Julius Caesar (30 page)

In another passage of the Alexandrian war Caesar took charge of the Roman ships that lay off the palace and went out to escort the vessels carrying the 37th Legion. This had arrived from Asia Minor, but was unable to enter harbor because of the Egyptian ships patrolling off the coast. Caesar embarked aboard his small galley fleet, manned only by Rhodian sailors since he had to leave his legionaries to garrison the beleaguered palace, and in the ensuing action soundly defeated the Egyptians, allowing the convoy to enter harbor safely. His attempt to capture the Pharos, Alexandria’s great lighthouse and one of the Wonders of the World, even though it ended in failure and he nearly lost his life, showed the same spirit and audacity in the forefront of the action which never failed to endear him to his troops. On this occasion, an uncharacteristically bold move by the Egyptians had the Romans under Caesar trapped on the great dyke that led between the city of Alexandria and the island on which the Pharos stood. When they were forced to embark in small boats in order to escape, many men were lost through the boats being sunk or overturning under their weight. Caesar himself only managed to get clear of his craft by swimming for it (holding, so legend has it, important dispatches in one hand so as to keep them out of the water). Even his purple general’s cloak, upon which he set great store, had to be abandoned: it was later displayed over a trophy which Ganymedes and the Egyptians erected in memory of the Roman defeat.

It almost seems as if Caesar treated this early phase of the Alexandrian war in a lighthearted fashion, as some sort of escapade. But the loss of four hundred legionaries in the struggle for the Pharos, as well as a great many sailors, reminded him that he must play for time, and he reverted to his earlier policy of holding the palace position and waiting. In due course the land and sea forces which he had sent for from Syria and Asia Minor would arrive, capture Pelusium and take the Egyptian army in the back.

The politician in Caesar now took over. Hearing that the Egyptian army, unhappy with the combination of Arsinoe and her tutor Ganymedes, was still clamoring for Ptolemy to be restored to them, he decided to accede to their demands. This youth, the technical husband of Cleopatra, was no more than a nuisance to Caesar, since it had long been clear that the Egyptian people would not respect any commands he gave while he was in Roman hands. The two youngest children could remain in the palace as hostages, Cleopatra herself staying with Caesar of her own accord, but it seemed good tactics to restore Ptolemy XIII to the Alexandrians and the army. With his adviser Pothinus dead he was no more than a figurehead in any case, and as such, when the relief army came down and the Egyptians had to stand and fight, Ptolemy would be forced either to fly or to lead his troops in battle. In either case he was doomed. On being told that Caesar intended to restore him to his people the young Ptolemy is said to have burst into tears, saying that he did not want to leave Caesar and the palace. Clearly he saw his future prospects much as the Roman did, but he insisted on sending the Egyptian back to the embrace of his enthusiastic subjects—who promptly relieved Arsinoe and Ganymedes of the command of the army.

Mithridates of Pergamum, the son of a Galatian princess and the man whom Caesar had entrusted with the task of raising the relief army, finally appeared off Pelusium and quickly captured this important fortress. His troops, from Asia, Syria and Arabia, were powerfully reinforced by a Jewish contingent under Antipater (father of Herod the Great), who was the minister of the High Priest of the Jews. A forceful character, it was Antipater who was largely responsible for securing the help of other eastern princes, as well as bringing over to Caesar’s side the many Jews resident in Alexandria. Mithridates, after an easy victory over the Egyptians as he advanced toward Memphis, then crossed to the western bank of the Nile and prepared to march on Alexandria.

