artificial composition, made with lime, to imitate the
natural surface of the stone. On this outer surface he cut a new
inscription, in which he inserted the name of the king. In process of time
the lime moldered away, the king's inscription disappeared, and his own,
which thenceforward continued as long as the building endured, came out to
view.

The Pharos was said to have been four hundred feet high. It was famed
throughout the world for many centuries; nothing, however, remains of it
now but a heap of useless and unmeaning ruins.

Besides the light that beamed from the summit of this lofty tower, there
was another center of radiance and illumination in ancient Alexandria,
which was in some respects still more conspicuous and renowned, namely, an
immense library and museum established and maintained by the Ptolemies.
The Museum, which was first established, was not, as its name might now
imply, a collection of curiosities, but an institution of learning,
consisting of a body of learned men, who devoted their time to
philosophical and scientific pursuits. The institution was richly endowed,
and magnificent buildings were erected for its use. The king who
established it began immediately to make a collection of books for the use
of the members of the institution. This was attended with great expense,
as every book that was added to the collection required to be transcribed
with a pen on parchment or papyrus, with infinite labor and care. Great
numbers of scribes were constantly employed upon this work at the Museum.
The kings who were most interested in forming this library would seize the
books that were possessed by individual scholars, or that were deposited
in the various cities of their dominions, and then, causing beautiful
copies of them to be made by the scribes of the Museum, they would retain
the originals for the great Alexandrian Library, and give the copies to
the men or the cities that had been thus despoiled. In the same manner
they would borrow, as they called it, from all travelers who visited
Egypt, any valuable books which they might have in their possession, and,
retaining the originals, give them back copies instead.

In process of time the library increased to four hundred thousand volumes.
There was then no longer any room in the buildings of the Museum for
further additions. There was, however, in another part of the city, a
great temple called the Serapion. This temple was a very magnificent
edifice, or, rather, group of edifices, dedicated to the god Serapis. The
origin and history of this temple were very remarkable. The legend was
this:

It seems that one of the ancient and long-venerated gods of the Egyptians
was a deity named Serapis. He had been, among other divinities, the object
of Egyptian adoration ages before Alexandria was built or the Ptolemies
reigned. There was also, by a curious coincidence, a statue of the same
name at a great commercial town named Sinope, which was built upon the
extremity of a promontory which projected from Asia Minor into the Euxine
Sea.[2] Sinope was, in some sense, the Alexandria of the north, being the
center and seat of a great portion of the commerce of that quarter of the
world.

The Serapis of Sinope was considered as the protecting deity of seamen,
and the navigators who came and went to and from the city made sacrifices
to him, and offered him oblations and prayers, believing that they were,
in a great measure, dependent upon some mysterious and inscrutable power
which he exercised for their safety in storms. They carried the knowledge
of his name, and tales of his imaginary interpositions, to all the places
that they visited; and thus the fame of the god became extended, first, to
all the coasts of the Euxine Sea, and subsequently to distant provinces
and kingdoms. The Serapis of Sinope began to be considered every where as
the tutelar god of seamen.

Accordingly, when the first of the Ptolemies was forming his various plans
for adorning and aggrandizing Alexandria, he received, he said, one night,
a divine intimation in a dream that he was to obtain the statue of Serapis
from Sinope, and set it up in Alexandria, in a suitable temple which he
was in the mean time to erect in honor of the god. It is obvious that very
great advantages to the city would result from the accomplishment of this
design. In the first place, a temple to the god Serapis would be a new
distinction for it in the minds of the rural population, who would
undoubtedly suppose that the deity honored by it was their own ancient
god. Then the whole maritime and nautical interest of the world, which had
been accustomed to adore the god of Sinope, would turn to Alexandria as
the great center of religious attraction, if their venerated idol could be
carried and placed in a new and magnificent temple built expressly for him
there. Alexandria could never be the chief naval port and station of the
world, unless it contained the sanctuary and shrine of the god of seamen.

Ptolemy sent accordingly to the King of Sinope and proposed to purchase
the idol. The embassage was, however, unsuccessful. The king refused to
give up the god. The negotiations were continued for two years, but all in
vain. At length, on account of some failure in the regular course of the
seasons on that coast, there was a famine there, which became finally so
severe that the people of the city were induced to consent to give up
their deity to the Egyptians in exchange for a supply of corn. Ptolemy
sent the corn and received the idol. He then built the temple, which, when
finished, surpassed in grandeur and magnificence almost every sacred
structure in the world.

It was in this temple that the successive additions to the Alexandrian
library were deposited, when the apartments at the Museum became full. In
the end there were four hundred thousand rolls or volumes in the Museum,
and three hundred thousand in the Serapion. The former was called the
parent library, and the latter, being, as it were, the offspring of the
first, was called the daughter.

Ptolemy Philadelphus, who interested himself very greatly in collecting
this library, wished to make it a complete collection of all the books in
the world. He employed scholars to read and study, and travelers to make
extensive tours, for the purpose of learning what books existed among all
the surrounding nations; and, when he learned of their existence, he
spared no pains or expense in attempting to procure either the originals
themselves, or the most perfect and authentic copies of them. He sent to
Athens and obtained the works of the most celebrated Greek historians, and
then causing, as in other cases, most beautiful transcripts to be made, he
sent the transcripts back to Athens, and a very large sum of money with
them as an equivalent for the difference of value between originals and
copies in such an exchange.

In the course of the inquiries which Ptolemy made into the literature of
the surrounding nations, in his search for accessions to his library, he
heard that the Jews had certain sacred writings in their temple at
Jerusalem, comprising a minute and extremely interesting history of their
nation from the earliest periods, and also many other books of sacred
prophecy and poetry. These books, which were, in fact, the Hebrew
Scriptures of the Old Testament, were then wholly unknown to all nations
except the Jews, and among the Jews were known only to priests and
scholars. They were kept sacred at Jerusalem. The Jews would have
considered them as profaned in being exhibited to the view of pagan
nations. In fact, the learned men of other countries would not have been
able to read them; for the Jews secluded themselves so closely from the
rest of mankind, that their language was, in that age, scarcely ever heard
beyond the confines of Judea and Galilee.

Ptolemy very naturally thought that a copy of these sacred books would be
a great acquisition to his library. They constituted, in fact, the whole
literature of a nation which was, in some respects, the most extraordinary
that ever existed on the globe. Ptolemy conceived the idea, also, of not
only adding to his library a copy of these writings in the original
Hebrew, but of causing a translation of them to be made into Greek, so
that they might easily be read by the Greek and Roman scholars who were
drawn in great numbers to his capital by the libraries and the learned
institutions which he had established there. The first thing to be
effected, however, in accomplishing either of these plans, was to obtain
the consent of the Jewish authorities. They would probably object to
giving up any copy of their sacred writings at all.

There was one circumstance which led Ptolemy to imagine that the Jews
would, at that time particularly, be averse to granting any request of
such a nature coming from an Egyptian king, and that was, that during
certain wars which had taken place in previous reigns, a considerable
number of prisoners had been taken by the Egyptians, and had been brought
to Egypt as captives, where they had been sold to the inhabitants, and
were now scattered over the land as slaves. They were employed as servile
laborers in tilling the fields, or in turning enormous wheels to pump up
water from the Nile. The masters of these hapless bondmen conceived, like
other slave-holders, that they had a right of property in their slaves.
This was in some respects true, since they had bought them of the
government at the close of the war for a consideration; and though they
obviously derived from this circumstance no valid proprietary right or
claim as against the men personally, it certainly would seem that it gave
them a just claim against the government of whom they bought, in case of
subsequent manumission.

Ptolemy or his minister, for it can not now be known who was the real
actor in these transactions, determined on liberating these slaves and
sending them back to their native land, as a means of propitiating the
Jews and inclining them to listen favorably to the request which he was
about to prefer for a copy of their sacred writings. He, however, paid to
those who held the captives a very liberal sum for ransom. The ancient
historians, who never allow the interest of their narratives to suffer for
want of a proper amplification on their part of the scale on which the
deeds which they record were performed, say that the number of slaves
liberated on this occasion was a hundred and twenty thousand, and the sum
paid for them, as compensation to the owners, was six hundred talents,
equal to six hundred thousand dollars.[3] And yet this was only a
preliminary expense to pave the way for the acquisition of a single series
of books, to add to the variety of the immense collection.

After the liberation and return of the captives, Ptolemy sent a splendid
embassage to Jerusalem, with very respectful letters to the high priest,
and with very magnificent presents. The embassadors were received with the
highest honors. The request of Ptolemy that he should be allowed to take a
copy of the sacred books for his library was very readily granted.

The priests caused copies to be made of all the sacred writings. These
copies were executed in the most magnificent style, and were splendidly
illuminated with letters of gold. The Jewish government also, at Ptolemy's
request, designated a company of Hebrew scholars, six from each tribe--men
learned in both the Greek and Hebrew languages--to proceed to Alexandria,
and there, at the Museum, to make a careful translation of the Hebrew
books into Greek. As there were twelve tribes, and six translators chosen
from each, there were seventy-two translators in all. They made their
translation, and it was called the _Septuagint_, from the Latin
_septuaginta duo_, which means seventy-two.

Although out of Judea there was no feeling of reverence for these Hebrew
Scriptures as books of divine authority, there was still a strong interest
felt in them as very entertaining and curious works of history, by all
the Greek and Roman scholars who frequented Alexandria to study at the
Museum. Copies were accordingly made of the Septuagint translation, and
were taken to other countries; and there, in process of time, copies of
the copies were made, until, at length the work became extensively
circulated throughout the whole learned world. When, finally, Christianity
became extended over the Roman empire, the priests and monks looked with
even a stronger interest than the ancient scholars had felt upon this
early translation of so important a portion of the sacred Scriptures. They
made new copies for abbeys, monasteries, and colleges; and when, at
length, the art of printing was discovered, this work was one of the first
on which the magic power of typography was tried. The original manuscript
made by the scribes of the seventy-two, and all the early transcripts
which were made from it, have long since been lost or destroyed; but,
instead of them, we have now hundreds of thousands of copies in compact
printed volumes, scattered among the public and private libraries of
Christendom. In fact, now, after the lapse of two thousand years, a copy
of Ptolemy's Septuagint may be obtained of any considerable bookseller in
any country of the civilized world; and though it required a national
embassage, and an expenditure, if the accounts are true, of more than a
million of dollars, originally to obtain it, it may be procured without
difficulty now by two days' wages of an ordinary laborer.

Besides the building of the Pharos, the Museum, and the Temple of Serapis,
the early Ptolemies formed and executed a great many other plans tending
to the same ends which the erection of these splendid edifices was
designed to secure, namely, to concentrate in Alexandria all possible
means of attraction, commercial, literary, and religious, so as to make
the city the great center of interest, and the common resort for all
mankind. They raised immense revenues for these and other purposes by
taxing heavily the whole agricultural produce of the valley of the Nile.
The inundations, by the boundless fertility which they annually produced,
supplied the royal treasuries. Thus the Abyssinian rains at the sources of
the Nile built the Pharos at its mouth, and endowed the Alexandrian
library.

The taxes laid upon the people of Egypt to supply the Ptolemies with funds
were, in fact, so heavy, that only the bare means of subsistence were
left to the mass of the agricultural population. In admiring the greatness
and glory of the city, therefore, we must remember that there was a gloomy
counterpart to its splendor in the very extended destitution and poverty
to which the mass of the people were every where doomed. They lived in
hamlets of wretched huts along the banks of the river, in order that the
capital might be splendidly adorned with temples and palaces. They passed
their lives in darkness and ignorance, that seven hundred thousand volumes
of expensive manuscripts might be enrolled at the Museum for the use of
foreign philosophers and scholars. The policy of the Ptolemies was,
perhaps, on the whole, the best, for the general advancement and ultimate
welfare of mankind, which could have been pursued in the age in which they
lived and acted; but, in applauding the results which they attained, we
must not wholly forget the cost which they incurred in attaining them. At
the same cost, we could, at the present day, far surpass them. If the
people of the United States will surrender the comforts and conveniences
which they individually enjoy--if the farmers scattered in their
comfortable homes on the hill-sides and plains throughout the land will
give up their houses, their furniture, their carpets, their books, and the
privileges of their children, and then--withholding from the produce of
their annual toil only a sufficient reservation to sustain them and their
families through the year, in a life like that of a beast of burden, spent
in some miserable and naked hovel--send the rest to some hereditary
sovereign residing upon the Atlantic sea-board, that he may build with the
proceeds a splendid capital, they may have an Alexandria now that will
infinitely exceed the ancient city of the Ptolemies in splendor and
renown. The nation, too, would, in such a case, pay for its metropolis the
same price, precisely, that the ancient Egyptians paid for theirs.

