Caesarion (Rome) - Historical and Cultural Background

Historical and Cultural Background

• The newsreader lists four noblemen recently returned from Greece who have received Caesar's pardon. With the exception of Cicero, all of them - Brutus, Cassius, and Casca - would take part in the plot to assassinate Caesar.
• At the time of Caesar's arrival in Egypt, it was undergoing a dynastic dispute among the various siblings of the Ptolemaic Dynasty. Ptolemy XIII (who was probably being manipulated by his regent Pothinus), Arsinoe IV and Cleopatra VII, were all contesting for rulership.
• The scene where Pompey's head is presented to Caesar is based on an account from Plutarch's Life of Pompey. In similar fashion, Caesar professed to be disgusted by Pompey's murder and wept for the death of his old colleague.
• Caesar refers to the enormous debt incurred by Ptolemy and Cleopatra's father, Ptolemy XII Auletes, when he first came to the throne, of some 6,000 gold talents. To shore up his throne's stability, Auletes paid an enormous bribe to the Roman Senate, in exchange for a formal declaration that he was a Friend and Ally of Rome. In effect, he was bribing the Senate (a large portion of the bribe going straight into Pompey and Caesar's pockets) to endorse his legitimacy as King, and implicitly pledge not to annex the country as another Roman province. Ptolemy was forced to realize this immediate sum by borrowing it from Roman moneylenders, most prominently Gaius Rabirius Postumus, who later also enjoyed an appointment as Egypt's finance minister.
  • Ptolemy expected to pay back the loan (estimated at anywhere between one half or the whole of Egypt's gross national product for a year) with tax revenues from Egypt, but these taxes proved so unpopular that Ptolemy was ousted from his throne, in favor of his daughter, Berenice. Thereafter, Ptolemy paid another, even larger bribe of ten thousand talents, to Pompey's lieutenant, Aulus Gabinius, to lead a Roman army to Egypt to restore him to the throne. It is unclear whether the money Caesar is demanding from Pothinus and Ptolemy includes this latter sum.
• Caesar calculates the total that Egypt owes as equal to "17 thousand thousand drachma." According to the historical notes, a drachma is roughly equal to one denarius. The total is therefore equal to seventeen million denarii, or sixty-eight million sestercii (for a discussion of the relative value of Roman coinage, see "How Titus Pullo Brought Down the Republic").
• The god that Titus Pullo finds so unimpressive, the "bastard with a dog's head on him", is possibly the Egyptian god Anubis (since he is not the only god with a dog's head but the best known). The bit of statuary that Lucius Vorenus is sharpening his sword on while he and Pullo wait, wears the "Double Crown" of Upper and Lower Egypt. This means that it is a depiction of a Pharaoh — presumably a fragment of some long-lost royal monument.
• The scenes where Cleopatra schemes to give birth to "Caesar"'s child by seducing Vorenus or Pullo, gives color to the historical debate about who Caesarion's true father was. After he was born, Cleopatra openly declared that he was Caesar's child, while several of her political enemies, including Octavian, sought to prove otherwise. According to historian Michael Grant, there is at least one potent argument in favor of each side:
  • On the one hand, the portrayal of Cleopatra as promiscuous or sexually voracious is an invention of later propaganda (much of it from Octavian), and there is no hard evidence that she had relations with any man other than Caesar or Mark Antony.
  • On the other hand, there is speculation that Caesar was infertile - a theory reinforced by the fact that, in the course of three marriages and numerous liaisons with other women, he had produced only one child, his daughter Julia - and thus could not have fathered Caesarion.
  • The series' portrayal of Cleopatra walks a middle path between the two accounts: she is very experienced with sex, and clearly enjoys it, but only seduces men who can further her political aims.
• The scene where Cleopatra is smuggled into Alexandria rolled up in a carpet is, likewise, based on a story that that was how she first met Caesar, while he was in the royal palace, surrounded by Ptolemy's guards.
  • The beginning somewhat resembles Handel's opera Giulio Cesare.
• The enmity between Antony and Cicero was long-standing;
  • according to the historical notes accompanying the episode, Cicero despised Antony (a man of aristocratic birth) for his vulgarity, while Antony was offended that Cicero (a novus homo who had achieved election to the Senate from humble origins) was such a snob.
  • Cicero had been consul during the Catiline Conspiracy, and had a number of suspected conspirators arrested and executed without trial, including Antony's stepfather, whom Antony had great affection for.
  • Years later, after Caesar's assassination, Antony and Octavian proscribed a number of enemies, and Cicero's was one of the first names Antony put down. Antony made good on the threat spoken in the episode: one of Cicero's hands was cut off and nailed to a monument in the forum.
• Antony has good reason to boast about Caesar's victory in Alexandria: it was one of the narrowest victories of his military career, won with barely 4,000 men against approximately 21,000 commanded by Achillas.