Meanwhile Dolabella, who was Tribune that year, was stirring up trouble in Rome. He picked up the baton Caelius had let fall and, in opposition to government policy, was campaigning for a cancellation of debts. Caesar’s financial settlement in Italy was faltering and discontent spread through the country, even contaminating veteran legions stationed not far away in Campania. Antony was forced to go to the troops to pacify them, leaving the city to Dolabella and disorder. Dolabella’s agitations seriously reduced his value to Cicero as an insurance policy with the new regime.
All in all, the behavior of his relatives added private misery to Cicero’s public misfortune. What was worse, he did not dare to draw attention to himself by leaving Brundisium, and there was little he could do so far from Rome except brood on an uncertain future.
Caesar now unexpectedly disappeared from view and nothing was heard from him for months. Between December 23, 48, and June of the following year he sent no dispatches to Rome. He had become embroiled, with too few troops at his back, in a bitter little war with the Egyptian court and at one stage was blockaded inside the royal palace in Alexandria. One of the daughters of the late Pharaoh, Ptolemy, was Cleopatra, now in her late teens. This young woman was to become one of the most celebrated and enigmatic figures in ancient history, mysterious in part because her memory is filtered through the malicious accounts of her enemies. Cleopatra was unable to offer her own version of the momentous events of her time; sex and politics are interwoven so closely in her career that her motives are hard to disentangle. Raison d’état led her into the bedrooms of two famous Romans—first Caesar, and later Mark Antony. To what extent did physical attraction or love also play a part? We do not know.
Cleopatra was not, it seems, particularly good-looking, but she had a bewitching personality. “Her own beauty, so we are told, was not of that incomparable kind which instantly captivates the beholder,” Plutarch avers. “But the charm of her presence was irresistible: and there was an attractiveness in her person and talk, together with a peculiar force of character which pervaded her every word and action, and laid all who associated with her under its spell. It was delight merely to hear the sound of her voice.”
At the time of her first meeting with Caesar, Cleopatra and a younger half-brother were joint Pharaohs (and, according to Egyptian custom for royal families, were probably married). She had no intention of sharing her authority with her brother for a minute longer than was necessary. The arrival of Rome’s leading general was an opportunity for her, if only she could win him over to her cause.
The Queen had herself smuggled into Caesar’s presence wrapped in a carpet or bedroll and they soon began an affair. She quickly persuaded him to take her side in the struggle for power with her brother. Caesar defeated the Egyptian army at the end of March 47 and Cleopatra’s annoying little brother was drowned while trying to escape by boat from the battlefield. She wasted no time in marrying yet another boy sibling. Unaccountably, Caesar did not leave the country until June. He seems to have spent some of this time on a lavish and leisurely excursion up the Nile.
This was risky, if not irresponsible behavior, for it undermined the apparently decisive result of Pharsalus. What remained of Pompey’s fleet was scoring successes in the Adriatic and the optimates in Africa were raising substantial forces. Antony was not doing well at governing Italy and failed to calm the mutinous soldiery. Caesar, cut off from the rest of the world, did not learn of these developments until later, but he could have foreseen that his absence would lead to problems. It was no time for him to quit the helm.
While Rome was distracted with its internal quarrels and Caesar was indulging in his Egyptian interlude, Mithridates’ son Pharnaces seized his chance, recovering his kingdom of Pontus and defeating a Roman army. Asia Minor was on the point of disintegration. It looked as if the chain of eastern provinces along the Mediterranean seaboard and the protective buffer zone of client kingdoms inland could be lost—a high price to pay for the luxury of a civil war.
It is hard to find a convincing political explanation for Caesar’s behavior. He may have thought that securing Egypt, with the kingdom’s vast wealth and inexhaustible corn supplies, was of high importance. Ensuring that the young and inexperienced queen was firmly established on the throne took time. In addition, he could have simply felt he needed a holiday in the company of his charming new mistress. This is posterity’s favorite explanation, and there may be truth in it.
In any event, he finally left Egypt a few weeks before the birth of Cleopatra’s son, named Caesarion and almost certainly the product of their affair. His first task, which he accomplished with remarkable rapidity, was to deal with Pharnaces. In a lightning five-day campaign, he annihilated the king’s army at Zela in Cappadocia. “Came, saw, conquered,” he remarked. He added acidly that Pompey was lucky to have been considered a great general if this was the kind of opposition he had had to face.
Meanwhile Cicero remained isolated in Brundisium, unable to move until Caesar reappeared and ruled on his case. Quintus, badgered by Atticus, sent his brother a grudging letter of apology, which as far as Cicero was concerned only made matters worse. Young Quintus also wrote to him “most offensively.” In the summer Cicero learned that his nephew had been given an interview with Caesar and that he and his father had been forgiven. He was pleased, with the reservation that concessions of this sort, “from a master to slaves,” could be revoked at will. Except for the occasional explosion, his anger with both Quintuses gradually subsided.
Then, as if he didn’t have enough domestic problems, relations with Terentia came under increasing strain. The details are clouded, but she was “doing some wicked things” regarding her will. Cicero remained very worried about the financial prospects of Marcus and Tullia and he must have believed that his wife was in some way imperiling their interests. But he still depended on her for advice and trusted her judgment on how to handle relations with Dolabella. Tullia’s marriage was turning out to be an unhappy one. Dolabella was rumored to have had a number of sexual escapades and was conducting an affair with a respectable married woman from the Metellus clan. To add insult to injury, he was proposing to erect a statue of Clodius, of all people. Divorce was being considered, but the timing was important. Was Dolabella too powerful to offend just at the moment?
In June 47 Tullia took the long and uncomfortable journey south to visit her father. He was touched and delighted, even if her presence made him feel guilty. “Her own courage, thoughtfulness and affection,” he wrote to Atticus, “far from giving me the pleasure I ought to take in such a paragon of daughters, grieve me beyond measure when I consider the unhappy lot in which so admirable a nature is cast, not through any misconduct of hers but by grave fault on my part.” In the absence of cash, Cicero begged Atticus to gather up his movables—plate, furniture, fabrics—and hide them away somewhere; they could be sold later as minimal provision for his children.
By now Cicero was desperate to leave Brundisium. He wrote to Antony, to Balbus and to Oppius, and finally he appealed to Atticus: “I must ask you to get me out of here. Any punishment is better than staying on in this place.” At long last, in August he received a letter directly from Caesar, who had emerged from his Egyptian imbroglio. It was “quite a handsome one,” he conceded to Terentia. We may assume that it indicated a pardon for Cicero, or at least the prospect of one, and Caesar seems to have proposed a meeting on his return to Italy. Athough welcome, this created yet another dilemma. Should he go to meet the returning victor halfway or wait where he was? He took the latter option, perhaps because it seemed less like a decision.