Also early on occurred the burning of the warehouses along the harbor, which has since grown into the legend that Caesar burned the whole of the great Library. In fact, when Caesar's men set fire to a number of Egyptian ships anchored in the great harbor, so that the vessels could not later be seized and used against them, the fire spread to some buildings on the waterfront. Among these was a warehouse used by the Library, in which great quantities of papyrus were stored along with an uncertain number of recently acquired or copied scrolls that had not yet been filed in the Library. As many as forty thousand volumes may have been destroyed, but the Library itself was unscathed. Still, Cleopatra gave Caesar much grief about the destruction, and Caesar himself bitterly regretted it, if only because it gave the Egyptians further cause to label him a destroyer and a barbarian.

But the low point of the war, for Caesar, was the day he lost his new purple cape.

Caesar had always worn a blood red cape, proud of the fact that friends and foes alike could easily spot him in the thick of battle. It was Cleopatra who gave Caesar a new cape of a different hue, an equally conspicuous, very regal shade of purple. A few Romans grumbled at this innovation-were they fighting for a consul or a king?-but many appeared to welcome it. Caesar wore the cape on the day he sailed across the harbor with several hundred troops and laid siege to the causeway leading out to the Pharos lighthouse. His object was to gain control of the arch in the causeway that allowed Egyptian ships to attack from the Eunostos Harbor.

The battle went well at first; the island of Pharos itself was seized, as was the causeway, and Caesar's men set about filling the mouth of the tunnel with stones. But the Alexandrians received reinforcements, and the tide of the battle turned. Caesar's men panicked and fled. Caesar himself was forced to retreat to his ship, which was drawn alongside the causeway. So many soldiers streamed onto the ship that it began to founder. Wearing his purple cape, Caesar jumped from the deck and swam toward another ship farther out in the harbor. The heavy folds of the sodden cape threatened to drag him under; struggling in the choppy waves, barely keeping his head above water, he managed to extricate himself from the garment, and for a while he swam with it held between his teeth, for he hated to lose the queen's gift. But in the end the cape slipped from his teeth, and he abandoned it.

The day was a disaster for Caesar. The Alexandrians reclaimed the archway and removed the stones that blocked it; more than eight hundred of Caesar's men were killed by the enemy or drowned, including all those aboard his lost ship; and the triumphant Alexandrians managed to fish his new purple cape out of the water. On the causeway, they danced and shouted and waved the cape like a flag of triumph as Caesar dragged himself sputtering and half-drowned aboard the ship and made an ignominious retreat. Later the Alexandrians attached the tattered, filthy cape to a pole, like a captured banner, and for the rest of the war, they flaunted it on every possible occasion as an insult to Caesar's dignity.

The war continued for months. As in all wars, there were lulls in the fighting as each side regrouped. Caesar used such occasions to consult the many scholars and philosophers who found themselves confined to the precincts of the city under his control, which included the famous Library and the adjacent Museum, the repository of so much of the world's mathematical and astronomical learning. It was during one such lull that Caesar set about devising a new, more reliable calendar, for the venerable Roman calendar had in recent years grown out of step with the actual seasons, so that harvest festivals were taking place long before the actual harvests, and spring holidays occurred while Romans shivered. The world's most esteemed scholars were consulted when Caesar devised the new calendar, and if they did their job well, it may be that the calendar, like the movements of the stars and planets, will outlast Rome itself.

At last the balance between the warring sides was altered by the approach of Caesar's ally, King Mithridates of Pergamum, who arrived at the Egyptian frontier at the head of an army composed of Jewish, Arabian, and Syrian levies. Mithridates took Pelusium, then marched south, toward the apex of the Nile Delta. Hearing of Mithridates's advance, King Ptolemy dispatched a force to intercept him; when this Egyptian force was annihilated, Ptolemy set out himself to do battle with the new invaders. Meanwhile, Caesar, in regular communication with Mithri-dates, assembled his best troops, left a contingent to hold his position in the city, and sailed out of the harbor. He landed at a point west of Alexandria and circled around Ptolemy's army, marching at such a quick pace that he passed the king and joined Mithridates at the Nile before Ptolemy arrived. Thus the stage was set for the decisive battle of the Alexandrian War, which would not take place in Alexandria, but in the very heart of Egypt on the banks of the great river.

I was not there, but Meto was. Through his eyes I witnessed the end of King Ptolemy.

Ptolemy's army occupied a small village near the river, situated on a hill with a canal on one side to act as a moat; the Egyptians also built earthen ramparts and dug trenches lined with sharp pickets. The position appeared unassailable; but Caesar's men forded the canal by cutting down trees and filling the channel until a makeshift bridge was created, while others of his men swam downstream and emerged on the far side of the village, so that Ptolemy's stronghold was encircled. Still, the fortifications appeared impenetrable until Caesar's scouts noticed a poorly guarded area where the hill upon which the village stood was steepest; apparently the Egyptians assumed the sheerness of the cliff was itself adequate defense. Against that point Caesar launched a sudden and powerful assault, and when the high point was taken, his men went streaming down through the village, driving the Egyptians before them in a panic. The Egyptians were trapped by their own fortifications, falling from the walls, piling atop one another in the trenches, and impaling themselves on the pickets. Those who managed to escape the village faced the Roman soldiers who encircled them, and the army of Ptolemy was slaughtered from within and without.

King Ptolemy, apprised of the disaster as it unfolded, managed to flee by a small boat to take refuge on a royal barge in the Nile. The captain lifted anchor, dipped oars, and began to flee the scene of battle. Meanwhile, hundreds of desperate Egyptian soldiers threw down their weapons, stripped off their armor, and dove into the river. In a great, churning mass they converged on the royal barge and attempted to clamber aboard. Those already on the boat welcomed the first newcomers, then saw that they would quickly be overwhelmed and began to try to fight off their comrades, slashing at them with swords, jabbing them with spears, and firing arrows at those farther off.

The scene was horrific. The banks of the Nile echoed with the screams of the dying and the pleas of the living. The water around the barge grew thick with corpses. But those in the water greatly outnumbered those on the barge, and despite the slaughter, more and more of them managed to climb aboard, until at last the vessel was overloaded. The starboard side was submerged; the opposite side rose into the air. As if tipped by the hand of a Titan, the great barge capsized, emptying its occupants into the water and falling upside down onto the horde of swimmers who had attempted to board her. For a brief moment, the underside of the barge remained visible above the water, and a few dazed, desperate Egyptians managed to climb aboard; then the vessel vanished completely, swallowed by the river.