Cleopatra and Caesar
Also called: Alexandrian War
Caesar, pursuing Pompey to Alexandria, took the side of Cleopatra, who had been ousted in a struggle for the throne. After the Alexandrian War she regained the crown of Egypt.
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The Ptolemies were a Greek dynasty founded by one of Alexander’s generals, and by the first century BC they ruled at Rome’s sufferance. When Ptolemy XII died in 51 BC, the eighteen-year-old Cleopatra VII took the throne jointly with her younger brother Ptolemy XIII, but the courtiers around her brother drove her out of the capital, Alexandria.
In 48 BC Pompey, beaten in Rome’s civil war, fled to Egypt and was murdered by Ptolemy XIII’s ministers; Caesar, in pursuit, entered Alexandria. Plutarch tells that Cleopatra had herself smuggled into the palace in a bedding sack to meet him. When Caesar took her side the Egyptian army besieged the palace (the Alexandrian War), and a fire that spread in the fighting is said to have burned some of the books at the harbour. The next year Roman reinforcements arrived, and Ptolemy XIII was defeated in a battle on the Nile and drowned.
Cleopatra made her younger brother Ptolemy XIV nominal co-ruler and held real power herself, and in 47 BC bore Caesarion, known as Caesar’s son. She was staying in Rome when Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC, and returned to Egypt.
