"We are aware, Gnaeus Pompeius. You have our sympathy."
"That's a start," said Gnaeus Pompey with all the cheerful lack of politesse his father had made famous, "but not enough. I am here to ask for material aid, not expressions of condolence."
"Quite so. Alexandria is a long journey to obtain expressions of condolence. We had gathered that you have come to seek our—er—material aid. What kind of aid?"
"I want a fleet consisting of at least ten superior warships, sixty good transport vessels, sailors and oarsmen in sufficient numbers to power them, and every one of the sixty transports filled to the brim with wheat and other foodstuffs," Gnaeus Pompey chanted.
The little King moved on his minor throne, turned his head—which also wore the white ribbon of the diadem—to look at the Lord High Chamberlain and the slender, effeminate man beside him. His elder sister, who was also his wife—how decadently convoluted these eastern monarchies were!—promptly reacted exactly as a Roman elder sister might have. She was holding a gold and ivory scepter, and used it to rap him across the knuckles so hard that he let out a yelp of pain. His pretty, pouting face returned to the front and stayed there, his bright blue eyes winking away tears.
"We are delighted to be asked to give you material aid, Gnaeus Pompeius. You may have all the ships you require. There are ten excellent quinqueremes in the boat sheds attached to the Cibotus Harbor, all designed to carry plenty of artillery, all endowed with the best oaken rams, and all highly maneuverable. Their crews are rigorously trained. We will also commandeer sixty large, stout cargo vessels from among those belonging to us. We own all the ships of Egypt, commercial as well as naval, though we do not own all the merchant ships of Alexandria."
The Queen paused, looked very stern—and very ugly. "However, Gnaeus Pompeius, we cannot donate you any wheat or other foodstuffs. Egypt is in the midst of famine. The Inundation was down in the Cubits of Death; no crops germinated. We do not have sufficient to feed our own people, particularly those of Alexandria."
Gnaeus Pompey, who looked very like his father save that his equally thick crop of hair was a darker gold, sucked his teeth and shook his head. "That won't do!" he barked. "I want grain and I want food! Nor will I take no for an answer!"
"We have no grain, Gnaeus Pompeius. We have no food. We are not in a position to accommodate you, as we have explained."
"Actually," said Gnaeus Pompey casually, "you don't have any choice in the matter. Sorry if your own people starve, but that's not my affair. Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius Scipio Nasica the governor is still in Syria, and has more than enough good Roman troops to march south and crush Egypt like a beetle. You're old enough to remember the arrival of Aulus Gabinius and what happened then. All I have to do is send to Syria and you're invaded. And don't think of doing to me what you did to the sons of Bibulus! I am Magnus's son. Kill me or any of mine and you'll all die very painfully. In many ways annexation would be best for my father and the government in exile. Egypt would become a province of Rome and everything Egypt possesses would go to Rome. In the person of my father. Think it over, Queen Cleopatra. I'll return tomorrow."
The lictors wheeled and marched out, faces impassive, Gnaeus Pompey strolling behind them.
"The arrogance!" gasped Theodotus, flapping his hands. "Oh, I don't believe the arrogance!"
"Hold your tongue, tutor!" the Queen snapped.
"May I go?" the little King asked, his tears overflowing.
"Yes, go, you little toad! And take Theodotus with you!"
Out they went, the man's arm possessively about the boy's heaving shoulders.
"You'll have to do as Gnaeus Pompeius has ordered you to do," purred Potheinus.
"I am well aware of that, you self-satisfied worm!"
"And pray, mighty Pharaoh, Isis on Earth, Daughter of Ra, that Nilus rises into the Cubits of Plenty this summer."
"I intend to pray. No doubt you and Theodotus—and your minion Achillas, commander-in-chief of my army!—intend to pray just as hard to Serapis that Nilus remains in the Cubits of Death! Two failed Inundations in a row would dry up the Ta-she and Lake Moeris. No one in Egypt would eat. My income would shrink to a point whereat, Potheinus, I could find little money for buying in. If there is grain to buy in. There is drought from Macedonia and Greece to Syria and Egypt. Food prices will keep on rising until the Nilus rises. While you and your two cronies urge a third kind of rise—the Alexandrians against me."
"As Pharaoh, O Queen," said Potheinus smoothly, "you have the key to the treasure vaults of Memphis."
