When Ptolemy found out about his sister’s conquest he was thrown into a violent tantrum. He flounced out into the streets, tossing his diadem down into the dust and screaming for his subjects to rally to his defence. The inhabitants of Alexandria were much given to rioting, and Caesar’s high-handed demands for money had already done little for his popularity. Now, when Ptolemy asked the mob to attack the Romans, it obliged enthusiastically. The hated foreigners were besieged in the palace, and so threatened did Caesar’s position become that he was obliged not only to recognise Ptolemy as joint monarch with Cleopatra, but also to cede Cyprus back to the pair of them. Even so, such concessions did little to ease him out of his embarrassing scrape. A few weeks into the siege and the rioters were joined by Ptolemy’s entire army, some twenty thousand strong. Caesar found his situation going from bad to desperate. Trapped in the hot-house of an Egyptian palace, surrounded by treacherous eunuchs and incestuous royals, he was completely cut off from the outside world. Far beyond the light cast by the flashing Pharos, the Republic was still at war with itself – yet Caesar could not get so much as a letter smuggled through to Rome.
For the next five months the terrible exploits of his previous campaigns were replayed as farce. Burning the Egyptian fleet in the harbour, the bibliophile Caesar accidentally set fire to warehouses crammed with priceless books;* attempting to secure the Pharos, he was forced to jump ship and abandon his general’s cloak to the enemy. Despite these embarrassments, however, Caesar succeeded in retaining control of both the palace and the harbour – and stamped his authority in other ways too. Not only did he have the scheming Pothinus put to death, but he impregnated Cleopatra, an act of king-making to trump anything achieved by Pompey. By March 47 BC, when reinforcements finally arrived in Egypt, the Queen was visibly swelling with the proof of Caesar’s favour. Ptolemy, panicking, fled Alexandria. Weighed down by his golden armour, he drowned in the Nile – a convenient accident that left Cleopatra unchallenged on her throne. Caesar had backed a winner once again.
But at what cost? A steep one, it seemed. With his communication lines restored, Caesar was now back in touch with his agents, and the news they sent could hardly have been less promising. The Alexandrian escapade had squandered much of the advantage won at Pharsalus. In Italy Antony’s stewardship was provoking widespread resentment; in Asia King Pharnaces, Mithridates’ son, had proved himself a chip off the old block by invading Pontus; in Africa Metellus Scipio and Cato were marshalling a vast new army; in Spain Pompeians were fostering renewed unrest. North, east, south, west – war across the world. There were few places where Caesar was not desperately required. But for two more months he lingered in Egypt. With the Republic fatally riven, and the empire of the Roman people collapsing into anarchy, Caesar, the man whose restless ambition had begun the civil war, lolled by his mistress’s side.
No wonder that Cleopatra’s seductiveness should have struck many Romans as something almost demonic. To tempt a citizen famous for his energies into idleness, to lure him from the path of duty, to keep him from Rome and a destiny that seemed increasingly to have been ordained by the gods – this was a theme worthy of great and terrible poetry. And of obscene chanting too. Caesar’s libido had long been a source of hilarity to his men: ‘Lock up your wives,’ they would sing, ‘our commander is bad news/He may be bald, but he fucks anything that moves.’16 Other jokes, inevitably, harped on the old gossip about Nicomedes. Even to men who had followed their general through unbelievable hardships, his sexual prowess spelled effeminacy. Great though Caesar had proved himself, steel-hard in body and mind, the moral codes of the Republic were unforgiving. A citizen could never afford to slip. Dirt on a toga would always show.
It was the threat of such ridicule, of course, that helped to keep a Roman a man. Custom, wrote the greatest scholar of Caesar’s day, was ‘a pattern of thought which has evolved to become a regular practice’:* shared and accepted by all the citizens of the Republic, it had provided Rome with the surest foundation of her greatness. How different things were in Alexandria! Raised from scratch on sandbanks, the city lacked deep roots. No wonder, to Roman eyes, that it had such a harlot character. Without custom there could be no shame, and without shame anything became possible. A people whose traditions had withered would become prey to the most repellent and degrading habits. Who better illustrated this than the Ptolemies themselves? No sooner had Cleopatra seen off one sibling than she married another. The spectacle of the heavily pregnant Queen taking as her husband her ten-year-old brother was one to put any of Clodia’s exploits into the shade. Greek Cleopatra may have been, a daughter of the same culture that had provided the bedrock of a Roman’s education, but she was also fabulously, exotically alien. For a man of Caesar’s temperament, with his taste for the taboo, it must have been an enchanting combination.
Yet if Cleopatra provided him with a delicious erotic interlude, an opportunity, for a couple of months, to drop the guard expected of a Roman magistrate, Caesar was never the man to forget his own future, nor that of Rome. Pondering them, he must have been given much food for thought by what he found in Alexandria. Just like its queen, the city was a disorienting blend of the familiar and the weird. With its library and its temples, it was all very Greek – indeed, the capital of the Greek world. Sometimes, however, when the prevailing winds turned and breezes no longer bore a freshness from the sea, sand would gust through Alexandria, carried from the burning desert to the south. The Egyptian hinterland was too vast and too ancient to be entirely ignored. It made of its capital a dreamlike, hybrid place. The spacious streets were decorated not only with the clean-limbed masterpieces of Greek sculptors, but also with statuary looted from the banks of the Nile: sphinxes, gods with animal heads, pharaohs with enigmatic smiles. Just as strikingly – and, to a Roman’s eye, bizarrely – however, there were some quarters of the city in which there were no images of gods to be seen at all. As well as to Greeks and Egyptians, Alexandria was home to a vast number of Jews; more, almost certainly, than Jerusalem itself. They completely dominated one of the city’s five administrative districts, and despite having to rely on a Greek translation of the Torah, they remained in other ways defiantly unassimilated. Jews entering their synagogue, Syrians camped outside beneath a statue of Zeus, all of them in the shadow of a plundered obelisk – this was the look of cosmopolis.
And was it to be Rome’s future too? There were certainly plenty of citizens who feared so. To the Romans, the prospect of being swamped by barbarous cultures had always been a fertile source of paranoia. The ruling classes, in particular, mistrusted foreign influences because they dreaded the enfeebling of the Republic. The world’s mistress, yes, but a world city, no: this, essentially, was the Senate’s manifesto for Rome. So it was that Jews and Babylonian astrologers were endlessly being expelled from the city. So too Egyptian gods. Even in the frantic months before Caesar crossed the Rubicon one of the consuls had found time to pick up an axe and personally start on the demolition of a temple of Isis. But the Jews and astrologers always made their ways back, and the great goddess Isis, divine mother and queen of the heavens, had far too strong a hold upon her worshippers easily to be banished from the city. The consul had been forced to lift the axe against her only because no labourers could be found to do the job. Rome was changing, lapped by tides of immigration, and there was little that the Senate could do to hold them back. New languages, new customs, new religions: these were the fruits of the Republic’s own greatness. Not for nothing did all roads now lead to Rome.