Egypt, like all the rest of the world, had been watching with deep interest the warfare waged between the two Roman giants, Pompey and Cæsar, confident in the success of the former; and the messenger of the defeated general must have brought the first authentic news of the result of the eagerly awaited battle. The sympathies of the Alexandrians were all on the side of the Pompeians, for the fugitive, who now asked a return of his former favours, had always been to them the gigantic representative of Roman patronage. They knew little, if anything, about Cæsar, who had spent so many years in the far north-west; but Pompey was Rome itself to them, and had always shown himself particularly desirous of acting, when occasion arose, in their behalf. For many years he had been, admittedly, the most powerful personage in Rome, and the civilised world had grovelled at his feet. Then came the inevitable quarrel with Julius Cæsar, a man who could not tolerate the presence of a rival. Civil war broke out, and the two armies met on the plains of Pharsalia. It is not necessary to record here how Pompey’s patrician cavalry, in whom he confidently trusted, was defeated by Cæsar’s hardened legions; how the foreign allies were awed into inactivity by the spectacle of the superb contest between Romans and Romans; how the debonnaire Pompey, realising his defeat, passed, dazed, to his pavilion and sat there staring in front of him, until the enemy had penetrated to his very door, when, uttering the despairing cry, “What! even into the camp?” he galloped from the field; and how Cæsar’s men found the enemy’s tents decked in readiness for the celebration of their anticipated victory, the doorways hung with garlands of myrtle, the floors spread with rich carpets, and the tables covered with goblets of wine and dishes of food. Pompey had fled to Larissa and thence to the sea, where he boarded a merchantman and set sail for Mitylene. Here picking up his wife Cornelia, he made his way to Cyprus, where he transhipped to the galley in which he crossed to Egypt. He had expected, very naturally, to be received with courtesy by Ptolemy, who was to be regarded as his political protégé; and he had some undefined but cogent plans of gathering his forces together again and giving battle a second time to his enemies. At Pharsalia he had thought his power irrevocably destroyed, but on his way to Egypt he learnt that Cato had rallied a considerable number of his troops, and that his fleet, which had not come into action, was still loyal; and he therefore hoped that with Ptolemy’s expected help he might yet regain the mastery of the Roman world.
As soon as his approach was reported to the Egyptian King, a council of ministers was called, in order to decide the manner in which they should receive the fallen general. There were present at this meeting the three scoundrelly advisers of the youthful monarch whom we have already met: Potheinos, the eunuch, who was a kind of prime minister; Achillas, the Egyptian, who commanded the King’s troops; and Theodotos of Chios, the professional master of rhetoric, and tutor to Ptolemy. These three men appear to have organised the plot by which Cleopatra had been driven from Egypt; and, having the boy Ptolemy well under their thumbs, they seem to have been acting with zeal in his name for the advancement of their own fortunes. “It was, indeed, a miserable thing,” says Plutarch, “that the fate of the great Pompey should be left to the determinations of these three men; and that he, riding at anchor at a distance from the shore, should be forced to wait the sentence of this tribunal.”
Some of the councillors suggested that he should be politely requested to seek refuge in some other country, for it was obvious that Cæsar might deal harshly with them if they were to befriend him. Others proposed that they should receive him and cast in their lot with him, for it was to be supposed, and indeed such was the fact, that he still had a very good chance of recovering from the fiasco of Pharsalia; and there was the danger that, if they did not do so, he might accept the assistance of their enemy Cleopatra. Theodotos, however, pointing out, in a carefully reasoned speech, that both these courses were fraught with danger to themselves, proposed that they should curry favour with Cæsar by murdering their former patron, thus bringing the contest to a close, and thereby avoiding any risk of backing the wrong horse; “and,” he added with a smile, “a dead man cannot bite.” The councillors readily approved this method of dealing with the difficult situation, and they committed its execution to Achillas, who thereupon engaged the services of a certain Roman officer named Septimius, who had once held a command under Pompey, and another Roman centurion named Salvius. The three men, with a few attendants, then boarded a small boat and set out towards the galley.