Ptolemy and his advisers moved out from Alexandria with their army to give battle, while Caesar embarked his troops and sailed off as if in the direction of Pelusium. Overnight the fleet was reversed, and Caesar sailed back west of Alexandria, where the troops disembarked and proceeded by forced marches through the desert to join up with the army of Mithridates near Memphis. Their combined forces now marched north to meet the Egyptians under Ptolemy. The battle, when it came, was hard-fought, lasting two days, but in the end the Egyptian army was practically annihilated. Those who fled by small boats across the Nile were mostly drowned, among them Cleopatra’s brother Ptolemy XIII, whose body was only identified by the gold royal corselet that he wore. Caesar had it sent back to Alexandria as proof to the citizens that the King was indeed dead—and that the struggle was over. On 27 March 47, he entered the city in triumph, the citizens sending a deputation to him in mourning, begging forgiveness for their part in the recent events. He was prepared to be clement, for he could be confident that he would have no more trouble in Egypt. Cleopatra was installed as Queen with her young brother as co-regent. Egypt was pacified and Caesar could have made it a Roman province without any real difficulty; that he did not do so was most probably due to his very real affection for Cleopatra. Cyprus was added to her kingdom and, to avoid any further potential trouble in the royal family, Cleopatra’s sister Arsinoe was sent away to Rome to grace his later triumph. Cleopatra was pregnant by Caesar—a fact which could no longer be concealed from the court, but which necessitated some clever propaganda among the Egyptian people. Cleopatra, in her capacity as Queen of Egypt, was equated with the goddess Isis, and a goddess could not conceive by a mere mortal (hence the royal incest). Now Caesar had already been hailed at Ephesus as “Descendant of Ares and Aphrodite, God Incarnate, and Savior of Mankind,” so the story was circulated for the benefit of the superstitious Egyptians that he was an incarnation of the god Amon (more or less equivalent to Zeus or Jupiter). Bas-reliefs have been found near Thebes showing Cleopatra as Isis in conversation with Amon, as well as depicting the birth of the divine child, who would be formally named Ptolemy Caesar but popularly known as Caesarion, “Little Caesar.” An epitaph dating from the last years of the Queen’s reign is inscribed “in the twentieth year after the union of Cleopatra and Amon.”

Caesar, in effect, now joined the divine royal family—which he will not have found difficult. He had in any case a good precedent, for Alexander the Great, after his visit to the famous temple of Amon at Siwah in the Libyan desert, had become known as the son of Amon. Coin portraits depict him with the ram’s horns of the god projecting from his head. Whether Alexander the Great or Caesar credited the identification is irrelevant, the fact was that it became widely believed among their subject peoples (whatever the sophisticated may have thought and said). It has already been suggested that something of Caesar’s apparent nonchalance and indifference to danger may have been due to some belief, however irrational, in a divine ancestry. This characteristic, as well as his will to power, was to become even more marked in his later years.

For the moment, the intricate and savage five-month-long Alexandrian war being over, Caesar intended to relax. Commentators then, and indeed ever since, have found it difficult to accept his behavior at a time when so many grave problems were pressing upon him. The empire and particularly Italy itself was in a state of confusion; the Pompeians had a strong fleet and army at Dyrrhachium and Corfu; a considerable army supporting the Pompeian cause was still in Africa; yet Caesar apparently chose to idle away his time in Egypt. Cicero, writing in June 47, states that, since December the previous year, not a letter from Caesar had been received in Rome—perhaps not so surprising if one considers the circumstances of the war in Alexandria.

It was now, in the spring of 47, that Caesar embarked on his famous boat trip (in the magnificent Ptolemaic state barge) up the Nile, in company with Cleopatra and with an enormous concourse of attendant barges, together with Roman troops keeping pace with the assembly along the river banks. A strong military escort was certainly necessary, not only for security reasons but to demonstrate to the whole of Egypt the might of Rome. Caesar was merely repeating what Alexander and then the Ptolemies had done—impressing the people, upon whom ultimately the wealth of Egypt depended, with the power and the protecting arm afforded to them by divine-style monarchs. The secret of monarchy in the East rested on the fact that, as was evident to even the simplest peasant, the rulers were more able to affect their lives, living conditions, and even the crops, through their actions—whether for peace or war—than the remote gods in the temples. It was understandable, therefore, that the powers of the gods should be seen incarnated in these rulers and—even as in modern parades and presidential or royal processions—it was essential that this power and splendor should be visibly displayed.

There was also a human factor for his staying on in Egypt after the war. At his age, month upon month of unremitting warfare, Pharsalus following upon Dyrrhachium, and the Alexandrian war upon that, had taxed Caesar to the hilt. He was entitled to some rest in the company of his young mistress—about to bear his child—and also to look with the eye of both a traveler and an administrator on this new land which he had, in effect, just added to the territories of Rome. Affairs of state, trouble in Asia Minor, subduing the last of the Pompeians, all these problems would soon enough call him away. Before he left, however, he was determined to see Egypt secure and Cleopatra secure in charge of Egypt. He had decided to leave three legions in the country, the command of which would normally have devolved upon a senator, but Caesar rightly did not trust any senator with the power of so many troops as well as the wealth of Egypt. He entrusted the legions to a man whom he knew to be a completely reliable officer, Rufio, neither an aristocrat nor one of his own set, but the son of a freed slave. It was an intelligent choice and later, after the annexation of Egypt, Augustus was to make such a type of appointment a basic part of imperial policy. Early in June Caesar left Egypt for Syria, and not long afterward Cleopatra gave birth to his only son.

