hinus that Caesar
should not for such petty matters neglect his own so important affairs.
In his dealing with the Egyptians he was just and even indulgent.
Although the aid which they had given to Pompeius justified
the imposing of a war contribution, the exhausted land was spared
from this; and, while the arrears of the sum stipulated for in 695(40)
and since then only about half paid were remitted, there was required
merely a final payment of 10,000,000 -denarii- (400,000 pounds).
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 Ptolemaeus Dionysus, and further gave unasked
the kingdom of Cyprus--cancelling the earlier act of annexation(41)--
as the appanageof the second-born of Egypt to the younger children
of Auletes, Arsinoe and Ptolemaeus the younger.

Insurrection in Alexandria

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 as regularly and as heartily as the Parisians
of the present day: one may conceive their feelings, 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 dissatisfied at once with the peremptory
requisition of old debts and with the intervention in the throne-
dispute which could only issue, as it did, in favour of Cleopatra,
sent--in order to pacify the Roman demands--the treasures
of the temples and the gold plate of the king with intentional
ostentation to be melted at the mint; with increasing
indignation the Egyptians--who were pious even to superstition,
and who rejoiced in the world-renowned magnificence of their court
as if it were a possession of their own--beheld the bare walls
of their temp