The Ptolemies expended the revenues which they raised by this taxation
mainly in a very liberal and enlightened manner, for the accomplishment of
the purposes which they had in view. The building of the Pharos, the
removal of the statue of Serapis, and the endowment of the Museum and the
library were great conceptions, and they were carried into effect in the
most complete and perfect manner. All the other operations which they
devised and executed for the extension and aggrandizement of the city
were conceived and executed in the same spirit of scientific and
enlightened liberality. Streets were opened; the most splendid palaces
were built; docks, piers, and breakwaters were constructed, and fortresses
and towers were armed and garrisoned. Then every means was employed to
attract to the city a great concourse from all the most highly-civilized
nations then existing. The highest inducements were offered to merchants,
mechanics, and artisans to make the city their abode. Poets, painters,
sculptors, and scholars of every nation and degree were made welcome, and
every facility was afforded them for the prosecution of their various
pursuits. These plans were all eminently successful. Alexandria rose
rapidly to the highest consideration and importance; and, at the time when
Cleopatra--born to preside over this scene of magnificence and
splendor--came upon the stage, the city had but one rival in the world.
That rival was Rome.




CHAPTER IV.

CLEOPATRA'S FATHER.


When the time was approaching in which Cleopatra appeared upon the stage,
Rome was perhaps the only city that could be considered as the rival of
Alexandria, in the estimation of mankind, in respect to interest and
attractiveness as a capital. In one respect, Rome was vastly superior to
the Egyptian metropolis, and that was in the magnitude and extent of the
military power which it wielded among the nations of the earth. Alexandria
ruled over Egypt, and over a few of the neighboring coasts and islands;
but in the course of the three centuries during which she had been
acquiring her greatness and fame, the Roman empire had extended itself
over almost the whole civilized world. Egypt had been, thus far, too
remote to be directly reached; but the affairs of Egypt itself became
involved at length with the operations of the Roman power, about the time
of Cleopatra's birth, in a very striking and peculiar manner; and as the
consequences of the transaction were the means of turning the whole
course of the queen's subsequent history, a narration of it is necessary
to a proper understanding of the circumstances under which she commenced
her career. In fact, it was the extension of the Roman empire to the
limits of Egypt, and the connections which thence arose between the
leading Roman generals and the Egyptian sovereign, which have made the
story of this particular queen so much more conspicuous, as an object of
interest and attention to mankind, than that of any other one of the ten
Cleopatras who rose successively in the same royal line.

Ptolemy Auletes, Cleopatra's father, was perhaps, in personal character,
the most dissipated, degraded, and corrupt of all the sovereigns in the
dynasty. He spent his whole time in vice and debauchery. The only honest
accomplishment that he seemed to possess was his skill in playing upon the
flute; of this he was very vain. He instituted musical contests, in which
the musical performers of Alexandria played for prizes and crowns; and he
himself was accustomed to enter the lists with the rest as a competitor.
The people of Alexandria, and the world in general, considered such
pursuits as these wholly unworthy the attention of the representative of
so illustrious a line of sovereigns; and the abhorrence which they felt
for the monarch's vices and crimes was mingled with a feeling of contempt
for the meanness of his ambition.

There was a doubt in respect to his title to the crown, for his birth, on
the mother's side, was irregular and ignoble. Instead, however, of
attempting to confirm and secure his possession of power by a vigorous and
prosperous administration of the government, he wholly abandoned all
concern in respect to the course of public affairs; and then, to guard
against the danger of being deposed, he conceived the plan of getting
himself recognized at Rome as one of the allies of the Roman people. If
this were once done, he supposed that the Roman government would feel
under an obligation to sustain him on his throne in the event of any
threatened danger.

The Roman government was a sort of republic, and the two most powerful men
in the state at this time were Pompey and Cæsar. Cæsar was in the
ascendency at Rome at the time that Ptolemy made his application for an
alliance. Pompey was absent in Asia Minor, being engaged in prosecuting a
war with Mithradates, a very powerful monarch, who was at that time
resisting the Roman power. Cæsar was very deeply involved in debt, and
was, moreover, very much in need of money, not only for relief from
existing embarrassments, but as a means of subsequent expenditure, to
enable him to accomplish certain great political schemes which he was
entertaining. After many negotiations and delays, it was agreed that Cæsar
would exert his influence to secure an alliance between the Roman people
and Ptolemy, on condition that Ptolemy paid him the sum of six thousand
talents, equal to about six millions of dollars. A part of the money,
Cæsar said, was for Pompey.

The title of ally was conferred, and Ptolemy undertook to raise the money
which he had promised by increasing the taxes of his kingdom. The
measures, however, which he thus adopted for the purpose of making himself
the more secure in his possession of the throne, proved to be the means of
overthrowing him. The discontent and disaffection of his people, which had
been strong and universal before, though suppressed and concealed, broke
out now into open violence. That there should be laid upon them, in
addition to all their other burdens, these new oppressions, heavier than
those which they had endured before, and exacted for such a purpose too,
was not to be endured. To be compelled to see their country sold on any
terms to the Roman people was sufficiently hard to bear; but to be forced
to raise, themselves, and pay the price of the transfer, was absolutely
intolerable. Alexandria commenced a revolt. Ptolemy was not a man to act
decidedly against such a demonstration, or, in fact, to evince either
calmness or courage in any emergency whatever. His first thought was to
escape from Alexandria to save his life. His second, to make the best of
his way to Rome, to call upon the Roman people to come to the succor of
their ally!

Ptolemy left five children behind him in his flight. The eldest was the
Princess Berenice, who had already reached maturity. The second was the
great Cleopatra, the subject of this history. Cleopatra was, at this time,
about eleven years old. There were also two sons, but they were very
young. One of them was named Ptolemy.

The Alexandrians determined on raising Berenice to the throne in her
father's place, as soon as his flight was known. They thought that the
sons were too young to attempt to reign in such an emergency, as it was
very probable that Auletes, the father, would attempt to recover his
kingdom. Berenice very readily accepted the honor and power which were
offered to her. She established herself in her father's palace, and began
her reign in great magnificence and splendor. In process of time she
thought that her position would be strengthened by a marriage with a royal
prince from some neighboring realm. She first sent embassadors to make
proposals to a prince of Syria named Antiochus. The embassadors came back,
bringing word that Antiochus was dead, but that he had a brother named
Seleucus, upon whom the succession fell. Berenice then sent them back to
make the same offers to him. He accepted the proposals, came to Egypt, and
he and Berenice were married. After trying him for a while, Berenice found
that, for some reason or other, she did not like him as a husband, and,
accordingly, she caused him to be strangled.

At length, after various other intrigues and much secret management,
Berenice succeeded in a second negotiation, and married a prince, or a
pretended prince, from some country of Asia Minor, whose name was
Archelaus. She was better pleased with this second husband than she had
been with the first, and she began, at last, to feel somewhat settled and
established on her throne, and to be prepared, as she thought, to offer
effectual resistance to her father in case he should ever attempt to
return.

It was in the midst of the scenes, and surrounded by the influences which
might be expected to prevail in the families of such a father and such a
sister, that Cleopatra spent those years of life in which the character is
formed. During all these revolutions, and exposed to all these exhibitions
of licentious wickedness, and of unnatural cruelty and crime, she was
growing up in the royal palaces a spirited and beautiful, but indulged and
neglected child.

In the mean time, Auletes, the father, went on toward Rome. So far as his
character and his story were known among the surrounding nations, he was
the object of universal obloquy, both on account of his previous career of
degrading vice, and now, still more, for this ignoble flight from the
difficulties in which his vices and crimes had involved him.

He stopped, on the way, at the island of Rhodes. It happened that Cato,
the great Roman philosopher and general, was at Rhodes at this time. Cato
was a man of stern, unbending virtue, and of great influence at that
period in public affairs. Ptolemy sent a messenger to inform Cato of his
arrival, supposing, of course, that the Roman general would hasten, on
hearing of the fact, to pay his respects to so great a personage as he, a
king of Egypt--a Ptolemy--though suffering under a temporary reverse of
fortune. Cato directed the messenger to reply that, so far as he was
aware, he had no particular business with Ptolemy. "Say, however, to the
king," he added, "that, if he has any business with me, he may call and
see me, if he pleases."

Ptolemy was obliged to suppress his resentment and submit. He thought it
very essential to the success of his plans that he should see Cato, and
secure, if possible, his interest and co-operation; and he consequently
made preparations for paying, instead of receiving, the visit, intending
to go in the greatest royal state that he could command. He accordingly
appeared at Cato's lodgings on the following day, magnificently dressed,
and accompanied by many attendants. Cato, who was dressed in the plainest
and most simple manner, and whose apartment was furnished in a style
corresponding with the severity of his character, did not even rise when
the king entered the room. He simply pointed with his hand, and bade the
visitor take a seat.

Ptolemy began to make a statement of his case, with a view to obtaining
Cato's influence with the Roman people to induce them to interpose in his
behalf. Cato, however, far from evincing any disposition to espouse his
visitor's cause, censured him, in the plainest terms, for having abandoned
his proper position in his own kingdom, to go and make himself a victim
and a prey for the insatiable avarice of the Roman leaders. "You can do
nothing at Rome," he said, "but by the influence of bribes; and all the
resources of Egypt will not be enough to satisfy the Roman greediness for
money." He concluded by recommending him to go back to Alexandria, and
rely for his hopes of extrication from the difficulties which surrounded
him on the exercise of his own energy and resolution there.

Ptolemy was greatly abashed at this rebuff, but, on consultation with his
attendants and followers, it was decided to be too late now to return. The
whole party accordingly re-embarked on board their galleys, and pursued
their way to Rome.

Ptolemy found, on his arrival at the city, that Cæsar was absent in Gaul,
while Pompey, on the other hand, who had returned victorious from his
campaigns against Mithradates, was now the great leader of influence and
power at the Capitol. This change of circumstances was not, however,
particularly unfavorable; for Ptolemy was on friendly terms with Pompey,
as he had been with Cæsar. He had assisted him in his wars with
Mithradates by sending him a squadron of horse, in pursuance of his policy
of cultivating friendly relations with the Roman people by every means in
his power. Besides, Pompey had received a part of the money which Ptolemy
had paid to Cæsar as the price of the Roman alliance, and was to receive
his share of the rest in case Ptolemy should ever be restored. Pompey was
accordingly interested in favoring the royal fugitive's cause. He received
him in his palace, entertained him in magnificent style, and took
immediate measures for bringing his cause before the Roman senate, urging
upon that body the adoption of immediate and vigorous measures for
effecting his restoration, as an ally whom they were bound to protect
against his rebellious subjects.

There was at first some opposition in the Roman senate against espousing
the cause of such a man, but it was soon put down, being overpowered in
part by Pompey's authority, and in part silenced by Ptolemy's promises and
bribes. The senate determined to restore the king to his throne, and began
to make arrangements for carrying the measure into effect.

The Roman provinces nearest to Egypt were Cilicia and Syria, countries
situated on the eastern and northeastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea,
north of Judea. The forces stationed in these provinces would be, of
course, the most convenient for furnishing the necessary troops for the
expedition. The province of Cilicia was under the command of the consul
Lentulus. Lentulus was at this time at Rome; he had repaired to the
capital for some temporary purpose, leaving his province and the troops
stationed there under the command, for the time, of a sort of lieutenant
general named Gabinius. It was concluded that this Lentulus, with his
Syrian forces, should undertake the task of reinstating Ptolemy on his
throne.

While these plans and arrangements were yet immature, a circumstance
occurred which threatened, for a time, wholly to defeat them. It seems
that when Cleopatra's father first left Egypt, he had caused a report to
be circulated there that he had been killed in the revolt. The object of
this stratagem was to cover and conceal his flight. The government of
Berenice soon discovered the truth, and learned that the fugitive had gone
in the direction of Rome. They immediately inferred that he was going to
appeal to the Roman people for aid, and they determined that, if that were
the case, the Roman people, before deciding in his favor, should have the
opportunity to hear their side of the story as well as his. They
accordingly made preparations at once for sending a very imposing
embassage to Rome. The deputation consisted of more than a hundred
persons. The object of Berenice's government in sending so large a number
was not only to evince their respect for the Roman people, and their sense
of the magnitude of the question at issue, but also to guard against any
efforts that Ptolemy might make to intercept the embassage on the way, or
to buy off the members of it by bribes. The number, however, large as it
was, proved insufficient to accomplish this purpose. The whole Roman
world was at this time in such a condition of disorder and violence, in
the hands of the desperate and reckless military leaders who then bore
sway, that there were every where abundant facilities for the commission
of any conceivable crime. Ptolemy contrived, with the assistance of the
fierce partisans who had espoused his cause, and who were deeply
interested in his success on account of the rewards which were promised
them, to waylay and destroy a large proportion of this company before they
reached Rome. Some were assassinated; some were poisoned; some were
tampered with and bought off by bribes. A small remnant reached Rome; but
they were so intimidated by the dangers which surrounded them, that they
did not dare to take any public action in respect to the business which
had been committed to their charge. Ptolemy began to congratulate himself
on having completely circumvented his daughter in her efforts to protect
herself against his designs.

