S10E03

Welcome to Echoes of History, the place to explore the rich stories from the past that bring the world of Assassin's Creed to life. I'm Matt Lewis. In recent episodes, we've pondered the riddle of the Sphinx of Giza and contemplated the puzzle of Ptolemy XIII. Today, I want to tackle the mystery of what might have been Julius Caesar's biggest military blunder, the Alexandrian War. It's not a simple story. It involves the most powerful leaders of the time, their complicated relationships and a messy power struggle between friends and family who hated, respected and maybe loved one another. It's a story full of twists and contradictions. Let's go back over two millennia to Ancient Egypt. The sky glowers over the capital city. What should be a clear Mediterranean evening is instead a billowing black cloud. The fierce orange of an uncontrolled blaze illuminates the tendrils of smoke as they stretch upwards to smother the stars. The seat of power in Egypt is on fire. From the relative safety of your small fishing boat in the harbour, you watch the skyline of the city with a morbid fascination. Somewhere in the smoke you think you see a tower fall into the inferno. Which grand monument will tumble next? There are many mighty buildings in the capital, testament to generations of pharaonic power, what took decades to construct long before your lifetime could tumble in mere seconds before your very eyes. You listen carefully over the roar of the flames is the cacophony of panic. Citizens strive to put out the fire or flee for their lives. Some of them will no doubt burn tonight. Many more may die in other ways. Far above the crackle of the bonfire, you can hear the harsh bark of military orders and the clash of metal. Your eyes follow the horizon beyond the limits of the city. There, barely visible in the evil glow, are the outlines of the army's camp. The tents are innumerable and spread over the delta further than your eyes can see. The enemy is coming force. Except they're not really the enemy, are they? Those tents belong to the Egyptians. And as an Egyptian born and bred, you should feel a pang of loyalty to the soldiers who lay siege to the capital. After all, you've always been a loyal subject of the pharaoh. Or pharaohs. It's not always clear how many kings you might have at any one time. They're a bit of an argumentative lot these Ptolemies. You've lost count of how many rulers to whom you've owed obeisance in your own short lifespan. Which sibling is in charge today? And are they an ally of Rome or not? That's quite important, really. The pharaohs are definitely in charge of Egypt. But, well, the Romans seem to have a big say in who is the pharaoh in charge. You guess that's what the fuss is about. You saw the legionaries marching into the city the other day. Or rather, you heard them. They do make a lot of noise with their horns and chain mail and heavy armour, stamping those sandals all over the streets of the city. Your city. Your city that's now in flames. Who will make it through the night? Will the innocent citizens survive? Will the buildings still stand? And who will be in charge tomorrow? Assassin's Creed Origins gives us a dramatic retelling of the Alexandrian War. When Julius Caesar found himself at the heart of a conflict, it didn't really have anything to do with. His glittering career almost ended during this war and its events would pave the way to his infamous assassination. To help me untie the knot of events and personalities that make up the Alexandrian War, I'm joined by Dr. Jen Gherish from the College of Charleston. Welcome to Echoes of History, Jen. It's fantastic to have you here. Thanks so much. I'm glad to be here. So to get us started, could you give us a little bit of context about what's going on here? We're talking about the Alexandrian War as a medieval historian. I might be thinking of Alexander the Great. I don't know. I don't even know what this is. I'm looking forward to finding out more. So Alexander the Great is the founder of the city of Alexandria. It's a great court city in Egypt. And Caesar did not mean to walk into a war there. It's actually sort of a chain of unrelated events that brings him to Egypt in the first place. He has been involved in a civil war with Pompey, who is one of the other kind of great warlords of the end of the Roman Republic. And after the battle at Pharsalus, Pompey fled to Alexandria. He had a pre-existing relationship with Ptolemy XII, who was the previous ruler of Alexandria. And so he thought, okay, I've just been defeated by Caesar, but I've got these allies here. Maybe I can go get some ships, get some money, kind of, you know, get this civil war going again. He arrives in Alexandria, and is immediately beheaded in the harbor. What a reception. Yeah, yeah, it's quite a, quite a welcome. His family is in the boat watching when it happens. It's actually a very gruesome episode. But the current ruler of Alexandria, Ptolemy XIII, he knows that Caesar won the war, and he doesn't want to attach himself to a loser. And so Pompey is executed. Caesar is in pursuit, arrives there about three days later, and that's how he ends up in Alexandria to begin with. Surprises Ptolemy by not thanking him and celebrating the death of his rival and his enemy. Our sources are unanimous about his reaction that he said, no, this was a consul of Rome. This