The religious feelings of the Egyptians were much warmer and stronger than those of the Greeks or Romans; they have often been accused of eating one another, but never of eating a sacred animal. Once a year the people of Memphis celebrated the birthday of Apis with great pomp and expense, and one of the chief ceremonies on the occasion was the throwing a golden dish into the Nile. During the week that these rejoicings lasted, while the sacred river was appeased by gifts, the crocodile was thought to lose its fierceness, its teeth were harmless, and it never attempted to bite; and it was not till six o’clock on the eighth day that this animal again became an object of fear to those whose occupations brought them to the banks of the Nile. Once a year also the statues of the gods were removed from their pedestals and placed in barges, and thus carried in solemn procession along the Nile, and only brought back to the temples after some days. It was supposed that the gods were passing these days on a visit to the righteous Ethiopians.
The cat was at all times one of the animals held most sacred by the Egyptians. In the earliest and latest times we find the statues of their goddesses with cats’ heads. The cats of Alexandria were looked upon as so many images of Neith or the Minerva of Saïs, a goddess worshipped both by Greeks and Egyptians; and it passed into a proverb with the Greeks, when they spoke of any two things being unlike, to say that they were as much like one another as a cat was to Minerva. It is to Alexandria also that we trace the story of a cat turned into a lady to please a prince who had fallen in love with it. The lady, however, when dressed in her bridal robes, could not help scampering about the room after a mouse seen upon the floor; and when Plutarch was in Egypt it had already become a proverb, that any one in too much finery was as awkward as a cat in a crocus-coloured robe.
So deeply rooted in the minds of the Egyptians was the worship of these animals that, when a Roman soldier had killed a cat unawares, though the Romans were masters of the country, the people rose against him in a fury. In vain the king sent a message to quiet the mob, to let them know that the cat was killed by accident; and, though the fear of Rome would most likely have saved a Roman soldier unharmed whatever other crime he might have been guilty of, in this case nothing would quiet the people but his death, and he was killed before the eyes of Diodorus, the historian. One nation rises above another not so much from its greater strength or skill in arms as from its higher aim and stronger wish for power. The Egyptians, we see, had not lost their courage, and when the occasion called them out they showed a fearlessness not unworthy of their Theban forefathers; on seeing a dead cat in the streets they rose against the king’s orders and the power of Rome; had they thought their own freedom or their country’s greatness as much worth fighting for, they could perhaps have gained them.
But the Egyptians had no civil laws or rights that they cared about; they had nothing left that they valued but their religion, and this the Romans took good care not to meddle with. Had the Romans made war upon the priests and temples, as the Persians had done, they would perhaps in the same way have been driven out of Egypt: but they never shocked the religious feelings of the people, and even after Egypt had become a Roman province, when the beautiful temples of Esne, Dendera, and other cities, were dedicated in the names of the Roman emperors, they seldom copied the example of Philometor, and put Greek, much less Roman, writing on the portico, but continued to let the walls be covered with hieroglyphical inscriptions.
The Egyptians, when rich enough to pay for it, still had the bodies of their friends embalmed at their death, and made into mummies; though the priests, to save part of the cost, often put the mummy of a man just dead into a mummy-case which had been made and used in the reign of a Thûtmosis or an Amenhôthes. They thought that every man at his death took upon himself the character of Osiris, that the nurses who laid out the dead body represented the goddesses Isis and Nepthys, while the man who made the mummy was supposed to be the god Anubis. When the embalming was finished, it was part of the funeral to bring the dead man to trial for what he had done when living, and thus to determine whether he was entitled to an honourable burial. The mummy was ferried across the lake belonging to the temple, and taken before the judge Osiris. A pair of scales was brought forth by the dog-headed Anubis and the hawk-headed Horus; and with this they weighed the past life of the deceased. The judge, with the advice of a jury of forty-two, then pronounced the solemn verdict, which was written down by the ibis-headed Thot. But human nature is the same in all ages and in all countries, and, whatever might have been the past life of the dead, the judge, not to hurt the feelings of the friends, always declared that he was “a righteous and a good man:” and, notwithstanding the show of truth in the trial, it passed into a proverb to say of a wicked man, that he was too bad to be praised even at his funeral. This custom of embalming was thought right by all; but from examining the mummies that have come down to us, it would seem to have been very much confined to the priestly families, and seldom used in the case of children. The mummies, however, were highly valued by the survivors of the family, and when from poverty any man was driven to borrow money, the mummies were thought good security by the lender, and taken as such for the loan.
The mummy-cases indeed could be sold for a large sum, as when made of wood they were covered with painting, and sometimes in part gilt, and often three in number, one enclosing the other. The stone mummy-cases were yet more valuable, as they were either of white alabaster or hard black basalt, beautifully polished, in either case carved with hieroglyphics, and modelled to the shape of the body like the inner wooden cases.
It is interesting to note here that the pigment known to modern art by the name of mummy is, in many cases, actually prepared from the bituminous substances preserved within the wrappings of the ancient mummies. The grinding up of mummies imported from Thebes or Memphis for the purpose of enabling the twentieth century painter to paint the golden tresses of contemporary belles is of course not very extensively carried on, for one mummy will make several thousand tubes of paint, but the practice exists, and of late has been protested against both in England and France.
