Meanwhile the Pompeian army was gathering in northern Greece, and the senators were breathing death and damnation against Cæsar. The final struggle on the Albanian coast and in Thessaly, which culminated in the great battle of Pharsalus (48 B.C.), decided the fate of the world. The troops were fairly equal, if numbers and training are taken into account; in numbers alone Cæsar was far inferior. But Cæsar’s men had extraordinary devotion to their general, as he had to his beloved legions. Never was there completer confidence between an army and its leader than between Cæsar and his veterans. He could be merciless in discipline. Once he had to decimate the Ninth Legion, but he could move his grim legionaries to tears by a reproach. He shared all their labours, he starved with them, and marched those prodigious forced marches by their side. They trusted in his generalship, and they were not disappointed. Pompeius showed, when at last he roused himself, that he too had not forgotten the military art. It was a battle of giants; Pompeius the more orthodox tactician, Cæsar incredibly bold, rapid, and far-seeing. More than once it was touch and go. Cæsar had terrible difficulties to face, above all in the necessity of transporting his army across the wintry Adriatic in face of the enemy when he had no fleet. The feat was accomplished by sheer audacity, and then he had to face and contain a larger army, thoroughly well prepared and supplied, with no base and no communications for his own men. He actually tried to fling a line of earthworks round the Pompeian army while his own men were starving. Yet it was by generalship that the battle of Pharsalus was won. Pompeius fled to Egypt for refuge, and was murdered there by treacherous Alexandrians and renegade Romans. Cæsar, who had received the submission of the whole provincial world with the exception of King Juba’s African realm, followed Pompeius to Egypt, and on landing was presented with his rival’s head. In Alexandria itself Cæsar had to face one of the most serious crises of his life. For six months he held the royal palace against a host of infuriated Orientals. In the palace was Cleopatra, the wife and sister of the reigning Ptolemy, and then a brilliant and fascinating young woman of twenty. Let us believe that she was beautiful, and that the portrait-painters and coin-engravers of her day were incompetent or disloyal.[18] But if rumour spoke truly, Cæsar was by no means exclusive in his devotion to female charms. Her son was named Cæsarion.