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Eighteen years previous to these events, CÆsar, being Ædile, had endeavored to have voted by a plebiscit the execution of the will of Alexander II., who had bequeathed Egypt to the Roman people. Now, Egypt was subjugated and CÆsar had but to say the word for this vast and rich country to become a Roman province. But in the year 63 Cleopatra was only just born; in the year 65 CÆsar had not felt the bite of the “Serpent of the Nile,” as Shakspeare calls her—the consul took good care not to remember the propositions of the Ædile. The first act of CÆsar on reËntering Alexandria was solemnly to recognize Cleopatra as Queen of Egypt. In order, however, to humor the ideas of the Egyptians he determined that she should espouse her second brother, Ptolemy Neoteras, and share the sovereignty with him. As, however, Dion remarks, this union and this sharing were equally visionary; the young prince, who was only fifteen, could be neither king nor even husband to the queen; apparently Cleopatra was the wife of her brother, and his partner on the throne; in reality she reigned solely, and continued the mistress of CÆsar.

During the eight months of the Alexandrian struggle CÆsar, shut up in the palace, had scarcely quitted Cleopatra, except for the fight, and this long honeymoon had seemed short to him. He loved the beautiful queen as fondly, and perhaps more so, than in the early days, and he could not resolve to leave her. In vain the gravest interests called him to Rome, where disorder reigned and blood was flowing, and where, since the December of the preceding year, not a letter had been received from him;1 in vain, in Asia, Pharnaces, the conquerer of the royal allies of Rome and of the legions of Domitius, has seized on Pontus, Cappadocia, and Armenia; in vain, in Africa, Cato and the last adherents of Pompey have concentrated at Utica an immense army—fourteen legions, ten thousand Numidian horsemen, and one hundred and twenty elephants of war; in vain, in Spain, all minds are excited and revolt is brewing. Duty, interest, ambition, danger—CÆsar forgets everything in the arms of Cleopatra. Truly he is preparing to leave Alexandria, but it is to accompany the beautiful queen on a pleasure excursion up the Nile. By the orders of Cleopatra, one of those immense flat-bottomed pleasure vessels has been prepared, such as were used by the LagidÆ for sailing on the river, and called thalamegos (pleasure pinnace). It was a veritable floating palace, half a stadium long and forty cubits high above the water-line. The stories rose one above the other, surrounded by porticos and open galleries, and surmounted by belvederes sheltered from the sun by purple awnings. Within were numerous apartments, furnished with every convenience and every luxurious refinement of Greco-Egyptian civilization, vast saloons surrounded by colonnades, a banqueting-hall provided with thirteen couches, with a ceiling arched like a grotto, and sparkling with a rock-work of jasper, lapis lazuli, cornelian, alabaster, amethyst, aquamarine, and topaz. The vessel was built of cedar and cypress, the sails were of byssus, the ropes were dyed purple. Throughout, carved by skillful hands, were the opening chalices of the lotus, wound the volutes of the acanthus, twined garlands of bean-leaves and flowers of the date palm. On all sides shone facings of marble, of thyia, ivory, onyx, capitals and architraves of bronze. Mimes, acrobats, troops of dancing-girls, and flutists were on board to cheer the austere solitude of the Thebaid with the diversions and luxuries of Alexandria.

CÆsar and Cleopatra anticipate with rapture this voyage of enchantments; they will carry their young loves amid the old cities of Egypt, along the “Golden Nile,” which they will ascend as far as the mysterious land of Ethiopia. But on the very eve of their departure the legionaries become indignant, they murmur, they rebel; their officers cry aloud to the consul, and CÆsar returns to reason. For an instant he contemplates carrying Cleopatra away with him to Rome, but that project must be deferred. It is in Armenia that the danger is most pressing; it is to Armenia that he will first repair. He leaves two legions with Cleopatra—a faithful and formidable guard, which will secure the tranquility of Alexandria, and sets sail for Antioch.