Though the old laws of Egypt must very much have fallen into disuse during the reigns of the latter Ptolemies, they had at least been left unchanged; and they teach us that the shadow of freedom may be seen, as in Rome under the Cæsars, and in Florence under the Medici, long after the substance has been lost. In quarrels between man and man, the thirty judges, from the cities of Thebes, Memphis, and Heliopolis, were still guided by the eight books of the law. The king, the priests, and the soldiers were the only landholders in the country, while the herdsmen, husbandmen, and handicraftsmen were thought of lower caste. Though the armies of Egypt were for the most part filled with Greek mercenaries, and the landholders of the order of soldiers could then have had as little to do with arms as knights and esquires have in our days, yet they still boasted of the wisdom of their laws, by which arms were only to be trusted to men who had a stake in the country worth fighting for. The old manners had long since passed away. The priests alone obeyed the old marriage law, that a man should have only one wife. Other men, when rich enough, married several. All children were held equally legitimate, whatever woman was the mother.
It is to these latter reigns of the Ptolemies, when high feeling was sadly wanting in all classes of society, when literature and art were alike in a very low state, that we may place the rise of caricature in Egypt. We find drawings made on papyrus to scoff at what the nation used to hold sacred. The sculptures on the walls of the temples are copied in little; and cats, dogs, and monkeys are there placed in the attitudes of the gods and kings of old. In one picture we have the mice attacking a castle defended by the cats, copied from a battle-scene of Ramses II. fighting against the Ethiopians. In another the king on his throne as a dog, with a second dog behind him as a fan-bearer, is receiving the sacred offerings from a cat. In a third the king and queen are seen playing at chess or checkers in the form of a lion playing with a unicorn or horned ass.
We may form some opinion of the wealth of Egypt in its more prosperous times when we learn from Cicero that in this reign, when the Romans had good means of knowing, the revenues of the country amounted to twelve thousand five hundred talents, or ten million dollars; just one-half of which wras paid by the port of Alexandria. This was at a time when the foreign trade had, through the faults of the government, sunk down to its lowest ebb; when not more than twenty ships sailed each year from the Red Sea to India; when the free population of the kingdom had so far fallen off that it was not more than three millions, which was only half of what it had been in the reign of Ptolemy Soter, though Alexandria alone still held three hundred thousand persons.
But, though much of the trade of the country was lost, though many of the royal works had ceased, though the manufacture of the finer linen had left the country, the digging in the gold mines, the favourite source of wealth to a despot, never ceased. Night and day in the mines near the Golden Berenicê did slaves, criminals, and prisoners of war work without pause, chained together in gangs, and guarded by soldiers, who were carefully chosen for their not being able to speak the language of these unhappy workmen.
The rock which held the gold was broken up into small pieces; when hard it was first made brittle in the fire; the broken stone was then washed to separate the waste from the heavier grains which held the gold; and, lastly, the valuable parts when separated were kept heated in a furnace for five days, at the end of which time the pure gold was found melted into a button at the bottom. But the mines were nearly worn out; and the value of the gold was a very small part of the thirty-five million dollars which they are said to have yielded every year in the reign of Ramses II.
As Auletes felt himself hardly safe upon the throne, his first wish was to get himself acknowledged as king by the Roman senate. For this end he sent to Rome a large sum of money to buy the votes of the senators, and he borrowed a further sum of Rabirius Posthumus, one of the richest farmers of the Roman taxes, which he spent on the same object. But though the Romans never tried to turn him out of his kingdom, he did not get the wished-for decree before he went to Rome in the twenty-fourth year of his reign. But we know nothing of the first years of his reign. A nation must be in a very demoralised state when its history disproves the saying, that the people are happy while their annals are short. There was more virtue and happiness, and perhaps even less bloodshed, with the stir of mind while Ptolemy Soter was at war with Antigonus than during this dull, un-warlike, and vicious time. The king gave himself up to his natural bent for pleasure and debauchery. At times when virtue is uncopied and unrewarded it is usually praised and let alone; but in this reign sobriety was a crime in the eyes of the king, a quiet behaviour was thought a reproach against his irregularities. The Platonic philosopher Demetrius was in danger of being put to death because it was told to the king that he never drank wine, and had been seen at the feast of Bacchus in his usual dress, while every other man was in the dress of a woman. But the philosopher was allowed to disprove the charge of sobriety, or at least to make amends for his fault; and, on the king sending for him the next day, he made himself drunk publicly in the sight of all the court, and danced with cymbals in a loose dress of Tarentine gauze. But so few are the deeds worth mentioning in the falling state that we are pleased even to be told that, in the one hundred and seventy-eighth Olympiad, Strato of Alexandria conquered in the Olympic games and was crowned in the same day for wrestling, and for pancratium, or wrestling and boxing joined, these sports being considered among the most honourable in which athletes could contend.
In the thirteenth year of this reign (B.C. 68), when the war against the pirates called for the whole naval force of Rome, Pompey sent a fleet under Lentulus Marcellinus to clear the coast and creeks of Egypt from these robbers. The Egyptian government was too weak to guard its own trade; and Lentulus in his consulship put the Ptolemaic eagle and thunderbolt on his coins, to show that he had exercised an act of sovereignty. Three years later, we again meet with the eagle and thunderbolt on the consular coins of Aurelius Cotta; and we learn from Cicero that in that year it was found necessary to send a fleet to Alexandria to enforce the orders of the senate.
We next find the Roman senate debating whether they should not seize the kingdom as their inheritance under the wall of Ptolemy Alexander II., but, moved by the bribes of Auletes, and perhaps by other reasons which we are not told, they forbore to grasp the prize. In this difficulty Auletes was helped by the great Pompey, to whom he had sent an embassy with a golden crown wrorth four thousand pieces of gold, which met him at Damascus on his Syrian campaign. He then formed a secret treaty with Mithridates, King of Pontus, who was engaged in warfare with the Romans, their common enemy. Auletes was now a widower with six young children, and Mithridates had two daughters; and accordingly it was agreed that one daughter should be married to Auletes, and the other to his brother, the King of Cyprus. But the ruin and death of Mithridates broke off the marriages; and Auletes was able to conceal from the Romans that he had ever formed an alliance with their enemy.
