Killing Jesus: A History

has been lost rather than submit to the victors. Caesar takes Rome within two months, only to find it abandoned. Merely capturing Rome is not enough. He must have total victory. Pompey has fled, and Caesar gives chase across the Mediterranean, to Egypt.
    As he wades ashore to meet with Ptolemy XIII, the teenage king of Egypt, Pompey—the great general, architect, builder, and prodigious lover who was married five times, and who was three times given the privilege of riding in triumph through the streets of Rome after epic battlefield conquests in his youth—is stabbed through the back with a sword, and then stabbed several more times for good measure. Not wanting his murderers to see his expression at the moment death arrives, Pompey pulls the hem of his toga up over his face. His murderers quickly cut off his head, and leave his corpse on the sand to be picked apart by shorebirds. Thinking it will please Julius Caesar, the Egyptians bring him Pompey’s severed skull. But Caesar is devastated. He weeps, and then demands that the rest of the body be retrieved so that it might be given a proper Roman burial.
    But Pompey’s murder is not the end of the war, for his outraged allies and sons soon take up his cause. In the end, Caesar will win the civil war and take control of the Roman Republic, much to the joy of its common citizens, who revere him. Yet four years of conflict will pass before that day arrives. In the meantime, Julius Caesar will command his legions in locales ranging from Pharsalus, in central Greece; to Thapsus, in Tunisia; to the plains of Munda, in present-day southern Spain, 1 and his legend will only grow larger.
    Caesar’s conquests, however, are not only on the battlefield.
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    The year is 48 B.C. A civil war is taking place in Egypt at the same time as the civil war in Rome. On one side is the twenty-one-year-old Cleopatra. On the other is her thirteen-year-old brother, Ptolemy XIII, who is being advised by a conniving eunuch named Potheinos. Ptolemy has succeeded in driving Cleopatra from her palace in the seaside capital at Alexandria. The troubles in Italy then intervene when Caesar chases Pompey to Alexandria. It is Potheinos, thinking to ally himself with Caesar, who has Pompey beheaded on the Egyptian beach just moments after the Roman is assassinated while coming ashore to align himself strategically with Ptolemy XIII.
    But Caesar is disgusted by Potheinos’s barbarous act, for he had planned to be lenient toward Pompey. “What gave him the most pleasure,” the eminent historian Plutarch will one day write of Caesar, “was that he was so often able to save the lives of fellow citizens who had fought against him.”
    Caesar moves into Egypt’s royal palace for the time being. But he fears that Potheinos will attempt to assassinate him, so he stays up late most nights, afraid to go to sleep. One such evening, Caesar retires to his quarters. He hears a noise at the door. But rather than Potheinos or some other assassin, a young woman walks into the room alone. It is Cleopatra, though he does not yet know that. She has slipped into the palace through a waterfront entrance and navigated its stone corridors without being noticed. Her hair and face are covered, and her body is wrapped in a thick dark mantle. Beguiled, Caesar waits for this stranger to reveal herself.
    Slowly and seductively, Cleopatra shows her face, with her full lips and aquiline nose. She then lets her wrap drop to the marble floor, revealing that she is wearing nothing but a sheer linen robe. Caesar’s dark eyes look her body up and down, for he can now clearly see much more than the outline of Cleopatra’s small breasts and the sway of her hips. The lust between them is not one-sided. In that moment of revealing, one historian will write of Cleopatra, “her desire grew greater than it had been before.”
    Cleopatra knows well the power of seduction, and she is about to bestow upon Caesar her most precious gift—intending, of course, to gain a great political reward. The bold gambit pays off immediately. That night, she and Caesar begin one of the most passionate love affairs in history, a political and romantic entanglement that will have long-lasting effects on the entire world. Before the morning sun rises, Caesar decides to place Cleopatra back on the Egyptian throne—just as she had hoped. For Caesar, this means he is now aligned with a woman who owes her reign to the legacy of Alexander the