Auletes knew only too well what Caesar was in 48 discovering firsthand: the Alexandrian populace constituted a force unto itself. The best thing you could say of that people was that they were sharp-witted. Their humor was quick and biting. They knew how to laugh. They were mad for drama, as the city’s four hundred theaters suggested. They were no less sharp-elbowed. The genius for entertainment extended to a taste for intrigue, a propensity to riot. To one visitor Alexandrian life was “just one continuous revel, not a sweet or gentle revel either, but savage and harsh, a revel of dancers, whistlers, and murderers all combined.” Cleopatra’s subjects had no compunction about massing at the palace gates and loudly howling their demands. Very little was required to set off an explosion. For two centuries they had freely and wildly deposed, exiled, and assassinated Ptolemies. They had forced Cleopatra’s great-grandmother to rule with one son when she attempted to rule with the other. They had driven out Cleopatra’s great-uncle. They had dragged Ptolemy XI from the palace and torn him limb from limb after he had murdered his wife. To the Roman mind, the Egyptian army was no better. As Caesar noted from the palace, “These men habitually demanded that friends of the king be put to death, plundered the property of the rich, laid siege to the king’s residence to win higher pay, and removed some and appointed others to the throne.” Such were the seething forces that Caesar and Cleopatra could hear outside the palace walls. She knew they harbored no particular affection for her. Their feelings about Romans were equally clear. When Cleopatra was nine or ten, a visiting official had accidentally killed a cat, an animal held sacred in Egypt.* A furious mob assembled, with whom Auletes’ representative attempted to reason. While this was a crime for an Egyptian, surely a foreigner merited a special exemption? He could not save the visitor from the bloodthirsty crowd.
What Auletes passed down to his daughter was a precarious balancing act. To please one constituency was to displease another. Failure to comply with Rome would lead to intervention. Failure to stand up to Rome would lead to riots. (Auletes appears not to have been much loved by anyone save Cleopatra, who remained loyal always to his memory, despite the political cost of that loyalty at home.) The dangers were manifold. You could be removed by Rome, as Cleopatra’s uncle, the king of Cyprus, had been. You could be eliminated—stabbed, poisoned, exiled, dismembered—by your own family. Or you could be deposed by the disaffected, disruptive populace. (There were variations on those themes as well. A Ptolemy could be hated by his people, adored by the royal courtiers; loved by the people and betrayed by his family; or detested by the Alexandrian Greeks and loved by the native Egyptians, as was Cleopatra.) Auletes would spend twenty years currying favor in Rome only to discover that he should have been ingratiating himself at home. When he chose not to intervene in Cyprus he was besieged by his subjects, who demanded he either stand up to the Romans or bail out his brother. Panic ensued. Was this not a cautionary tale for Egypt? Auletes fled to Rome, where he spent much of the next three years negotiating for his restoration. It was to those years that Cleopatra owed Caesar’s present visit. While Auletes was by no means universally welcomed in Rome, few—Caesar and Pompey among them—were able to resist a Greek bearing bribes. Many were happy to lend Auletes the money with which to pay those bribes, funds he eagerly accepted. The more numerous his creditors, the more numerous those invested in his restoration.
For much of 57 the hot potato business of the day was how, if at all, to handle the deposed king’s appeals. The great orator Cicero furtively worked overtime to walk friends through the thorny matter, a business “bedeviled by certain individuals, not without the connivance of the king himself and his advisers.” The question stood at a deadlock for some time. Auletes may have gone down in history as a profligate and a puppet, but in Rome he distinguished himself for tenacity and masterly negotiation, to the dismay of his hosts. He papered the Forum and Senate with flyers. He handed out litters—canopied couches, in which to travel splendidly through the city—to his supporters. The situation was complicated by the rivalries among politicians who vied for the luscious reward of helping him; his restoration amounted to a get-rich-quick scheme. By January 56, Cicero complained that the business had “gained a highly invidious notoriety.” It occasioned shouting, shoving, spitting, in the Senate. And the matter only grew more delicate. To prevent Pompey or any other individual from assisting Auletes, a religious oracle surfaced. It warned that the Egyptian king was not to be restored by a Roman army, an act expressly forbidden by the gods. The Senate respected this subterfuge, groaned Cicero, “not for religion’s sake, but out of ill will and the odium aroused by the royal largesse.”
From Auletes’ overseas adventure came another essential lesson for the adolescent Cleopatra. No sooner had Auletes left the country than the eldest of his children, Berenice IV, seized the throne; his stock was so low that the Alexandrians were delighted to exchange him for a teenaged girl. Berenice enjoyed the support of the native population but suffered from the consort problem, one that would speak to Cleopatra’s predicament and that she would address differently. Berenice needed a marriageable co-regent. This was a difficult order, as appropriate, well-born Macedonian Greeks were in short supply. (For some reason it was decided that Berenice should pass over her younger brothers, who would have qualified as kings.) The people chose for her, summoning a Seleucid prince. Berenice found him repellent. He was strangled within days of the union. The next prospect was an ambitious Pontic priest who boasted the only two credentials that mattered: he was hostile to Rome, and he could pass for noble. Installed as co-regent in the spring of 56, he fared better. Meanwhile the Alexandrians had dispatched a delegation of one hundred ambassadors to Rome, to protest Auletes’ brutality and prevent his return. He poisoned the group’s leader and had the rest assassinated, bribed, or run out of town before they could make their case. Conveniently, no investigation of the massacre—in which Pompey appeared to have been complicit—followed, another tribute to Auletes’ generosity.
Roman legions returned Auletes to Egypt in 55. None of them was much enchanted by the dubious assignment, especially as it involved a march through a searing desert, followed by a slog through the quicksand and fetid lagoons of Pelusium. Aulus Gabinius, the Syrian governor and a Pompey protégé, reluctantly consented to lead the mission, either for legitimate reasons (he feared a government headed by Berenice’s new husband); for a bribe nearly equivalent to Egypt’s annual income; or at the urging of the eager young head of his cavalry, much in Auletes’ thrall. That officer was the shaggy-haired Mark Antony, who was to leave behind a great name on which to capitalize later. He fought valiantly. He also urged Auletes to pardon the disloyal army at the Egyptian frontier. Again sounding a little like an ineffectual dilettante, the king “in his rage and spite” preferred to execute those men. For his part Gabinius meticulously respected the oracle. He arranged for Auletes to follow safely behind the actual battles so that he could not literally be said to have been restored by an army. The Egyptian king was nonetheless returned to the palace by the first Roman legions to set foot in Alexandria.
Of the reunion with his family we have only a partial account. Auletes executed Berenice. He retaliated at court as well, where he thinned the ranks, confiscating fortunes along the way. He replaced high officials and reorganized the army that had opposed him. At the same time he settled lands and pensions on the troops Gabinius left behind. They transferred their allegiance to Egypt. It was that compelling donkey load again; it paid better to serve a Ptolemaic king than a Roman general. As Caesar later observed, those soldiers became “habituated to the ill-disciplined ways of Alexandrian life and had unlearnt the good name and orderly conduct of Romans.” They did so in stunningly short order. In his final moments Pompey had recognized a Roman veteran among his murderers.