Instead of that, however, it soon proved that the effect of this atrocious
treachery was exactly the contrary of what its perpetrators had expected.
The knowledge of the facts became gradually extended among the people of
Rome, and it awakened a universal indignation. The party who had been
originally opposed to Ptolemy's cause seized the opportunity to renew
their opposition; and they gained so much strength from the general odium
which Ptolemy's crimes had awakened, that Pompey found it almost
impossible to sustain his cause.

At length the party opposed to Ptolemy found, or pretended to find, in
certain sacred books, called the Sibylline Oracles, which were kept in the
custody of the priests, and were supposed to contain prophetic intimations
of the will of Heaven in respect to the conduct of public affairs, the
following passage:

"_If a king of Egypt should apply to you for aid, treat him in a friendly
manner, but do not furnish him with troops; for if you do, you will incur
great danger._"

This made new difficulty for Ptolemy's friends. They attempted, at first,
to evade this inspired injunction by denying the reality of it. There was
no such passage to be found, they said. It was all an invention of their
enemies. This point seems to have been overruled, and then they attempted
to give the passage some other than the obvious interpretation. Finally,
they maintained that, although it prohibited their furnishing Ptolemy
himself with troops, it did not forbid their sending an armed force into
Egypt under leaders of their own. _That_ they could certainly do; and
then, when the rebellion was suppressed, and Berenice's government
overthrown, they could invite Ptolemy to return to his kingdom and resume
his crown in a peaceful manner. This, they alleged, would not be
"furnishing him with troops," and, of course, would not be disobeying the
oracle.

These attempts to evade the direction of the oracle on the part of
Ptolemy's friends, only made the debates and dissensions between them and
his enemies more violent than ever. Pompey made every effort in his power
to aid Ptolemy's cause; but Lentulus, after long hesitation and delay,
decided that it would not be safe for him to embark in it. At length,
however, Gabinius, the lieutenant who commanded in Syria, was induced to
undertake the enterprise. On certain promises which he received from
Ptolemy, to be performed in case he succeeded, and with a certain
encouragement, not very legal or regular, which Pompey gave him, in
respect to the employment of the Roman troops under his command, he
resolved to march to Egypt. His route, of course, would lay along the
shores of the Mediterranean Sea, and through the desert, to Pelusium,
which has already been mentioned as the frontier town on this side of
Egypt. From Pelusium he was to march through the heart of the Delta to
Alexandria, and, if successful in his invasion, overthrow the government
of Berenice and Archelaus, and then, inviting Ptolemy to return, reinstate
him on the throne.

In the prosecution of this dangerous enterprise, Gabinius relied strongly
on the assistance of a very remarkable man, then his second in command,
who afterward acted a very important part in the subsequent history of
Cleopatra. His name was Mark Antony. Antony was born in Rome, of a very
distinguished family, but his father died when he was very young, and
being left subsequently much to himself, he became a very wild and
dissolute young man. He wasted the property which his father had left him
in folly and vice; and then going on desperately in the same career, he
soon incurred enormous debts, and involved himself, in consequence, in
inextricable difficulties. His creditors continually harassed him with
importunities for money, and with suits at law to compel payments which he
had no means of making. He was likewise incessantly pursued by the
hostility of the many enemies that he had made in the city by his violence
and his crimes. At length he absconded, and went to Greece.

Here Gabinius, when on his way to Syria, met him, and invited him to join
his army rather than to remain where he was in idleness and destitution.
Antony, who was as proud and lofty in spirit as he was degraded in morals
and condition, refused to do this unless Gabinius would give him a
command. Gabinius saw in the daring and reckless energy which Antony
manifested the indications of the class of qualities which in those days
made a successful soldier, and acceded to his terms. He gave him the
command of his cavalry. Antony distinguished himself in the Syrian
campaigns that followed, and was now full of eagerness to engage in this
Egyptian enterprise. In fact, it was mainly his zeal and enthusiasm to
embark in the undertaking which was the means of deciding Gabinius to
consent to Ptolemy's proposals.

The danger and difficulty which they considered as most to be apprehended
in the whole expedition was the getting across the desert to Pelusium. In
fact, the great protection of Egypt had always been her isolation. The
trackless and desolate sands, being wholly destitute of water, and utterly
void, could be traversed, even by a caravan of peaceful travelers, only
with great difficulty and danger. For an army to attempt to cross them,
exposed, as the troops would necessarily be, to the assaults of enemies
who might advance to meet them on the way, and sure of encountering a
terrible opposition from fresh and vigorous bands when they should
arrive--wayworn and exhausted by the physical hardships of the way--at the
borders of the inhabited country, was a desperate undertaking. Many
instances occurred in ancient times in which vast bodies of troops, in
attempting marches over the deserts by which Egypt was surrounded, were
wholly destroyed by famine or thirst, or overwhelmed by storms of sand.[4]

These difficulties and dangers, however, did not at all intimidate Mark
Antony. The anticipation, in fact, of the glory of surmounting them was
one of the main inducements which led him to embark in the enterprise. The
perils of the desert constituted one of the charms which made the
expedition so attractive. He placed himself, therefore, at the head of his
troop of cavalry, and set off across the sands in advance of Gabinius, to
take Pelusium, in order thus to open a way for the main body of the army
into Egypt. Ptolemy accompanied Antony. Gabinius was to follow.

With all his faults, to call them by no severer name, Mark Antony
possessed certain great excellences of character. He was ardent, but then
he was cool, collected, and sagacious; and there was a certain frank and
manly generosity continually evincing itself in his conduct and character
which made him a great favorite among his men. He was at this time about
twenty-eight years old, of a tall and manly form, and of an expressive and
intellectual cast of countenance. His forehead was high, his nose
aquiline, and his eyes full of vivacity and life. He was accustomed to
dress in a very plain and careless manner, and he assumed an air of the
utmost familiarity and freedom in his intercourse with his soldiers. He
would join them in their sports, joke with them, and good-naturedly
receive their jokes in return; and take his meals, standing with them
around their rude tables, in the open field. Such habits of intercourse
with his men in a commander of ordinary character would have been fatal to
his ascendency over them; but in Mark Antony's case, these frank and
familiar manners seemed only to make the military genius and the
intellectual power which he possessed the more conspicuous and the more
universally admired.

Antony conducted his troop of horsemen across the desert in a very safe
and speedy manner, and arrived before Pelusium. The city was not prepared
to resist him. It surrendered at once, and the whole garrison fell into
his hands as prisoners of war. Ptolemy demanded that they should all be
immediately killed. They were rebels, he said, and, as such, ought to be
put to death. Antony, however, as might have been expected from his
character, absolutely refused to allow of any such barbarity. Ptolemy,
since the power was not yet in his hands, was compelled to submit, and to
postpone gratifying the spirit of vengeance which had so long been
slumbering in his breast to a future day. He could the more patiently
submit to this necessity, since it appeared that the day of his complete
and final triumph over his daughter and all her adherents was now very
nigh at hand.

[Illustration: ANTONY CROSSING THE DESERT.]

In fact, Berenice and her government, when they heard of the arrival of
Antony and Ptolemy at Pelusium, of the fall of that city, and of the
approach of Gabinius with an overwhelming force of Roman soldiers, were
struck with dismay. Archelaus, the husband of Berenice, had been, in
former years, a personal friend of Antony's. Antony considered, in fact,
that they were friends still, though required by what the historian calls
their duty to fight each other for the possession of the kingdom. The
government of Berenice raised an army. Archelaus took command of it, and
advanced to meet the enemy. In the mean time, Gabinius arrived with the
main body of the Roman troops, and commenced his march, in conjunction
with Antony, toward the capital. As they were obliged to make a circuit to
the southward, in order to avoid the inlets and lagoons which, on the
northern coast of Egypt, penetrate for some distance into the land, their
course led them through the heart of the Delta. Many battles were fought,
the Romans every where gaining the victory. The Egyptian soldiers were, in
fact, discontented and mutinous, perhaps, in part, because they considered
the government on the side of which they were compelled to engage as,
after all, a usurpation. At length a great final battle was fought, which
settled the controversy. Archelaus was slain upon the field, and Berenice
was taken prisoner; their government was wholly overthrown, and the way
was opened for the march of the Roman armies to Alexandria.

Mark Antony, when judged by our standards, was certainly, as well as
Ptolemy, a depraved and vicious man; but his depravity was of a very
different type from that of Cleopatra's father. The difference in the men,
in one respect, was very clearly evinced by the objects toward which their
interest and attention were respectively turned after this great battle.
While the contest had been going on, the king and queen of Egypt,
Archelaus and Berenice, were, of course, in the view both of Antony and
Ptolemy, the two most conspicuous personages in the army of their enemies;
and while Antony would naturally watch with the greatest interest the fate
of his friend, the king, Ptolemy, would as naturally follow with the
highest concern the destiny of his daughter. Accordingly, when the battle
was over, while the mind of Ptolemy might, as we should naturally expect,
be chiefly occupied by the fact that his _daughter_ was made a captive,
Antony's, we might suppose, would be engrossed by the tidings that his
_friend_ had been slain.

The one rejoiced and the other mourned. Antony sought for the body of his
friend on the field of battle, and when it was found, he gave himself
wholly to the work of providing for it a most magnificent burial. He
seemed, at the funeral, to lament the death of his ancient comrade with
real and unaffected grief. Ptolemy, on the other hand, was overwhelmed
with joy at finding his daughter his captive. The long-wished-for hour for
the gratification of his revenge had come at last, and the first use which
he made of his power when he was put in possession of it at Alexandria was
to order his daughter to be beheaded.




CHAPTER V.

ACCESSION TO THE THRONE.


At the time when the unnatural quarrel between Cleopatra's father and her
sister was working its way toward its dreadful termination, as related in
the last chapter, she herself was residing at the royal palace in
Alexandria, a blooming and beautiful girl of about fifteen. Fortunately
for her, she was too young to take any active part personally in the
contention. Her two brothers were still younger than herself. They all
three remained, therefore, in the royal palaces, quiet spectators of the
revolution, without being either benefited or injured by it. It is
singular that the name of both the boys was Ptolemy.

The excitement in the city of Alexandria was intense and universal when
the Roman army entered it to reinstate Cleopatra's father upon his throne.
A very large portion of the inhabitants were pleased with having the
former king restored. In fact, it appears, by a retrospect of the history
of kings, that when a legitimate hereditary sovereign or dynasty is
deposed and expelled by a rebellious population, no matter how intolerable
may have been the tyranny, or how atrocious the crimes by which the
patience of the subject was exhausted, the lapse of a very few years is
ordinarily sufficient to produce a very general readiness to acquiesce in
a restoration; and in this particular instance there had been no such
superiority in the government of Berenice, during the period while her
power continued, over that of her father, which she had displaced, as to
make this case an exception to the general rule. The mass of the people,
therefore--all those, especially, who had taken no active part in
Berenice's government--were ready to welcome Ptolemy back to his capital.
Those who had taken such a part were all summarily executed by Ptolemy's
orders.

There was, of course, a great excitement throughout the city on the
arrival of the Roman army. All the foreign influence and power which had
been exercised in Egypt thus far, and almost all the officers, whether
civil or military, had been Greek. The coming of the Romans was the
introduction of a new element of interest to add to the endless variety of
excitements which animated the capital.

The restoration of Ptolemy was celebrated with games, spectacles, and
festivities of every kind, and, of course, next to the king himself, the
chief center of interest and attraction in all these public rejoicings
would be the distinguished foreign generals by whose instrumentality the
end had been gained.

Mark Antony was a special object of public regard and admiration at the
time. His eccentric manners, his frank and honest air, his Roman
simplicity of dress and demeanor, made him conspicuous; and his
interposition to save the lives of the captured garrison of Pelusium, and
the interest which he took in rendering such distinguished funeral honors
to the enemy whom his army had slain in battle, impressed the people with
the idea of a certain nobleness and magnanimity in his character, which,
in spite of his faults, made him an object of general admiration and
applause. The very faults of such a man assume often, in the eyes of the
world, the guise and semblance of virtues. For example, it is related of
Antony that, at one time in the course of his life, having a desire to
make a present of some kind to a certain person, in requital for a favor
which he had received from him, he ordered his treasurer to send a sum of
money to his friend--and named for the sum to be sent an amount
considerably greater than was really required under the circumstances of
the case--acting thus, as he often did, under the influence of a blind and
uncalculating generosity. The treasurer, more prudent than his master,
wished to reduce the amount, but he did not dare directly to propose a
reduction; so he counted out the money, and laid it in a pile in a place
where Antony was to pass, thinking that when Antony saw the amount, he
would perceive that it was too great. Antony, in passing by, asked what
money that was. The treasurer said that it was the sum that he had ordered
to be sent as a present to such a person, naming the individual intended.
Antony was quick to perceive the object of the treasurer's maneuver. He
immediately replied, "Ah! is that all? I thought the sum I named would
make a better appearance than that; send him double the amount."

