Cleopatra's Kidnappers

In 1961, Norman Schwarzkopf, then a young U.S. Army officer, attended an advanced training course at Fort Benning, Georgia. While in that course, he wrote an essay that won him an award from the army. Titled “The Battered Helmet,” it told of a weary, mud-splattered general entering his tent after a battle and tossing his battered helmet onto the cot in the corner. As the essay unfolded, the reader came to realize that the author was not talking about a modern-day general or a contemporary battle, but was referring instead to Julius Caesar following his defeat of Pompey the Great at the Battle of Pharsalus in 48 B.C. It was a highly original treatise on the fact that while times have changed, the basic human element in war has not.

Schwarzkopf, later a famous general himself as commander of coalition forces in the 1991 Gulf War (Operation Desert Storm), made one or two small errors in his 1961 essay. For instance, the day of the Battle of Pharsalus was hot and dry, so Caesar could not have been wearing mud-splattered boots. But Norman Schwarzkopf made a much more fundamental error, an error frequently made down through the ages since the time of Caesar—he described Pompey as the “rebel” general in the affair. In reality, Julius Caesar was the rebel—a rebel who went to war against his own country and was declared an enemy of the state.

To put the civil war initiated by Julius Caesar in a modern context, what he did in 49 B.C. when he crossed the Rubicon River and invaded Italy was the equivalent of General Schwarzkopf in 1991 returning from commanding coalition forces in the Persian Gulf and invading the United States with part of his army, intent on deposing President George H. W. Bush and overthrowing Congress. The modern counterpart of Caesar’s chief military opponent, Pompey the Great, would have been General Colin Powell, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Caesar’s defeat of Pompey at Pharsalus in Greece in 48 B.C. was like General Schwarzkopf defeating General Powell at a battle in Florida, after which Powell would have fled to Mexico, just as Pompey fled to Egypt. And just as Caesar arrived in Egypt in search of Pompey, and became entangled in a prolonged conflict in Alexandria, General Schwarzkopf would have reached Mexico with a small force and occupied part of Mexico City. And there he would have taken the four leading members of the ruling Mexican dynasty hostage. In Caesar’s case, in Egypt, the kidnap victims were the siblings Cleopatra, Ptolemy, Arsinoe, and the younger Ptolemy.

It is on Egypt in 48-47 B.C. that this book focuses, as the rebel Caesar arrived in pursuit of Pompey, to eliminate his rival and become ruler of the Roman world. This is the story of Caesar’s life-and-death struggles in Egypt; of months of vicious street fighting that culminated in an all-out battle beside the Nile River; and of the short, bloody Battle of Zela immediately after, in Turkey. It’s also the story of Caesar’s romance with Cleopatra, a girl young enough to be his daughter who made a career of attaching herself to Roman strongmen.

Most importantly, this is the story of the nine hundred Spanish legionaries of the 6th Legion who kidnapped Cleopatra and led the way for Caesar in three successive battles, nine hundred men who made it possible for Caesar to come, to see, and to conquer. Shortly before, these soldiers had been members of a defeated army, and stood on the brink of annihilation as the troops of Mark Antony surrounded them. Yet, within months, these few men of the 6th Legion were to prove so invincible it was as if they were clad in iron, as they helped Julius Caesar go from rebel general and from a declared enemy of the state to ruler of the Roman world.