12-19-2004, 01:44 AM
A few observations on what others have said so far:<br>
We can't say for certain that Cleopatra would have been ritually strangled at the end like a male ruler. After all, Queen Zenobia of Palmyra walked in Aurelian's triumph and was given a comfortable retirement at Tibur. Granted, that was more than three centuries later, but the late Romans behaved scarcely more savagely than the early ones.<br>
I doubt that Caesar could have had imperial ambitions for Caesarion. It is generally agreed that the Romans would never have stood for the son of an Egyptian queen as their ruler, and in any case there was no precedent for a dictator's son inheriting the dictatorship. Augustus was at great pains throughout his life to avoid royal titles for himself, while weilding the power in practice. Caesar most certainly planned to put Caesarion on the throne of Egypt, though, and being king of the richest country in the world wasn't too shabby.<br>
As for the way the assassin's plot went awry, hey, the guys were going to do the bloody deed, slay the tyrant, and naturally the people would pelt them with flowers in humble gratitude. Nothing wrong with that sort of reasoning. Perle, Wolfowitz an Rumsfled, our modern tyrannicides, reasoned the same way. <p></p><i></i>
We can't say for certain that Cleopatra would have been ritually strangled at the end like a male ruler. After all, Queen Zenobia of Palmyra walked in Aurelian's triumph and was given a comfortable retirement at Tibur. Granted, that was more than three centuries later, but the late Romans behaved scarcely more savagely than the early ones.<br>
I doubt that Caesar could have had imperial ambitions for Caesarion. It is generally agreed that the Romans would never have stood for the son of an Egyptian queen as their ruler, and in any case there was no precedent for a dictator's son inheriting the dictatorship. Augustus was at great pains throughout his life to avoid royal titles for himself, while weilding the power in practice. Caesar most certainly planned to put Caesarion on the throne of Egypt, though, and being king of the richest country in the world wasn't too shabby.<br>
As for the way the assassin's plot went awry, hey, the guys were going to do the bloody deed, slay the tyrant, and naturally the people would pelt them with flowers in humble gratitude. Nothing wrong with that sort of reasoning. Perle, Wolfowitz an Rumsfled, our modern tyrannicides, reasoned the same way. <p></p><i></i>