To determine, under such circumstances as these, to double an extravagance
merely for the purpose of thwarting the honest attempt of a faithful
servant to diminish it, made, too, in so cautious and delicate a way, is
most certainly a fault. But it is one of those faults for which the
world, in all ages, will persist in admiring and praising the perpetrator.

In a word, Antony became the object of general attention and favor during
his continuance at Alexandria. Whether he particularly attracted
Cleopatra's attention at this time or not does not appear. She, however,
strongly attracted _his_. He admired her blooming beauty, her
sprightliness and wit, and her various accomplishments. She was still,
however, so young--being but fifteen years of age, while Antony was nearly
thirty--that she probably made no very serious impression upon him. A
short time after this, Antony went back to Rome, and did not see Cleopatra
again for many years.

When the two Roman generals went away from Alexandria, they left a
considerable portion of the army behind them, under Ptolemy's command, to
aid him in keeping possession of his throne. Antony returned to Rome. He
had acquired great renown by his march across the desert, and by the
successful accomplishment of the invasion of Egypt and the restoration of
Ptolemy. His funds, too, were replenished by the vast sums paid to him and
to Gabinius by Ptolemy. The amount which Ptolemy is said to have agreed
to pay as the price of his restoration was two thousand talents--equal to
ten millions of dollars--a sum which shows on how great a scale the
operations of this celebrated campaign were conducted. Ptolemy raised a
large portion of the money required for his payments by confiscating the
estates belonging to those friends of Berenice's government whom he
ordered to be slain. It was said, in fact, that the numbers were very much
increased of those that were condemned to die, by Ptolemy's standing in
such urgent need of their property to meet his obligations.

Antony, through the results of this campaign, found himself suddenly
raised from the position of a disgraced and homeless fugitive to that of
one of the most wealthy and renowned, and, consequently, one of the most
powerful personages in Rome. The great civil war broke out about this time
between Cæsar and Pompey. Antony espoused the cause of Cæsar.

In the mean time, while the civil war between Cæsar and Pompey was raging,
Ptolemy succeeded in maintaining his seat on the throne, by the aid of the
Roman soldiers whom Antony and Gabinius had left him, for about three
years. When he found himself drawing toward the close of life, the
question arose to his mind to whom he should leave his kingdom. Cleopatra
was the oldest child, and she was a princess of great promise, both in
respect to mental endowments and personal charms. Her brothers were
considerably younger than she. The claim of a son, though younger, seemed
to be naturally stronger than that of a daughter; but the commanding
talents and rising influence of Cleopatra appeared to make it doubtful
whether it would be safe to pass her by. The father settled the question
in the way in which such difficulties were usually surmounted in the
Ptolemy family. He ordained that Cleopatra should marry the oldest of her
brothers, and that they two should jointly occupy the throne. Adhering
also, still, to the idea of the alliance of Egypt with Rome, which had
been the leading principle of the whole policy of his reign, he solemnly
committed the execution of his will and the guardianship of his children,
by a provision of the instrument itself, to the Roman senate. The senate
accepted the appointment, and appointed Pompey as the agent, on their
part, to perform the duties of the trust. The attention of Pompey was,
immediately after that time, too much engrossed by the civil war waged
between himself and Cæsar, to take any active steps in respect to the
duties of his appointment. It seemed, however, that none were necessary,
for all parties in Alexandria appeared disposed, after the death of the
king, to acquiesce in the arrangements which he had made, and to join in
carrying them into effect. Cleopatra was married to her brother--yet, it
is true, only a boy. He was about ten years old. She was herself about
eighteen. They were both too young to govern; they could only reign. The
affairs of the kingdom were, accordingly, conducted by two ministers whom
their father had designated. These ministers were Pothinus, a eunuch, who
was a sort of secretary of state, and Achillas, the commander-in-chief of
the armies.

Thus, though Cleopatra, by these events, became nominally a queen, her
real accession to the throne was not yet accomplished. There were still
many difficulties and dangers to be passed through, before the period
arrived when she became really a sovereign. She did not, herself, make any
immediate attempt to hasten this period, but seems to have acquiesced, on
the other hand, very quietly, for a time, in the arrangements which her
father had made.

Pothinus was a eunuch. He had been, for a long time, an officer of
government under Ptolemy, the father. He was a proud, ambitious, and
domineering man, determined to rule, and very unscrupulous in respect to
the means which he adopted to accomplish his ends. He had been accustomed
to regard Cleopatra as a mere child. Now that she was queen, he was very
unwilling that the real power should pass into her hands. The jealousy and
ill will which he felt toward her increased rapidly as he found, in the
course of the first two or three years after her father's death, that she
was advancing rapidly in strength of character, and in the influence and
ascendency which she was acquiring over all around her. Her beauty, her
accomplishments, and a certain indescribable charm which pervaded all her
demeanor, combined to give her great personal power. But, while these
things awakened in other minds feelings of interest in Cleopatra and
attachment to her, they only increased the jealousy and envy of Pothinus.
Cleopatra was becoming his rival. He endeavored to thwart and circumvent
her. He acted toward her in a haughty and overbearing manner, in order to
keep her down to what he considered her proper place as his ward; for he
was yet the guardian both of Cleopatra and her husband, and the regent of
the realm.

Cleopatra had a great deal of what is sometimes called spirit, and her
resentment was aroused by this treatment. Pothinus took pains to enlist
her young husband, Ptolemy, on his side, as the quarrel advanced. Ptolemy
was younger, and of a character much less marked and decided than
Cleopatra. Pothinus saw that he could maintain control over him much more
easily and for a much longer time than over Cleopatra. He contrived to
awaken the young Ptolemy's jealousy of his wife's rising influence, and to
induce him to join in efforts to thwart and counteract it. These attempts
to turn her husband against her only aroused Cleopatra's resentment the
more. Hers was not a spirit to be coerced. The palace was filled with the
dissensions of the rivals. Pothinus and Ptolemy began to take measures for
securing the army on their side. An open rupture finally ensued, and
Cleopatra was expelled from the kingdom.

She went to Syria. Syria was the nearest place of refuge, and then,
besides, it was the country from which the aid had been furnished by which
her father had been restored to the throne when he had been expelled, in
a similar manner, many years before. Her father, it is true, had gone
first to Rome; but the succors which he had negotiated for had been sent
from Syria. Cleopatra hoped to obtain the same assistance by going
directly there.

Nor was she disappointed. She obtained an army, and commenced her march
toward Egypt, following the same track which Antony and Gabinius had
pursued in coming to reinstate her father. Pothinus raised an army and
went forth to meet her. He took Achillas as the commander of the troops,
and the young Ptolemy as the nominal sovereign; while he, as the young
king's guardian and prime minister, exercised the real power. The troops
of Pothinus advanced to Pelusium. Here they met the forces of Cleopatra
coming from the east. The armies encamped not very far from each other,
and both sides began to prepare for battle.

The battle, however, was not fought. It was prevented by the occurrence of
certain great and unforeseen events which at this crisis suddenly burst
upon the scene of Egyptian history, and turned the whole current of
affairs into new and unexpected channels. The breaking out of the civil
war between the great Roman generals Cæsar and Pompey, and their
respective partisans, has already been mentioned as having occurred soon
after the death of Cleopatra's father, and as having prevented Pompey from
undertaking the office of executor of the will. This war had been raging
ever since that time with terrible fury. Its distant thundering had been
heard even in Egypt, but it was too remote to awaken there any special
alarm. The immense armies of these two mighty conquerors had moved
slowly--like two ferocious birds of prey, flying through the air, and
fighting as they fly--across Italy into Greece, and from Greece, through
Macedon, into Thessaly, contending in dreadful struggles with each other
as they advanced, and trampling down and destroying every thing in their
way. At length a great final battle had been fought at Pharsalia. Pompey
had been totally defeated. He had fled to the sea-shore, and there, with a
few ships and a small number of followers, he had pushed out upon the
Mediterranean, not knowing whither to fly, and overwhelmed with
wretchedness and despair. Cæsar followed him in eager pursuit. He had a
small fleet of galleys with him, on board of which he had embarked two or
three thousand men. This was a force suitable, perhaps, for the pursuit
of a fugitive, but wholly insufficient for any other design.

Pompey thought of Ptolemy. He remembered the efforts which he himself had
made for the cause of Ptolemy Auletes, at Rome, and the success of those
efforts in securing that monarch's restoration--an event through which
alone the young Ptolemy had been enabled to attain the crown. He came,
therefore, to Pelusium, and, anchoring his little fleet off the shore,
sent to the land to ask Ptolemy to receive and protect him. Pothinus, who
was really the commander in Ptolemy's army, made answer to this
application that Pompey should be received and protected, and that he
would send out a boat to bring him to the shore. Pompey felt some
misgivings in respect to this proffered hospitality, but he finally
concluded to go to the shore in the boat which Pothinus sent for him. As
soon as he landed, the Egyptians, by Pothinus's orders, stabbed and
beheaded him on the sand. Pothinus and his council had decided that this
would be the safest course. If they were to receive Pompey, they reasoned,
Cæsar would be made their enemy; if they refused to receive him, Pompey
himself would be offended, and they did not know which of the two it
would be safe to displease; for they did not know in what way, if both the
generals were to be allowed to live, the war would ultimately end. "But by
killing Pompey," they said, "we shall be sure to please Cæsar, and Pompey
himself will _lie still_."

In the mean time, Cæsar, not knowing to what part of Egypt Pompey had
fled, pressed on directly to Alexandria. He exposed himself to great
danger in so doing, for the forces under his command were not sufficient
to protect him in case of his becoming involved in difficulties with the
authorities there. Nor could he, when once arrived on the Egyptian coast,
easily go away again; for, at the season of the year in which these events
occurred, there was a periodical wind which blew steadily toward that part
of the coast, and, while it made it very easy for a fleet of ships to go
to Alexandria, rendered it almost impossible for them to return.

Cæsar was very little accustomed to shrink from danger in any of his
enterprises and plans, though still he was usually prudent and
circumspect. In this instance, however, his ardent interest in the pursuit
of Pompey overruled all considerations of personal safety. He arrived at
Alexandria, but he found that Pompey was not there. He anchored his
vessels in the port, landed his troops, and established himself in the
city. These two events, the assassination of one of the great Roman
generals on the eastern extremity of the coast, and the arrival of the
other, at the same moment, at Alexandria, on the western, burst suddenly
upon Egypt together, like simultaneous claps of thunder. The tidings
struck the whole country with astonishment, and immediately engrossed
universal attention. At the camps both of Cleopatra and Ptolemy, at
Pelusium, all was excitement and wonder. Instead of thinking of a battle,
both parties were wholly occupied in speculating on the results which were
likely to accrue, to one side or to the other, under the totally new and
unexpected aspect which public affairs had assumed.

Of course the thoughts of all were turned toward Alexandria. Pothinus
immediately proceeded to the city, taking with him the young king.
Achillas, too, either accompanied them, or followed soon afterward. They
carried with them the head of Pompey, which they had cut off on the shore
where they had killed him, and also a seal which they took from his
finger. When they arrived at Alexandria, they sent the head, wrapped up
in a cloth, and also the seal, as presents to Cæsar. Accustomed as they
were to the brutal deeds and heartless cruelties of the Ptolemies, they
supposed that Cæsar would exult at the spectacle of the dissevered and
ghastly head of his great rival and enemy. Instead of this, he was shocked
and displeased, and ordered the head to be buried with the most solemn and
imposing funeral ceremonies. He, however, accepted and kept the seal. The
device engraved upon it was a lion holding a sword in his paw--a fit
emblem of the characters of the men, who, though in many respects
magnanimous and just, had filled the whole world with the terror of their
quarrels.

The army of Ptolemy, while he himself and his immediate counselors went to
Alexandria, was left at Pelusium, under the command of other officers, to
watch Cleopatra. Cleopatra herself would have been pleased, also, to
repair to Alexandria and appeal to Cæsar, if it had been in her power to
do so; but she was beyond the confines of the country, with a powerful
army of her enemies ready to intercept her on any attempt to enter or pass
through it. She remained, therefore, at Pelusium, uncertain what to do.

In the mean time, Cæsar soon found himself in a somewhat embarrassing
situation at Alexandria. He had been accustomed, for many years, to the
possession and the exercise of the most absolute and despotic power,
wherever he might be; and now that Pompey, his great rival, was dead, he
considered himself the monarch and master of the world. He had not,
however, at Alexandria, any means sufficient to maintain and enforce such
pretensions, and yet he was not of a spirit to abate, on that account, in
the slightest degree, the advancing of them. He established himself in the
palaces of Alexandria as if he were himself the king. He moved, in state,
through the streets of the city, at the head of his guards, and displaying
the customary emblems of supreme authority used at Rome. He claimed the
six thousand talents which Ptolemy Auletes had formerly promised him for
procuring a treaty of alliance with Rome, and he called upon Pothinus to
pay the balance due. He said, moreover, that by the will of Auletes the
Roman people had been made the executor; and that it devolved upon him as
the Roman consul, and, consequently, the representative of the Roman
people, to assume that trust, and in the discharge of it to settle the
dispute between Ptolemy and Cleopatra; and he called upon Ptolemy to
prepare and lay before him a statement of his claims, and the grounds on
which he maintained his right to the throne to the exclusion of Cleopatra.