was my son-in-law. He had been married to Caesar's daughter for a time. And in fact, young Ptolemy, I'm not very happy with you. And I hear that you and your sister are fighting about the throne. This is how he becomes involved in the conflict in Alexandria. Fascinating. So would beheading an enemy like that have been acceptable in an Egyptian context? Mike Ptolemy thought he was doing the right thing and that Caesar might have thanked him. But actually, what Caesar sees is an Egyptian person killing a significant Roman individual, and that's just not on. It's certainly he thought that it would be taken as a sign of respect, a sign of friendship. What he didn't understand was Caesar's sort of military and political philosophy of what we call in the Latin Clementia. It's exactly what it sounds like in English, this policy of clemency or mercy. Caesar had a very strong policy of pardoning his enemies. This was not a humanitarian gesture. I don't want to give that impression that he's like, hey, I just want to sell the Roman buddies again. Very, very pragmatic, right? Like if you owe Caesar your life, you are in his debt. And so he made people useful this way. He very much wanted the opportunity to be seen pardoning Pompey and to put Pompey in his debt. It was not just the the gruseness of the execution, but the fact that it robbed Caesar of the symbolic victory to go along with his actual military victory. Yeah, and I suppose as well it gave Caesar the space to think of it as almost an attack on Rome as well, which he would see as unacceptable too. Yes, whether he genuinely saw it that way or not, that's absolutely how he trains it. And that is part of his justification for entering into the war in Alexandria, is to treat it as an attack on the friendship between the Romans and the Alexandrians, which dates back quite a few generations. Right. So before we get into too much detail about the actual war, could we talk a little bit about Alexandria, the city? Where is it in modern day Egypt? And do we know what Alexandria looked like? Great question. So it's underneath modern Alexandria. So it's exactly the site that the modern city is on, founded at the end of the fourth century by Alexander. In his campaigns, he traveled to Egypt, decided that he was the son of Zeus Ammon, an Egyptian god. And so Alexandria is just a marvelously cosmopolitan city. It was, you know, the term melting pot is kind of overused, but it was very much a melting pot of native Egyptian population, of course, but also this Macedonian Greek population that Alexander sort of imported. So you end up with the sort of triangulation between the Egyptian people, who are not exclusively the lower classes, but much of the sort of economically lower class population. You have the Egyptian priestly elite, and then you have the Ptolemies, these Greek rulers who have been imposed. And so they negotiate something of a detente in which the priests are allowed to maintain religious authority, the Ptolemies, political, economic, military authority. And so what grows up is just an incredibly sort of vibrant and diverse city that comes home to a really important cultural institution, the Library of Alexandria, which it was a library. They had books there. They tried to get a copy of every book written in Greek and eventually in Latin. But it was also kind of like a modern university. It was a place where scholars would come research, pursue their own scholarly pursuits, using funding from the Ptolemies, and then to the benefit of the Ptolemies, right? This like royal patronage system. And so we get some incredible advances in literature, science, mathematics, medicine, all taking place there. So this is the city that Caesar has wandered into. The Ptolemaic dynasty lasted for almost 300 years. The first Ptolemy sort of came to power around 300 BC. Cleopatra is going to be the last of the line. She's going to die in 30 BC. So it's an incredibly long-lived dynasty in what we might today call a global city. And apart from the Library of Alexandria, do we know any of the kind of the main buildings there? Was there presumably some kind of palace complex? Were there any other big tourist hotspots? Yeah, so there is a palace complex. This is where Caesar is going to find himself besieged eventually when he ends up there. One of the great sort of physical landmarks on the Alexandrian landscape is the pharaoh's lighthouse. This is one of the original seven wonders of the world. We have no direct physical evidence of it that's quite long gone. I believe as late as maybe the 15th century, there were still at least some bricks and rubble from it. When it was constructed, it was sort of the most magnificent thing that had ever been seen protecting this very important harbor. I don't know as much about the folks who are doing underwater archaeology there. That's just a huge emerging field, but I believe they have done a lot to kind of reconstruct the two main harbors kind of on other side of the pharaoh's causeway. The harbor area would have been incredibly well developed because this is really kind of your central point for any sort of water transport. For other buildings, we have evidence for lots of construction during the Roman period where the new Roman government starts kind of importing all the features of a Roman city, you know, bath complex and things like that. It's