In the year which was made famous by the consulship of Cicero, Jerusalem was taken by the Roman army under Pompey; and Judæa, which had enjoyed a shortlived freedom of less than one hundred years under the Maccabees, was then put under a Roman governor. The fortifications of the temple were destroyed. This was felt by the Jews of Lower Egypt as a heavy blow, and from this time their sufferings in that country began. While their brethren had been lords of Judæa, they had held up their heads with the Greeks in Alexandria, but upon the fall of Jerusalem they sunk down to the rank of the Egyptians. They thought worse of themselves, and they were thought worse of by others. The Egyptian Jews were very closely allied to the people of the Delta. Though they had been again and again warned by their prophets not to mix with the Egyptians, they seem not to have listened to the warning. They were in many religious points less strict than their brethren in Judæa. The living in Egypt, the building a second temple, and the using a Greek Bible, were all breaches, if not of the law, at least of the tradition. They surrounded their synagogues with sacred groves, which were clearly forbidden by Moses. Though they were not guilty of worshipping images, yet they did not think it wrong to have portraits and statues of themselves. In their dislike of pork, in their washings, and in other Eastern customs, they were like the Egyptians; and hence the Greeks, who thought them both barbarians, very grudgingly yielded to them the privileges of choosing their own magistrates, of having their own courts of justice, and the other rights of citizenship which the policy of the Ptolemies had granted. The Jews, on the other hand, in whose eyes religion was everything, saw the Greeks and Egyptians worshipping the same gods and the same sacred animals, and felt themselves as far above the Greeks in those branches of philosophy which arise out of religion as they were below them in that rank which is gained by success in war. Hence it was with many heartburnings, and not without struggles which shed blood in the streets of Alexandria, that they found themselves, in the years which ushered in the Christian era, sinking down to the level of the Egyptians, and losing one by one the rights of Macedonian citizenship.
During these years Auletes had been losing his friends and weakening his government, and, at last, when he refused to quarrel with the senate about the island of Cyprus, the Egyptians rose against him in arms, and he was forced to fly from Alexandria. He took ship for Rome, and in his way there he met Cato, who was at Rhodes on his voyage to Cyprus. He sent to Cato to let him know that he was in the city, and that he wished to see him. But the Roman sent word back that he was unwell, and that if the king wanted to speak to him he must come himself. This was not a time for Auletes to quarrel with a senator, when he was on his way to Rome to beg for help against his subjects; so he was forced to go to Cato’s lodgings, who did not even rise from his seat when the king entered the room. But this treatment was not quite new to Auletes; in his flight from Alexandria, in disguise and without a servant, he had had to eat brown bread in the cottage of a peasant; and he now learned how much more irksome it was to wait upon the pleasure of a Roman senator. Cato gave him the best advice; that, instead of going to Rome, where he would find that all the wealth of Egypt would be thought a bribe too small for the greediness of the senators whose votes he wanted, he would do better to return to Alexandria, and make peace with his rebellious subjects. Auletes, however, went on to Italy, and he arrived at Rome in the twenty-fourth year of his reign; and in the three years that he spent there in courting and bribing the senators, he learned the truth of Cato’s statements, and the value of his advice.
His brother Ptolemy, who was reigning in Cyprus, was not even so well treated. The Romans passed a law making that wealthy island a Roman province, no doubt upon the plea of the will of Alexander II. and the king’s illegitimacy; and they sent Cato, rather against his will, to turn Ptolemy out of his kingdom. Ptolemy gave up the island without Cato being called upon to use force, and in return the Romans made him high priest in the temple of the Paphian Venus; but he soon put himself to death by poison. Canidius Crassus, who had been employed by Cato in this affair, may have had some fighting at sea with the Egyptians, as on one of his coins we see on one side a crocodile, and on the other the prow of a ship, as if he had beaten the Egyptian fleet in the mouth of the Nile.
On the flight of their king, the rebellious Alexandrians set on the throne the two eldest of his daughters, Cleopatra Tryphaena and Berenicê, and sent an embassy, at the head of which was Dion, the academic philosopher, to plead their cause at Rome against the king. But the gold of Auletes had already gained the senate; and Cicero spoke, on his behalf, one of his great speeches, now unfortunately lost, in which he rebutted the charge that Auletes was at all to be blamed for the death of Alexander, whom he thought justly killed by his guards for the murder of his queen and kinswoman. Cæsar, whose year of consulship was then drawing to an end, took his part warmly; and Auletes became in debt to him in the sum of seventeen million drachmas, or nearly two and a half million dollars, either for money lent to bribe the senators, or for bonds then given to Cæsar instead of money. By these means Auletes got his title acknowledged; the door of the senate was shut against the Alexandrian ambassadors; and the philosopher Dion, the head of the embassy, was poisoned in Rome by the slaves of his friend Lucceius, in whose house he was dwelling. But nevertheless, Auletes was not able to get an army sent to help him against his rebellious subjects and his daughters; nor was Cæsar able to get from the senate, for the employment of his proconsular year, the task of replacing Auletes on the throne.
This high employment was then sought for both by Lentulus and by Pompey. The senate at first leaned in favour of the former; and he would perhaps have gained it if the Roman creditors of Auletes, who were already trembling for their money, had not bribed openly in favour of Pompey, as the more powerful of the two. On Pompey, therefore, the choice of the senate at last fell. Pompey then took Auletes into his house, as his friend and guest, and would have got orders to lead him back into his kingdom at the head of a Roman army had not the tribunes of the people, fearing any addition to Pompey’s great power, had recourse to their usual state-engine, the Sibylline books; and the pontifex, at their bidding, publicly declared that it was written in those sacred pages that the King of Egypt should have the friendship of Rome, but should not be helped with an army.