On the other hand, Pothinus, who had been as little accustomed to
acknowledge a superior as Cæsar, though his supremacy and domination had
been exercised on a somewhat humbler scale, was obstinate and pertinacious
in resisting all these demands, though the means and methods which he
resorted to were of a character corresponding to his weak and ignoble
mind. He fomented quarrels in the streets between the Alexandrian populace
and Cæsar's soldiers. He thought that, as the number of troops under
Cæsar's command in the city, and of vessels in the port, was small, he
could tease and worry the Romans with impunity, though he had not the
courage openly to attack them. He pretended to be a friend, or, at
least, not an enemy, and yet he conducted toward them in an overbearing
and insolent manner. He had agreed to make arrangements for supplying
them with food, and he did this by procuring damaged provisions of a most
wretched quality; and when the soldiers remonstrated, he said to them,
that they who lived at other people's cost had no right to complain of
their fare. He caused wooden and earthen vessels to be used in the palace,
and said, in explanation, that he had been compelled to sell all the gold
and silver plate of the royal household to meet the exactions of Cæsar. He
busied himself, too, about the city, in endeavoring to excite odium
against Cæsar's proposal to hear and decide the question at issue between
Cleopatra and Ptolemy. Ptolemy was a sovereign, he said, and was not
amenable to any foreign power whatever. Thus, without the courage or the
energy to attempt any open, manly, and effectual system of hostility, he
contented himself with making all the difficulty in his power, by urging
an incessant pressure of petty, vexatious, and provoking, but useless
annoyances. Cæsar's demands may have been unjust, but they were bold,
manly, and undisguised. The eunuch may have been right in resisting them;
but the mode was so mean and contemptible, that mankind have always taken
part with Cæsar in the sentiments which they have formed as spectators of
the contest.

With the very small force which Cæsar had at his command, and shut up as
he was in the midst of a very great and powerful city, in which both the
garrison and the population were growing more and more hostile to him
every day, he soon found his situation was beginning to be attended with
very serious danger. He could not retire from the scene. He probably would
not have retired if he could have done so. He remained, therefore, in the
city, conducting all the time with prudence and circumspection, but yet
maintaining, as at first, the same air of confident self-possession and
superiority which always characterized his demeanor. He, however,
dispatched a messenger forthwith into Syria, the nearest country under the
Roman sway, with orders that several legions which were posted there
should be embarked and forwarded to Alexandria with the utmost possible
celerity.




CHAPTER VI.

CLEOPATRA AND CÆSAR.


In the mean time, while the events related in the last chapter were taking
place at Alexandria, Cleopatra remained anxious and uneasy in her camp,
quite uncertain, for a time, what it was best for her to do. She wished to
be at Alexandria. She knew very well that Cæsar's power in controlling the
course of affairs in Egypt would necessarily be supreme. She was, of
course, very earnest in her desire to be able to present her cause before
him. As it was, Ptolemy and Pothinus were in communication with the
arbiter, and, for aught she knew, assiduously cultivating his favor, while
she was far away, her cause unheard, her wrongs unknown, and perhaps even
her existence forgotten. Of course, under such circumstances, she was very
earnest to get to Alexandria.

But how to accomplish this purpose was a source of great perplexity. She
could not march thither at the head of an army, for the army of the king
was strongly intrenched at Pelusium, and effectually barred the way. She
could not attempt to pass alone, or with few attendants, through the
country, for every town and village was occupied with garrisons and
officers under the orders of Pothinus, and she would be certainly
intercepted. She had no fleet, and could not, therefore, make the passage
by sea. Besides, even if she could by any means reach the gates of
Alexandria, how was she to pass safely through the streets of the city to
the palace where Cæsar resided, since the city, except in Cæsar's
quarters, was wholly in the hands of Pothinus's government? The
difficulties in the way of accomplishing her object seemed thus almost
insurmountable.

She was, however, resolved to make the attempt. She sent a message to
Cæsar, asking permission to appear before him and plead her own cause.
Cæsar replied, urging her by all means to come. She took a single boat,
and with the smallest number of attendants possible, made her way along
the coast to Alexandria. The man on whom she principally relied in this
hazardous expedition was a domestic named Apollodorus. She had, however,
some other attendants besides. When the party reached Alexandria, they
waited until night, and then advanced to the foot of the walls of the
citadel. Here Apollodorus rolled the queen up in a piece of carpeting,
and, covering the whole package with a cloth, he tied it with a thong, so
as to give it the appearance of a bale of ordinary merchandise, and then
throwing the load across his shoulder, he advanced into the city.
Cleopatra was at this time about twenty-one years of age, but she was of a
slender and graceful form, and the burden was, consequently, not very
heavy. Apollodorus came to the gates of the palace where Cæsar was
residing. The guards at the gates asked him what it was that he was
carrying. He said that it was a present for Cæsar. So they allowed him to
pass, and the pretended porter carried his package safely in.

When it was unrolled, and Cleopatra came out to view, Cæsar was perfectly
charmed with the spectacle. In fact, the various conflicting emotions
which she could not but feel under such circumstances as these, imparted a
double interest to her beautiful and expressive face, and to her naturally
bewitching manners. She was excited by the adventure through which she had
passed, and yet pleased with her narrow escape from its dangers. The
curiosity and interest which she felt on the one hand, in respect to
the great personage into whose presence she had been thus strangely
ushered, was very strong; but then, on the other, it was chastened and
subdued by that feeling of timidity which, in new and unexpected
situations like these, and under a consciousness of being the object of
eager observation to the other sex, is inseparable from the nature of
woman.

[Illustration: CLEOPATRA ENTERING THE PALACE OF CÆSAR.]

The conversation which Cæsar held with Cleopatra deepened the impression
which her first appearance had made upon him. Her intelligence and
animation, the originality of her ideas, and the point and pertinency of
her mode of expressing them, made her, independently of her personal
charms, an exceedingly entertaining and agreeable companion. She, in fact,
completely won the great conqueror's heart; and, through the strong
attachment to her which he immediately formed, he became wholly
disqualified to act impartially between her and her brother in regard to
their respective rights to the crown. We call Ptolemy Cleopatra's brother;
for, though he was also, in fact, her husband, still, as he was only ten
or twelve years of age at the time of Cleopatra's expulsion from
Alexandria, the marriage had been probably regarded, thus far, only as a
mere matter of form. Cæsar was now about fifty-two. He had a wife, named
Calpurnia, to whom he had been married about ten years. She was living, at
this time, in an unostentatious and quiet manner at Rome. She was a lady
of an amiable and gentle character, devotedly attached to her husband,
patient and forbearing in respect to his faults, and often anxious and
unhappy at the thought of the difficulties and dangers in which his ardent
and unbounded ambition so often involved him.

Cæsar immediately began to take a very strong interest in Cleopatra's
cause. He treated her personally with the fondest attention, and it was
impossible for her not to reciprocate in some degree the kind feeling with
which he regarded her. It was, in fact, something altogether new to her to
have a warm and devoted friend, espousing her cause, tendering her
protection, and seeking in every way to promote her happiness. Her father
had all his life neglected her. Her brother, of years and understanding
totally inferior to hers, whom she had been compelled to make her husband,
had become her mortal enemy. It is true that, in depriving her of her
inheritance and expelling her from her native land, he had been only the
tool and instrument of more designing men. This, however, far from
improving the point of view from which she regarded him, made him appear
not only hateful, but contemptible too. All the officers of government,
also, in the Alexandrian court had turned against her, because they had
supposed that they could control her brother more easily if she were away.
Thus she had always been surrounded by selfish, mercenary, and implacable
foes. Now, for the first time, she seemed to have a friend. A protector
had suddenly arisen to support and defend her--a man of very alluring
person and manners, of a very noble and generous spirit, and of the very
highest station. He loved her, and she could not refrain from loving him
in return. She committed her cause entirely into his hands, confided to
him all her interests, and gave herself up wholly into his power.

Nor was the unbounded confidence which she reposed in him undeserved, so
far as related to his efforts to restore her to her throne. The legions
which Cæsar had sent for into Syria had not yet arrived, and his situation
in Alexandria was still very defenseless and very precarious. He did not,
however, on this account, abate in the least degree the loftiness and
self-confidence of the position which he had assumed, but he commenced
immediately the work of securing Cleopatra's restoration. This quiet
assumption of the right and power to arbitrate and decide such a question
as that of the claim to the throne, in a country where he had accidentally
landed and found rival claimants disputing for the succession, while he
was still wholly destitute of the means of enforcing the superiority which
he so coolly assumed, marks the immense ascendency which the Roman power
had attained at this time in the estimation of mankind, and is, besides,
specially characteristic of the genius and disposition of Cæsar.

Very soon after Cleopatra had come to him, Cæsar sent for the young
Ptolemy, and urged upon him the duty and expediency of restoring
Cleopatra. Ptolemy was beginning now to attain an age at which he might be
supposed to have some opinion of his own on such a question. He declared
himself utterly opposed to any such design. In the course of the
conversation he learned that Cleopatra had arrived at Alexandria, and that
she was then concealed in Cæsar's palace. This intelligence awakened in
his mind the greatest excitement and indignation. He went away from
Cæsar's presence in a rage. He tore the diadem which he was accustomed to
wear from his head in the streets, threw it down, and trampled it under
his feet. He declared to the people that he was betrayed, and displayed
the most violent indications of vexation and chagrin. The chief subject of
his complaint, in the attempts which he made to awaken the popular
indignation against Cæsar and the Romans, was the disgraceful impropriety
of the position which his sister had assumed in surrendering herself as
she had done to Cæsar. It is most probable, however, unless his character
was very different from that of every other Ptolemy in the line, that what
really awakened his jealousy and anger was fear of the commanding
influence and power to which Cleopatra was likely to attain through the
agency of so distinguished a protector, rather than any other consequences
of his friendship, or any real considerations of delicacy in respect to
his sister's good name or his own marital honor.

However this may be, Ptolemy, together with Pothinus and Achillas, and all
his other friends and adherents, who joined him in the terrible outcry
that he made against the coalition which he had discovered between
Cleopatra and Cæsar, succeeded in producing a very general and violent
tumult throughout the city. The populace were aroused, and began to
assemble in great crowds, and full of indignation and anger. Some knew the
facts, and acted under something like an understanding of the cause of
their anger. Others only knew that the aim of this sudden outbreak was to
assault the Romans, and were ready, on any pretext, known or unknown, to
join in any deeds of violence directed against these foreign intruders.
There were others still, and these, probably, far the larger portion, who
knew nothing and understood nothing but that there was to be tumult and a
riot in and around the palaces, and were, accordingly, eager to be there.

Ptolemy and his officers had no large body of troops in Alexandria; for
the events which had thus far occurred since Cæsar's arrival had succeeded
each other so rapidly, that a very short time had yet elapsed, and the
main army remained still at Pelusium. The main force, therefore, by which
Cæsar was now attacked, consisted of the population of the city, headed,
perhaps, by the few guards which the young king had at his command.

Cæsar, on his part, had but a small portion of his forces at the palace
where he was attacked. The rest were scattered about the city. He,
however, seems to have felt no alarm. He did not even confine himself to
acting on the defensive. He sent out a detachment of his soldiers with
orders to seize Ptolemy and bring him in a prisoner. Soldiers trained,
disciplined, and armed as the Roman veterans were, and nerved by the ardor
and enthusiasm which seemed always to animate troops which were under
Cæsar's personal command, could accomplish almost any undertaking against
a mere populace, however numerous or however furiously excited they might
be. The soldiers sallied out, seized Ptolemy, and brought him in.

The populace were at first astounded at the daring presumption of this
deed, and then exasperated at the indignity of it, considered as a
violation of the person of their sovereign. The tumult would have greatly
increased, had it not been that Cæsar--who had now attained all his ends
in thus having brought Cleopatra and Ptolemy both within his
power--thought it most expedient to allay it. He accordingly ascended to
the window of a tower, or of some other elevated portion of his palace, so
high that missiles from the mob below could not reach him, and began to
make signals expressive of his wish to address them.