hard to get a really good look at Alexandria because as I mentioned, the modern city is right on top of it in such a way that it would be very disruptive to the underlies. We've heard a couple of names already that people I think will recognize. We've talked a bit about Julius Caesar. We've talked about Cleopatra. We've heard kind of Ptolemy XIII. Are there any other kind of main players involved as we move into this period? And how are they all aligned? Who's on whose side? The Ptolemies are always going to give you a very complicated family dynamic. You can't talk about Ptolemies without talking about incest. It's just part of the game, these sort of royal marriages. So we've got four siblings who are in play here. We've mentioned the two elder siblings. Ptolemy XIII is on the throne. He's supposed to be sharing it with his sister Cleopatra VII. And of course, this is our famous Cleopatra. They have two younger siblings who are going to become involved. There's Ptolemy XIV. And then they have a sister named Arsinoe who is going to get involved in the war. And she has kind of an interesting storyline as well. And I think the other two people that are good to be aware of, Ptolemy XIII is a teenager at this point. So he is technically ruling, but he does have a regent who has been appointed to rule alongside him. And this is a eunuch named Pothinus who seems to have been very ambitious for himself. There's also the head of the armed forces named Achilles. He's also going to be involved. Interesting. So everybody's on everybody else's side, but their own side really. And there's lots of intrigue and it's all a little bit of a tangle. There are no sides except Caesar and Cleopatra kind of end up on a side together, but everyone else is just out for their own personal advancement. And I guess it takes sibling rivalry to a whole new level to marry a sibling and then fall out so spectacularly. Yeah, it really complicates the holidays. You're trying to seat people at the dinner table. You know, you never have to sit by who. It'd be a fly on the wall in one of those awkward family dinners. So Caesar kind of marches into the middle of all of this that's already going on, this dynamic between the Ptolemies in Egypt. We haven't quite mentioned kind of when he arrives. So when are we and how does his arrival? So we've heard he's not very happy about what happens to Pompey. When does he arrive and how does that reaction of his turn into war? So it's 48 BCE is the year that we are in. He'll be there from 48 until 47. The reception in the city is mixed. The idea of Roman occupation is something that provokes a lot of anxiety in any part of the Mediterranean world that has not yet been subjugated by the Romans. Egypt at this point is one of the last three independent kingdoms that is directly in the orbit of the Romans. It's not going to become a province until Cleopatra has died. But among at least the ruling elite, this cabal around Ptolemy the 13th, they're quite excited when he gets there because they think they're going to attach themselves to the new master of Rome. When they see that that's not the case, they are going to begin to prepare for war and beseech him. So it's a pretty quick change of attitude, which is something that our sources have a little bit to say about. We have a record of the war in Alexandria that was written by somebody who was there. We don't know who wrote it. It was certainly one of Caesar's officers that wrote it, but we don't know which one. But anyhow, this author makes a point to say, well, the Egyptians, they welcomed us at first, but then they turned on us because that's what Egyptians are like. They're shifty, they're disloyal. And so the way that our Roman sources present it, that's the reason that Caesar's reception changes so drastically is it's totally about the character of the Egyptian people. Unfortunately, we don't have sources from the other side. So all we have is kind of this xenophobic Roman interpretation. Yeah, but I mean, it's not hard to imagine. And anyway, I am imagining this, so please tell me if I'm wrong. But it's not hard to imagine the Egyptians also feeling like they have this long heritage that stretches way, way, way, way, way back beyond Rome. And all of a sudden, Rome is rising to power. And I can imagine a world in which Egypt would want to view themselves as almost an equal of Rome rather than risking becoming a province so that they expect Rome to be grateful that they've done them a favour, ridding them of Pompey who was causing trouble. And then they don't get the reaction they want, but they're not willing to just sort of bow down to Rome and be cowed by them. Yeah, it's interesting because there's this sort of blended identity of Alexandrians where the native Egyptian population has already been put through this. They've already been conquered and put under the rule of the Ptolemies who are Macedonian Greeks. Like these are, you know, sort of new kids on the block. And so you already have this, like difficult legacy of the Egyptians who exactly as you said, I mean, I don't want to speak in like super general terms of, you know, like Egyptian culture, but your listeners know what I mean. And I'm sorry for like oversimplifying, but Egyptian culture has existed for far longer than either the Greeks as we know them, or certainly the Romans. And so they've