matter how vigilant her guards.
Caesar ordered a man to dispense with the eunuch, which was done. For his part Achillas focused more intently on what was to become, in Plutarch’s understated estimation, “a troublesome and embarrassing war.” Caesar had four thousand men, hardly fresh or in any shape to feel invincible. Achillas’s force was five times as great and marching toward Alexandria. And no matter what hints Cleopatra may have offered, Caesar had an insufficient grasp of the depths of Ptolemaic guile. Under the young king’s name, Caesar dispatched two emissaries with a peace proposal. They were men of stature and experience. Both had served effectively under Cleopatra’s father; Caesar had very likely met them earlier in Rome. Achillas—whom Caesar acknowledged to be “a man of remarkable nerve”—read the overture for the weaker hand it was. He murdered the ambassadors before they could so much as deliver their message.
With the arrival of Egyptian troops in the city, Achillas attempted to break into Caesar’s quarters. Frantically, under cover of darkness, the Romans fortified the palace with entrenchments and a ten-foot wall. Caesar might well be blockaded, but he did not care to fight against his will. He knew that Achillas was recruiting auxiliary troops in every corner of the country. Meanwhile the Alexandrians established vast munitions factories throughout the city; the wealthy outfitted and paid their adult slaves to fight the Romans. Skirmishes erupted daily. Mostly Caesar worried about water, of which he had little, and food, of which he had none. Already Pothinus had pressed the point by delivering musty grain. As ever, the successful general was the gifted logician; it was essential that Caesar neither be separated from nor vulnerable to Lake Mareotis, south of the city and its second port. That brilliant blue freshwater lake connected Alexandria by canals to Egypt’s interior; it was as rich and important as the two Mediterranean harbors. On the psychological front there were additional considerations. Caesar did everything he could to court the young king, as he understood “that the royal name had great authority with his people.” To all who would listen he broadcast regular reminders that the war was not Ptolemy’s but that of his rogue advisers. The protests fell on deaf ears.
While Caesar tended to supply lines and fortifications, a second plot hatched in the palace, where the atmosphere must already have been strained, at least among the feuding siblings. Arsinoe too had a clever tutor. That eunuch now arranged her escape. His coup suggests either that Cleopatra was negligent (highly improbable under the circumstances), preoccupied with her brother and her own survival, or astutely double-crossed. It is unlikely that she underestimated her seventeen-year-old sister. Arsinoe burned with ambition; she was not the kind of girl who inspired complacency. She clearly had no great faith in Cleopatra, which sentiment she had presumably kept to herself for weeks.* Outside the palace walls she was more vocal. She was a Ptolemy not in thrall to a foreigner, precisely what the Alexandrians preferred. They declared her queen—every sister had now had a turn—and rallied exuberantly behind her. Arsinoe assumed her position at Achillas’s side, at the head of the army. In her rooms at the palace, Cleopatra had further reason to believe it wiser to trust a Roman than a member of her own family. This, too, was old news by 48 BC. “One loyal friend,” Euripides reminds us, “is worth ten thousand relatives.”
IN THE YEAR of Cleopatra’s birth, Mithradates the Great, the Pontic king, suggested an alliance to his neighbor, the king of the Parthians.† For decades Mithradates had hurled insults and ultimatums at Rome, which he felt was systematically gobbling up the world. The scourge was now coming their way, he warned, and “no laws, human or divine, prevent them from seizing and destroying allies and friends, those near them and those far off, weak or powerful, and from considering every government which does not serve them, especially monarchies, as their enemies.” Did it not make sense to band together? He was unwilling to follow in the mincing steps of Cleopatra’s father. Auletes was “averting hostilities from day to day by the payment of money,” Mithradates scoffed; the Egyptian king might think himself cunning but was only delaying the inevitable. The Romans pocketed his funds but offered no guarantees. They had no respect for kings. They betrayed even their friends. They would destroy humanity or perish in the process. Over the next two decades they indeed proceeded to dismantle large portions of the vast Ptolemaic Empire, events Cleopatra must have followed closely. Cyrene, Crete, Syria, Cyprus, were long gone. The kingdom she would inherit was barely larger than it had been when Ptolemy I had installed himself on the throne two centuries earlier. Egypt had lost its “fence of client states”; Roman lands now surrounded it on all sides.