When silence was obtained, he made them a speech well calculated to quiet
the excitement. He told them that he did not pretend to any right to judge
between Cleopatra and Ptolemy as their superior, but only in the
performance of the duty solemnly assigned by Ptolemy Auletes, the father,
to the Roman people, whose representative he was. Other than this he
claimed no jurisdiction in the case; and his only wish, in the discharge
of the duty which devolved upon him to consider the cause, was to settle
the question in a manner just and equitable to all the parties concerned,
and thus arrest the progress of the civil war, which, if not arrested,
threatened to involve the country in the most terrible calamities. He
counseled them, therefore, to disperse, and no longer disturb the peace of
the city. He would immediately take measures for trying the question
between Cleopatra and Ptolemy, and he did not doubt but that they would
all be satisfied with his decision.

This speech, made, as it was, in the eloquent and persuasive, and yet
dignified and imposing manner for which Cæsar's harangues to turbulent
assemblies like these were so famed, produced a great effect. Some were
convinced, others were silenced; and those whose resentment and anger
were not appeased, found themselves deprived of their power by the
pacification of the rest. The mob was dispersed, and Ptolemy remained with
Cleopatra in Cæsar's custody.

The next day, Cæsar, according to his promise, convened an assembly of the
principal people of Alexandria and officers of state, and then brought out
Ptolemy and Cleopatra, that he might decide their cause. The original will
which Ptolemy Auletes had executed had been deposited in the public
archives of Alexandria, and carefully preserved there. An authentic copy
of it had been sent to Rome. Cæsar caused the original will to be brought
out and read to the assembly. The provisions of it were perfectly explicit
and clear. It required that Cleopatra and Ptolemy should be married, and
then settled the sovereign power upon them jointly, as king and queen. It
recognized the Roman commonwealth as the ally of Egypt, and constituted
the Roman government the executor of the will, and the guardian of the
king and queen. In fact, so clear and explicit was this document, that the
simple reading of it seemed to be of itself a decision of the question.
When, therefore, Cæsar announced that, in his judgment, Cleopatra was
entitled to share the supreme power with Ptolemy, and that it was his
duty, as the representative of the Roman power and the executor of the
will, to protect both the king and the queen in their respective rights,
there seemed to be nothing that could be said against his decision.

Besides Cleopatra and Ptolemy, there were two other children of Ptolemy
Auletes in the royal family at this time. One was a girl, named Arsinoë.
The other, a boy, was, singularly enough, named, like his brother,
Ptolemy. These children were quite young, but Cæsar thought that it would
perhaps gratify the Alexandrians, and lead them to acquiesce more readily
in his decision, if he were to make some royal provision for them. He
accordingly proposed to assign the island of Cyprus as a realm for them.
This was literally a gift, for Cyprus was at this time a Roman
possession.[5]

The whole assembly seemed satisfied with this decision except Pothinus. He
had been so determined and inveterate an enemy to Cleopatra, that, as he
was well aware, her restoration must end in his downfall and ruin. He
went away from the assembly moodily determining that he would not submit
to the decision, but would immediately adopt efficient measures to prevent
its being carried into effect.

Cæsar made arrangements for a series of festivals and celebrations, to
commemorate and confirm the re-establishment of a good understanding
between the king and the queen, and the consequent termination of the war.
Such celebrations, he judged, would have great influence in removing any
remaining animosities from the minds of the people, and restore the
dominion of a kind and friendly feeling throughout the city. The people
fell in with these measures, and cordially co-operated to give them
effect; but Pothinus and Achillas, though they suppressed all outward
expressions of discontent, made incessant efforts in secret to organize a
party, and to form plans for overthrowing the influence of Cæsar, and
making Ptolemy again the sole and exclusive sovereign.

Pothinus represented to all whom he could induce to listen to him that
Cæsar's real design was to make Cleopatra queen alone, and to depose
Ptolemy, and urged them to combine with him to resist a policy which would
end in bringing Egypt under the dominion of a woman. He also formed a
plan, in connection with Achillas, for ordering the army back from
Pelusium. The army consisted of thirty thousand men. If that army could be
brought to Alexandria and kept under Pothinus's orders, Cæsar and his
three thousand Roman soldiers would be, they thought, wholly at their
mercy.

There was, however, one danger to be guarded against in ordering the army
to march toward the capital, and that was, that Ptolemy, while under
Cæsar's influence, might open communications with the officers, and so
obtain command of its movements, and thwart all the conspirators' designs.
To prevent this, it was arranged between Pothinus and Achillas that the
latter should make his escape from Alexandria, proceed immediately to the
camp at Pelusium, resume the command of the troops there, and conduct them
himself to the capital; and that in all these operations, and also
subsequently on his arrival, he should obey no orders unless they came to
him through Pothinus himself.

Although sentinels and guards were probably stationed at the gates and
avenues leading from the city, Achillas contrived to effect his escape
and to join the army. He placed himself at the head of the forces, and
commenced his march toward the capital. Pothinus remained all the time
within the city as a spy, pretending to acquiesce in Cæsar's decision, and
to be on friendly terms with him, but really plotting for his overthrow,
and obtaining all the information which his position enabled him to
command, in order that he might co-operate with the army and Achillas when
they should arrive.

All these things were done with the utmost secrecy, and so cunning and
adroit were the conspirators in forming and executing their plots, that
Cæsar seems to have had no knowledge of the measures which his enemies
were taking, until he suddenly heard that the main body of Ptolemy's army
was approaching the city, at least twenty thousand strong. In the mean
time, however, the forces which he had sent for from Syria had not
arrived, and no alternative was left but to defend the capital and himself
as well as he could with the very small force which he had at his
disposal.

He determined, however, first, to try the effect of orders sent out in
Ptolemy's name to forbid the approach of the army to the city. Two
officers were accordingly intrusted with these orders, and sent out to
communicate them to Achillas. The names of these officers were Dioscorides
and Serapion.

It shows in a very striking point of view to what an incredible exaltation
the authority and consequence of a sovereign king rose in those ancient
days, in the minds of men, that Achillas, at the moment when these men
made their appearance in the camp, bearing evidently some command from
Ptolemy in the city, considered it more prudent to kill them at once,
without hearing their message, rather than to allow the orders to be
delivered and then take the responsibility of disobeying them. If he could
succeed in marching to Alexandria and in taking possession of the city,
and then in expelling Cæsar and Cleopatra and restoring Ptolemy to the
exclusive possession of the throne, he knew very well that the king would
rejoice in the result, and would overlook all irregularities on his part
in the means by which he had accomplished it, short of absolute
disobedience of a known command. Whatever might be the commands that these
messengers were bringing him, he supposed that they doubtless originated,
not in Ptolemy's own free will, but that they were dictated by the
authority of Cæsar. Still, they would be commands coming in Ptolemy's
name; and the universal experience of officers serving under the military
despots of those ancient days showed that, rather than to take the
responsibility of directly disobeying a royal order once received, it was
safer to avoid receiving it by murdering the messengers.

Achillas therefore directed the officers to be seized and slain. They were
accordingly taken off and speared by the soldiers, and then the bodies
were borne away. The soldiers, however, it was found, had not done their
work effectually. There was no interest for them in such a cold-blooded
assassination, and perhaps something like a sentiment of compassion
restrained their hands. At any rate, though both the men were desperately
wounded, one only died. The other lived and recovered.

Achillas continued to advance toward the city. Cæsar, finding that the
crisis which was approaching was becoming very serious in its character,
took, himself, the whole command within the capital, and began to make the
best arrangements possible under the circumstances of the case to defend
himself there. His numbers were altogether too small to defend the whole
city against the overwhelming force which was advancing to assail it. He
accordingly intrenched his troops in the palaces and in the citadel, and
in such other parts of the city as it seemed practicable to defend. He
barricaded all the streets and avenues leading to these points, and
fortified the gates. Nor did he, while thus doing all in his power to
employ the insufficient means of defense already in his hands to the best
advantage, neglect the proper exertions for obtaining succor from abroad.
He sent off galleys to Syria, to Cyprus, to Rhodes, and to every other
point accessible from Alexandria where Roman troops might be expected to
be found, urging the authorities there to forward re-enforcements to him
with the utmost possible dispatch.

During all this time Cleopatra and Ptolemy remained in the palace with
Cæsar, both ostensibly co-operating with him in his councils and measures
for defending the city from Achillas. Cleopatra, of course, was sincere
and in earnest in this co-operation; but Ptolemy's adhesion to the common
cause was very little to be relied upon. Although, situated as he was, he
was compelled to seem to be on Cæsar's side, he must have secretly desired
that Achillas should succeed and Cæsar's plans be overthrown. Pothinus
was more active, though not less cautious in his hostility to them. He
opened a secret communication with Achillas, sending him information, from
time to time, of what took place within the walls, and of the arrangements
made there for the defense of the city against him, and gave him also
directions how to proceed. He was very wary and sagacious in all these
movements, feigning all the time to be on Cæsar's side. He pretended to be
very zealously employed in aiding Cæsar to secure more effectually the
various points where attacks were to be expected, and in maturing and
completing the arrangements for defense.

But, notwithstanding all his cunning, he was detected in his double
dealing, and his career was suddenly brought to a close, before the great
final conflict came on. There was a barber in Cæsar's household, who, for
some cause or other, began to suspect Pothinus; and, having little else to
do, he employed himself in watching the eunuch's movements and reporting
them to Cæsar. Cæsar directed the barber to continue his observations. He
did so; his suspicions were soon confirmed, and at length a letter, which
Pothinus had written to Achillas, was intercepted and brought to Cæsar.
This furnished the necessary proof of what they called his guilt, and
Cæsar ordered him to be beheaded.

This circumstance produced, of course, a great excitement within the
palace, for Pothinus had been for many years the great ruling minister of
state--the king, in fact, in all but in name. His execution alarmed a
great many others, who, though in Cæsar's power, were secretly wishing
that Achillas might prevail. Among those most disturbed by these fears was
a man named Ganymede. He was the officer who had charge of Arsinoë,
Cleopatra's sister. The arrangement which Cæsar had proposed for
establishing her in conjunction with her brother Ptolemy over the island
of Cyprus had not gone into effect; for, immediately after the decision of
Cæsar, the attention of all concerned had been wholly engrossed by the
tidings of the advance of the army, and by the busy preparations which
were required on all hands for the impending contest. Arsinoë, therefore,
with her governor Ganymede, remained in the palace. Ganymede had joined
Pothinus in his plots; and when Pothinus was beheaded, he concluded that
it would be safest for him to fly.

He accordingly resolved to make his escape from the city, taking Arsinoë
with him. It was a very hazardous attempt, but he succeeded in
accomplishing it. Arsinoë was very willing to go, for she was now
beginning to be old enough to feel the impulse of that insatiable and
reckless ambition which seemed to form such an essential element in the
character of every son and daughter in the whole Ptolemaic line. She was
insignificant and powerless where she was, but at the head of the army she
might become immediately a queen.

It resulted, in the first instance, as she had anticipated. Achillas and
his army received her with acclamations. Under Ganymede's influence they
decided that, as all the other members of the royal family were in
durance, being held captive by a foreign general, who had by chance
obtained possession of the capital, and were thus incapacitated for
exercising the royal power, the crown devolved upon Arsinoë; and they
accordingly proclaimed her queen.

Every thing was now prepared for a desperate and determined contest for
the crown between Cleopatra, with Cæsar for her minister and general, on
the one side, and Arsinoë, with Ganymede and Achillas for her chief
officers, on the other. The young Ptolemy, in the mean time, remained
Cæsar's prisoner, confused with the intricacies in which the quarrel had
become involved, and scarcely knowing now what to wish in respect to the
issue of the contest. It was very difficult to foresee whether it would be
best for him that Cleopatra or that Arsinoë should succeed.




CHAPTER VII.

THE ALEXANDRINE WAR.


The war which ensued as the result of the intrigues and maneuvers
described in the last chapter is known in the history of Rome and Julius
Cæsar as the Alexandrine war. The events which occurred during the
progress of it, and its termination at last in the triumph of Cæsar and
Cleopatra, will form the subject of this chapter.

Achillas had greatly the advantage over Cæsar at the outset of the
contest, in respect to the strength of the forces under his command.
Cæsar, in fact, had with him only a detachment of three or four thousand
men, a small body of troops which he had hastily put on board a little
squadron of Rhodian galleys for pursuing Pompey across the Mediterranean.
When he set sail from the European shores with this inconsiderable fleet,
it is probable that he had no expectation even of landing in Egypt at all,
and much less of being involved in great military undertakings there.
Achillas, on the other hand, was at the head of a force of twenty
thousand effective men. His troops were, it is true, of a somewhat
miscellaneous character, but they were all veteran soldiers, inured to the
climate of Egypt, and skilled in all the modes of warfare which were
suited to the character of the country. Some of them were Roman soldiers,
men who had come with the army of Mark Antony from Syria when Ptolemy
Auletes, Cleopatra's father, was reinstated on the throne, and had been
left in Egypt, in Ptolemy's service, when Antony returned to Rome. Some
were native Egyptians. There was also in the army of Achillas a large
number of fugitive slaves--refugees who had made their escape from various
points along the shores of the Mediterranean, at different periods, and
had been from time to time incorporated into the Egyptian army. These
fugitives were all men of the most determined and desperate character.