But though Lentulus and Pompey were each strong enough to stop the other from having this high command, Auletes was not without hopes that some Roman general would be led, by the promise of money, and by the honour, to undertake his cause, though it would be against the laws of Rome to do so without orders from the senate. Cicero then took him under his protection, and carried him in a litter of state to his villa at Baiæ, and wrote to Lentulus, the proconsul of Cilicia and Cyprus, strongly urging him to snatch the glory of replacing Auletes on the throne, and of being the patron of the King of Egypt. But Lentulus seems not to have chosen to run the risk of so far breaking the laws of his country.
Auletes then went, with pressing letters from Pompey, to Gabinius, the proconsul of Syria, and offered him the large bribe of ten thousand talents, or seven and a half million dollars, if he would lead the Roman army into Egypt, and replace him on the throne. Most of the officers were against this undertaking; but the letters of Pompey, the advice of Mark Antony, the master of the horse, and perhaps the greatness of the bribe, outweighed those cautious opinions.
While Auletes had been thus pleading his cause at Rome and with the army, Cleopatra Tryphæna, the elder of the two queens, had died; and, as no one of the other children of Auletes was old enough to be joined with Berenicê on the throne, the Alexandrians sent to Syria for Seleucus, the son of Antiochus Grypus and of Selene, the sister of Lathyrus, to come to Egypt and marry Berenicê. He was low-minded in all his pleasures and tastes, and got the nickname of Cybiosactes, the scullion. He was even said to have stolen the golden sarcophagus in which the body of Alexander was buried; and was so much disliked by his young wife that she had him strangled on the fifth day after their marriage. Berenicê then married Archelaus, a son of Mithridates Eupator, King of Pontus; and she had reigned one year with her sister and two years with her husbands when the Roman army brought back her father, Ptolemy Auletes, into Egypt.
Gabinius, on marching, gave out as an excuse for quitting the province entrusted to him by the senate, that it was in self-defence; and that Syria was in danger from the Egyptian fleet commanded by Archelaus. He was accompanied by a Jewish army under the command of Antipator, sent by Hyrcanus, whom the Romans had just made governor of Judæa. Mark Antony was sent forward with the horse, and routed the Egyptian army near Pelusium, and then entered the city with Auletes. The king, in the cruelty of his revenge, wished to put the citizens to the sword, and was only stopped by Antony’s forbidding it. The Egyptian army was at this time in the lowest state of discipline; it was the only place where the sovereign was not despotic. The soldiers, who prized the lawlessness of their trade even more than its pay, were a cause of fear only to their fellow-citizens. When Archelaus led them out against the Romans, and ordered them to throw up a trench around their camp, they refused to obey; they said that ditch-making was not work for soldiers, but that it ought to be done at the cost of the state. Hence, when on this first success Gabinius followed with the body of the army, he easily conquered the rest of the country and put to death Berenicê and Archelaus. He then led back the army into his province of Syria, but left behind him a body of troops under Lucius Septimius to guard the throne of Auletes and to check the risings of the Alexandrians.
Gabinius had refused to undertake this affair, which was the more dangerous because against the laws of Rome, unless the large bribe were first paid down in money. He would take no promises; and Auletes, who in his banishment had no money at his command, had to borrow it of some one who would listen to his large promises of after payment. He found this person in Rabirius Posthumus, who had before lent him money, and who saw that it would be all lost unless Auletes regained the throne. Rabirius therefore lent him all he was worth, and borrowed the rest from his friends; and as soon as Auletes was on the throne, he went to Alexandria to claim his money and his reward.
While Auletes still stood in need of Roman help, and saw the advantage of keeping faith with his foreign creditors, Rabirius was allowed to hold the office of royal dioecetes, or paymaster-general, which was one of great state and profit, and one by which he could in time have repaid himself his loan. He wore a royal robe; the taxes of Alexandria went through his hands; he was indeed master of the city. But when the king felt safe on his throne, he sent away his troublesome creditor, who returned to Rome with the loss of his money, to stand his trial as a state criminal for having lent it. Rabirius had been for a time mortgagee in possession of the revenues of Egypt; and Auletes had felt more indebted for his crown to a Roman citizen than to the senate. But in the dealings of Rome with foreign kings, these evils had often before arisen, and at last been made criminal; and while Gabinius was tried for treason, de majestate, for leading his army out of his province, Rabirius was tried, under the Lex Julia de pecuniis repetundis, for lending money and taking office under Auletes.
One of the last acts of Gabinius in Syria was to change the form of the Jewish government into an aristocracy, leaving Hyrcanus as the high priest. The Jews thereon began to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, that had been thrown down by Pompey. Among the prisoners sent to Rome by Gabinius was Timagenes, the son of the king’s banker, who probably lost his liberty as a hostage on Ptolemy’s failure to repay the loan. But he was afterwards ransomed from slavery by a son of Sulla, and he remained at Rome teaching Greek eloquence in the schools, and writing his numerous works.
The climate of Egypt is hardly suited to Europeans, and perhaps at no time did the births in the Greek families equal the deaths. That part of the population was kept up by newcomers; and latterly the Romans had been coming over to share in the plunder that was there scattered among the ruling class. For some time past Alexandria had been a favourite place of settlement for such Romans as either through their fault or their misfortune were forced to leave their homes.
