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longer corresponded with the appropriate seasons.--Suetonius, AD 96
     
    As night fell, a small ship slipped under the sea chain defending Alexandria’s harbour, raised by guards bribed to let it pass. The boat on this balmy October evening in 48 BC stole quietly through the black waters, past quays and warehouses full of grain and treasure. Skirting the fleets of Egyptian and Roman warships, the boat carried a cargo that would not only transform two great empires, but lead to a revolution in measuring time that is directly responsible for calendars hanging on walls from present-day St Louis to Singapore.
    After the boat landed unnoticed on a stone wharf, a Sicilian named Apollodorus leapt ashore, carefully lifting onto his back a rolled-up coverlet tied at each end. Apollodorus carried his load past Roman sentinels, explaining by the light of torches that he bore a gift for the recently arrived Julius Caesar, dictator of Rome. Led to the general’s apartment in Alexandria’s royal palace, Apollodorus greeted Caesar by unfurling the coverlet, which concealed a woman.
    She can hardly have appeared dignified emerging from a bedroll. Yet as Cleopatra rose in front of the astonished Caesar, she managed to impress him profoundly with her majesty and sexual allure--and also with the pathos of a woman who desperately needed help from the most powerful man in the Western world.
    Cleopatra’s trouble had begun a few months earlier when her teenaged brother and co-ruler, Ptolemy XIII, staged a palace coup with his advisors and forced her to flee the city. Escaping to Syria, she had recently returned to Egypt at the head of a small army, determined to wrest back her throne--a cause she hoped to convince the newly arrived Caesar to embrace.
    Poets and romantics tell us Caesar was smitten from the moment he saw Cleopatra. She was twenty-two years old and a queen since her father, Ptolemy XII, had died three years earlier, leaving her and her then ten-year-old brother to jointly rule in the Egyptian fashion. Cunning, brilliant and erotic, Cleopatra spoke several languages, was highly educated in science and literature, and was possessed of an insatiable ambition that amused and captivated the master of the Roman world. The Roman poet Lucan (AD 39-65) says the general and the queen made love that very night.
    Caesar was fifty-two years old at the time. ‘Tall, fair and well-built,’ according to the Roman historian Suetonius, but also balding and epileptic, he was on the verge of becoming the undisputed dictator of an empire that had just conquered virtually the entire Mediterranean world and parts beyond. Caesar himself had seized Gaul in a series of masterly victories ten years earlier. Since then he had been locked in a wrenching civil war against another brilliant general and conqueror, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus--Pompey for short. Caesar had just arrived in Egypt in hot pursuit of Pompey, who fled there after a crushing defeat by Caesar in the Battle of Pharsalus in central Greece. Arriving three days after Pompey, Caesar had been welcomed off the coast of Alexandria with a grisly gift from the boy-king Ptolemy and his advisors: General Pompey’s embalmed head wrapped in Egyptian linen. A soldier hired by Ptolemy’s court had stabbed the great general in the back as he stepped off his boat. Caesar reportedly wept at the spectre of this great Roman being assassinated by foreigners. But his sorrow was tempered with relief if not a carefully concealed elation, for the empire was now his.
    With Pompey dead, Caesar should have left for Rome to consolidate his victory. Instead he stayed to settle the conflict in Egypt, a country still nominally independent but in thrall to Rome, and to be with Cleopatra. The latest in a never-ending string of mistresses--Caesar’s troops sang of his conquests in battle and in bed when they celebrated his triumphs--Cleopatra impacted both his libido and his politics. ‘Overcome by the charm of her