already been put through that once. Yeah, the threat of the Romans coming in and saying, we're in even newer culture, and we're going to impose ourselves on you is very offensive. It is sort of richly ironic that Ptolemy takes that stance, right? Because yes, the Ptolemies have been in power for over, you know, 250 years at this point. But they are, you know, they're no more native to Egypt than white settlers were to the United States. And I think one of my favorite facts, which I'm sure you know, I'm just going to show off that I know something about ancient history. One of the favorite facts I ever hear is that Cleopatra, so Cleopatra VII, the Cleopatra that we think about, lived closer to today than she did to the beginning of the Egyptian Empire, or the reign of the pharaohs. Yeah, I think that really puts it in perspective just how unnatural the Ptolemaic occupation of Egypt was. So then it also seems quite odd that Caesar ends up in Alexandria, kind of the capital of Egypt, and then he is besieged within the city, they lay siege to him within their own capital city. That seems slightly odd. How does he end up being trapped and besieged in Alexandria? So Caesar didn't come to Egypt looking for a war. He didn't pack for that. So he has come with his beach shorts and his sandals. And yeah, he brought his beach reeds. So yeah, he has arrived not prepared to engage in any sort of warfare. And the Alexandrian, the Ptolemaic army, is quite capable. The Ptolemies have never really sought to expand their kingdom, but they have been in nearly constant wars of defense around their borders. So kind of beating back the Seleucids, the Antigonids from the Macedonian dynasty. So even though they have never tried to invade mainland Europe or anything like that, they do have very capable forces. And so it happens sort of before Caesar can even react. He is going to get penned in there. He does send for reinforcements. That's what ultimately is going to turn the tide of the siege. He's going to get through deities, and then the kingdom of the Jews are going to send some reinforcements. But until then, he's really at just an incredible numbers disadvantage. But it is right. It's unusual to have somebody besieged, not in their own home city. That is part of the advantage of linking up with Cleopatra. He never would have survived without being able to call upon her resources and her local knowledge. And also quite surprisingly, I guess that we think of Caesar as one of the great generals of the ancient world. And here, there's some teenager from Alexandria has got the drop on him, you know, while he's unpacking his sandals and his towels, and looking for a sunbed. He suddenly besieged the city by a teenage boy. That must have been a bit of a slap in the face for Caesar too. It is. And I think this is this is a lot of why the historical record does not have a ton to say about this conflict. So we have the document I mentioned, the Alexandrian War history, written by someone who is there, it is very clearly written as a sort of apologetic making it sound like it wasn't as bad as it was. Every time he describes an Alexandrian advantage, so they win a sea battle, they retake part of the city, he's going to follow that up with, but all that did was make Caesar's men fight harder. So he's working overtime to make this seem like it wasn't a near catastrophe. It absolutely was. I don't think we really can even access how difficult Caesar's position was because our sources don't want to give us that. Our best later sources for this are two biographies of Caesar by Suetonius and Plutarch. They're really going to kind of downplay how close to disaster he came. There's also a historian named Cassius Dio. He's a little bit more balanced, but he's so much later that we don't know what he's basing his history on. For someone who is even today regarded as one of the greatest military geniuses of all time, he came perilously close to not making it out of Alexandria. So maybe not a surprise that Rome doesn't broadcast this massive issue that they've had with this teenage boy in Egypt. Yeah, that's one that you're gonna maybe try to relegate to a footnote if you can. Yeah, we can say it was difficult, so Caesar looks good, but we don't want to say it was actually really quite scary. This is very much rhetorical tactic of all ancient historians is you've got to make the enemy look just scary enough that you look bigger for conquering them, but you can't elevate them too high or else you risk lionizing them. It's a very fine needle that they try to thread. And I suppose if you reduced them too low as well, then you look like a bully and it wasn't a fair fight kind of thing, so there's no glory in that win. Precisely. So tricky to write about other people's wars in a way that makes them look great. It is, well that's why Caesar does it himself. He leaves nothing to chance regarding the Gallic War and the Civil War. We still possess today, and that's a lot of what my research is on, is on these narratives that he wrote about his own wars precisely to take that opportunity away from posterity. He really wanted to control that narrative. I think Caesar would have been tremendously successful in today's media ecosystem. He would not need a social media team. He would know exactly how to pitch his message. Have you ever wondered if