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society,’ writes the Roman biographer Plutarch, he forced the boy-king Ptolemy within days of Cleopatra’s dramatic entrance to reconcile with his sister, ordering ‘that she should rule as his colleague in the kingdom’. Cleopatra then promptly threw a party to celebrate which is where Caesar first heard about the Egyptians’ solar calendar, according to Lucan.
    This seems an unlikely venue for an event that would literally reorder time for millions of people. Indeed, Lucan tells us Cleopatra hardly had calendar making on her mind the night of the soiree. Dressed in heavy strands of pearls, ‘her white breasts . . . revealed by the fabric of Sidon’, and her hair wrapped in wreaths of roses, she seemed far more intent on dazzling her lover with the riches and exotica of Egypt: ‘birds and beasts’ served on gold platters, crystal ewers filled with Nile water for their hands, and ‘wine . . . poured into great jewelled goblets’.
    Still, Eros and fine food were not all that the young queen and her court offered to this uncommonly curious Roman conqueror. ‘When sated,’ says Lucan, Caesar began discoursing with a scholar attached to the royal court, an elderly wise man named Acoreus, ‘who lay, dressed in his linen robe, upon the highest seat.’ Caesar asked questions about the source of the Nile, the history of Egypt and about the country’s calendar. It was during this conversation that Caesar heard about Egypt’s reliance on the sun for its year--measured by the annual rise of Sirius in the eastern sky and by the flooding of the Nile, which, the Alexandrian sage said, ‘does not arouse its water before the shining of the Dog-star.’
    No other ancient source that I am aware of describes this scene or mentions the sagacious Acoreus, although something like this undoubtedly happened to inform Caesar about the Egyptian system for measuring time. Later he would take this new knowledge back to Rome, though for the moment he seemed in no rush to leave.
     
    Caesar’s liaison with Cleopatra was also an infatuation with Egypt itself. Already very ancient even in Caesar’s day, this was a country of fantastic wealth and mystery--and, during the final years of the Ptolemaic dynasty, of a decadence and sensuality very foreign to a Roman raised in the austerity of the republic. But Alexandria was also a feast for the mind, a city that even in its decline as a regional power remained one of history’s premier centres of learning and sophistication. For three centuries it had attracted the greatest minds of the far-flung Hellenistic world, who created a milieu of intellectualism that fostered a breath-taking progression of discoveries--including ground-breaking work on time and the calendar.
    Founded by Alexander the Great when he conquered Egypt in 332 BC, the city was seized after Alexander’s death by Ptolemy, one of his key generals. Declaring himself king of Egypt in 305 BC, Ptolemy I lavished the Nile Valley’s wealth on his new capital, creating a haven for scholars who came from as far away as India, which was briefly connected to the Hellenistic world after Alexander’s conquests. The city quickly expanded to at least 150,000 people, one of the largest in the ancient world, as Ptolemy and his dynasty filled the city with magnificent palaces, temples, gymnasiums, museums and amphitheatres. Sometime around 307 BC the Athenian writer and statesman Demetrius of Phaleron inspired Ptolemy I to lay the foundations for the great library of Alexandria, which eventually housed hundreds of thousands of papyrus scrolls, including Aristotle’s personal library. A generation later Ptolemy II (308--246 BC) built the famed Pharos lighthouse, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, towering four hundred feet and emitting a blazing fire signal that could be seen for miles offshore.
    Luminaries during Alexandria’s golden age included Apollonius of Rhodes, author of the Argonantica , about Jason’s quest for the golden