to his custom--wherever he found himself in the wide Empire--of finally
regulating matters at once and in person, and firmly convinced that no
resistance was to be expected either from the Roman garrison or from
the court; being, moreover, in urgent pecuniary embarrassment, landed
in Alexandria with the two amalgamated legions accompanying him to the
number of thirty-two hundred men and eight hundred Celtic and German
cavalry, took up his quarters in the royal palace, and proceeded
to collect the necessary sums of money and to regulate the Egyptian
succession, without allowing himself to be disturbed by the saucy remark
of Pothinus that Caesar should not for such petty matters neglect his own
so important affairs. In his dealings with the Egyptians he was just
and even indulgent. Although the aid which they had given to Pompey
justified the imposing of a war contribution, the exhausted land was
spared from this; and, while the arrears of the sums stipulated for in
B.C. 59, and since then only about half paid, were remitted, there was
required merely a final payment of ten million denarii (two million
dollars). The belligerent brother and sister were enjoined immediately
to suspend hostilities, and were invited to have their dispute
investigated and decided before the arbiter. They submitted; the royal
boy was already in the palace and Cleopatra also presented herself
there. Caesar adjudged the kingdom of Egypt, agreeably to the testament
of Auletes, to the intermarried brother and sister Cleopatra and
Ptolomoreus Dionysus, and further gave unasked the kingdom of
Cyprus--cancelling the earlier act of annexation--as the appanage of
the second-born of Egypt to the younger children of Auletes, Arsinoe and
Ptolemy the younger. But a storm was secretly preparing. Alexandria
was a cosmopolitan city as well as Rome, hardly inferior to the Italian
capital in the number of its inhabitants, far superior to it in stirring
commercial spirit, in skill of handicraft, in taste for science and
art: in the citizens there was a lively sense of their own national
importance, and, if there was no political sentiment, there was at any
rate a turbulent spirit, which induced them to indulge in their street
riots regularly and heartily. We may conceive their feeling when they
saw the Roman general ruling in the palace of the Lagids, and their
kings accepting the award of his tribunal. Pothinus and the boy-king,
both, as may be conceived, very d