the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were actually real? Or what made Alexander so great? Join me, Tristan Hughes, twice a week, every week on the Ancients from History hit, where I'm joined by leading academics, best-selling authors, and world-class archaeologists to shine a light on some of ancient history's most fascinating questions. Like, who built Stonehenge and why? What are the Dead Sea Scrops and why are they so valuable? And were the Spartan warriors really as formidable as the history books say? Join me, Tristan Hughes, twice a week, every week on the Ancients from History hit, wherever you get your podcasts. How does the siege play out then? Do we get a series of battles and a bit of to and fro? Does it look at any point? I mean, you said it seems at some points that maybe Rome might have lost, Caesar might have lost this. But how does it actually play out? Again, according to this anonymous officer who was there, there were a series of naval battles. It was largely fought within the harbours for control of the harbour. Very back and forth. The Alexandrians would win one, and then the Romans would be so inspired, motivated, they would win another. One advantage that the Egyptians had is they were able to increase the size of their fleet very rapidly. Obviously, Caesar can't be building new ships when he's trapped in the palace, but the Egyptians are able to kind of constantly refresh their supply of ships and sailors. This is the point at which the Library of Alexandria was pretty famously set on fire and much of what was contained there of literature, scientific resources, was lost. One of the ways that you sort of do naval warfare at this point is you try to burn each other's ships. And in an ancient city, there's a lot of flammable material. So at some point, a fire that Caesar's men set kind of took off from the ships into the harbour and burned down the library. And this, of course, played right into the narrative of Ptolemy, who could then say the Romans, the savage barbarous Romans, have now tried to take away the great cultural achievement of our city. Which is quite funny because it seems like that's what Roman normally saying about everybody else. You know, we're here to civilize and deal with the barbarians, and Egypt are now getting a chance to say that about Rome. Exactly. It's sort of subverting one of their normal tactics. And I think very unfairly, I'm always excited to kind of defend Caesar on this count, because Caesar was an incredible man of letters. He wrote epic poetry. He wrote a grammar book, which I know most people don't think is awesome, but I think is just brilliant. He wrote it while he was in Gaul. I mean, like this guy, he like goes, chops up barbarians all day and then goes to his tent at night and is like writing about, you know, the rules of nouns and verbs. Sometimes people frame it as like when Caesar burned the library and just I want to go on the record and say it was absolutely accidental. He never would have wished to do that. So that's my my Caesar apology for the day. Anyhow, so the lots of sea battles, the climactic battle of the conflict ends in the Delta of the Nile River, kind of in the mouth there in this battle. Ptolemy himself gets kind of backed into a quarter. He jumps off his boat to try to swim to safety, and he drowns in the river. And this is largely what changes the momentum of the war. By this point, Caesar's reinforcements have arrived and he's able to be freed. And so does the loss of Ptolemy kind of almost end it in the sense that both Caesar has reinforcements coming, but he also has Cleopatra on his side at this point. So he already has the Queen of Egypt. So with the king gone, does all of that kind of come together to mean that Caesar just wins? Does it just fizzle out? Heathers Very much so, right? Like they've lost their their leadership on that side. I should say that Arsenoe, the sister, is also kind of out there. She has her own troops around her and is trying to kind of wedge into this conflict. Her troops get defeated as well. So yes, Cleopatra is really the only plausible leader to install at this point. So it is in some ways kind of a default at that point. Paul And how much damage does this do to Alexandria? So we have this image of this, this beautiful city, incredible center of learning and wealth and commerce and prestige as the home of the pharaohs and things like that. The Library of Alexandria is burned, you know, something people still mourn to this day. How much more damage is done to the city of Alexandria during this siege? Heathers It's awful. The city suffers just incredible physical damage. You've also got incredible economic strain. Warfare is always expensive. But when the warfare is centered in the harbor, which is your connection to the world, it's going to make things very difficult. Egypt does have the advantage that it is where so much of the food is produced, that at the very least, we're not going to see a sort of catastrophic famine, the way we would if Rome got besieged. Italy does not produce its own food. It's not self-sustaining. If you lose your harbor in Rome, you're all going to starve. Fortunately for the Alexandrians, their food is coming from in country. So we don't see widespread plague or famine or some of those things. But certainly the physical city is ravaged. And the psychological