All who were banished for their crimes or who went away to escape from trial, all runaway slaves, all ruined debtors, found a place of safety in Alexandria; and by enrolling themselves in the Egyptian army they joined in bonds of fellowship with thousands like themselves, who made it a point of honour to screen one another from being overtaken by justice or reclaimed by their masters. With such men as these, together with some bands of robbers from Syria and Cilicia, had the ranks of the Egyptian army latterly been recruited. These were now joined by a number of soldiers and officers from the army of Gabinius, who liked the Egyptian high pay and lawlessness better than the strict discipline of the Romans. As, in this mixed body of men, the more regular courage and greater skill in war was found among the Romans, they were chiefly chosen as officers, and the whole had something of the form of a Roman army. These soldiers in Alexandria were above all law and discipline.
The laws were everywhere badly enforced, crimes passed unpunished, and property became unsafe. Robberies were carried on openly, and the only hope of recovering what was stolen was by buying it back from the thief. In many cases, whole villages lived upon plunder, and for that purpose formed themselves into a society, and put themselves under the orders of a chief; and, when any merchant or husbandman was robbed, he applied to this chief, who usually restored to him the stolen property on payment of one-fourth of its value.
As the country fell off in wealth, power, and population, the schools of Alexandria fell off in learning, and we meet with few authors whose names can brighten the pages of this reign. Apollonius of Citium, indeed, who had studied surgery and anatomy at Alexandria under Zopyrus, when he returned to Cyprus, wrote a treatise on the joints of the body, and dedicated his work to Ptolemy, king of that island. The work is still remaining in manuscript.
Beside his name of Neus Dionysus, the king is in the hieroglyphics sometimes called Philopator and Philadelphus; and in a Greek inscription on a statue at Philae he is called by the three names, Neus Dionysus, Philopator, Philadelphus. The coins which are usually thought to be his are in a worse style of art than those of the kings before him. He died in B.C. 51, in the twenty-ninth year of his reign, leaving four children, namely, Cleopatra, Arsinoë, and two Ptolemies.
Pompey, Cæsar, and Antony in Egypt—Cleopatra’s extravagance and intrigues—Octavianus annexes Egypt—Retrospect.
Ptolemy Neus Dionysus had by his will left his kingdom to Cleopatra and Ptolemy, his elder daughter and elder son, who, agreeably to the custom of the country, were to marry one another and reign with equal power. He had sent one copy of his will to Rome, to be lodged in the public treasury, and in it he called upon the Roman people, by all the gods and by the treaties by which they were bound, to see that it was obeyed. He had also begged them to undertake the guardianship of his son. The senate voted Pompey tutor to the young king, or governor of Egypt; and the Alexandrians in the third year of his reign sent sixty ships of war to help the great Pompey in his struggle against Julius Cæsar for the chief power in Rome. But Pompey’s power was by that time drawing to an end, and the votes of the senate could give no strength to the weak: hence the eunuch Pothinus, who had the care of the elder Ptolemy, was governor of Egypt, and his first act was to declare his young pupil king, and to set at nought the will of Auletes, by which Cleopatra was joined with him on the throne.
Cleopatra fled into Syria, and, with a manly spirit which showed what she was afterwards to be, raised an army and marched back to the borders of Egypt, to claim her rights by force of arms. It was in the fourth year of her reign, when the Egyptian troops were moved to Pelusium to meet her, and the two armies were within a few leagues of one another, that Pompey, who had been the friend of Auletes when the king wanted a friend, landed on the shores of Egypt in distress, and almost alone. His army had just been beaten at Pharsalia, and he was flying from Cæsar, and he hoped to receive from the son the kindness which he had shown to the father. But gratitude is a virtue little known in palaces, and Ptolemy had been cradled in princely selfishness. In this civil war between Pompey and Cæsar, the Alexandrians would have been glad to be the friends of both, but that was now out of the question; Pompey’s coming made it necessary for them to choose which they should join, and Ptolemy’s council, like cowards, only wished to side with the strong.
Pothinus the eunuch, Achilles the general, who was a native Egyptian, and Theodotus of Chios, who was the prince’s tutor in rhetoric, were the men by whom the fate of this great Roman was decided. “By putting him to death,” said Theodotus, “you will oblige Cæsar, and have nothing to fear from Pompey;” and he added with a smile, “Dead men do not bite.” So Achilles and Lucius Septimius, the head of the Roman troops in the Egyptian army, were sent down to the seaside to welcome him, to receive him as a friend, and to murder him. They handed him out of his galley into their boat, and put him to death on his landing. They then cut off from his lifeless trunk the head which had been three times crowned with laurels in the capitol; and in that disfigured state the young Ptolemy saw for the first time, and without regret, the face of his father’s best friend.
When Cæsar, following the track of Pompey, arrived in the roadstead of Alexandria, all was already over. With deep agitation he turned away when the murderer brought to his ship the head of the man who had been his son-in-law and for long years his colleague in rule, and to get whom alive into his power he had come to Egypt. The dagger of the rash assassin precluded an answer to the question, how Cæsar would have dealt with the captive Pompey; but, while the human sympathy which still found a place in the great soul of Cæsar, side by side with ambition, enjoined that he should spare his former friend, his interest also required that he should annihilate Pompey otherwise than by the executioner. Pompey had been for twenty years the acknowledged ruler of Rome; a dominion so deeply rooted does not end with the ruler’s death. The death of Pompey did not break up the Pompeians, but gave to them instead of an aged, incapable, and worn-out chief, in his sons Gnacus and Sextus, two leaders, both of whom were young and active, and the second of them of decided capacity. To the newly founded hereditary monarchy, hereditary pretendership attached itself at once like a parasite, and it was very doubtful whether by this change of persons Cæsar did not lose more than he gained.