When they had come alongside Septimius stood up and saluted Pompey by his military title; and Achillas thereupon invited him to come ashore in the smaller vessel, saying that the large galley could not make the harbour owing to the shallow water. It was now seen that a number of Egyptian battleships were cruising at no great distance, and that the sandy shore was alive with troops; and Pompey, whose suspicions were aroused, realised that he could not now turn back, but must needs place himself in the hands of the surly-looking men who had come out to meet him. His wife Cornelia was distraught with fears for his safety, but he, bidding her to await events without anxiety, lowered himself into the boat, taking with him two centurions, a freedman named Philip, and a slave called Scythes. As he bade farewell to Cornelia he quoted to her a couple of lines from Sophocles—
“He that once enters at a tyrant’s door
Becomes a slave, though he were free before;”
and so saying, he set out towards the shore. A deep silence fell upon the little company as the boat passed over the murky water, which at this time of year is beginning to be discoloured by the Nile mud brought down by the first rush of the annual floods;[19] and in the damp heat of an Egyptian summer day the dreary little town and the barren colourless shore must have appeared peculiarly uninviting. In order to break the oppressive silence Pompey turned to Septimius, and, looking earnestly upon him, said: “Surely I am not mistaken in believing you to have been formerly my fellow-soldier?” Septimius made no reply, but silently nodded his head; whereupon Pompey, opening a little book, began to read, and so continued until they had reached the shore. As he was about to leave the boat he took hold of the hand of his freedman Philip; but even as he did so Septimius drew his sword and stabbed him in the back, whereupon both Salvius and Achillas attacked him. Pompey spoke no word, but, groaning a little, hid his face with his mantle, and fell into the bottom of the vessel, where he was speedily done to death.
Cornelia, standing upon the deck of the galley, witnessed the murder, and uttered so great a cry that it was heard upon the shore. Then, seeing the murderers stoop over the body and rise again with the severed head held aloft, she called to her ship’s captain to weigh anchor, and in a few moments the galley was making for the open sea and was speedily out of the range of pursuit. Pompey’s decapitated body, stripped of all clothing, was now bundled into the water, and a short time afterwards was washed up by the breakers upon the sands of the beach, where it was soon surrounded by a crowd of idlers. Meanwhile Achillas and his accomplices carried the head up to the royal camp.
The freedman Philip was not molested, and, presently making his way to the beach, wandered to and fro along the desolate shore until all had retired to the town. Then, going over to the body and kneeling down beside it, he washed it with sea-water and wrapped it in his own shirt for want of a winding-sheet. As he was searching for wood wherewith to make some sort of funeral pyre, he met with an old Roman soldier who had once served under the murdered general; and together these two men carried down to the water’s edge such pieces of wreckage and fragments of rotten wood as they could find, and placing the body upon the pile set fire to it.
Upon the next morning one of the Pompeian generals, Lucius Lentulus, who was bringing up the two thousand soldiers whom Pompey had gathered together as a bodyguard, arrived in a second galley before Pelusium; and as he was being rowed ashore he observed the still smoking remains of the pyre. “Who is this that has found his end here?” he said, being still in ignorance of the tragedy, and added with a sigh, “Possibly even thou, Pompeius Magnus!” And upon stepping ashore, he too was promptly murdered.
A few days later, on October 2nd, Julius Cæsar, in hot pursuit, arrived at Alexandria, where he heard with genuine disgust of the miserable death of his great enemy. Shortly afterwards Theodotos presented himself to the conqueror, carrying with him Pompey’s head and signet-ring; but Cæsar turned in distress from the gruesome head, and taking only the ring in his hand, was for a moment moved to tears.[20] He then appears to have dismissed the astonished Theodotos from his presence like an offending slave: and it was not long before that disillusioned personage fled for his life from Egypt. For some years, it may be mentioned, he wandered as a vagabond through Syria and Asia Minor; but at last, after the death of Cæsar, he was recognised by Marcus Brutus, and, as a punishment for having instigated the murder of the great Pompey, was crucified with every possible ignominy. Cæsar seems to have arranged that the ashes of his rival should be sent to his wife Cornelia, by whom they were ultimately deposited at his country house near Alba; and he also gave orders that the piteous head should be buried near the sea, in the grove of Nemesis, outside the eastern walls of Alexandria, where, in the shade of the trees, a monument was set up to him and the ground around it laid out. Cæsar then offered his protection and friendship to all those partisans of Pompey whom the Egyptians had imprisoned, and he expressed his great satisfaction at being able thus to save the lives of his fellow-countrymen.