ACCESSION TO THE THRONE.
Cleopatra.--Excitement in Alexandria.--Ptolemy restored.--Acquiescence
of the people.--Festivities.--Popularity of Antony.--Antony's
generosity.--Anecdote.--Antony and Cleopatra.--Antony returns to
Rome.--Ptolemy's murders.--Pompey and Caesar.--Close of Ptolemy's
reign.--Settlement of the succession.--Accession of Cleopatra.--She is
married to her brother.--Pothinus, the eunuch.--His character and
government.--Machinations of Pothinus.--Cleopatra is expelled.
--Cleopatra's army.--Approaching contest.--Caesar and Pompey.
--Battle of Pharsalia.--Pompey at Pelusium.--Treachery of
Pothinus.--Caesar's pursuit of Pompey.--His danger.--Caesar at
Alexandria.--Astonishment of the Egyptians.--Caesar presented with
Pompey's head.--Pompey's seal.--Situation of Caesar.--His
demands.--Conduct of Pothinus.--Quarrels--Policy of Pothinus.
--Contentions.--Caesar sends to Syria for additional troops.
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 Caesar and Pompey. Antony espoused the cause of Caesar.
In the mean time, while the civil war between Caesar 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 Caesar, 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 Caesar 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. Caesar 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, Caesar 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 Caesar and Pompey himself will _lie still."_
In the mean time, Caesar, 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.
Caesar 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 Caesar. Accustomed as
they were to the brutal deeds and heartless cruelties of the Ptolemies,
they supposed that Caesar 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 Caesar, 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, Caesar 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 Caesar, 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 Caesar's soldiers. He thought that, as the
number of troops under Caesar'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 himself
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 Caesar. He busied himself, too, about
the city, in endeavoring to excite odium against Caesar'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.
Caesar'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 Caesar in the sentiments which they have formed as spectators of the
contest.
With the very small force which Caesar 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 himself 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.