Meanwhile in Egypt Cæsar had now nothing further to do, and the Romans and Egyptians expected that he would immediately set sail and apply himself to the subjugation of Africa, and to the huge task of organisation which awaited him after the victory. But Cæsar, faithful to his custom—wherever he found himself in the wide Empire—of finally regulating matters at once and in person, and firmly convinced that no resistance was to be expected either from the Roman garrison or from the court; being, moreover, in urgent pecuniary embarrassment, landed in Alexandria with the two amalgamated legions accompanying him to the number of thirty-two hundred men and eight hundred Celtic and German cavalry, took up his quarters in the royal palace, and proceeded to collect the necessary sums of money and to regulate the Egyptian succession, without allowing himself to be disturbed by the saucy remark of Pothinus that Cæsar should not for such petty matters neglect his own so important affairs. In his dealings with the Egyptians he was just and even indulgent. Although the aid which they had given to Pompey justified the imposing of a war contribution, the exhausted land was spared from this; and, while the arrears of the sums stipulated for in B.C. 59, and since then only about half paid, were remitted, there was required merely a final payment of ten million denarii (two million dollars). The belligerent brother and sister were enjoined immediately to suspend hostilities, and were invited to have their dispute investigated and decided before the arbiter. They submitted; the royal boy was already in the palace and Cleopatra also presented herself there. Cæsar adjudged the kingdom of Egypt, agreeably to the testament of Auletes, to the intermarried brother and sister Cleopatra and Ptolomoreus Dionysus, and further gave unasked the kingdom of Cyprus—cancelling the earlier act of annexation—as the appanage of the second-born of Egypt to the younger children of Auletes, Arsinoë and Ptolemy the younger. But a storm was secretly preparing. Alexandria was a cosmopolitan city as well as Rome, hardly inferior to the Italian capital in the number of its inhabitants, far superior to it in stirring commercial spirit, in skill of handicraft, in taste for science and art: in the citizens there was a lively sense of their own national importance, and, if there was no political sentiment, there was at any rate a turbulent spirit, which induced them to indulge in their street riots regularly and heartily. We may conceive their feeling when they saw the Roman general ruling in the palace of the Lagids, and their kings accepting the award of his tribunal. Pothinus and the boy-king, both, as may be conceived, very dissatisfied at once with the peremptory requisition of all debts and with the intervention in the throne-dispute which could only issue, as it did, in the favour of Cleopatra, sent—in order to pacify the Roman demands—the treasures of the temple and the gold plate of the king with intentional ostentation to be melted at the mint; with increasing indignation the Egyptians—who were pious even to superstition, and who rejoiced in the world-renowned magnificence of their court as if it were a possession of their own—beheld the bare walls of their temples and the wooden cups on the table of their king. The Roman army of occupation also, which had been essentially denationalised by its long abode in Egypt and the many intermarriages between the soldiers and Egyptian women, and which moreover numbered a multitude of the old soldiers of Pompey and runaway Italian criminals and slaves in its ranks, was indignant at Cæsar, by whose orders it had been obliged to suspend its action on the Syrian frontier, and at his handful of haughty legionaries. The tumult even at the landing, when the multitude saw the Roman axes carried into the old palace, and the numerous instances in which his soldiers were assassinated in the city, had taught Cæsar the immense danger in which he was placed with his small force in presence of the exasperated multitude. But it was difficult to return on account of the northwest winds prevailing at this season of#the year, and the attempt of embarkation might easily become a signal for the outbreak of the insurrection; besides, it was not the nature of Cæsar to take his departure without having accomplished his work. He accordingly ordered up at once reinforcements from Asia, and meanwhile, till these arrived, made a show of the utmost self-possession. Never was there greater gaiety in his camp than during this rest at Alexandria, and while the beautiful and clever Cleopatra was not sparing of her charms in general and least of all towards her judge, Cæsar also appeared among all his victories to value most those won over beautiful women. It was a merry prelude to graver scenes. Under the leadership of Achilles and, as was afterwards proved, by the secret orders of the king and his guardian, the Roman army of occupation stationed in Egypt appeared unexpectedly in Alexandria, and, as soon as the citizens saw that it had come to attack Cæsar, they made common cause with the soldiers.
With a presence of mind, which in some measure justifies his foolhardiness, Cæsar hastily collected his scattered men; seized the persons of the king and his ministers; entrenched himself in the royal residence and adjoining theatre; and gave orders, as there was no time to place in safety the war-fleet stationed in the principal harbour immediately in front of the theatre, that it should be set on fire and that Pharos, the island with the light-tower commanding the harbour, should be occupied by means of boats. Thus at least a restricted position for defence was secured, and the way was kept open to procure supplies and reinforcements. At the same time orders were issued to the commandant of Asia Minor as well as to the nearest subject countries, the Syrians and the Nabatæans, the Cretans and the Rhodians, to send men and ships in all haste to Egypt. The insurrection, at the head of which the Princess Arsinoë and her confidant, the eunuch Ganymedes, had placed themselves, meanwhile had free course in all Egypt and in the greater part of the capital. In the streets of the latter there was daily fighting, but without success either on the part of Cæsar in gaining freer scope and breaking through to the fresh water lake of Mariut which lay behind the town, where he could have provided himself with water and forage; or on the part of the Alexandrians in acquiring superiority in besieging and depriving them of all drinking water; for, when the Nile canals in Cæsar’s part of the town had been spoiled by the introduction of salt water, drinkable water was unexpectedly found in wells dug on the beach.
