Meanwhile in Egypt Caesar had now nothing further to do, and the Romans and Egyptians expected that he would immediately set sail and apply himself to the subjugation of Africa, and to the huge task of organisation which awaited him after the victory. But Caesar, faithful to his custom--wherever he found himself in the wide Empire--of finally regulating matters at once and in person, and firmly convinced that no resistance was to be expected either from the Roman garrison or from the court; being, moreover, in urgent pecuniary embarrassment, landed in Alexandria with the two amalgamated legions accompanying him to the number of thirty-two hundred men and eight hundred Celtic and German cavalry, took up his quarters in the royal palace, and proceeded to collect the necessary sums of money and to regulate the Egyptian succession, without allowing himself to be disturbed by the saucy remark of Pothinus that Caesar should not for such petty matters neglect his own so important affairs. In his dealings with the Egyptians he was just and even indulgent. Although the aid which they had given to Pompey justified the imposing of a war contribution, the exhausted land was spared from this; and, while the arrears of the sums stipulated for in B.C. 59, and since then only about half paid, were remitted, there was required merely a final payment of ten million denarii (two million dollars). The belligerent brother and sister were enjoined immediately to suspend hostilities, and were invited to have their dispute investigated and decided before the arbiter. They submitted; the royal boy was already in the palace and Cleopatra also presented herself there. Caesar adjudged the kingdom of Egypt, agreeably to the testament of Auletes, to the intermarried brother and sister Cleopatra and Ptolomoreus Dionysus, and further gave unasked the kingdom of Cyprus--cancelling the earlier act of annexation--as the appanage of the second-born of Egypt to the younger children of Auletes, Arsinoe and Ptolemy the younger. But a storm was secretly preparing. Alexandria was a cosmopolitan city as well as Rome, hardly inferior to the Italian capital in the number of its inhabitants, far superior to it in stirring commercial spirit, in skill of handicraft, in taste for science and art: in the citizens there was a lively sense of their own national importance, and, if there was no political sentiment, there was at any rate a turbulent spirit, which induced them to indulge in their street riots regularly and heartily. We may conceive their feeling when they saw the Roman general ruling in the palace of the Lagids, and their kings accepting the award of his tribunal. Pothinus and the boy-king, both, as may be conceived, very dissatisfied at once with the peremptory requisition of all debts and with the intervention in the throne-dispute which could only issue, as it did, in the favour of Cleopatra, sent--in order to pacify the Roman demands--the treasures of the temple and the