effects of seeing up close warfare in your city, this is not something that the Alexandrians have experienced in living memory. It must have been truly awful, I would think, for just the average resident. Aidan And does the end of the siege kind of end the war? What does Caesar do once the siege of Alexandria is over? Sarah Yeah, so once he is freed from the siege, he places on the throne, through what authority? Don't ask me because at this point, Rome is not in control of Egypt. It's not a province, but sort of through his, what the Romans called auktoritos, his personal authority, installs Cleopatra. And then the little brother who we'd kind of forgotten about, marries them off to each other, makes them king and queen of Egypt. And then he's going to go off to Asia Minor, where Farnacke is who is a king over there has been sort of annoying the Romans for a while. So he's going to install Cleopatra and little bro, and then he's going to head off to the east to continue his war mind ring. Aidan Yeah. Do we see Caesar kind of taking any lessons from what happens to him in Alexandria, this idea that he was caught off guard, almost, you know, could have lost his life in Alexandria? Do we see him taking away lessons from that? Does it affect the way that he engages in other places? Sarah That's a great question. My gut reaction is that we don't get a chance to find out. So the timeline on this 48 is when he gets out of Alexandria, he dies in 44. So this is one of the things I think is easy to forget about Caesar because he means so large in the imagination. He's only the dictator like the sole ruler of Rome, for a little less than four years, and he spends almost none of that time in Rome, he's kind of doing these like mop up operations from the Civil War, chasing around Pompeian partisans who are in Spain, and they're in Africa. So I don't know that we actually get to see how he might have incorporated any lessons from this. Those all are very offensive wars. Of course, as we've seen, that doesn't mean he can't get trapped in a siege. And maybe that's why he's able to kind of dip in and out of Spain and Africa. But as with a lot about Caesar's career, we just don't get to see how it plays out, which is, I think, one of the, I want to say tragedies, one of the disappointing historical facts of his assassination is that we don't get to see what he does militarily. After all this, we don't get to see what kinds of reforms he actually wanted to implement as a dictator, we don't get to see what kind of autocrat he was going to be. Outside of Assassin's Creed origins, which is kind of set during this Alexandrian War, and then the 1963 famous Cleopatra film, which also features the Alexandrian War. It's not something that gets talked about too much. It hasn't made it into pop culture in the same way as we all know about Antony and Cleopatra, and we all know about Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, and we all know about those names that revolve around it. And maybe that's some of the fallout of it. Why do you think we know so little about it? Is it because Rome came so close to losing there that they didn't want it particularly well recorded? I do think that has a lot to do with it. What we conceive the ancient world as looking like is so dependent on what was handed down to us. There are reasons that we talk about Augustus, the first emperor of Rome, as just this tremendous leader who restored the city to its glory and brought peace. Why do we think that? Not because it's true. It definitely wasn't true. He was an autocrat. He was a dictator. He took away the freedom of the Roman people. They never had a real election again, but we don't remember him that way because he was the victor and he wrote a very different story in the same way. Yes, Caesar was the victor here, but this was not a glorious victory. Right away in the immediate aftermath when the apologetic text by the officer was written and then the next couple generations, it didn't contribute to the myth of Roman greatness in a very useful way. That gets repeated through the years. By the time we get to us in the 20th century, it's been, if not fully elided from the record, which hasn't been. It's been smoothed over and whitewashed so much. I don't think there's anything here for creative people to kind of latch onto. I will say that the HBO Rome series handles this episode really well. I would definitely recommend that to anybody who is interested in seeing this brought to life. I think they did a very nice job of it. I think the other thing that is sort of at play here is that the only person in all of history who's big enough to overshadow Caesar is Cleopatra. And so I think when you have them together in the story, it's the Cleopatra side of it that interests people more. So maybe people don't know about the battles that took place, but they might have heard the story about how they met that she was snuck into the palace wrapped up in tapestries because she's just such a big character. And so I think that's part of how Caesar gets kind of elided from his own story here. And that means it doesn't have a place in Roman history to the Romans themselves. And does the episode of the Alexandrian War have any kind of legacy in terms of the relationship between Rome and Egypt? Because Julius Caesar will kind of install Cleopatra and for all of their