Caesarion: Cleopatra’s Son and Egypt’s Last Pharaoh

Caesarion is the name Alexandria gave Cleopatra’s eldest son, Ptolemy XV Caesar. He was the last king of the Ptolemaic line, and his death ended that dynasty’s rule in Egypt.

You have probably heard a single tidy ending for him. A tutor led him back, and a philosopher told Octavian that too many Caesars would be a bad thing. That scene stands in one ancient book, while two other writers describe a chase and never mention the line. You will find his parentage here, then his years beside Cleopatra, the titles Antony gave him, and those three accounts of his death.

Was Caesarion the Son of Julius Caesar?

Cleopatra maintained that Julius Caesar was the father, and she named the boy for him. Caesarion is a Greek diminutive, little Caesar, and his formal style was Ptolemy Caesar, with the cult title Theos Philopator Philometor, the father-loving, mother-loving god.

He was born in the summer of 47 BCE, a few months after Caesar left Egypt. Caesar had restored Cleopatra to the throne beside her brother Ptolemy XIV in the Alexandrian War, fought from September 48 to January 47 BCE, and he stayed in the country for a while after the fighting ended.

Caesar later called Cleopatra to Rome, loaded her with honours and gifts, and allowed her to give his name to the child she bore, as Suetonius records in his life of Julius. Greek writers noted in that same passage said the boy resembled Caesar in looks and in the way he carried himself.

Finally he called her to Rome and did not let her leave until he had ladened her with high honours and rich gifts, and he allowed her to give his name to the child which she bore. In fact, according to certain Greek writers, this child was very like Caesar in looks and carriage.

Suetonius, The Deified Julius, Loeb translation

The will read after the assassination did not do what the name suggested. Caesar adopted his grand-nephew Octavian and did not name Caesarion. Cleopatra was still in Rome for that reading, staying in his villa in the Horti Caesaris, and she left with the boy within a month of his death on 15 March 44 BCE. No account here describes a marriage between Caesar and Cleopatra. A permitted name and a Roman adoption are different acts, and the will conferred the adoption on Octavian.

Mark Antony later told the Senate that Caesar had acknowledged the boy, and that Gaius Matius, Gaius Oppius, and other friends of Caesar knew it. Oppius answered with a book arguing that the child Cleopatra called Caesar’s was not his. Nicolaus of Damascus went further and claimed the will repudiated Caesarion, a detail no other surviving account repeats, and one he raised while denying that Caesar had wanted to be a king. Oppius published a denial, and Antony had already spent a speech in the Senate on the opposite claim.

Caesarion’s Childhood Between Rome and Alexandria

The court that raised him spoke Greek and followed Macedonian royal habit. The Ptolemies were a Macedonian family, so on his mother’s side he had little Egyptian ancestry, whatever the later temple scenes made him look like.

Cleopatra brought the household to Rome in 46 BCE and again in 44, both times to Caesar’s villa. In 46 Caesar dedicated a temple to Venus Genetrix, the ancestor he claimed through Aeneas, and he set a gilded statue of Cleopatra as Isis-Venus inside it. Caesarion was certainly with his mother for the stay that ended at the assassination, when he was still two.

Ptolemy XIV died in 44 BCE, in August by one chronological notice, and rumour said Cleopatra had poisoned him to clear the throne. On 2 September 44 BCE her son, then three, was proclaimed king and her co-ruler. In 43 BCE Cornelius Dolabella recognized the boy-king on the Senate’s behalf. Cleopatra kept the actual power. Priestly art cast the pair as Isis and Horus, the son who inherits after his father is cut down.

The only tutor attached to Caesarion by name is a Greek called Rhodon, and almost nothing is recorded of him until the final flight. In late 37 BCE, at about ten, Caesarion travelled with his mother to Antioch. Antony, with Octavian’s consent, added Cyrene, Cilicia, Crete, and parts of the Levant to Ptolemaic control. Antony and Cleopatra bound their households together while Antony was still married to Octavian’s sister Octavia, a marriage that ran on until 32 BCE.

Twins had already been born to Cleopatra and Antony in 40 BCE, Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene, Sun and Moon. A younger son, Ptolemy Philadelphus, followed in 36 BCE. Those three children, not Caesarion, are the ones a later Roman household would have to raise.

Titles from the Donations of Alexandria

In the autumn of 34 BCE Antony staged the Donations of Alexandria in the gymnasium, after a campaign in Armenia. He and Cleopatra sat on golden thrones set on a silver platform, he as Dionysus and Osiris, she as Isis. The children sat on lower thrones. Caesarion, about thirteen, was shown as Horus, the royal son.

Plutarch’s scene is the fullest single description of who received what. In it Antony has Cleopatra share her throne with Caesarion, then turns to his own sons.

