, to repair to Alexandria and appeal to Caesar, if it had been in her
power to do so; but she was beyond the confines of the country, with a
powerful army of her enemies ready to intercept her on any attempt to
enter or pass through it. She remained, therefore, at Pelusium,
uncertain what to do.

In the mean time, Caesar soon found himself in a somewhat embarrassing
situation at Alexandria. He had been accustomed, for many years, to the
possession and the exercise of the most absolute and despotic power,
wherever he might be; and now that Pompey, his great rival, was dead, he
considered himself the monarch and master of the world. He had not,
however, at Alexandria, any means sufficient to maintain and enforce
such pretensions, and yet he was not of a spirit to abate, on that
account, in the slightest degree, the advancing of them. He established
himself in the palaces of Alexandria as if he were himself the king. He
moved, in state, through the streets of the city, at the head of his
guards, and displaying the customary emblems of supreme authority used
at Rome. He claimed the six thousand talents which Ptolemy Auletes had
formerly promised him for procuring a treaty of alliance with Rome, and
he called upon Pothinus to pay the balance due. He said, moreover, that
by the will of Auletes the Roman people had been made the executor; and
that it devolved upon him as the Roman consul, and, consequently, the
representative of the Roman people, to assume that trust, and in the
discharge of it to settle the dispute between Ptolemy and Cleopatra, and
he called upon Ptolemy to prepare and lay before him a statement of his
claims, and the grounds on which he maintained his right to the throne
to the exclusion of Cleopatra.

On the other hand, Pothinus, who had been as little accustomed to
acknowledge a superior as Caesar, though his supremacy and domination had
been exercised on a somewhat humbler scale, was obstinate and
pertinacious in resisting all these demands, though the means and
methods which he resorted to were of a character corresponding to his
weak and ignoble mind. He fomented quarrels in the streets between the
Alexandrian populace and Caesar's soldiers. He thought that, as the
number of troops under Caesar's command in the city, and of vessels in
the port, was small, he could tease and worry the Romans with impunity,
though he had not the courage openly to attack them. He pretended to be
a friend, or, at least, n