The history of Egypt, at this time, is almost lost in that of Rome. Within five years of Cæsar’s landing in Alexandria, and finding that by the death of Pompey he was master of the world, he paid his own life as the forfeit for crushing his country’s liberty. The Queen of Egypt, with her infant son Cæsarion about four years old, was then in Rome, living with Cæsar in his villa on the farther side of the Tiber. On Cæsar’s death her first wish was to get the child acknowledged by the Roman senate as her colleague on the throne of Egypt, and as a friend of the Roman people. With this view she applied to Cicero for help, making him an offer of some books or works of art; but he was offended at her haughtiness and refused her gifts. Besides, she was more likely to thwart than to help the cause for which he was struggling. He was alarmed at hearing that she was soon to give birth to another child. He did not want any more Cæsars. He hoped she would miscarry, as he wished she had before miscarried. So he bluntly refused to undertake her cause. On this she thought herself unsafe in Rome, she fled privately, and reached Egypt in safety with Cæsarion; but we hear of no second child by Julius. The Romans were now the masters of Egypt, and Cleopatra could hardly hope to reign but by the help of one of the great generals who were struggling for the sovereignty of the republic. Among these was the young Sextus Pompeius, whose large fleet made him for a time master of Sicily and of the sea; and he was said to have been admitted by the Queen of Egypt as a lover. But he was able to be of but little use to her in return for her favours, as his fleet was soon defeated by Octavianus.
Cæsar had left behind him, in the neighbourhood of Alexandria, a large body of Roman troops, in the pay and nominally under the orders of Cleopatra, but in reality to keep Egypt in obedience. There they lived as if above all Egyptian law or Roman discipline, indulging in the vices of that luxurious capital. When some of them in a riot, in the year 45 B.C., killed two sons of Bibulus the consul, Cleopatra was either afraid or unable to punish the murderers; the most she could do was to get them sent in chains into Syria to the grieving father, who with true greatness of mind sent them back to the Egyptian legions, saying that it was for the senate to punish them, not for him.
While Ptolemy her second husband was a boy and could claim no share of the government, he was allowed to live with all the outward show of royalty, but as soon as he reached the age of fifteen, in B.C. 44, at which he might call himself her equal and would soon be her master, Cleopatra had him put to death. She had then reigned four years with her elder brother and four years with her younger brother, and from that time forward she reigned alone, calling her child by Cæsar her colleague on the throne.
At a time when vice and luxury claimed the thoughts of all who were not busy in the civil wars, we cannot hope to find the fruits of genius in Alexandria; but the mathematics are plants of a hardy growth, and are not choked so easily as poetry and history. Sosigenes was then the first astronomer in Egypt, and Julius Cæsar was guided by his advice in setting right the Roman Calendar. He was a careful and painstaking mathematician, and, after fixing the length of the year at three hundred and sixty-five days and a quarter, he three times changed the beginning of the year, in his doubts as to the day on which the equinox fell; for the astronomer could then only make two observations in a year with a view to learn the time of the equinox, by seeing when the sun shone in the plane of the equator. Photinus the mathematician wrote both on arithmetic and geometry, and was usually thought the author of a mathematical work published in the name of the queen, called the Canon of Cleopatra.
Didymus was another of the writers that we hear of at that time. He was a man of great industry, both in reading and writing; but when we are told that he wrote three thousand five hundred volumes, or rolls, it rather teaches us that a great many rolls of papyrus would be wanted to make a modern book, than what number of books he wrote. These writings were mostly on verbal criticism, and all have long since perished except some notes or scholia on the Hiad and Odyssey which bear his name, and are still printed in some editions of Homer.
Dioscorides, the physician of Cleopatra, has left a work on herbs and minerals, and on their uses in medicine; also on poisons and poisonous bites. To these he has added a list of prescriptions. His works have been much read in all ages, and have only been set aside by the discoveries of the last few centuries. Serapion, another physician, was perhaps of this reign.
He followed medicine rather than surgery; and, while trusting chiefly to his experience gained in clinical or bedside practice, was laughed at by the surgeons as an empiric.
The small temple at Hermonthis, near Thebes, seems to have been built in this reign, and it is dedicated to Mandoo, or the sun, in the name of Cleopatra and Cassation. It is unlike the older Egyptian temples in being much less of a fortress; for what in them is a strongly walled courtyard, with towers to guard the narrow doorway, is here a small space between two double rows of columns, wholly open, without walls, while the roofed building is the same as in the older temples. Near it is a small pool, seventy feet square, with stone sides, which was used in the funerals and other religious rites.