Achillas had also in his command a force of two thousand horse. Such a
body of cavalry made him, of course, perfect master of all the open
country outside the city walls. At the head of these troops Achillas
gradually advanced to the very gates of Alexandria, invested the city on
every side, and shut Cæsar closely in.

The danger of the situation in which Cæsar was placed was extreme; but he
had been so accustomed to succeed in extricating himself from the most
imminent perils, that neither he himself nor his army seem to have
experienced any concern in respect to the result. Cæsar personally felt a
special pride and pleasure in encountering the difficulties and dangers
which now beset him, because Cleopatra was with him to witness his
demeanor, to admire his energy and courage, and to reward by her love the
efforts and sacrifices which he was making in espousing her cause. She
confided every thing to him, but she watched all the proceedings with the
most eager interest, elated with hope in respect to the result, and proud
of the champion who had thus volunteered to defend her. In a word, her
heart was full of gratitude, admiration, and love.

The immediate effect, too, of the emotions which she felt so strongly was
greatly to heighten her natural charms. The native force and energy of her
character were softened and subdued. Her voice, which always possessed a
certain inexpressible charm, was endued with new sweetness through the
influence of affection. Her countenance beamed with fresh animation and
beauty, and the sprightliness and vivacity of her character, which became
at later periods of her life boldness and eccentricity, now being softened
and restrained within proper limits by the respectful regard with which
she looked upon Cæsar, made her an enchanting companion. Cæsar was, in
fact, entirely intoxicated with the fascinations which she unconsciously
displayed.

Under other circumstances than these, a personal attachment so strong,
formed by a military commander while engaged in active service, might have
been expected to interfere in some degree with the discharge of his
duties; but in this case, since it was for Cleopatra's sake and in her
behalf that the operations which Cæsar had undertaken were to be
prosecuted, his love for her only stimulated the spirit and energy with
which he engaged in them.

The first measure to be adopted was, as Cæsar plainly perceived, to
concentrate and strengthen his position in the city, so that he might be
able to defend himself there against Achillas until he should receive
re-enforcements from abroad. For this purpose he selected a certain group
of palaces and citadels which lay together near the head of the long pier
or causeway which led to the Pharos, and, withdrawing his troops from all
other parts of the city, established them there. The quarter which he thus
occupied contained the great city arsenals and public granaries. Cæsar
brought together all the arms and munitions of war which he could find in
other parts of the city, and also all the corn and other provisions which
were contained either in the public depôts or in private warehouses, and
stored the whole within his lines. He then inclosed the whole quarter with
strong defenses. The avenues leading to it were barricaded with walls of
stone. Houses in the vicinity which might have afforded shelter to an
enemy were demolished, and the materials used in constructing walls
wherever they were needed, or in strengthening the barricades. Prodigious
military engines, made to throw heavy stones, and beams of wood, and other
ponderous missiles, were set up within his lines, and openings were made
in the walls and other defenses of the citadel, wherever necessary, to
facilitate the action of these machines.

[Illustration: VIEW OF ALEXANDRIA.]

There was a strong fortress situated at the head of the pier or mole
leading to the island of Pharos, which was without Cæsar's lines, and
still in the hands of the Egyptian authorities. The Egyptians thus
commanded the entrance to the mole. The island itself, also, with the
fortress at the other end of the pier, was still in the possession of the
Egyptian authorities, who seemed disposed to hold it for Achillas. The
mole was very long, as the island was nearly a mile from the shore. There
was quite a little town upon the island itself, besides the fortress or
castle built there to defend the place. The garrison of this castle was
strong, and the inhabitants of the town, too, constituted a somewhat
formidable population, as they consisted of fishermen, sailors, wreckers,
and such other desperate characters as usually congregate about such a
spot. Cleopatra and Cæsar, from the windows of their palace within the
city, looked out upon this island, with the tall light-house rising in the
center of it and the castle at its base, and upon the long and narrow
isthmus connecting it with the main land, and concluded that it was very
essential that they should get possession of the post, commanding, as it
did, the entrance to the harbor.

In the harbor, too, which, as will be seen from the engraving, was on the
south side of the mole, and, consequently, on the side opposite to that
from which Achillas was advancing toward the city, there were lying a
large number of Egyptian vessels, some dismantled, and others manned and
armed more or less effectively. These vessels had not yet come into
Achillas's hands, but it would be certain that he would take possession of
them as soon as he should gain admittance to those parts of the city which
Cæsar had abandoned. This it was extremely important to prevent; for, if
Achillas held this fleet, especially if he continued to command the island
of Pharos, he would be perfect master of all the approaches to the city
on the side of the sea. He could then not only receive re-enforcements and
supplies himself from that quarter, but he could also effectually cut off
the Roman army from all possibility of receiving any. It became,
therefore, as Cæsar thought, imperiously necessary that he should protect
himself from this danger. This he did by sending out an expedition to burn
all the shipping in the harbor, and, at the same time, to take possession
of a certain fort upon the island of Pharos which commanded the entrance
to the port. This undertaking was abundantly successful. The troops burned
the shipping, took the fort, expelled the Egyptian soldiers from it, and
put a Roman garrison into it instead, and then returned in safety within
Cæsar's lines. Cleopatra witnessed these exploits from her palace windows
with feelings of the highest admiration for the energy and valor which her
Roman protectors displayed.

The burning of the Egyptian ships in this action, however fortunate for
Cleopatra and Cæsar, was attended with a catastrophe which has ever since
been lamented by the whole civilized world. Some of the burning ships were
driven by the wind to the shore, where they set fire to the buildings
which were contiguous to the water. The flames spread and produced an
extensive conflagration, in the course of which the largest part of the
great library was destroyed. This library was the only general collection
of the ancient writings that ever had been made, and the loss of it was
never repaired.

The destruction of the Egyptian fleet resulted also in the downfall and
ruin of Achillas. From the time of Arsinoë's arrival in the camp there had
been a constant rivalry and jealousy between himself and Ganymede, the
eunuch who had accompanied Arsinoë in her flight. Two parties had been
formed in the army, some declaring for Achillas and some for Ganymede.
Arsinoë advocated Ganymede's interests, and when, at length, the fleet was
burned, she charged Achillas with having been, by his neglect or
incapacity, the cause of the loss. Achillas was tried, condemned, and
beheaded. From that time Ganymede assumed the administration of Arsinoë's
government as her minister of state and the commander-in-chief of her
armies.

About the time that these occurrences took place, the Egyptian army
advanced into those parts of the city from which Cæsar had withdrawn,
producing those terrible scenes of panic and confusion which always
attend a sudden and violent change of military possession within the
precincts of a city. Ganymede brought up his troops on every side to the
walls of Cæsar's citadels and intrenchments, and hemmed him closely in. He
cut off all avenues of approach to Cæsar's lines by land, and commenced
vigorous preparations for an assault. He constructed engines for battering
down the walls. He opened shops and established forges in every part of
the city for the manufacture of darts, spears, pikes, and all kinds of
military machinery. He built towers supported upon huge wheels, with the
design of filling them with armed men when finally ready to make his
assault upon Cæsar's lines, and moving them up to the walls of the
citadels and palaces, so as to give to his soldiers the advantage of a
lofty elevation in making their attacks. He levied contributions on the
rich citizens for the necessary funds, and provided himself with men by
pressing all the artisans, laborers, and men capable of bearing arms into
his service. He sent messengers back into the interior of the country, in
every direction, summoning the people to arms, and calling for
contributions of money and military stores.

These messengers were instructed to urge upon the people that, unless
Cæsar and his army were at once expelled from Alexandria, there was
imminent danger that the national independence of Egypt would be forever
destroyed. The Romans, they were to say, had extended their conquests over
almost all the rest of the world. They had sent one army into Egypt
before, under the command of Mark Antony, under the pretense of restoring
Ptolemy Auletes to the throne. Now another commander, with another force,
had come, offering some other pretexts for interfering in their affairs.
These Roman encroachments, the messengers were to say, would end in the
complete subjugation of Egypt to a foreign power, unless the people of the
country aroused themselves to meet the danger manfully, and to expel the
intruders.

As Cæsar had possession of the island of Pharos and of the harbor,
Ganymede could not cut him off from receiving such re-enforcements of men
and arms as he might make arrangements for obtaining beyond the sea; nor
could he curtail his supply of food, as the granaries and magazines within
Cæsar's quarter of the city contained almost inexhaustible stores of corn.
There was one remaining point essential to the subsistence of an army
besieged, and that was an abundant supply of water. The palaces and
citadels which Cæsar occupied were supplied with water by means of
numerous subterranean aqueducts, which conveyed the water from the Nile to
vast cisterns built under ground, whence it was raised by buckets and
hydraulic engines for use. In reflecting upon this circumstance, Ganymede
conceived the design of secretly digging a canal, so as to turn the waters
of the sea by means of it into these aqueducts. This plan he carried into
effect. The consequence was, that the water in the cisterns was gradually
changed. It became first brackish, then more and more salt and bitter,
until, at length, it was wholly impossible to use it. For some time the
army within could not understand these changes; and when, at length, they
discovered the cause, the soldiers were panic-stricken at the thought that
they were now apparently wholly at the mercy of their enemies, since,
without supplies of water, they must all immediately perish. They
considered it hopeless to attempt any longer to hold out, and urged Cæsar
to evacuate the city, embark on board his galleys, and proceed to sea.

Instead of doing this, however, Cæsar, ordering all other operations to
be suspended, employed the whole laboring force of his command, under the
direction of the captains of the several companies, in digging wells in
every part of his quarter of the city. Fresh water, he said, was almost
invariably found, at a moderate depth, upon sea-coasts, even upon ground
lying in very close proximity with the sea. The diggings were successful.
Fresh water, in great abundance, was found. Thus this danger was passed,
and the men's fears effectually relieved.

A short time after these transactions occurred, there came into the harbor
one day, from along the shore west of the city, a small sloop, bringing
the intelligence that a squadron of transports had arrived upon the coast
to the westward of Alexandria, and had anchored there, being unable to
come up to the city on account of an easterly wind which prevailed at that
season of the year. This squadron was one which had been sent across the
Mediterranean with arms, ammunition, and military stores for Cæsar, in
answer to requisitions which he had made immediately after he had landed.
The transports being thus wind-bound on the coast, and having nearly
exhausted their supplies of water, were in distress; and they accordingly
sent forward the sloop, which was probably propelled by oars, to make
known their situation to Cæsar, and to ask for succor. Cæsar immediately
went, himself, on board of one of his galleys, and ordering the remainder
of his little fleet to follow him, he set sail out of the harbor, and then
turned to the westward, with a view of proceeding along the coast to the
place where the transports were lying.

All this was done secretly. The land is so low in the vicinity of
Alexandria that boats or galleys are out of sight from it at a very short
distance from the shore. In fact, travelers say that, in coming upon the
coast, the illusion produced by the spherical form of the surface of the
water and the low and level character of the coast is such that one seems
actually to descend from the sea to the land. Cæsar might therefore have
easily kept his expedition a secret, had it not been that, in order to be
provided with a supply of water for the transports immediately on reaching
them, he stopped at a solitary part of the coast, at some distance from
Alexandria, and sent a party a little way into the interior in search for
water. This party were discovered by the country people, and were
intercepted by a troop of horse and made prisoners. From these prisoners
the Egyptians learned that Cæsar himself was on the coast with a small
squadron of galleys. The tidings spread in all directions. The people
flocked together from every quarter. They hastily collected all the boats
and vessels which could be obtained at the villages in that region and
from the various branches of the Nile. In the mean time, Cæsar had gone on
to the anchorage ground of the squadron, and had taken the transports in
tow to bring them to the city; for the galleys, being propelled by oars,
were in a measure independent of the wind. On his return, he found quite a
formidable naval armament assembled to dispute the passage.

A severe conflict ensued, but Cæsar was victorious. The navy which the
Egyptians had so suddenly got together was as suddenly destroyed. Some of
the vessels were burned, others sunk, and others captured; and Cæsar
returned in triumph to the port with his transports and stores. He was
welcomed with the acclamations of his soldiers, and, still more warmly, by
the joy and gratitude of Cleopatra, who had been waiting during his
absence in great anxiety and suspense to know the result of the
expedition, aware as she was that her hero was exposing himself in it to
the most imminent personal danger.

