Cleopatra and Antony by Diana Preston Page B

had them murdered out of hand.
    With the Alexandrians eagerly awaiting the arrival of Ptolemy’s army, Caesar took the precaution of placing the king under house arrest. Also, accepting that he could never hold the entire city, he fortified the quarter around the royal palace, the adjacent theater and the great library. Soon after, Achillas’ forces arrived and launched their attack in what Lucan described as a very un-Roman manner: “weapons rain down on the palace and the household gods tremble. There is no battering ram to breach the walls in one blow and break into the palace, there is no siege engine, nor do flames work for them; rather, the young troops, without any strategy, split up and surround the palace.” Caesar’s well-disciplined men relatively easily prevented their disorganized enemy from gaining entry, yet Cleopatra and her Roman lover were effectively as much in prison as her half brother. Thus in 48 the Alexandrian War had begun and, as Suetonius wrote, would prove to be “a most difficult campaign, fought during winter within the city-walls of a well-equipped and cunning enemy.”
    Caesar faced attack by sea as well as by land. In Alexandria’s Great Harbor, ships of the royal Egyptian fleet mustered in readiness to assault Caesar’s ships, anchored in the palace’s private harbor, which they greatly outnumbered. Caesar responded to the apparently hopeless position by ordering his ships to row out to surprise and engage the Egyptian fleet. The shock tactics worked. In fierce hand-to-hand fighting the Romans seized and set fire to many enemy ships. Their pitch-coated wood burned so fiercely that flames whipped up by the wind soon spread to the buildings along the quayside, jumping, in Lucan’s words, “from roof to roof like a meteor as it cuts a furrow across the heavens.” Here the fires were fed by the dry papyrus of thousands of scrolls waiting to be taken to the great library or to be shipped abroad. *
    In the confusion of acrid, choking smoke and searing heat, and with the Alexandrians distracted from the siege of the palace by the need to save their homes, Caesar took a further bold step to secure his safety and that of Cleopatra. Noting that “because of the narrowness of the channel there can be no access by ship to the harbor without the consent of those who hold the Pharos,” he dispatched troops by boat to capture the lighthouse at the eastern tip of the island of Pharos. They soon overran it and installed a garrison. It would now be possible for Caesar’s much hoped-for reinforcements to enter the harbor and land. Caesar also took advantage of the confusion to throw up further barricades around the palace quarter.
    The sudden flight of Cleopatra’s young half sister, Arsinoe, however, took the seasoned commander by surprise. Together with her adviser, an ambitious, bellicose eunuch named Ganymedes, the princess managed to reach Achillas and his army. The anti-Roman Arsinoe was more to their taste than the pro-Roman bed partner of Caesar, and they at once proclaimed her queen of Egypt and joint monarch with Ptolemy. This undermined Caesar’s position only a 84 little less than Cleopatra’s. Up till then, he could claim the rising was a rebellion against Egypt’s rightful king, conveniently, of course, under his protection in the palace, but the proclamation of Arsinoe gave the rising a new legitimacy. However, the infighting so characteristic of the Ptolemaic court came to Caesar’s aid. Ganymedes, Achillas and their respective cliques soon began to spar over control of the army. When Pothinus, confined with his protégé Ptolemy in the palace, learned of the feuding, he sent a message to Achillas assuring him of his support and promising to escape from the palace with the king.
    This time, thanks to a barber who was, according to Plutarch, “habitually driven by his quite extraordinary cowardice to keep his ear to the ground and poke his nose into everyone’s affairs,”