Cicero - Anthony Everitt [130]
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