As Cæsar sailed out of the Great Harbour of Alexandria he must have turned his keen grey eyes with peculiar interest upon the splendid buildings of the Palace, which towered in front of the city, upon the Lochias Promontory; and that quiet, whimsical expression must have played around his close-shut lips as he thought of the change that had been wrought in his mental attitude by the months spent amidst its royal luxuries. Enthusiasm for the work which lay before him must have burnt like a fire within him; but stamped upon his brain there must have been the picture of a darkened room in which the wild, happy-go-lucky, little Queen of Egypt, now so subdued and so gentle, lay clasping to her breast the new-born Cæsar, the sole heir to the kingdom of the whole world.
Cæsar’s movements during the year after his departure from Egypt do not, for the purpose of this narrative, require to be recorded in detail. From Alexandria, which he may have left at about the middle of the first week in July, he sailed in a fast-going galley across the 500 miles of open sea to Antioch, arriving at that city a few days before the middle of that month.[46] There he spent a day or two in regulating the affairs of the country, and presently sailed on to Ephesus, some 600 miles from Antioch, which he probably reached at the end of the third week of July. At Antioch he heard that one of his generals, Domitius Calvinus, had been defeated by Pharnakes, the son of Mithridates the Great, and had been driven out of Pontus, and it seems that he at once sent three legions to the aid of the beaten troops with orders to await in north-western Galatia or Cappadocia for his coming. After a day or two at Ephesus, Cæsar travelled with extreme rapidity to the rendezvous, taking with him only a thousand cavalry; and arriving at Zela, 500 miles from Ephesus, on or before August 2nd, at once defeated the rebels. It had been his custom in Gaul to travel by himself at the rate of a hundred miles a day, and even with a heavily laden army he covered over forty miles a day, as for example in his march from Rome to Spain, which he accomplished in twenty-seven days, and he may thus have joined his main army and commenced his preparations for the battle of Zela as early as the last days of July. The crushing defeat which he inflicted on the enemy so shortly after taking over the command was thus a feat of which he might justly be proud, and it so tickled his vanity that in writing to a friend of his in Rome, named Amantius, he described the campaign in the three famous words, _Veni, vidi, vici_, “I came, I saw, I conquered,” which so clearly indicate that he was beginning to regard himself as a sort of swift-footed, irresistible demigod.