As Cæsar was not to be overcome from the landward side, the exertions of the besiegers were directed to destroy his fleet and cut him off from the sea, by which supplies reached him. The island with the lighthouse and the mole by which this was connected with the mainland divided the harbour into a western and an eastern half, which were in communication with each other through two arch-openings in the mole. Cæsar commanded the island and the east harbour, while the mole and the west harbour were in possession of the citizens; and, as the Alexandrian fleet was burnt, his vessels sailed in and out without hindrance. The Alexandrians, after having vainly attempted to introduce fire-ships from the western into the eastern harbour, equipped with the remnant of their arsenal a small squadron, and with this blocked up the way of Cæsar’s vessels, when these were towing in a fleet of transports with a legion that had arrived from Asia Minor; but the excellent Rhodian mariners of Cæsar mastered the enemy. Not long afterwards, however, the citizens captured the lighthouse-island, and from that point totally closed the narrow and rocky mouth of the east harbour for larger ships; so that Cæsar’s fleet was compelled to take its station in the open roads before the east harbour, and his communication with the sea hung only on a weak thread. Cæsar’s fleet, attacked in that roadstead repeatedly by the superior naval force of the enemy, could neither shun the unequal strife, since the loss of the lighthouse-island closed the inner harbour against it, nor yet withdraw, for the loss of the roadstead would have debarred Cæsar wholly from the sea. Though the brave legionaries, supported by the dexterity of the Rhodian sailors, had always hitherto decided these conflicts in favour of the Romans, the Alexandrians renewed and augmented their naval armaments with unwearied perseverance; the besieged had to fight as often as it pleased the besiegers, and, if the former should be on a signal occasion vanquished, Cæsar would be totally hemmed in and probably lost.
It was absolutely necessary to make an attempt to recover the lighthouse-island. The double attack, which was made by boats from the side of the harbour and by the war-vessels from the seaboard, in reality brought not only the island but also the lower part of the mole into his power; it was only at the second arch-opening of the mole that Cæsar ordered the attack to be stopped, and the mole to be there closed towards the city by a transverse wall. But while a violent conflict arose here round the entrenchers, the Roman troops left the lower part of the mole adjoining the island bare of defenders; a division of Egyptians landed there unexpectedly, attacked in the rear the Roman soldiers and sailors crowded together on the mole of the transverse wall, and drove the whole mass in wild confusion into the sea. A part were taken on board by the Roman ships; but more were drowned. Some four hundred soldiers and a still greater number of men belonging to the fleet were sacrificed on this day; the general himself, who had shared the fate of his men, had been obliged to seek refuge in his ship, and, when this sank from having been overloaded with men, he had to save himself by swimming to another. But, severe as was the loss suffered, it was amply compensated by the recovery of the lighthouse-island, which along with the mole as far as the first arch-opening remained in the hands of Cæsar.
At length the longed-for relief arrived, Mithridates of Pergamus, an able warrior of the school of Mithridates Eupator, whose natural son he claimed to be, brought up by land from Syria a motley army,—the Ituræans of the prince of the Libanus, the Bedouins of Jamblichus, son of Sampsiceramus, the Jews under the minister Antipater, and the contingents generally of the petty chiefs and communities of Cilicia and Syria. From Pelusium, which Mithridates had the fortune to occupy on the day of his arrival, he took the great road towards Memphis, with the view of avoiding the intersected ground of the Delta and crossing the Nile before its division; during which movement his troops received manifold support from the Jewish peasants who were settled in this part of Egypt. The Egyptians, with the young king Ptolemy now at their head, whom Cæsar had released to his people in the vain hope of allaying the insurrection by his means, despatched an army to the Nile, to detain Mithridates on its farther bank. The army fell in with the enemy even beyond Memphis at the so-called Jews’ camp, between Onion and Heliopolis; nevertheless Mithridates, trained in the Roman fashion of manoeuvring and encamping, amidst successful conflicts gained the opposite bank at Memphis. Cæsar, on the other hand, as soon as he obtained news of the arrival of the relieving army, conveyed a part of his troops in ships to the end of the lake of Morea to the west of Alexandria, and marched round this lake and down the Nile to meet Mithridates advancing up the river.
The junction took place without the enemy attempting to hinder it. Cæsar then marched into the Delta, whither the king had retreated, overthrew, notwithstanding the deeply cut canal in their front, the Egyptian vanguard at the first onset, and immediately stormed the Egyptian camp itself. It lay at the foot of a rising ground between the Nile—from which only a narrow path separated it—and marshes difficult of access. Cæsar caused the camp to be assailed simultaneously from the front and from the flank on the path along the Nile; and during this assault ordered a third detachment to ascend unseen the heights of the camp. The victory was complete; the camp was taken, and those of the Egyptians who did not fall beneath the sword of the enemy were drowned in the attempt to escape to the fleet on the Nile. With one of the boats, which sank overladen with men, the young king also disappeared in the waters of his native stream. Immediately after the battle Cæsar advanced at the head of his cavalry from the land side straight into the portion of the capital occupied by the Egyptians. In mourning attire, with the images of their gods in their hands, the enemy received him and sued for peace; and his troops, when they saw him return as victor from the side opposite to that by which he had set forth, welcomed him with boundless joy. The fate of the town, which had ventured to thwart the plans of the master of the world and had brought him within a hair’s-breadth of destruction, lay in Cæsar’s hands; but he was too much of a ruler to be sensitive, and dealt with the Alexandrians as with the Massiliots. Cæsar—pointing to their city severely devastated and deprived of its granaries, of its world-renowned library, and of other important public buildings on the occasion of the burning of the fleet—exhorted the inhabitants in future earnestly to cultivate the arts of peace alone, and to heal the wounds inflicted on themselves; for the rest, he contented himself with granting to the Jews settled in Alexandria the same rights which the Greek population of the city enjoyed, and with placing in Alexandria instead of the previous Roman army of occupation—which nominally at least obeyed the kings of Egypt, a Roman garrison—two of the legions besieged there, and a third which afterwards arrived from Syria—under a commander nominated by himself. For this position of trust a man was purposely selected whose birth made it impossible for him to abuse it—Rufio, an able soldier, but the son of a freed man. Cleopatra and her younger brother Ptolemy obtained the sovereignty of Egypt under the supremacy of Rome; the Princess Arsinoë was carried off to Italy, that she might not serve once more as a pretext for insurrections to the Egyptians, who were after the Oriental fashion quite as much devoted to their dynasty as they were indifferent towards the individual dynasts; and Cyprus became again a part of the Roman province of Cilicia. Cæsar’s love for Cleopatra, who had just borne him a son named Cæsarion, was not so strong as his ambition; and after having been above a year in Egypt he left her to govern the kingdom in her own name, but on his behalf; and sailed for Italy, taking with him the sixth legion. While engaged in this warfare in Alexandria, Cæsar had been appointed dictator in Rome, where his power was exercised by Mark Antony, his master of the horse; and for above six months he had not written one letter home, as though ashamed to write about the foolish difficulty he had entangled himself in, until he had got out of it.
