As it was, ‘his life lasted longer than his power’. The murder, however, proved a wrong move for its perpetrators. Caesar, who turned up a few days later, apparently wept as he was presented with Pompey’s pickled head and shortly backed one of the rivals to the throne of Egypt. That rival was Queen Cleopatra VII, best known for her alliance, political and romantic, with Mark Antony in the next round of Roman civil wars. But at this point her interests lay with Caesar, with whom she had an open affair and – if her claims about paternity are to be believed – a child.
