Ganymedes (eunuch)

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Ganymedes († 47 BC ) was a eunuch and educator of the Ptolemaic king's daughter Arsinoë IV , the younger sister of the famous Cleopatra VII. In the Alexandrian War he proved to be a capable and serious opponent to Gaius Julius Caesar .

Life

When in autumn 48 BC When the Alexandrian War broke out, Caesar, who traveled to Egypt with a relatively weak army, holed up in the palace district of Alexandria . The Ptolemaic royal family had to reside as a hostage with the Romans in the palace. In the course of the fighting, Ganymedes managed to escape from the palace with Princess Arsinoe IV, who was entrusted to his education, and to go with her to the Egyptian army besieging Caesar, which was under the command of the general Achillas . Ganymedes achieved that Arsinoë IV was proclaimed by the Egyptians to be the counter-queen to Cleopatra VII.

The Ptolemaic princess wanted to strengthen her position of power and for this purpose tried to transfer the supreme command of the Egyptian army to her confidante Ganymedes. This naturally brought her into a dispute with the previous general Achillas. The Prime Minister Potheinos , who was still in the palace under Caesar's control, supported his ally Achillas through messengers in this power struggle, but was therefore executed on the dictator's orders. Due to Potheinos' death, the Arsinoes IV party gained the upper hand in the conflict over command of the Egyptian armed forces. Both sides tried to win over the troops through gifts of money. According to the historian Cassius Dio , Ganymedes accused Achillas of wanting to betray the fleet to the enemy. Arsinoë IV used this completely unjustified accusation as a pretext to have Achillas executed. Ganymedes now exercised his position as commander-in-chief. The Alexandrians who joined the siege army followed the eunuch much more willingly than the regular armed forces, who had long been used to Achillas as commanders.

Ganymedes had the canals fed by the Nile , which led underground to Caesar's quarter, shut off and tried to cut off the drinking water supply to the Romans. In addition, the eunuch ordered enormous amounts of seawater to be pumped into the higher districts of the city with the help of machines and to let this flow down into the palace district. This contaminated the fresh water in the cisterns and the legionaries panic. Caesar ordered deep wells to be dug and after a night of excavation work came across large quantities of drinking water.

Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus sent the 37th Legion from Asia Minor as reinforcement on a fleet to Caesar, which was driven past Alexandria by strong easterly winds and landed at the promontory of Chersonesos protruding into the sea. The lack of water soon became noticeable on board. The dictator received news of the arrival of the reinforcement troops and their supply shortage from messengers and drove to meet them with his fleet. However, he did not take a large military escort with him, since he could only muster a few soldiers to defend his district. Some of his companions were supposed to look for fresh water on land, but some of them fell into the hands of enemy cavalrymen. So Ganymedes found out about Caesar's quite unprotected situation and decided to attack the Roman general on the way back to Alexandria with his ships. However, Caesar managed to lead the fleet sent by Calvinus into the Great Harbor after repelling Ganymedes' attack.

After this failure, Ganymedes encouraged the Alexandrians in a popular assembly not to give up the fight. He tried diligently to renew his fleet. A number of old ships were repaired and made ready for use and new ones built surprisingly quickly. So Ganymedes soon had five five-oars, 22 four-oars and several smaller ships. The aim was to arm the Egyptian naval forces so far that they could cut off the Romans from any further supplies to the sea. According to Cassius Dio, Ganymedes seems to have succeeded with his newly strengthened fleet in burning some Roman ships and capturing others, a detail which the procesarian-minded author of the Alexandrian War , probably Aulus Hirtius , is hiding. Caesar went on the offensive, appeared with his fleet in the port of Eunostus and sank five Ptolemaic ships with almost no losses of their own, mainly due to the ability of his Rhodian naval units, whereupon the rest of them fled to the dam that connected the island to the city. There the Alexandrians were able to defend their ships better by nearby houses and fortifications, so that Caesar withdrew.

Caesar almost died trying to capture the Heptastadion Dam. Around then, the Alexandrians apparently turned away from Arsinoë IV and Ganymedes as leaders. Allegedly they were bitter about the tough regime and the insufficient success of the eunuch. They asked Caesar for the release of Ptolemy XIII. The Roman general agreed. The young king now assumed the supreme command of the Egyptian army and fought vigorously against the Romans. But Caesar soon received further reinforcements and won the decisive victory.

After the Roman triumph, Ganymedes ended up on the run.

literature

Remarks

  1. ^ Caesar, Civil War 3, 112, 10; Cassius Dio 42, 39, 1.
  2. ↑ Caesar, Civil War 3, 112, 11f .; Alexandrian War 4; Cassius Dio 42, 39, 2 and 42, 40, 1; Lucan , Pharsalia 10, 521ff .; Livy , book 112, fragment 50 in Adnot. super Lucan 10,521; on this Christoph Schäfer , Kleopatra , 2006, pp. 69–71.
  3. ^ Alexandrian War 5–9; Cassius Dio 42, 38, 4; Plutarch , Caesar 49, 6.
  4. ^ Alexandrian War 10f .; Cassius Dio 42, 38, 3.
  5. ↑ Alexandrian War 12-16; Cassius Dio 42, 40, 3.
  6. ↑ Florus 2:13 , 60.
personal data
SURNAME Ganymedes
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Tutor of Arsinoë IV .; Army leader against Caesar in the Alexandrian War
DATE OF BIRTH 2nd century BC BC or 1st century BC Chr.
DATE OF DEATH 47 BC Chr.