Did Caesar and Cleopatra have a child?

A son for the Ptolemies

Caesar reached Alexandria in 48 BC on Pompey’s trail, stayed to settle Egypt’s royal quarrel and won the war that followed, with Cleopatra on his side. In 47 BC he lingered with her on the Nile before leaving for a war in Pontus. That summer she bore a boy. An Egyptian inscription from the Serapeum at Memphis seems to record the date, June 23, 47 BC. She named him Ptolemy Caesar, joining her dynasty’s name to his father’s. The Alexandrians, Plutarch says, called him Caesarion, little Caesar. He would be her only child by Caesar. She later had three more with Mark Antony.

Did Caesar claim him?

Rome argued about it for years. Suetonius sets out the evidence. Some Greek writers said the boy looked like Caesar and even walked like him. Caesar allowed Cleopatra to give the child his name. Mark Antony told the Senate that Caesar had acknowledged the boy, which Caesar’s friends knew. But one of those friends, Gaius Oppius, wrote a whole pamphlet to prove the child was not Caesar’s. By then the question had become a weapon in the quarrel between Antony and Octavian, Caesar’s adopted heir, who wanted no rival son.

Caesar himself never mentions the boy in anything he wrote, and his will left him nothing. Under Roman law it could hardly have done otherwise: Cleopatra was not a Roman citizen and the two were not married, so a child of theirs could not be Caesar’s legal heir. When Caesar was murdered in 44 BC, Cleopatra was staying in Rome, in Caesar’s gardens across the Tiber. Cicero, who disliked her, wrote to a friend that her departure did not trouble him.

King of Kings

Back in Egypt, Cleopatra’s younger brother and co-ruler, Ptolemy XIV, died that same year; the historian Josephus says she poisoned him. She made her son, aged about three, her partner on the throne as Ptolemy XV. On the rear wall of the temple of Hathor at Dendera mother and son appear in the old dress of pharaohs, bringing gifts to the gods.

In 34 BC, at a ceremony in Alexandria known as the Donations, Antony proclaimed Cleopatra Queen of Kings and Caesarion King of Kings, and declared him Caesar’s true son. That was aimed straight at Octavian, whose power rested on being Caesar’s son by adoption. Two years later Octavian declared war on Cleopatra, and in 31 BC he beat her and Antony at Actium.

Too many Caesars

In 30 BC, with Octavian closing in on Alexandria, Cleopatra enrolled Caesarion, now about sixteen, among the young men of the city, a sign that he had come of age. Then she sent him south with a large sum of money, by way of Ethiopia toward India. After Antony and Cleopatra were dead, his tutor Rhodon persuaded him to turn back, saying Octavian would let him rule Egypt. Octavian’s adviser, the philosopher Areius, is said to have given the verdict with a twist on a line of Homer: too many Caesars is not a good thing. Caesarion was killed in August 30 BC. With him the dynasty of the Ptolemies, rulers of Egypt for almost three centuries, came to an end, and Egypt became a Roman province.