Four years later, the Flute Player was dead.
In the shadowed halls of the Alexandrian palace in 51 BCE, eighteen-year-old Cleopatra stared down at the embalmed corpse of her father, Ptolemy XII. She did not weep. She was already hardened by the brutal math of her family's politics. Across the funerary bier stood the other half of her father's final will and testament: her new co-ruler and customary husband, Ptolemy XIII.
Visibly adolescent and completely dwarfed by the heavy, jewel-encrusted Hellenistic diadem resting on his brow, the ten-year-old looked less like a pharaoh and more like a child playing dress-up in adult regalia. His default expression was a petulant sneer, but his eyes constantly darted over his shoulder, seeking the approval of the towering advisors who shadowed him.
Looking at the boy, Cleopatra remembered exactly what had happened four years ago. She remembered the clash of Roman armor, the screaming, and the sight of her father ordering the execution of her older sister Berenice to secure this very throne. In the Ptolemaic dynasty, you did not share power. You either ruled, or you died.
And currently, there was barely a kingdom left to rule. The Nile had failed to flood, leaving the countryside starving. The royal treasury was a fiction, crushed beneath a staggering debt of 17.5 million drachmas owed to Roman creditors.
Cleopatra had no intention of letting a child navigate this crisis.
To bypass her brother, the teenage queen weaponized her staggering intellect. For nearly three hundred years, the Greek Ptolemies had ruled Egypt without ever bothering to learn the native language of their subjects. Cleopatra became the first to speak Egyptian.
In the marble reception halls of the palace, she began bypassing the Greek interpreters. She spoke directly to the native priests and the local commanders. By 49 BCE, she was minting coins with solely her own face and dropping her brother's name entirely from official state decrees. She was erasing him.
But Ptolemy XIII was not acting alone. The boy was heavily managed by a shadow cabinet led by Pothinus, the towering, smooth-faced eunuch regent who moved through the palace with unnerving silence.
Pothinus understood exactly what Cleopatra was doing. He also understood that a fiercely independent, highly educated eighteen-year-old queen could not be controlled. A ten-year-old boy, however, was a perfectly pliable puppet.
"She strips the diadem from your head without lifting a finger, my king," Pothinus murmured to the boy in the dim corridors of the palace, holding a wooden administrative tally stick in his elongated hands. "She feeds the native priests while the Greek citizens of Alexandria starve. The people are angry. They need only to be pointed in the right direction."
Cleopatra tried to erase her brother through sheer administrative brilliance, but Pothinus controlled the Alexandrian mob, so she was ultimately outmatched by brute force.
In the autumn of 48 BCE, Pothinus orchestrated a coup. He whipped the starving, riotous citizens of Alexandria into a frenzy against the young queen. Knowing the mob would drag her through the streets just as they had done to her ancestors, Cleopatra fled the city of marble and water in the dead of night. She escaped into the blistering heat of the Syrian desert, using her remaining wealth to hire a mercenary army of Arab tribesmen.
She was an exiled pharaoh, preparing to march back and kill her brother.
*
While the Ptolemaic siblings tore Egypt apart, the Mediterranean’s true superpower arrived on their shores, bringing a much larger civil war with him.
In the summer of 48 BCE, a Roman armada sailed into the Alexandrian harbor. Julius Caesar had come to Egypt.
At fifty-two, the Roman dictator was tall, meticulously groomed, and deeply vain. He ruthlessly combed his thinning hair forward from the crown of his head to mask a receding hairline, and he blatantly rejected traditional Roman military tailoring. Caesar wore a light-toned senatorial tunic with long, wrist-length fringed sleeves, belted highly loosely at his waist. He stood with a relaxed, eccentric posture, projecting the boundless, terrifying arrogance of a man who had just shattered the armies of his greatest rival, Pompey the Great.
Caesar had tracked Pompey across the sea, knowing the defeated general was seeking asylum in Egypt. Now, Caesar set up his command inside the Alexandrian royal palace, demanding an audience with the boy-king.
Ptolemy XIII and Pothinus arrived to greet the most powerful man in the world. They brought a wooden box.
Low afternoon light spilled across the marble floor of the reception hall as Pothinus stepped forward. He bowed his rigid frame, his face a mask of perfectly calculated sycophancy.
"Rome has bled enough, Imperator," Pothinus said, his high, smooth voice echoing in the vast chamber. "Our king, in his great wisdom, knew you sought your enemy. He knew you sought an end to your civil war. We found Pompey at Pelusium. We have spared you the trouble of the execution."
Pothinus unlatched the heavy wooden lid and tilted the box forward.
Inside rested the severed, embalmed head of Pompey the Great, along with his heavy gold signet ring. The skin was leathery from the preserving salts, the hair stiff with dried blood.
Pothinus and the boy-king waited for the Roman dictator to smile. They expected gold. They expected gratitude. They fundamentally misunderstood Roman honor.
Caesar stared into the box. The eccentric, relaxed posture vanished. The dictator’s dark eyes widened, and the color drained from his famously fair complexion. Pompey had been his rival, yes. But Pompey was also a Roman Consul. He was a hero of the Republic. And years ago, he had been Caesar's son-in-law, the husband of Caesar's beloved, deceased daughter.
To see a titan of Rome butchered like a stray dog by a foreign child and a scheming eunuch broke something in the hardened warlord.
Caesar turned his face away from the box. To the absolute horror of the Egyptian court, the dictator began to weep.
"Get it out of my sight," Caesar choked, his voice suddenly sharp as rusted iron. He wiped his face, turning his piercing gaze back upon Pothinus and the trembling ten-year-old pharaoh. The grief instantly hardened into supreme, uncompromising authority.
"Your father owed Rome a debt of seventeen million drachmas," Caesar snapped, his loose sleeves whipping as he gestured to his heavily armed legionaries. "I am calling the debt due. You will disband your armies. And you will submit to my arbitration. Nobody leaves this city."
The political landscape had violently shifted. Caesar immediately occupied the royal palace, locking the gates and garrisoning his four thousand elite Roman legionaries along the walls. Ptolemy XIII and Pothinus found themselves essentially held hostage in their own home.
And miles away, trapped in the harsh dust of the Syrian border, Cleopatra received the news.
She had lost her capital. She was severely outnumbered by her brother's forces, who controlled the streets of Alexandria and had strict orders to assassinate her on sight. And the one man who possessed the military might to give her back her throne was currently barricaded inside the most heavily guarded fortress in the city.
She did not have a fleet. She did not have the numbers for a siege.
How does an exiled queen get past an army to reach him?