The Queen looked scornful. "Certainly, Lord High Chamberlain! You know perfectly well that the priests will not allow me to spend the Egyptian treasures to save Alexandria from starvation. Why should they? No native Egyptian is permitted to live in Alexandria, let alone have its citizenship. Something I do not intend to rectify for one good reason. I don't want my best and loyalest subjects to catch the Alexandrian disease."
"Then the future does not bode well for you, O Queen."
"You deem me a weak woman, Potheinus. That is a very grave mistake. You'd do better to think of me as Egypt."
Cleopatra had hundreds upon hundreds of servants; only two of them were dear to her, Charmian and Iras. The daughters of Macedonian aristocrats, they had been given to Cleopatra when all three were small children, to be the royal companions of the second daughter of King Ptolemy Auletes and Queen Cleopatra Tryphaena, a daughter of King Mithridates of Pontus by his queen. The same age as Cleopatra, they had been with her through all the stormy years since—through Ptolemy Auletes's divorce of Cleopatra Tryphaena and the arrival of a stepmother—through the banishment of Auletes—through three years of exile in Memphis while the oldest daughter, Berenice, reigned with her mother, Cleopatra Tryphaena—through the awful time after Cleopatra Tryphaena's death when Berenice searched frantically for a husband acceptable to the Alexandrians—through the return of Ptolemy Auletes and his resumption of the throne—through the day when Auletes had murdered Berenice, his own daughter—through the first two years of Cleopatra's reign. So long!
They were her only confidantes, so it was to them that she poured out the story of her audience with Gnaeus Pompey.
"Potheinus is becoming insufferably confident," she said.
"Which means," said Charmian, dark and very pretty, "that he will move to dethrone you as soon as he can."
"Oh, yes. I need to journey to Memphis and sacrifice in the true way to the true Gods," Cleopatra said fretfully, "but I daren't. To leave Alexandria would be a fatal mistake."
"Would it help to write for advice to Antipater at the court of King Hyrcanus?"
"No use whatsoever. He's all for the Romans."
"What was Gnaeus Pompeius like?" asked Iras, who always thought of personalities, never of politics. She was fair and very pretty.
"In the same mold as the great Alexander. Macedonian."
"Did you like him?" Iras persisted, blue eyes fondly misty.
Cleopatra looked exasperated. "As a matter of fact, Iras, I disliked the man intensely! Why do you ask such silly questions? I am Pharaoh. My hymen belongs to my equal in blood and deity. If you fancy Gnaeus Pompeius, go and sleep with him. You're a young woman; you should by rights be married. But I am Pharaoh, God on Earth. When I mate, I do so for Egypt, not for my own pleasure." Her face twisted. "Believe me, for no lesser reason than Egypt will I summon the fortitude to give my untouched body to the little viper!"
5
It was with a sense of enormous relief that Pompey the Great set out at the beginning of December to march westward along the Via Egnatia all the way to Dyrrachium. Sharing the palace in Thessalonica with more than half of Rome's Senate had proven a nightmare. For they had all returned, of course, from Cato to his beloved older son, who had sailed in from Alexandria with a superb fleet of ten quinqueremes and sixty transports, the latter loaded to creaking point. Their cargo was supposed to be wheat, barley, beans and chickpea, but turned out to consist mostly
of dates. Sweet and tasty for an Epicurean snack, unpalatable fare for soldiers.
"That stringy she-wolf monster!" Gnaeus Pompey had snarled after he discovered that only ten of the transports held wheat; the other fifty contained dates in jars he had seen filled with wheat. "She tricked me!"
His father, worn down by a combination of Cato and Cicero, chose to see the funny side, laughed himself to tears he couldn't shed any other way. "Never mind," he soothed his irate son, "after we've beaten Caesar we'll hie ourselves off to Egypt and pay for this war out of Cleopatra's treasury."
"It will give me great pleasure personally to torture her!"
"Tch, tch!" clucked Pompey. "Not loverlike language, Gnaeus! There's a rumor going round that you had her."
"The only way I'd have her is roasted and stuffed with dates!" Which reply set Pompey laughing again.
Cato had returned just before Gnaeus Pompey, very pleased with the success of his mission to Rhodes, and full of the story of his encounter with his half sister, Servililla, divorced wife of the dead Lucullus, and her son, Marcus Licinius Lucullus.
