Augustus

Caesar offered his impartial adjudication, and Cleopatra realized she needed to make her way into his presence through a ring of troops loyal to her brother if she was to influence his verdict. Together with a friend from Sicily, a merchant called Apollodorus, she embarked on a small boat and landed at the royal harbor when it was getting dark. She stretched herself out full-length inside a bed-linen sack; Apollodorus tied up the bag and carried it indoors to Caesar (in another version of the story she wrapped herself inside a carpet). According to Plutarch, “this little trick of Cleopatra’s, which first showed her provocative impudence, is said to have been the first thing about her which captivated Caesar.”

Caesar soon announced his judgment. Cleopatra and her brother were to reign jointly, with equal rights; while appearing equitable, in practice this shifted the balance of power from the latter to the former. Her opponents called in the royal army—an experienced force of twenty thousand soldiers—which laid siege to Caesar in the royal palace at Alexandria.

Eventually, long-expected reinforcements arrived, and on March 27 Caesar destroyed the royal army in a set-piece battle at the delta of the river Nile. The pharaoh boarded a boat to make his getaway, but the vessel was overturned by panicking soldiers trying to clamber aboard from the water. The hapless boy drowned.

It might have been supposed that, having extricated himself from a very difficult situation brought on by arrogance and carelessness, the dictator of Rome would immediately leave Egypt to conclude the civil war at home and establish his rule on a permanent basis. Nothing of the kind occurred.

Caesar, the fifty-two-year-old womanizer, had fallen for Cleopatra and they began an affair. The queen was attractive, although perhaps not conventionally beautiful. Plutarch reports:

As far as they say, her beauty was not in and for itself incomparable, nor such as to strike the person who was just looking at her; but her conversation had an irresistible charm; and from the one side her appearance, together with the seduction of her speech, from the other her character, which pervaded her actions in an inexplicable way when meeting people, was utterly spell-binding. The sound of her voice was sweet when she talked.

Her appearance on coins of the period ranges from the witchlike to the radiant but does little to confirm this account of a woman whose charm was at its most powerful when she was moving or talking. However, the eyes and lips of a fine marble bust in the Berlin State Museum, which has been identified as being a portrait of her, reveal a fresh, sensuous willfulness.

The queen was very much more than a pretty face. She was highly intelligent and must have received a good education, for she was fluent in many languages, among them Ethiopian, Hebrew, Arabic, Syrian, the languages of the Medes (who lived in Babylonia, or today’s Iraq) and Parthians, and (above all) Egyptian. In an interesting aside, which reveals how seriously Cleopatra took her role as queen, Plutarch notes: “Many rulers of Egypt before her had never even troubled to learn the Egyptian language, and some of them had even given up their native Macedonian dialect [in favor of regular Greek].”

Traveling with a flotilla of four hundred ships, Caesar went for a long cruise up the Nile in Cleopatra’s company to look at the country, and, writes Appian, he “enjoyed himself with her in other ways as well.”

Caesar left Egypt in June 47 B.C. to deal with a revolt in Asia Minor a few weeks before Cleopatra gave birth to a son, Ptolemy Caesar, derisively nicknamed by the Alexandrian mob Caesarion, or Little Caesar.

By October he was back in Rome, having been away for nine months. Largely thanks to Mark Antony’s incompetence as an administrator, Italy was in disarray and the legions were in a mutinous frame of mind. Cato with fellow optimates had assembled a powerful force in Africa.

Caesar acted fast. First, he dismissed Antony and, with cold brilliance, faced down his troops. Caesar’s relationship with his men was almost that of a love affair. Although from time to time they had lovers’ tiffs, the soldiers adored him and he in turn was utterly loyal to them. Few deserted from his legions. This link of trust and affection to many thousands of soldiers was a political fact of the highest importance and a crucial guarantee of his power.