famous relationship, leave her there with her brother-husband to kind of run it while he's off doing other things. Do we see Rome sort of being more cautious of Egypt? Does Ptolemy the 13th in some way, despite the fact that he dies, does he contribute to the maintenance of Egyptian independence for a while? No, this is very much the beginning of the end for Egypt. What will happen from here? Caesar is assassinated in 44 and then Rome breaks out into another set of civil wars. Mark Antony comes kind of into the narrative here. So Mark Antony is one of the combatants trying to kind of fill Caesar's position after his death. He gets embroiled with Cleopatra very famously. And it's through these civil wars that Mark Antony and with him Egypt is conquered by Octavian, who is the future emperor Augustus. He defeats Antony. Antony kills himself. Octavian goes to Alexandria and he says to Cleopatra, hey, you had a really good relationship with my dad. He's Caesar's adopted son. He says you also conducted yourself admirably when Mark Antony was here. You have a long history of friendship with Rome. I would love it if you would come to Rome and perhaps live in a room in the palace that has a lock on it and you can't leave. And she's like, okay, well, absolutely not. And so this is when Cleopatra dies by suicide and Egypt is turned into a province. So from the death of Ptolemy XIII to that, it's less than 15 years. So no, it doesn't represent anything good for the Ptolemaic dynasty. Yeah. And I suppose that maybe that contributes to why it's not so well remembered as well, because it just doesn't have a lasting legacy. It doesn't really have an impact on the region, maybe. Maybe so. I think we remember the great sea battle at Actium, which is the final battle before Egypt is made a province. That's a useful story to the Romans because it does mark the transition into formal conquest. But yeah, it's an awkward episode. I was excited to have a chance to talk about it because we don't talk about it. But I think it's an important moment in the history of the region, even if it's hard to kind of fit nicely into our narratives. As someone who didn't know anything about it, it seems like there is so much of a dynamic going on between different parties. You've got siblings who are married fighting against each other, trying to get into bed with Rome, but different sides in Rome, Ptolemy is leaning towards Pompey, Cleopatra is leaning towards Julius Caesar, for whatever reason. So there is a lot going on in that story. And it's almost a shame that all we ever really get out of it is the idea that Caesar and Cleopatra is a great love story because there's so much more going on. I think that's a really easy story. And that's why it has been so appealing over the years. We see that for the first time in Plutarch, the biographer, who tells us, yes, Cleopatra was brought to Caesar, wrapped up in these tapestries. And the moment he laid eyes on her, he was bewitched, which is fine. I think that sort of reading says more about the way Romans viewed powerful women than it says anything else. But what I think gets lost in that, you know, Caesar and Cleopatra, a great love story, is that these were equal states people. Cleopatra was a formidable estates woman. She spoke seven languages. She had read the entire corpus of Greek and Roman literature. She was incredibly savvy and self-sufficient as a ruler. And I think Caesar admired that. And I think he feared that and saw the advantage to having that on his side rather than treating her as an antagonist. And that's part of it that I think has really been lost in the more romantic version of it. But that's such an appealing story. So I can see why it takes hold. Yeah, I was going to say, what you've just described, it's almost a shame to have lost all of that behind Caesar loves Cleopatra. That almost seems like the boring version of the story now. It is. And I think Antony also gets a very bad rap. And I blame Mr. Shakespeare for a lot of that. But he drew it right again from Plutarch, the biographer, you know, in that version of the story, Antony is just this drunken, degenerate, clueless guy gets put under the sway of the seductive woman. And again, I think what we miss there is that these were high level bilateral political agreements. And both sides end up looking like these sort of, you know, love drunk idiots when I think it was much more strategic than that. Yeah, yeah, much more interesting. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Jen. It's been an absolute pleasure to find out more about this episode, which seems like it deserves to be better known. So maybe people can go and find the way through it in Assassin's Creed Origins, or maybe enjoy HBO's Rome for a good sense of what goes on to you. So thank you so much for joining us, Jen. It's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you. Great. Thank you. I enjoyed the conversation. I hope you've enjoyed this episode of Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit. Next time, we're leaving the ancient world and going to the new world to look at some of the key figures and moments of the American Revolution. Don't forget to subscribe and follow Echoes of History wherever you get your podcast. And if you're enjoying it, you can leave us a review too. I'll see you next time among the Echoes of History.