30

Pharnaces and Pompey’s Sons

CAESAR had felt, as had many others, that the war should have ended after Pharsalus, and certainly the death of Pompey would seem to have been its logical conclusion. But the Roman civil war was far more than just a contest between two men. It was the struggle between two completely different concepts of government: on the one hand the old powerful families, calling themselves the
Optimates
and clinging to the concept of government by the senate; on the other Caesar, who envisaged a centralized form of government, a cabinet but under a dictator such as himself, with the senate acting as little more than a rubber stamp. Although in his last years Caesar seems to have been struggling toward the idea of empire under an emperor which Augustus (by “hastening slowly”) was to achieve, he was still too close to the violence that marked the birth of this concept to be able to understand it fully. Some of his opponents, such as Cato, seem to have grasped what was happening, and to have foreseen the decline of their class and of “the republic” (that ideal which their famous ancestors had served but which no longer existed). For these
Optimates
Pompey had been no more than the figurehead, and the fact that he was dead did not end their resistance: their war was against “Caesarism.”

Conscious of the troubles that awaited him in Italy, Africa and now Spain (where his generals had gravely mishandled the people), Caesar was determined that he would at least leave the East secure behind him, and serious trouble had broken out in Asia Minor. His legate in Asia, weakened by the fact that he had sent two legions to Caesar in Egypt, had been defeated by Pharnaces, son of Mithridates the Great. Pharnaces hoped to revive his father’s empire and throw the Romans out of Asia, taking advantage of their distraction in the civil war and then of Caesar’s absence in Egypt. He was already marching through Bithynia on his way to the province of Asia when a revolt behind his back by some of his followers brought him to a temporary halt. Caesar left Egypt accompanied by only one legion, rewarding as he went all those peoples and princes in the Near East who had assisted in the recent war, particularly the Jews, whom he allowed to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem as well as giving Antipater Roman citizenship. Hyrcanus II, their High Priest and prince, was officially recognized as such, and the territory of the Jews was not only freed from contributions but from that often costly operation, the billeting of Roman soldiers.

Settling the affairs of Syria and Cilicia as he moved north toward Pharnaces, Caesar also saw fit to receive a number of distinguished Pompeians who came to seek for mercy and, as usual, granted it. He had found that this policy of reconciliation was generally successful, and there can be no doubt that it reinforced among the troops who had fought against him the warm respect which he sought. Everywhere that Caesar moved through Asia and the East it was as Imperator and Dictator, not as consul or provincial governor, that he dispensed justice and mercy. Hailed with wreaths of gold like any god-monarch of those countries, he now had behind him the two assets which he had said were the only essentials for a ruler—soldiers and money. The conquest of Gaul had already proved his point—that the general in command of a victorious army, backed by the wealth resulting from his conquest, does not need the dispensation of the senate.

Pharnaces, preoccupied with the rebellion in the Crimea, had withdrawn from any further advance into Asia. He was resting with his army in the northern district known as Pontus near the town of Zela. This was a name well enough known to Romans, since it was there that a Roman army had been heavily defeated by Mithridates the Great. But Pharnaces had no wish to confront the conqueror of Pompey, and he knew well enough that Caesar was eager to attend to all the other affairs that needed his attention in Rome and the West. He reckoned that if he adopted a conciliatory policy Caesar would happily leave Asia and while he was busily engaged in Africa or Spain, he himself could then set about rebuilding his father’s empire. As soon as he heard that Caesar had crossed the frontier into Pontus, he sent envoys carrying golden wreaths and begging him to halt his advance, while giving him every assurance that Pharnaces had never lent any assistance to’ Pompey and would accede to any demands the Roman might make. Caesar was waiting for further troops to join him, for he had with him only the one legion weakened by the Alexandrian war and the remnants of the two which had already suffered defeat at the hands of Pharnaces. Until he was reinforced he was prepared to keep the negotiations going, listening with apparent interest to what Pharnaces’ emissaries had to say. When he was ready to move he sent back the unacceptable demand that Pharnaces should leave Pontus altogether, pointing out at the same time that not to have assisted Pompey did not excuse him, nor did his subsequent treatment of Roman citizens.