Steven Saylor - The judgement of Caesar

The day was a disaster for Caesar. The Alexandrians reclaimed the archway and removed the stones that blocked it; more than eight hundred of Caesar's men were killed by the enemy or drowned, including all those aboard his lost ship; and the triumphant Alexandrians managed to fish his new purple cape out of the water. On the causeway, they danced and shouted and waved the cape like a flag of triumph as Caesar dragged himself sputtering and half-drowned aboard the ship and made an ignominious retreat. Later the Alexandrians attached the tattered, filthy cape to a pole, like a captured banner, and for the rest of the war, they flaunted it on every possible occasion as an insult to Caesar's dignity.

The war continued for months. As in all wars, there were lulls in the fighting as each side regrouped. Caesar used such occasions to consult the many scholars and philosophers who found themselves confined to the precincts of the city under his control, which included the famous Library and the adjacent Museum, the repository of so much of the world's mathematical and astronomical learning. It was during one such lull that Caesar set about devising a new, more reliable calendar, for the venerable Roman calendar had in recent years grown out of step with the actual seasons, so that harvest festivals were taking place long before the actual harvests, and spring holidays occurred while Romans shivered. The world's most esteemed scholars were consulted when Caesar devised the new calendar, and if they did their job well, it may be that the calendar, like the movements of the stars and planets, will outlast Rome itself.

At last the balance between the warring sides was altered by the approach of Caesar's ally, King Mithridates of Pergamum, who arrived at the Egyptian frontier at the head of an army composed of Jewish, Arabian, and Syrian levies. Mithridates took Pelusium, then marched south, toward the apex of the Nile Delta. Hearing of Mithridates's advance, King Ptolemy dispatched a force to intercept him; when this Egyptian force was annihilated, Ptolemy set out himself to do battle with the new invaders. Meanwhile, Caesar, in regular communication with Mithri-dates, assembled his best troops, left a contingent to hold his position in the city, and sailed out of the harbor. He landed at a point west of Alexandria and circled around Ptolemy's army, marching at such a quick pace that he passed the king and joined Mithridates at the Nile before Ptolemy arrived. Thus the stage was set for the decisive battle of the Alexandrian War, which would not take place in Alexandria, but in the very heart of Egypt on the banks of the great river.

I was not there, but Meto was. Through his eyes I witnessed the end of King Ptolemy.

Ptolemy's army occupied a small village near the river, situated on a hill with a canal on one side to act as a moat; the Egyptians also built earthen ramparts and dug trenches lined with sharp pickets. The position appeared unassailable; but Caesar's men forded the canal by cutting down trees and filling the channel until a makeshift bridge was created, while others of his men swam downstream and emerged on the far side of the village, so that Ptolemy's stronghold was encircled. Still, the fortifications appeared impenetrable until Caesar's scouts noticed a poorly guarded area where the hill upon which the village stood was steepest; apparently the Egyptians assumed the sheerness of the cliff was itself adequate defense. Against that point Caesar launched a sudden and powerful assault, and when the high point was taken, his men went streaming down through the village, driving the Egyptians before them in a panic. The Egyptians were trapped by their own fortifications, falling from the walls, piling atop one another in the trenches, and impaling themselves on the pickets. Those who managed to escape the village faced the Roman soldiers who encircled them, and the army of Ptolemy was slaughtered from within and without.

King Ptolemy, apprised of the disaster as it unfolded, managed to flee by a small boat to take refuge on a royal barge in the Nile. The captain lifted anchor, dipped oars, and began to flee the scene of battle. Meanwhile, hundreds of desperate Egyptian soldiers threw down their weapons, stripped off their armor, and dove into the river. In a great, churning mass they converged on the royal barge and attempted to clamber aboard. Those already on the boat welcomed the first newcomers, then saw that they would quickly be overwhelmed and began to try to fight off their comrades, slashing at them with swords, jabbing them with spears, and firing arrows at those farther off.

The scene was horrific. The banks of the Nile echoed with the screams of the dying and the pleas of the living. The water around the barge grew thick with corpses. But those in the water greatly outnumbered those on the barge, and despite the slaughter, more and more of them managed to climb aboard, until at last the vessel was overloaded. The starboard side was submerged; the opposite side rose into the air. As if tipped by the hand of a Titan, the great barge capsized, emptying its occupants into the water and falling upside down onto the horde of swimmers who had attempted to board her. For a brief moment, the underside of the barge remained visible above the water, and a few dazed, desperate Egyptians managed to climb aboard; then the vessel vanished completely, swallowed by the river.

The army of Ptolemy was annihilated. Caesar's victory was complete.

Or almost complete, for the body of the king was never found. Caesar's troops examined every corpse along the shore, waded through every patch of reeds, pulled nets through the shallows, and dragged poles across every accessible bit of river bottom for miles downstream. Caesar's best swimmers-among them Meto, who led the search-dove repeatedly at the spot where the barge sank, retrieving every corpse mired in the mud or trapped in the debris. It was exhausting, filthy, dangerous work, and it yielded nothing.

Or rather, almost nothing. One diver located the flute that had been played by the king's piper. Another retrieved Ptolemy's cobra-headed uraeus crown and delivered it into Caesar's hands. Meto himself found an even more curious souvenir: a tattered cape, so mud stained that at first it was difficult to discern its purple hue. It was the cape that Caesar had lost at the battle of the Pharos causeway, when he himself might have perished on a foundering ship. Apparently King Ptolemy had kept it close at hand, intending to use it to rally his troops at some critical juncture or to celebrate his ultimate triumph over the Roman invader. When Meto returned the cape to Caesar, the imperator smiled ruefully but said nothing. He spread the cape on a rock on the riverbank, and when it was sufficiently dry, he laid it upon one of the many pyres that had been lit to dispose of the Roman dead. The purple cape was consumed, and Caesar never spoke of it again.

Hearing the tale of Ptolemy's end, I remembered what Cleopatra had told me regarding those who died in the Nile, and the special blessing they received from Osiris. But it was not the king's existence in the life hereafter that worried Caesar, but the continuation of his existence, real or rumored, in this world. So long as Ptolemy's body was not found, the enemies of the queen might persist in believing that their champion survived, and the peace of Egypt might yet be disturbed by pretenders. There was even the slightest possibility that Ptolemy had indeed survived, and had gone into hiding, disguising himself as a commoner or fleeing to some place beyond the reach of Rome, perhaps to the court of the Parthian king. Caesar would have preferred to return to Alexandria with the lifeless body of the king, so that it could be displayed to Cleopatra as the head of Pompey had been displayed to him-irrefutable proof of the enemy's demise. But in this regard, despite all his efforts, Caesar was to be thwarted.