Mithradates correctly surmised that Egypt owed its continued autonomy more to mutual jealousies in Rome than to Auletes’ gold. Paradoxically, the country’s wealth prevented its annexation, a question first broached in Rome, by Julius Caesar, when Cleopatra was seven. Competing interests held the discussion in check. No one faction wished for any other to seize control of so fabulously rich a kingdom, the ideal base from which to overthrow a republic. For the Romans Cleopatra’s country remained a perennial nuisance, in the words of a modern historian “a loss if destroyed, a risk to annex, a problem to govern.”
From the start Auletes had engaged in a degrading dance with Rome, the indignities of which flavored his daughter’s early years. Throughout the Mediterranean, rulers looked to that city to shore up their dynastic claims; it was a haven for kings in trouble. A century earlier Ptolemy VI had traveled there in tatters, to set up house in a garret. Shortly thereafter his younger brother, Cleopatra’s great-grandfather, the dismemberer of his son, made the same trip. He displayed scars purportedly inflicted by Ptolemy VI and begged the Senate for mercy. The Romans looked wearily upon the endless procession of applicants, abused or not. They received their petitions and made few decisions. At one point the Senate went so far as to outlaw the hearing of their appeals. There was no reason to adopt a consistent foreign policy. As for the bewildering question of Egypt, some felt that that country would be best transformed into a housing project for Rome’s poor.
More recently and more problematically, another of Cleopatra’s great-uncles had devised an ingenious strategy to protect himself from his conspiring brother. In the event of his demise, Ptolemy X willed his kingdom to Rome. That testament hung awkwardly over Auletes’ head, as did his own illegitimacy, as did his unpopularity with the Alexandrian Greeks. And as his hold on the throne was insecure, he had little choice but to curry favor on the other side of the Mediterranean. That cost him in Roman eyes, where he appeared to be pandering, again in the eyes of his subjects, who did not like their sovereign bowing at foreign feet. Auletes moreover subscribed to the wisdom promulgated by the father of Alexander the Great: any fortress could be stormed, provided there was a way up for a donkey with a load of gold on its back. He consequently found himself trapped in a vicious circle. The donkey loads required Cleopatra’s father to tax his subjects more severely, which infuriated the very people whose loyalty he labored so assiduously to buy in Rome.
Auletes knew only too well what Caesar was in 48 discovering firsthand: the Alexandrian populace constituted a force unto itself. The best thing you could say of that people was that they were sharp-witted. Their humor was quick and biting. They knew how to laugh. They were mad for drama, as the city’s four hundred theaters suggested. They were no less sharp-elbowed. The genius for entertainment extended to a taste for intrigue, a propensity to riot. To one visitor Alexandrian life was “just one continuous revel, not a sweet or gentle revel either, but savage and harsh, a revel of dancers, whistlers, and murderers all combined.” Cleopatra’s subjects had no compunction about massing at the palace gates and loudly howling their demands. Very little was required to set off an explosion. For two centuries they had freely and wildly deposed, exiled, and assassinated Ptolemies. They had forced Cleopatra’s great-grandmother to rule with one son when she attempted to rule with the other. They had driven out Cleopatra’s great-uncle. They had dragged Ptolemy XI from the palace and torn him limb from limb after he had murdered his wife. To the Roman mind, the Egyptian army was no better. As Caesar noted from the palace, “These men habitually demanded that friends of the king be put to death, plundered the property of the rich, laid siege to the king’s residence to win higher pay, and removed some and appointed others to the throne.” Such were the seething forces that Caesar and Cleopatra could hear outside the palace walls. She knew they harbored no particular affection for her. Their feelings about Romans were equally clear. When Cleopatra was nine or ten, a visiting official had accidentally killed a cat, an animal held sacred in Egypt.* A furious mob assembled, with whom Auletes’ representative attempted to reason. While this was a crime for an Egyptian, surely a foreigner merited a special exemption? He could not save the visitor from the bloodthirsty crowd.
What Auletes passed down to his daughter was a precarious balancing act. To please one constituency was to displease another. Failure to comply with Rome would lead to intervention. Failure to stand up to Rome would lead to riots. (Auletes appears not to have been much loved by anyone save Cleopatra, who remained loyal always to his memory, despite the political cost of that loyalty at home.) The dangers were manifold. You could be removed by Rome, as Cleopatra’s uncle, the king of Cyprus, had been. You could be eliminated—stabbed, poisoned, exiled, dismembered—by your own family. Or you could be deposed by the disaffected, disruptive populace. (There
