When Cleopatra arrived, she found that the avenues of approach to Caesar’s quarters were all in possession of her enemies, so that, in attempting to join him, she incurred danger of falling into their hands as a prisoner.  She resorted to a stratagem, as the story is, to gain a secret admission.  They rolled her up in a sort of bale of bedding or carpeting, and she was carried in in this way on the back of a man, through the guards, who might otherwise have intercepted her.  Caesar was very much pleased with this device, and with the successful result of it.  Cleopatra, too, was young and beautiful, and Caesar immediately conceived a strong but guilty attachment to her, which she readily returned.  Caesar espoused her cause, and decided that she and Ptolemy should jointly occupy the throne.

[Sidenote:  Resistance of Ptolemy.] [Sidenote:  The Alexandrine war.]

Ptolemy and his partisans were determined not to submit to this award.  The consequence was, a violent and protracted war.  Ptolemy was not only incensed at being deprived of what he considered his just right to the realm, he was also half distracted at the thought of his sister’s disgraceful connection with Caesar.  His excitement and distress, and the exertions and efforts to which they aroused him, awakened a strong sympathy in his cause among the people, and Caesar found himself involved in a very serious contest, in which his own life was brought repeatedly into the most imminent danger, and which seriously threatened the total destruction of his power.  He, however, braved all the difficulty and dangers, and recklessly persisted in the course he had taken, under the influence of the infatuation in which his attachment to Cleopatra held him, as by a spell.

[Sidenote:  The Pharos.] [Sidenote:  Great splendor of the Pharos.]

The war in which Caesar was thus involved by his efforts to give Cleopatra a seat with her brother on the Egyptian throne, is called in history the Alexandrine war.  It was marked by many strange and romantic incidents.  There was a light-house, called the Pharos, on a small island opposite the harbor of Alexandria, and it was so famed, both on account of the great magnificence of the edifice itself, and also on account of its position at the entrance to the greatest commercial port in the world, that it has given its name, as a generic appellation, to all other structures of the kind—­any light-house being now called a Pharos, just as any serious difficulty is called a Gordian knot.  The Pharos was a lofty tower—­the accounts say that it was five hundred feet in height, which would be an enormous elevation for such a structure—­and in a lantern at the top a brilliant light was kept constantly burning, which could be seen over the water for a hundred miles.  The tower was built in several successive stories, each being ornamented with balustrades, galleries, and columns, so that the splendor of the architecture by day rivaled the brilliancy of the