During the campaigns of CÆsar in Armenia and Africa (from July, 47, to June, 46, B.C.) Cleopatra remained in Alexandria, where a few months after the departure of the dictator she gave birth to a son. She named him Ptolemy-CÆsarion, thus proclaiming her intimate relations with CÆsar, which, however, were no secret to the Alexandrians.

When CÆsar, the army of Cato under Thapsus being crushed, was about to return to Rome, he wrote to Cleopatra to meet him there. Probably she arrived there about midsummer of the year 46, at the period of the celebration of CÆsar’s four triumphs. In the second, the triumph of Egypt, Cleopatra must have beheld, at the head of the train of captives, her sister ArsinoË, who at the breaking out of the war of Alexandria had joined her enemies. The queen had brought with her her son CÆsarion, her pseudo-husband the young Ptolemy, and a numerous train of courtiers and officers. CÆsar gave up his superb villa on the right bank of the Tiber as a residence for Cleopatra and her court.

Officially, if we may thus use this very new word to express a very old thing, Cleopatra was well received in Rome. She was the queen of a great country, the ally of the Republic, and she was the guest of CÆsar, then all-powerful; but, beneath the homage offered, lurked contempt and hatred. Not that Roman society took offence at her intrigue with CÆsar; for more than half a century, republican Rome had strangely changed its chaste morals and severe principles. Public morality, private morality,—were utterly transformed. Electors sold their votes, and the elected made use of their offices to re-imburse themselves for their election expenses and to provide means for their reËlection; they sold alliances, prevaricated, plundered, took ransoms, having an understanding with the publicans (tax-gatherers) to grind down the provinces. In the latter times of the Republic in Rome politics became the school of crime; the theater, where, contrary to the custom of the Greeks, women might take part in the comedies and in the obscene games of the mimes and mountebanks, became the school of debauchery. The favorite poet is the licentious Catullus; the mold of fashion, and at the same time the pupil, client, and friend of Cicero is Coelius, a man of unscrupulous ambition and unbridled libertinism. Assassination became a means of government, poison a way to an inheritance. From the time of the proscriptions of Sylla, the hold on life seemed very precarious; one must make the most of it. “Let us live and love,” says Catullus. “Suns may set and rise again, but we, when our brief day is ended, must sleep a night that has no morrow.” The time was past when the Roman matron lived quietly at home and spun with her maidens. She sought adventures, plotted, gave or sold herself. Greek libertinism and Oriental voluptuousness had reached Rome and been transformed into a gross sensuality. The multiplicity of divorces “annihilated the sacredness of the family”; the love of luxury, ambition, and extravagant passions ruined its honor, and the noblest of the patrician ladies were the foremost in this race of debauchery. Among them were Valeria, the sister of Hortensius; Sempronia, wife of Junius Brutus; Claudia, wife of Lucullus, and the other Claudia, wife of Quintus Metellus Celer. Again there was Junia, the wife of Lepidus; Posthumia, the wife of Sulpicius; Lollia, the wife of Gabinius; Tertullia, the wife of Crassus; Mucia, the wife of the great Pompey; Servilia, the mother of Brutus, and many others.

In so dissolute and adulterous a city, it could shock no one that CÆsar should be false to his wife with one mistress or even with several; but in the midst of her debaucheries, and even though Rome had lost many of her ancient virtues, she still preserved the pride of the Roman name. These conquerors of the world looked upon other nations as of servile race and inferior humanity. Little did they care for the transient loves of CÆsar and Ennoah, queen of Mauritania, nor would they have cared any more had Cleopatra served merely to beguile his leisure during the war of Alexandria; but in bringing this woman to the seven-hilled city, in publicly acknowledging her as his mistress, in forcing on all the spectacle of a Roman citizen, five times consul and thrice dictator, as the lover of an Egyptian woman, CÆsar seemed, according to the ideas of the time, to insult all Rome. As Merivale justly observes: “If one can imagine the effect that would have been produced in the fifteenth century by the marriage of a peer of England or of a grandee of Spain with a Jewess some idea may be formed of the impression made on the Roman people by the intrigue of CÆsar and Cleopatra.”