"I don't understand her any more than I do Servilia," he said frowning. "When I encountered Servililla in Athens—she seemed to think she'd be proscribed if she stayed in Italia—she swore never again to leave me. Sailed the Aegaean with me, came to Rhodes. Started bickering with Athenodorus Cordylion and Statyllus. But when it came time to leave Rhodes, she said she was staying there."
"Women," said Pompey, "are queer fish, Cato. Now go away!"
"Not until you agree to tighten up on discipline among the Galatian and Cappadocian cavalry. They're behaving disgracefully."
"They are here to help us win against Caesar, Cato, and we do not have to pay for their upkeep. As far as I'm concerned, they are welcome to violate the female population of all Macedonia, and beat up the male population. Now go away!"
Next to arrive was Cicero, accompanied by his son. Exhausted, miserable, full of complaints about everyone from his brother and nephew, the Quintuses, to Atticus, who refused to speak out against Caesar and was busy smoothing Caesar's path in Rome.
"I was surrounded by traitors!" he fulminated to Pompey, his poor oozing eyes red and crusted. "It took months to manage my escape, and then I had to leave without Tiro."
"Yes, yes," said Pompey wearily. "There's a marvelous wisewoman lives outside the Larissa gate, Cicero. Go and see her about those eyes. Now! Please!"
In October came Lucius Afranius and Marcus Petreius from Spain, the harbingers of their own doom. With them they brought a few cohorts of troops, which was no consolation to Pompey, shattered by the news that his Spanish army was no more—and that Caesar had won another almost bloodless victory. To make matters worse, the advent of Afranius and Petreius provoked a frenzied fury in men like Lentulus Crus, returned from Asia Province.
"They're traitors!" Lentulus Crus yelled in Pompey's ear. "I demand that our Senate try them and condemn them!"
"Oh, shut up, Crus!" said Titus Labienus. "At least Afranius and Petreius know their way around a battlefield, which is more than anyone can say of you."
"Magnus, who is this lowborn worm?" gasped Lentulus Crus, outraged. "Why do we have to tolerate him? Why do I, a patrician Cornelius, have to be insulted by men who aren't fit to polish my boots? Tell him to take himself off!"
"Take yourself off, Lentulus!" said Pompey, close to tears.
Those tears finally overflowed at night upon his pillow after Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus sailed in with the news that Massilia had capitulated to Caesar, and that Caesar was in complete control of every land to the west of Italia.
"However," said Ahenobarbus, "I have a good little flotilla, and I intend to make use of it."
Bibulus journeyed late in December to find Pompey as his huge army plodded across the high passes of Candavia.
"Ought you to be here?" asked Pompey nervously.
"Calm down, Magnus! Caesar won't be landing in Epirus or Macedonia in the near future," said Bibulus comfortably. "For one thing, there aren't anything like enough transports in Brundisium for Caesar to get his troops across the Adriatic. For another, I have your son's fleet in the Adriatic as well as my own two under Octavius and Libo, and Ahenobarbus patrolling the Ionian Sea."
"You know, of course, that Caesar has been appointed Dictator and that the whole of Italia is for him? And that he hasn't any intention of proscribing?"
"I do. But cheer up, Magnus, it isn't all bad. I've sent Gaius Cassius and those seventy trim Syrian ships to the Tuscan Sea with orders to patrol it between Messana and Vibo and block all shipments of grain from Sicily. His presence will also prevent Caesar's sending any of his troops to Epirus from the west coast."
"Oh, that is good news!" cried Pompey.
"I think so." Bibulus smiled the restrained smile of real satisfaction. "If we can pen him up in Brundisium, can you imagine how Italia will feel if the countryside has to feed twelve legions through the winter? After Gaius Cassius gets through with the grain supply, Caesar will have enough trouble feeding the civilian populace. And we hold Africa, don't forget."
"That's true." Pompey lapsed back into gloom. "However, Bibulus, I'd be a far happier man if I'd received those two Syrian legions from Metellus Scipio before I left Thessalonica. I'm going to need them when and if Caesar manages to get across. Eight of his legions are completely veteran."
"What prevented the Syrian legions reaching you?"