The arrival of these re-enforcements greatly improved Cæsar's condition,
and the circumstance of their coming forced upon the mind of Ganymede a
sense of the absolute necessity that he should gain possession of the
harbor if he intended to keep Cæsar in check. He accordingly determined to
take immediate measures for forming a naval force. He sent along the
coast, and ordered every ship and galley that could be found in all the
ports to be sent immediately to Alexandria. He employed as many men as
possible in and around the city in building more. He unroofed some of the
most magnificent edifices to procure timber as a material for making
benches and oars. When all was ready, he made a grand attack upon Cæsar in
the port, and a terrible contest ensued for the possession of the harbor,
the mole, the island, and the citadels and fortresses commanding the
entrances from the sea. Cæsar well knew that this contest would be a
decisive one in respect to the final result of the war, and he accordingly
went forth himself to take an active and personal part in the conflict. He
felt doubtless, too, a strong emotion of pride and pleasure in exhibiting
his prowess in the sight of Cleopatra, who could watch the progress of
the battle from the palace windows, full of excitement at the dangers
which he incurred, and of admiration at the feats of strength and valor
which he performed. During this battle the life of the great conqueror was
several times in the most imminent danger. He wore a habit or mantle of
the imperial purple, which made him a conspicuous mark for his enemies;
and, of course, wherever he went, in that place was the hottest of the
fight. Once, in the midst of a scene of most dreadful confusion and din,
he leaped from an overloaded boat into the water and swam for his life,
holding his cloak between his teeth and drawing it through the water after
him, that it might not fall into the hands of his enemies. He carried, at
the same time, as he swam, certain valuable papers which he wished to
save, holding them above his head with one hand, while he propelled
himself through the water with the other.

The result of this contest was another decisive victory for Cæsar. Not
only were the ships which the Egyptians had collected defeated and
destroyed, but the mole, with the fortresses at each extremity of it, and
the island, with the light-house and the town of Pharos, all fell into
Cæsar's hands.

The Egyptians now began to be discouraged. The army and the people,
judging, as mankind always do, of the virtue of their military commanders
solely by the criterion of success, began to be tired of the rule of
Ganymede and Arsinoë. They sent secret messengers to Cæsar avowing their
discontent, and saying that, if he would liberate Ptolemy--who, it will be
recollected, had been all this time held as a sort of prisoner of state in
Cæsar's palaces--they thought that the people generally would receive him
as their sovereign, and that then an arrangement might easily be made for
an amicable adjustment of the whole controversy. Cæsar was strongly
inclined to accede to this proposal.

He accordingly called Ptolemy into his presence, and, taking him kindly by
the hand, informed him of the wishes of the people of Egypt, and gave him
permission to go. Ptolemy, however, begged not to be sent away. He
professed the strongest attachment to Cæsar, and the utmost confidence in
him, and he very much preferred, he said, to remain under his protection.
Cæsar replied that, if those were his sentiments, the separation would
not be a lasting one. "If we part as friends," he said, "we shall soon
meet again." By these and similar assurances he endeavored to encourage
the young prince, and then sent him away. Ptolemy was received by the
Egyptians with great joy, and was immediately placed at the head of the
government. Instead, however, of endeavoring to promote a settlement of
the quarrel with Cæsar, he seemed to enter into it now himself,
personally, with the utmost ardor, and began at once to make the most
extensive preparations both by sea and land for a vigorous prosecution of
the war. What the result of these operations would have been can now not
be known, for the general aspect of affairs was, soon after these
transactions, totally changed by the occurrence of a new and very
important event which suddenly intervened, and which turned the attention
of all parties, both Egyptians and Romans, to the eastern quarter of the
kingdom. The tidings arrived that a large army, under the command of a
general named Mithradates, whom Cæsar had dispatched into Asia for this
purpose, had suddenly appeared at Pelusium, had captured that city, and
were now ready to march to Alexandria.

The Egyptian army immediately broke up its encampments in the neighborhood
of Alexandria, and marched to the eastward to meet these new invaders.
Cæsar followed them with all the forces that he could safely take away
from the city. He left the city in the night and unobserved, and moved
across the country with such celerity that he joined Mithradates before
the forces of Ptolemy had arrived. After various marches and maneuvers,
the armies met, and a great battle was fought. The Egyptians were
defeated. Ptolemy's camp was taken. As the Roman army burst in upon one
side of it, the guards and attendants of Ptolemy fled upon the other,
clambering over the ramparts in the utmost terror and confusion. The
foremost fell headlong into the ditch below, which was thus soon filled to
the brim with the dead and the dying; while those who came behind pressed
on over the bridge thus formed, trampling remorselessly, as they fled, on
the bodies of their comrades, who lay writhing, struggling, and shrieking
beneath their feet. Those who escaped reached the river. They crowded
together into a boat which lay at the bank and pushed off from the shore.
The boat was overloaded, and it sank as soon as it left the land. The
Romans drew the bodies which floated to the shore up upon the bank again,
and they found among them one, which, by the royal cuirass which was upon
it, the customary badge and armor of the Egyptian kings, they knew to be
the body of Ptolemy.

The victory which Cæsar obtained in this battle and the death of Ptolemy
ended the war. Nothing now remained but for him to place himself at the
head of the combined forces and march back to Alexandria. The Egyptian
forces which had been left there made no resistance, and he entered the
city in triumph. He took Arsinoë prisoner. He decreed that Cleopatra
should reign as queen, and that she should marry her youngest brother, the
other Ptolemy--a boy at this time about eleven years of age. A marriage
with one so young was, of course, a mere form. Cleopatra remained, as
before, the companion of Cæsar.

Cæsar had, in the mean time, incurred great censure at Rome, and
throughout the whole Roman world, for having thus turned aside from his
own proper duties as the Roman consul, and the commander-in-chief of the
armies of the empire, to embroil himself in the quarrels of a remote and
secluded kingdom, with which the interests of the Roman commonwealth were
so little connected. His friends and the authorities at Rome were
continually urging him to return. They were especially indignant at his
protracted neglect of his own proper duties, from knowing that he was held
in Egypt by a guilty attachment to the queen--thus not only violating his
obligations to the state, but likewise inflicting upon his wife Calpurnia,
and his family at Rome, an intolerable wrong. But Cæsar was so fascinated
by Cleopatra's charms, and by the mysterious and unaccountable influence
which she exercised over him, that he paid no heed to any of these
remonstrances. Even after the war was ended he remained some months in
Egypt to enjoy his favorite's society. He would spend whole nights in her
company, in feasting and revelry. He made a splendid royal progress with
her through Egypt after the war was over, attended by a numerous train of
Roman guards. He formed a plan for taking her to Rome, and marrying her
there; and he took measures for having the laws of the city altered so as
to enable him to do so, though he was already married.

All these things produced great discontent and disaffection among Cæsar's
friends and throughout the Roman army. The Egyptians, too, strongly
censured the conduct of Cleopatra. A son was born to her about this time,
whom the Alexandrians named, from his father, Cæsarion. Cleopatra was
regarded in the new relation of mother, which she now sustained, not with
interest and sympathy, but with feelings of reproach and condemnation.

Cleopatra was all this time growing more and more accomplished and more
and more beautiful; but her vivacity and spirit, which had been so
charming while it was simple and childlike, now began to appear more
forward and bold. It is the characteristic of pure and lawful love to
soften and subdue the heart, and infuse a gentle and quiet spirit into all
its action; while that which breaks over the barriers that God and nature
have marked out for it, tends to make woman masculine and bold, to
indurate all her sensibilities, and to destroy that gentleness and
timidity of demeanor which have so great an influence in heightening her
charms. Cleopatra was beginning to experience these effects. She was
indifferent to the opinions of her subjects, and was only anxious to
maintain as long as possible her guilty ascendency over Cæsar.

Cæsar, however, finally determined to set out on his return to the
capital. Leaving Cleopatra, accordingly, a sufficient force to secure the
continuance of her power, he embarked the remainder of his forces in his
transports and galleys, and sailed away. He took the unhappy Arsinoë with
him, intending to exhibit her as a trophy of his Egyptian victories on his
arrival at Rome.




CHAPTER VIII.

CLEOPATRA A QUEEN.


The war by which Cæsar reinstated Cleopatra upon the throne was not one of
very long duration. Cæsar arrived in Egypt in pursuit of Pompey about the
1st of August; the war was ended and Cleopatra established in secure
possession by the end of January; so that the conflict, violent as it was
while it continued, was very brief, the peaceful and commercial pursuits
of the Alexandrians having been interrupted by it only for a few months.

Nor did either the war itself, or the derangements consequent upon it,
extend very far into the interior of the country. The city of Alexandria
itself and the neighboring coasts were the chief scenes of the contest
until Mithradates arrived at Pelusium. He, it is true, marched across the
Delta, and the final battle was fought in the interior of the country. It
was, however, after all, but a very small portion of the Egyptian
territory that was directly affected by the war. The great mass of the
people, occupying the rich and fertile tracts which bordered the various
branches of the Nile, and the long and verdant valley which extended so
far into the heart of the continent, knew nothing of the conflict but by
vague and distant rumors. The pursuits of the agricultural population went
on, all the time, as steadily and prosperously as ever; so that when the
conflict was ended, and Cleopatra entered upon the quiet and peaceful
possession of her power, she found that the resources of her empire were
very little impaired.

She availed herself, accordingly, of the revenues which poured in very
abundantly upon her, to enter upon a career of the greatest luxury,
magnificence, and splendor. The injuries which had been done to the
palaces and other public edifices of Alexandria by the fire, and by the
military operations of the siege, were repaired. The bridges which had
been broken down were rebuilt. The canals which had been obstructed were
opened again. The sea-water was shut off from the palace cisterns; the
rubbish of demolished houses was removed; the barricades were cleared from
the streets; and the injuries which the palaces had suffered, either from
the violence of military engines or the rough occupation of the Roman
soldiery, were repaired. In a word, the city was speedily restored once
more, so far as was possible, to its former order and beauty. The five
hundred thousand manuscripts of the Alexandrian library, which had been
burned, could not, indeed, be restored; but, in all other respects, the
city soon resumed in appearance all its former splendor. Even in respect
to the library, Cleopatra made an effort to retrieve the loss. She
repaired the ruined buildings, and afterward, in the course of her life,
she brought together, it was said, in a manner hereafter to be described,
one or two hundred thousand rolls of manuscripts, as the commencement of a
new collection. The new library, however, never acquired the fame and
distinction that had pertained to the old.

The former sovereigns of Egypt, Cleopatra's ancestors, had generally, as
has already been shown, devoted the immense revenues which they extorted
from the agriculturalists of the valley of the Nile to purposes of
ambition. Cleopatra seemed now disposed to expend them in luxury and
pleasure. They, the Ptolemies, had employed their resources in erecting
vast structures, or founding magnificent institutions at Alexandria, to
add to the glory of the city, and to widen and extend their own fame.
Cleopatra, on the other hand, as was, perhaps, naturally to be expected of
a young, beautiful, and impulsive woman, suddenly raised to so conspicuous
a position, and to the possession of such unbounded wealth and power,
expended her royal revenues in plans of personal display, and in scenes of
festivity, gayety, and enjoyment. She adorned her palaces, built
magnificent barges for pleasure excursions on the Nile, and expended
enormous sums for dress, for equipages, and for sumptuous entertainments.
In fact, so lavish were her expenditures for these and similar purposes
during the early years of her reign, that she is considered as having
carried the extravagance of sensual luxury and personal display and
splendor beyond the limits that had ever before or have ever since been
attained.

Whatever of simplicity of character, and of gentleness and kindness of
spirit she might have possessed in her earlier years, of course gradually
disappeared under the influences of such a course of life as she now was
leading. She was beautiful and fascinating still, but she began to grow
selfish, heartless, and designing. Her little brother--he was but eleven
years of age, it will be recollected, when Cæsar arranged the marriage
between them--was an object of jealousy to her. He was now, of course, too
young to take any actual share in the exercise of the royal power, or to
interfere at all in his sister's plans or pleasures. But then he was
growing older. In a few years he would be fifteen--which was the period of
life fixed upon by Cæsar's arrangements, and, in fact, by the laws and
usages of the Egyptian kingdom--when he was to come into possession of
power as king, and as the husband of Cleopatra. Cleopatra was extremely
unwilling that the change in her relations to him and to the government,
which this period was to bring, should take place. Accordingly, just
before the time arrived, she caused him to be poisoned. His death released
her, as she had intended, from all restraints, and thereafter she
continued to reign alone. During the remainder of her life, so far as the
enjoyment of wealth and power, and of all other elements of external
prosperity could go, Cleopatra's career was one of uninterrupted success.
She had no conscientious scruples to interfere with the most full and
unrestrained indulgence of every propensity of her heart, and the means of
indulgence were before her in the most unlimited profusion. The only bar
to her happiness was the impossibility of satisfying the impulses and
passions of the human soul, when they once break over the bounds which the
laws both of God and of nature ordain for restraining them.

In the mean time, while Cleopatra was spending the early years of her
reign in all this luxury and splendor, Cæsar was pursuing his career, as
the conqueror of the world, in the most successful manner. On the death of
Pompey, he would naturally have succeeded at once to the enjoyment of the
supreme power; but his delay in Egypt, and the extent to which it was
known that he was entangled with Cleopatra, encouraged and strengthened
his ene

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