On reaching Rome Cæsar amused the people and himself with a grand triumphal show, in which, among the other prisoners of war, the Princess Arsinoë followed his car in chains; and, among the works of art and nature which were got together to prove to the gazing crowd the greatness of his conquests, was that remarkable African animal the camelopard, then for the first time seen in Rome. In one chariot was a statue of the Nile god; and in another the Pharos lighthouse on fire, with painted flames. Nor was this the last of Cæsar’s triumphs, for soon afterwards Cleopatra, and her brother Ptolemy, then twelve years old, who was called her husband, came to Rome as his guests, and dwelt for some time with him in his house.
The history of Egypt, at this time, is almost lost in that of Rome. Within five years of Cæsar’s landing in Alexandria, and finding that by the death of Pompey he was master of the world, he paid his own life as the forfeit for crushing his country’s liberty. The Queen of Egypt, with her infant son Cæsarion about four years old, was then in Rome, living with Cæsar in his villa on the farther side of the Tiber. On Cæsar’s death her first wish was to get the child acknowledged by the Roman senate as her colleague on the throne of Egypt, and as a friend of the Roman people. With this view she applied to Cicero for help, making him an offer of some books or works of art; but he was offended at her haughtiness and refused her gifts. Besides, she was more likely to thwart than to help the cause for which he was struggling. He was alarmed at hearing that she was soon to give birth to another child. He did not want any more Cæsars. He hoped she would miscarry, as he wished she had before miscarried. So he bluntly refused to undertake her cause. On this she thought herself unsafe in Rome, she fled privately, and reached Egypt in safety with Cæsarion; but we hear of no second child by Julius. The Romans were now the masters of Egypt, and Cleopatra could hardly hope to reign but by the help of one of the great generals who were struggling for the sovereignty of the republic. Among these was the young Sextus Pompeius, whose large fleet made him for a time master of Sicily and of the sea; and he was said to have been admitted by the Queen of Egypt as a lover. But he was able to be of but little use to her in return for her favours, as his fleet was soon defeated by Octavianus.
Cæsar had left behind him, in the neighbourhood of Alexandria, a large body of Roman troops, in the pay and nominally under the orders of Cleopatra, but in reality to keep Egypt in obedience. There they lived as if above all Egyptian law or Roman discipline, indulging in the vices of that luxurious capital. When some of them in a riot, in the year 45 B.C., killed two sons of Bibulus the consul, Cleopatra was either afraid or unable to punish the murderers; the most she could do was to get them sent in chains into Syria to the grieving father, who with true greatness of mind sent them back to the Egyptian legions, saying that it was for the senate to punish them, not for him.
While Ptolemy her second husband was a boy and could claim no share of the government, he was allowed to live with all the outward show of royalty, but as soon as he reached the age of fifteen, in B.C. 44, at which he might call himself her equal and would soon be her master, Cleopatra had him put to death. She had then reigned four years with her elder brother and four years with her younger brother, and from that time forward she reigned alone, calling her child by Cæsar her colleague on the throne.
At a time when vice and luxury claimed the thoughts of all who were not busy in the civil wars, we cannot hope to find the fruits of genius in Alexandria; but the mathematics are plants of a hardy growth, and are not choked so easily as poetry and history. Sosigenes was then the first astronomer in Egypt, and Julius Cæsar was guided by his advice in setting right the Roman Calendar. He was a careful and painstaking mathematician, and, after fixing the length of the year at three hundred and sixty-five days and a quarter, he three times changed the beginning of the year, in his doubts as to the day on which the equinox fell; for the astronomer could then only make two observations in a year with a view to learn the time of the equinox, by seeing when the sun shone in the plane of the equator. Photinus the mathematician wrote both on arithmetic and geometry, and was usually thought the author of a mathematical work published in the name of the queen, called the Canon of Cleopatra.
Didymus was another of the writers that we hear of at that time. He was a man of great industry, both in reading and writing; but when we are told that he wrote three thousand five hundred volumes, or rolls, it rather teaches us that a great many rolls of papyrus would be wanted to make a modern book, than what number of books he wrote. These writings were mostly on verbal criticism, and all have long since perished except some notes or scholia on the Hiad and Odyssey which bear his name, and are still printed in some editions of Homer.
Dioscorides, the physician of Cleopatra, has left a work on herbs and minerals, and on their uses in medicine; also on poisons and poisonous bites. To these he has added a list of prescriptions. His works have been much read in all ages, and have only been set aside by the discoveries of the last few centuries. Serapion, another physician, was perhaps of this reign.