Certainly the suspicion that there was more to the matter than unfavorable winds and obedient females was in the air. In Rome Cicero lost no time in casting shameful aspersions. Just after Caesar’s death, Mark Antony—a curious messenger for this particular message—would protest that Caesar had not tarried in Alexandria “out of voluptuousness.” A century later, Plutarch begged to differ: “As to the war in Egypt, some say it was at once dangerous and dishonorable, and noways necessary, but occasioned only by his passion for Cleopatra.” (The inconvenient oracle of Auletes’ day—prohibiting the restoration of an Egyptian monarch by a Roman army—appears to have been quickly forgotten.) You could argue that Caesar had no particular affection for Cleopatra, that the two only happened to find themselves on the same side of a baffling war, but it would be easier to argue that she had no affection for him. She contributed nothing to that enterprise. Caesar would have been well served by throwing her over, if only to obtain a temporary truce. He would have been within his rights at war’s end to annex Egypt; Cleopatra must have been very, very persuasive. Pothinus had balked at repaying the Egyptian debt. Clearly Cleopatra did not. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that Caesar was to some extent in her sway. Dio thought that obvious: Caesar handed Egypt to Cleopatra, “for whose sake he had waged the conflict.” He acknowledges a certain embarrassment. At war’s end Caesar put Cleopatra on the throne with her remaining brother to defuse Roman anger that he was himself sleeping with her. To Dio this was “a mere pretence, which she accepted, whereas in truth she ruled alone and spent her time in Caesar’s company.” The two were inseparable. Plutarch felt similarly but expressed himself more subtly. Reading between his lines, he plainly believed Caesar both preoccupied with military matters and in Cleopatra’s bed every night. There is as well the minor matter of the departure date. The Alexandrian War ended on March 27. Caesar stayed with Cleopatra until mid-June.
THERE WAS REASON to celebrate, all the more so after having been cooped up behind a thicket of barricades for the better part of six months. And as every visitor to Hellenistic Egypt had noted, eyes wide, belly bursting, travel bag groaning, the Ptolemies knew how to entertain. Save that written by a poet who demonized Caesar and had less affection for Cleopatra, we have no account of her actual postwar banquets. We do know what a Ptolemaic feast looked like. Self-restraint was not an Alexandrian specialty, and in the spring of 47 Cleopatra had no cause to embrace it. She had secured the greatest of prizes, for “in view of Caesar’s favor there was nothing that she could not do.” He had gone further out on a limb than had any other Roman for an Egyptian sovereign. Ptolemy XIII, Pothinus, and Achillas were all dead. Theodotus was in exile, Arsinoe in Roman custody. Caesar had effectively eliminated every one of Cleopatra’s rivals to the throne. She reigned supreme, more securely than she had done four years previously, more securely than had any Ptolemy in several generations. She prided herself on her hospitality and knew her guest did as well; Caesar had once thrown his baker into chains for having served substandard bread. He was himself responsible for a fair amount of entertainment inflation. The queen of Egypt had every political reason to impress and please him; personal rapport aside, there would have been a heady admixture of pride, relief, and gratitude. And she had the resources to impress. The Alexandrian War gave Cleopatra everything she wanted. It cost her little.
Even in her exile, a swarm of servants had hovered around Cleopatra, ministering to her comforts. In the spring of 47 that swarm increased to a horde, with the return or appointment of tasters, scribes, lamplighters, royal harpists, masseurs, pages, doorkeepers, notaries, silver stewards, oil keepers, pearl setters. At her side also was a new consort. To satisfy the people’s preference for a ruling couple, possibly as well to cover Caesar’s tracks, twelve-year-old Ptolemy XIV ascended to the throne. The marriage took place soon after the Alexandrian surrender. We do not know how it was celebrated. From Cleopatra’s perspective, one nonentity replaced another. Ptolemy XIV assumed the same title that had been used by his dead brother; he never appeared with his sister on her coins. If he had ambitions or opinions of his own he knew better than to express them now. Surely he had no say in the administration that his sister-wife set about reconstituting. Whether or not Caesar had considered annexing Egypt he had clearly discovered that Cleopatra was in many respects similar to her country: a shame to lose, a risk to conquer, a headache to govern. Some courtiers had remained faithful; among Cleopatra’s entourage figured several of her father’s advisers. Those who had not did their best quickly to reassess their conduct. So presumably did the Greek aristocracy, which had presented Cleopatra with her strongest opposition.
She had at court a serious handicap, one that Caesar would have done well to observe. As a later Roman leader noted: “For the ruler labors under this special disadvantage as regards his friends, that although he can protect himself from his enemies by arranging his friends against them, there is no corresponding ally on whom he may rely to protect him from these friends.” For the most part Cleopatra knew who the ill-wishers were. Matters were murkier concerning her courtiers. She had after all been holed up for months with a Roman, battling a people who wanted no Roman in the house and who had deposed her father for consorting with them. The rules had now changed. There was always a certain amount of rot at court; the war would have been an excuse to clean it out. Those who had opposed Cleopatra paid a heavy price. Those rumored to have done so doubtless paid too. She replaced high officials and eliminated others, confiscating fortunes in the process. There were poisonings and stabbings, not dissimilar from those in which Auletes had engaged upon his restoration. The army alone invited a bloody round of proscriptions. It was by no means a smooth transition.
Around the palace and harbor there was more prosaic work to be done: trenches to be filled, palisades to be dismantled, debris to be cleared, structural damage to be repaired. What emerged was and remained “the first city of the civilized world, certainly far ahead of all the rest in elegance and extent and riches and luxury,” as a contemporary traveler put it. Visitors were at a loss to decide if Alexandria’s size or beauty was the more imposing. That was before acknowledging its hyperkinetic population. “Looking at the city, I doubted whether any race of men could ever fill it; looking at the inhabitants, I wondered whether any city could ever be found large enough to hold them all. The balance seemed exactly even,” effused a native son. Alexandria was studded with an awe-inspiring collection of sculpture, much of it carved of pink or red granite and violet porphyry, all of it pulsing with robust color. To anyone who knew Athens, the Egyptian city felt familiar, crowded as it was with fine Ptolemaic copies of Greek pieces. It was neither the first nor the last place in the world where a decline in power translated into an enormity of symbols; as the Ptolemaic influence diminished, the statuary ballooned, to hyperbolic dimensions. Forty-foot-tall rose granite sculptures of Cleopatra II and Cleopatra III greeted new arrivals in the Alexandrian harbor. At least one colossal hawk-headed sphinx towered over the palace wall. Glossy thirty-foot-long sphinxes guarded the city’s temples.