The Bedding Sack — Caesar III: The Ides of March

Alexandria, 48 BC. Caesar enters the city with a handful of men, because the rest of the army is still at sea. For a few days he feigns calm: he strolls the streets, admires the buildings, listens to philosophers in the crowd. But the palace is a trap.

The thirteen-year-old king Ptolemy XIII reigns under the eye of three adults: the eunuch Pothinus, who manages the treasury, the general Achillas, and the tutor Theodotus, the one who advised how to kill Pompey. His elder sister Cleopatra, who was to rule jointly with him, has been banished and is gathering forces outside the capital.

Pothinus insults Caesar at every turn. He had the soldiers issued the worst grain: let them be content, since they are eating someone else’s food. At the king’s banquets the dishes are clay and wood, supposedly because Caesar has taken all the gold and silver in payment of a debt. The king’s father owed Caesar seventeen and a half million drachmas, part of which Caesar had forgiven, and now he demands ten million for his army. When Pothinus advises him to leave and attend to his great affairs, promising to pay the money later with thanks, Caesar answers that he has no need of Egyptian advisers. And he secretly sends for Cleopatra.

Cleopatra is about twenty-one. She takes with her only one friend, Apollodorus of Sicily. At dusk they board a small boat and land at the palace. There is no way to get in unnoticed, so Cleopatra stretches out at full length in a bedding sack. Apollodorus ties it up with a cord and carries it to Caesar. This ruse, Plutarch writes, was the first thing to win Caesar over, because Cleopatra showed herself a bold coquette. The carpet you know from films is a later version. In Plutarch it is a sack.

Dio writes that she was dazzlingly beautiful and had a charming voice. Osgood reminds us that it was not only about feelings: Cleopatra needed ships, grain and an army, and Caesar needed money for the civil war.

In the morning Caesar brings in Ptolemy and tries to reconcile the siblings. The boy realizes that his sister is already in the palace. He runs out to the people, crying treachery, tears the diadem from his head and throws it on the ground. Alexandria is in uproar. Caesar goes out to the crowd, reads the will of their father, who had ordered them to rule together under Rome’s protection, and gives power to both. Cyprus he grants to their younger siblings: their sister Arsinoe and their brother, also called Ptolemy.

At the banquet of reconciliation, Caesar’s barber, the most timid man in the world, who eavesdropped everywhere, discovers that Achillas and Pothinus are plotting. Caesar surrounds the hall with guards and has Pothinus killed. Achillas flees to the army and starts a war.

The fight for Alexandria lasts for months. The enemy blocks the canals and Caesar is left without water. When they try to cut off his ships, he repels them with fire, and the blaze spreads from the docks and, as Plutarch writes, destroys the great library. Dio speaks of it more cautiously: so it was told. How much really burned, we do not know. One day on Pharos Caesar leaps from the mole into a boat, and when it sinks he throws himself into the sea. He swims, holding documents above the water in one hand. The Alexandrians capture his cloak and hang it up as a trophy. Ptolemy XIII dies after the battle on the Nile: Dio writes that he drowned in the river while fleeing, and Plutarch only that the king vanished.

Caesar spends nine months in Egypt. Cleopatra becomes queen, formally together with her younger brother. Caesar sails with her up the Nile with four hundred ships and, as Suetonius writes, would have gone nearly as far as Ethiopia had the soldiers not refused. Soon after, Cleopatra gives birth to a son, whom the Alexandrians call Caesarion. Was Caesar the father? Antony later said in the Senate that Caesar had acknowledged the boy as his son. Caesar’s friend Oppius wrote an entire book to prove that he was not.

Nine months is a very long time. No one is governing Rome, and in Asia Pharnaces, son of Mithridates, is winning battles against Roman governors. Caesar leaves three legions and the queen in Alexandria. He moves on.