Ptolemy: Julius Caesar's ally

What if Caesar had formed an alliance with Ptolemy upon receiving Pompey's head, like Ptolemy had originally intended?
 

Yuelang

Banned
What if Caesar had formed an alliance with Ptolemy upon receiving Pompey's head, like Ptolemy had originally intended?

The Roman Senate will quickly denounce him as foreign lover (since he allied with murderer of a consul), and thus, things are getting uglier... especially if Caesar forget about Ptolemy's tendency to backstab anyone covenient
 
The Roman Senate will quickly denounce him as foreign lover (since he allied with murderer of a consul), and thus, things are getting uglier... especially if Caesar forget about Ptolemy's tendency to backstab anyone covenient

The roman senate consists of those paying lip service to him or too scared to oppose him. Everyone else was in spain or africa.

Anyway for the record, he did try to work with ptolemy and that ended badly.
 
What if Caesar had formed an alliance with Ptolemy upon receiving Pompey's head, like Ptolemy had originally intended?

It was not in Caesar's interest, neither on roman politics, nor on personal/provincial strategy.

If one had been able to poll the roman people in the last weeks of the year 50 BCE, one would have found that 99% of the roman citizens considered that both Pompey and Caesar were national heros and that the greatness of their achievements qualified them for both being the first citizens in Rome, that both should stay political allies and friends and fix what had to be fixed in the roman republic and in the roman provinces.

And Caesar, more than anybody else (in which he was a nice exception), wanted clemency towards and reconciliation to prevail with his political enemies.

If Caesar had shown any gratitude to Ptolemy for killing Pompey, he would have been criticized as a barbarian and a monster, as un-roman. And, knowing that his political enemies had the strongest echo in the roman society and that he needed to win them back, he did not want to act so.

I don't mean that Caesar was not satisfied by Pompey's death which was rather opportune for him. But whatever he felf, at no cost could Caesar show any satisfaction for Pompey's death.


Concerning the personal/provincial strategy, no roman imperator could tolerate that a client king killed such an important man as Pompey on his own initiative. Any roman imperator felt an interest in warning clients against such kind of betrayals. A roman patron could suffer setbacks and could not tolerate his clients to try murdering him at the first setback.

And, at last, Ptolemy and his advisors were very stupid. They should have struck a deal with Caesar before doing anything against Pompey. Egypt at that time was something like the arabic peninsula today : the richest kingdom of the world with immense strategic agricultural ressources. They had to put their resources at Caesar's disposal. And they should have known that, Rome (and Caesar personally) having turned around the egyptian jackpot for almost 20 years, it was going to demand a lot in a time of civil war when it badly needed funds and resources.
Their idea was to give little to Caesar in hope he would quickly leave for other places were the civil war called hom. Total miscaculation : Caesar's goal was to secure strategic places and resources that had previously been at the service of Pompey and his republican/optimate allies.

Caesar had in fact already began negotiations with Cleopatra before arriving to Egypt. That's why he had her introduced in the palace in the famous carpet.
His goal obviously was to secure the tightest control over Egypt. And for this, I would even say that there was no better candidate than a woman. A woman was the weakest puppet a roman patron could hope for.

And Ptolemy had shown he was not trustable.
 
What if Caesar had formed an alliance with Ptolemy upon receiving Pompey's head, like Ptolemy had originally intended?

From what we know Ptolemy XIII was an ordinary teenager, boy of 13/14 years old. I mean he was not a wunderkind.
I am not sure about you, but I've never ever met in my life a boy of 13 who might rule an army, a court, a capital, foreign policy, finances, a country.
Which leaves me with only option:
- there was no Ptolemy XIII to make an alliance with. There was an Egyptian faction who had this pharaoh as a puppet. And to make things even worse it was not too clear who headed this faction and with whom one should negotiate. That was quite an unstable unruly gathering.

At this moment Caesar was not ready to make Egypt a province. What he needed was a reliable, stable, efficient client-king for this country. At least for a time while he would be dealing with his enemies in North Africa and Spain.
Ptolemy XIII did not qualify.
Cleopatra qualified. She was 19/20 years old, she was smart, reliable, actually she was what he was looking for. And ye, sex helped to make this relationship personal.
Caesar needed one person to make an alliance with and not a squabbling band around a boy-king.

* Murdering of Pompey is quite irrelevant in this situation.
Actually that was not a bad move of Ptolemy's faction. I just cannot imagine what Caesar would do with Pompey as prisoner in his hands.
Caesar could not keep Pompey alive as it is too dangerous and it would be inconvenient to execute one of the most glorious Romans. Quite an embarrassing situation which Caesar avoided with the help of the guys who had Ptolemy XIII as their puppet.
 
And Caesar, more than anybody else (in which he was a nice exception), wanted clemency towards and reconciliation to prevail with his political enemies.

You can only measure your own greatness by the quality of the opponents you defeat.

By removing an opponent utterly from the playing field, you deprive yourself of a measuring stick.

Pompey took the cognomen of Magnus ("Great") for himself (with some cause, not just his own over blown opinion of himself, the insecure Picenum hayseed that he was at heart, or at least that the Optimates/Boni believed him to be). So how great must Caesar have been to have defeated someone called Magnus by all of Rome?

Thus the barbaric death of Pompey at Ptolemy's hands was a blow in someways at Caesar's very own dignitas. Removing Pompey diminished Caesar. And that was unacceptable.
 
I agree. But not everybody thought that way in Rome. Several political enemies of Caesar would have been very happy if some of his gallic clients had murdered him, for example after the defeat of Dyrrachium.

Just consider the way Cinna's memory has been tarnished, although he was the man who victoriously stood for granting really equal political rights for the new italian citizens. Cinna was also basically the man who led the first refoundation of the new roman Italy.

If Sulla's proscriptions mainly concerned "equites", it is in part because they targeted the new italian-roman elites that participated in the beginning of the process or legal romanization of Italy under the patronage of Cinna and his noble roman allies (most the Valerii Flacci, the Aemilii Lepidi, the Domitii Ahenobarbi, the Marcii Philippi, quite many Cornelii including Cornelii Scipiones and probably, although more stealthly, Cornelii Lentuli, and others, ...etc).
 
Here's an interesting what if: If Ptolemy's advisers decide to detain Pompey instead of kill him, and hand him over to Caesar, what does Caesar do then? It was sort of convenient for him that Pompey was taken care of without him having to deal with him.
 
Top