About the beginning of February B.C. 30, Octavian returned to Italy to quell certain disturbances arising from his inability to pay his disbanded troops, and there he stayed about a month, sailing once more for Asia Minor early in March. Dion tells us that the news of his voyage to Rome and that of his return to Asia Minor were received simultaneously in Alexandria, probably late in April; but I think it very unlikely that the news of the first voyage was so long delayed, and, at any rate, some rumours of Octavian’s retirement to Rome must have filtered through to Cleopatra during the month of March.
The news of this respite once more fired the Queen with hope, and she determined to make the best possible use of this precious gift of time. It will be remembered that her son Cæsarion, if I am not in error, was born at the beginning of July B.C. 47;[127] but a short time afterwards, some eighty days were added to the calendar in order to correct the existing inexactitude,[128] the real anniversary of the boy’s birthday thereby being made to fall at about the middle of April.[129] The preparations for the celebration in this year B.C. 30, of his seventeenth birthday, were thus beginning to be put into motion at the time when Octavian was still thought to be struggling in Rome with his discontented troops. Cleopatra therefore determined to mark the festival by very great splendour, and to celebrate it more particularly by a public declaration of the fact that Cæsarion was now of age. I do not think it can be determined with certainty whether or not the seventeenth birthday was the customary age at which the state of manhood was supposed to be reached by an Egyptian sovereign, but it may certainly be said that the coming of age was seldom, if ever, postponed to a later period. Cleopatra seems to have wished to make a very particular point of this fact of her son’s majority, which would demonstrate to the Alexandrians, as Dion says, “that they now had a man as King.” Let the public think, if they were so minded, that she herself was a defeated and condemned woman; but from this time onwards they had a grown man to lead them, a son of the divine Julius Cæsar, for whose rights she had fought while he was a boy, but who was henceforth capable of defending himself. Whatever her own fate might be, her son would, at any rate, have a better chance of retaining his throne by being firmly established upon it in the capacity of a grown man. In future she herself could work, as it were, behind the scenes, and her son could carry on the great task which she had so long striven to accomplish.