Auletes was at once restored to his throne, and Berenice IV. was put to death. A large number of Roman infantry and Celtic and German cavalry, of whom we shall hear again, were left in the city to preserve order, and it would seem that for a short time Anthony remained in Alexandria. The young Princess Cleopatra was now a girl of some fourteen years of age, and already she is said to have attracted the Roman cavalry leader by her youthful beauty and charm. At the east end of the Mediterranean a girl of fourteen years is already mature, and has long arrived at what is called a marriageable age. There is probably little importance to be attached to this meeting, but it is not without interest as an earnest of future events.
The Romans now began to demand payment of the various sums promised to them by Auletes. Rabirius Postumus appears to have been one of the largest creditors, and the only way in which the King could pay him back was by making him Chancellor of the Exchequer, so that all taxes might pass through his hands. Rabirius also represented the interests of the importunate Julius Cæsar, and probably those of Gabinius. The situation was thus not unlike that which was found in Egypt in the ’seventies, when a European Commission was appointed to handle all public funds in order that the ruler’s private debts might be paid off. In the case of Auletes, however, it was the leading Romans who were his creditors, and hence we find the shadow of the great Republic hanging over the Alexandrian court, and Rome is seen to be inextricably mixed up with Egyptian affairs. Roman money had been lent and had to be regained; Roman officials handled all the taxes; a Roman army occupied the city, and the King reigned by permission of the Roman Senate to whom his kingdom had been bequeathed.
In B.C. 54 the Alexandrians made an attempt to shake off the incubus, and drove Rabirius out of Egypt. Roman attention was at once fixed upon Alexandria, and it is probable that the country would have been annexed at once had not the appalling Parthian catastrophe in the following year, when Crassus was defeated and killed, diverted their minds to other channels. Auletes, however, did not live long to enjoy his dearly-bought immunity; for in the summer of B.C. 51 he passed away, leaving behind him the four children born to him of his second marriage with the unknown lady who was now probably dead. The famous Cleopatra, the seventh of the name, was the eldest of this family, being, at her father’s death, about eighteen years of age. Her sister Arsinoe, whom she heartily disliked, was a few years younger. The third child was a boy of ten or eleven years of age, afterwards known as Ptolemy XIV.; and lastly, there was the child who later became Ptolemy XV., now a boy of seven or eight.[17] Auletes, warned by his own bitter experiences, had taken the precaution to write an explicit will in which he stated clearly his wishes in regard to the succession. One copy of the will was kept at Alexandria, and a second copy, duly attested and sealed, was placed in the hands of Pompey at Rome, who had befriended the King when he was in that city, with the request that it should be deposited in the ærarium. In this will Auletes decreed that his eldest surviving daughter and eldest surviving son should reign jointly; and he called upon the Roman people in the name of all their gods and in view of all their treaties made with him, to see that the terms of his testament were carried out. He further asked the Roman people to act as guardian to the new King, as though fearing that the boy might be suppressed, or even put out of the way by his co-regnant sister. At the same time he carefully urged them to make no change in the succession, and his words have been thought to suggest that he feared lest Cleopatra, in like manner, might be removed in favour of Arsinoe. In a court such as that of the Ptolemies the fact that two sons and two daughters were living at the palace at the King’s death boded ill for the prospects of peace; and it would seem that Auletes’ knowledge that Cleopatra and Arsinoe were not on the best of terms gave rise in his mind to the greatest apprehension. Being aware of the domestic history of his family, and knowing that his own hands were stained with the blood of his daughter Berenice, whom he had murdered on his return from exile, he must have been fully alive to the possibilities of internecine warfare amongst his surviving children; and, being in his old age sick of bloodshed and desiring only a bibulous peace for himself and his descendants, he took every means in his power to secure for them that pleasant inertia which had been denied so often to himself.
His wish that his eighteen-year-old daughter should reign with his ten-year-old son involved, as a matter of course, the marriage of the sister and brother, for the Ptolomies had conformed to ancient Egyptian customs to the extent of perpetrating when necessary a royal marriage between a brother and sister in this manner. The custom was of very ancient establishment in Egypt, and was based originally on the law of female succession, which made the monarch’s eldest daughter the heiress of the kingdom. The son who had been selected by his father to succeed to the throne, or who aspired to the sovereignty either by right or by might, obtained his legal warrant to the kingdom by marriage with this heiress. When such an heiress did not exist, or when the male claimant to the throne had no serious rivals, this rule often seems to have been set aside; but there are few instances of its disuse when circumstances demanded a solidification of the royal claim to the throne.