CÆsar had received supreme power and had been deified. He was created dictator for ten years, and in the city his statue bore this inscription: “CÆsari semideo”—To CÆsar the demigod. He might believe himself sufficiently powerful to despise Roman prejudices; for the rest, during the last two years of his life, CÆsar, till then so prudent, so cautious in humoring the sentiments of the plebeians, so skillful in using them for his own designs, pretended in his public life to despise and brave public opinion. It was the same in his private life; far from dismissing Cleopatra, he visited her more frequently than ever at the villa on the Tiber, talked incessantly of the queen, and allowed her publicly to call her son CÆsarion.

He went further still; he erected in the temple of Venus the golden statue of Cleopatra, thus adding to the insult to the Roman people the outrage to the Roman gods. It was not enough that CÆsar for love of Cleopatra had not reduced Egypt to a Roman province; not enough that he had installed this foreigner in Rome, in his villa on the banks of the Tiber, and that he lavished on her every mark of honor and every testimony of love;—now he dedicated, in the temple of a national divinity, the statue of this prostitute of Alexandria, this barbarous queen of the land of magicians, of thaumaturgy [wonder-working], of eunuchs, of servile dwellers by the Nile, these worshipers of stuffed birds and gods with the heads of beasts. Men asked each other where the infatuation of CÆsar would end. It was reported that the dictator was preparing to propose, by the tribune Helvius Cinna, a law which would permit him to espouse as many wives as he desired in order to beget children by them. It was said that he was about to recognize the son of Cleopatra as his heir, and still further, that after having exhausted Italy in levies of men and money he would leave the government of Rome in the hands of his creatures and transfer the seat of empire to Alexandria. These rumors aroused all minds against CÆsar, and, if we may credit Dion, tended to arm his assassins against him (to furnish the dagger to slay him).2 Notwithstanding this hostility, Cleopatra was not deserted in the villa on the Tiber. To please the divine Julius, to approach him more intimately, the CÆsarians controlled their antipathy and frequently visited the beautiful queen. To this court of Egypt transported to the banks of the Tiber came Mark Antony, Dolabella, Lepidus, then general-of-horse; Oppius Curio, Cornelius Balbus, Helvius Cinna, Matius, the prÆtor Vendidius, Trebonius, and others. Side by side with the partisans of CÆsar were also some of his secret enemies, such as Atticus, a celebrated silver merchant with great interests in Egypt, and others whom he had won over, like Cicero. The latter while making his peace with CÆsar did not forget his master-passion, love of books and of curiosities. An insatiable collector, he thought to enrich his library at Tusculum without loosing his purse-strings, and requested Cleopatra to send for him to Alexandria, where such treasures abounded, for a few Greek manuscripts and Egyptian antiquities. The queen promised willingly, and one of her officers, Aumonius, who, formerly an ambassador of Ptolemy Auletes to Rome, had there known Cicero, undertook the commission; but whether through forgetfulness or negligence the promised gifts came not, and Cicero preserved so deep an enmity to the queen in consequence that he afterwards wrote to Atticus, “I hate the queen (odi reginam),” giving as his only reason for this aversion the failure of the royal promise. The former consul had also received an affront from Sarapion, one of Cleopatra’s officers. This man had gone to his house, and when Cicero asked him what he wished he had replied rudely: “I seek Atticus,” and at once departed. How often does the ill-conduct of upper servants create a prejudice against the great.

The assassination of CÆsar, which struck Cleopatra like a thunderbolt, would have been the destruction of all her hopes if one could lose hope at twenty-five. CÆsar dead, there was nothing to detain her in Rome, and she did not feel safe in this hostile city amid the bloody scenes of the parricidal days. She prepared to depart, but Antony having entertained for a moment the weak desire of opposing to Octavius as CÆsar’s heir the little CÆsarion, Cleopatra remained in Rome until the middle of April. When the queen perceived that this project was finally abandoned, she hastened to depart from the city where she had experienced so much contempt and which she quitted with rage in her heart.

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