"According to Scipio's latest letter, he's having terrible trouble forcing the Amanus. The Skenite Arabs have taken up residence in the passes and they're obliging him to fight every inch of the way. Well, you know the Amanus, you campaigned there."
Bibulus frowned. "Then he still has to march the entire length of Anatolia before he reaches the Hellespont. I doubt you'll see Scipio before spring."
"So let us hope, Bibulus, that we don't see Caesar either."
A vain hope. Pompey was still in Candavia negotiating the heights north of Lake Ochris when Lucius Vibullius Rufus located him fairly early in January.
"What are you doing here?" asked Pompey, astonished. "We thought you in Nearer Spain!"
"I'm the first evidence of what happens to a man who, having been pardoned by Caesar—after Corfinium—goes off and opposes him again. He took me prisoner after Illerda, and he's kept me with him ever since."
Pompey could feel himself go pale. "You mean—?"
"Yes, I mean Caesar loaded four legions into every transport he could find and sailed from Brundisium the day before the Nones." Vibullius smiled mirthlessly. "He never even saw a single warship and landed safely on the coast at Palaestae."
"Palaestae?"
"Between Oricum and Corcyra. The first thing he did was to send me to see Bibulus on Corcyra—to inform him that he'd missed his chance. And to ask for your whereabouts. You see in me Caesar the Dictator's ambassador."
"Ye Gods, he has hide! Four legions? That's all?"
"That's all."
"What's his message?"
"That enough Roman blood has been spilled. That now's the time to discuss the terms of a settlement. Both sides, he says, are evenly matched but uncommitted."
"Evenly matched," said Pompey slowly. "Four legions!"
"They're his words, Magnus."
"And his terms?"
"That you and he apply to the Senate and People of Rome to set the terms. After you and he have dismissed your armies. That he requires within three days of my return to him."
"The Senate and People of Rome. His Senate. His People," said Pompey between his teeth. "He's been elected senior consul, he's no longer Dictator. Everyone in Rome and Italia deems him a wonder. Certainly no Sulla!"
"Yes, he rules through fair words, not foul means. Oh, he is clever! And all those fools in Rome and Italia fall for it."
"Well, Vibullius, he's the hero of the hour. Ten years ago, I was the hero of the hour. There are fashions in public heroes too. Ten years ago, the Picentine prodigy. Today, the patrician
prince." Pompey's manner changed. "Tell me, whom did he leave in charge at Brundisium?"
"Marcus Antonius and Quintus Fufius Calenus."
"So he has no cavalry with him in Epirus."
"Very little. Two or three squadrons of Gauls."
"He'll be making for Dyrrachium."
"Undoubtedly."
"Then I'd better summon my legates and start this army moving at the double. I have to beat him to Dyrrachium or he'll inherit my camp and access to Dyrrachium itself."
Vibullius stood up, taking this as a dismissal. "What about an answer to Caesar?"
"Let him whistle!" said Pompey. "Stay here and be useful."
Pompey beat Caesar to Dyrrachium, but only just.
The west coast of the landmass which comprised Greece, Epirus and Macedonia was only vaguely demarcated; the southern boundary of Epirus was generally taken as the north shore of the Gulf of Corinth, but that was also Grecian Acarnania, and the northern border of Epirus was largely anywhere an individual fancied. To a Roman general, the Via Egnatia, which ran from the Hellespont for close to seven hundred miles through Thrace and Macedonia to the Adriatic, was definitely in Macedonia. Some fifteen miles from the west coast it branched north and south; the northern branch terminated at Dyrrachium and the southern branch at Apollonia. Therefore most Roman generals classified Dyrrachium and Apollonia as part of Macedonia, not as part of Epirus.
To Pompey, arriving in haste and disorder at Dyrrachium, it came as a colossal shock to discover that all of Epirus proper had declared for Caesar, and so had Apollonia, the southern terminus of the Via Egnatia. Everything south of the river Apsus, in fact, now belonged to Caesar. Who had ejected Torquatus from Oricum and Staberius from Apollonia without bloodshed and in the simplest way: the local people cheered for Caesar and made life for a garrison too difficult. From where he had landed at Palaestae, the distance along a poorly surveyed and built local road to Dyrrachium was a little over a hundred miles, yet he almost beat Pompey, marching the Roman Via Egnatia, to Dyrrachium.