When, therefore, according to the terms of the will of Auletes, his eldest daughter and eldest son succeeded jointly to the throne as Cleopatra VII. and Ptolemy XIV., their formal marriage was contemplated as a matter of course. There is no evidence of this marriage, and one may suppose that it was postponed by Cleopatra’s desire, on the grounds of the extreme youth of the King. Marriages at the age of eleven or twelve years were not uncommon in ancient Egypt, but they were not altogether acceptable to Greek minds; and the Queen could not have found much difficulty in making this her justification for holding the power in her own hands. The young Ptolemy XIV. was placed in the care of the eunuch Potheinos, a man who appears to have been typical of that class of palace intriguers with whom the historian becomes tediously familiar. The royal tutor, Theodotos, an objectionable Greek rhetorician, also exercised considerable influence in the court, and a third intimate of the King was an unscrupulous soldier of Egyptian nationality named Achillas, who commanded the troops in the palace. These three men very soon obtained considerable power, and, acting in the name of their young master, they managed to take a large portion of the government into their own hands. Cleopatra, meanwhile, seems to have suffered something of an eclipse. She was still only a young girl, and her advisers appear to have been men of less strength of purpose than those surrounding her brother’s person. The King being still a minor, the bulk of the formal business of the State was performed by the Queen; but it would seem that the real rulers of the country were Potheinos and his friends.
Some two or three years after the death of Auletes, Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus,[18] the pro-consular Governor of Syria, sent his two sons to Alexandria to order the Roman troops stationed in that city to join his army in his contemplated campaign against the Parthians. These Alexandrian troops constituted the Army of Occupation, which had been left in Egypt by Gabinius in B.C. 55 as a protection to Auletes. They were for the most part, as has been said, Gallic and German cavalry, rough men whose rude habits and bulky forms must have caused them to be the wonder and terror of the city. These Gabiniani milites had by this time settled down in their new home, and had taken wives to themselves from the Greek and Egyptian families of Alexandria. In spite of the presence amongst them of a considerable body of Roman infantry veterans who had fought under Pompey, the discipline of the army was already much relaxed; and when the Governor of Syria’s orders were received there was an immediate mutiny, the two unfortunate sons of Bibulus being promptly murdered by the angry and probably drunken soldiers. When the affair was reported to the palace, Cleopatra issued orders for the immediate arrest of the murderers; and the army, realising that their position as mutinous troops was untenable, handed over the ringleaders apparently without further trouble. The prisoners were then sent by the Queen in chains to Bibulus; but he, being possessed of the best spirit of the old Roman aristocracy, sent back these murderers of his two sons to her with the message that the right of inflicting punishment in such cases belonged only to the Senate. History does not tell us what was the ultimate fate of these men, and the incident is not of great importance except in so far as it shows the first recorded act of Cleopatra’s reign as being one of tactful deliberation and fair dealing with her Roman neighbours.
Shortly after this, in the year B.C. 49, Pompey sent his son, Cnæus Pompeius, to Egypt to procure ships and men in preparation for the civil war which now seemed inevitable; and the Gabinian troops, feeling that a war against Julius Cæsar offered more favourable possibilities than a campaign against the ferocious Parthians, cheerfully responded to the call. Fifty warships and a force of 500 men left Alexandria with Cnæus, and eventually attached themselves to the command of Bibulus, who was now Pompey’s admiral in the Adriatic. It is said that Cnæus Pompeius was much attracted by Cleopatra’s beauty and charm, and that he managed to place himself upon terms of intimacy with her; but there is absolutely nothing to justify the suggestion that there was any sort of serious intrigue. I am of opinion that the stories of this nature which passed into circulation were due to the fact that the possibility of a marriage between Cleopatra and the young Roman had been contemplated by Alexandrian politicians. The great Pompey was master of the Roman world, and a union with his son, on the analogy of that between Berenice and the High Priest of Komana, was greatly to be desired. The proposal, however, does not seem to have obtained much support, and the matter was presently dropped.
In the following year, B.C. 48, when Cleopatra was twenty-one years of age and her co-regnant brother fourteen, important events occurred in Alexandria of which history has left us no direct record. It would appear that the brother and sister quarrelled, and that the palace divided itself into two opposing parties. The young Ptolemy, backed by the eunuch Potheinos, the rhetorician Theodotos, and the soldier Achillas, set himself up as sole sovereign of Egypt; and Cleopatra was obliged to fly for her life into Syria. We have no knowledge of these momentous events: the struggle in the palace, the days in which the young queen walked in deadly peril, the adventurous escape, and the flight from Egypt. We know only that when the curtain is raised once more upon the royal drama, the young Ptolemy is King of Egypt, and, with his army, is stationed on the eastern frontier to prevent the incursion of his exiled sister, who has raised an expeditionary force in Syria and is marching back to her native land to seize again the throne which she had lost. There is something which appeals very greatly to the imagination in the thought of this spirited young Queen’s rapid return to the perilous scenes from which she had so recently escaped; and the historian feels at once that he is dealing with a powerful character in this woman who could so speedily raise an army of mercenaries, and could dare to march back in battle array across the desert towards the land which had cast her out.