GRANTS IN PLUTARCH’S ACCOUNT

• The queen: Cleopatra is declared queen of Egypt, Cyprus, Libya, and Coele Syria, and she is to share that throne with Caesarion.
• The sons: Antony’s own sons by Cleopatra are proclaimed Kings of Kings.
• Alexander: He is given Armenia, Media, and Parthia, the last of these only once it has been conquered.
• Ptolemy: The younger boy is given Phoenicia, Syria, and Cilicia.

A second ancient version hands the highest style the other way. It calls Cleopatra Queen of Kings and Caesarion King of Kings, and it has Antony declare the boy Julius Caesar’s true son. Cleopatra Selene is queen of Cyrene in that wider telling of the day. Plutarch’s gymnasium scene and this second version do not award King of Kings to the same child. Either version was enough to anger Rome, because Antony was pointing at a second Caesar.

Much of the land named that day was already under Cleopatra, or still held by Parthia, so the map changed less than the titles did. Syria and neighbouring Roman provinces, plus Armenia, which Antony had just taken, were the grants with a real Roman cost. In 32 BCE Antony divorced Octavia. Octavian had Antony’s will taken from the Temple of Vesta and read out clauses that treated Caesarion as Caesar’s son, provided for the children by Cleopatra, and asked that Antony be buried in Egypt. The Senate’s war, declared in the spring of 32 BCE, was formally a war on Cleopatra. The fleets met off Actium on 2 September 31 BCE, and Antony and Cleopatra lost.

How Do Ancient Writers Describe Caesarion’s Death?

Back in Alexandria, Antony still staged one public coming of age. In the summer of 30 BCE he entered Caesarion, then seventeen, on the list of ephebes, the young men of the gymnasium, and he gave his own son Antyllus the toga of manhood. Most Greek youths joined that list nearer fourteen, and a prince could be enrolled late. Banquets followed while the war news grew worse, and the worst of it was kept from the city.

Octavian’s forces took Alexandria on 1 August 30 BCE, and Antony died by his own sword that same day. Cleopatra died on 12 August, eleven days later, rather than be walked in a Roman triumph. She had already sent her eldest son away with a large treasure. From there the three narratives stop matching.

THREE ACCOUNTS OF THE KILLING

Plutarch is the only one of the three who brings in the tutor and the line. He says the queen sent the boy, with much treasure, into India by way of Ethiopia. Rhodon, called a tutor of the same sort as Theodorus, the man attached to Antyllus, persuaded him to return on the ground that Octavian was inviting him to take the kingdom. While Octavian weighed the matter, Areius is reported to have said, “Not a good thing were a Caesar too many.” A note on that sentence in the Loeb text marks it as a play on a line of the Iliad about the rule of many. The killing, in this account, comes after Cleopatra is already dead.

Dio, in the chapter that closes Antony and Cleopatra’s lives, has no invitation and no philosopher. Caesarion, fleeing toward Ethiopia, was overtaken on the road and murdered. Suetonius agrees that Octavian caught him on the flight, brought him back, and had him killed. None of the three names a tomb, a trial, or a day inside the month. A careful royal chronology puts the death in late August 30 BCE. King lists can therefore show him as sole king for the short gap after 12 August. That gap was a clerical bridge into Roman Egypt, not a reign carried on from a capital that had already fallen. He is remembered as the last pharaoh of the Ptolemaic kingdom because the line of those kings stops with him.

Cleopatra’s Other Children After Caesarion’s Death

The same chapters that end Caesarion also say who was kept. Suetonius has Antyllus dragged from the image of the deified Julius, where he had fled after useless pleas, and killed. Dio says Antyllus was slain at once, though he was betrothed to Octavian’s daughter, and that he had taken refuge in a shrine of his father which Cleopatra had built.

Cleopatra Selene was married to Juba, son of Juba, and Dio says Octavian gave that man both the girl and the kingdom of his fathers. Alexander and Ptolemy were spared as a favour to the couple. Suetonius says the remaining children of Antony and Cleopatra were maintained according to their station, with the care given to kin. Selene’s life can be followed down to 6 BCE. Her two brothers drop out of the detailed record.

The split follows the claim each child could make. Caesarion was the boy a speech in Rome could call Caesar’s son, which cut against an heir who held that name by adoption. The younger children were Antony’s, and Octavian could raise them without creating a second Caesar. Antyllus was Antony’s Roman son, old enough to have received the toga, and he was killed with the rival who carried the other dangerous name.

Caesarion on the Temple Wall at Dendera

The texts stop at the killing. The image you can still go and see is cut into stone in Upper Egypt. On the rear exterior wall of the Temple of Hathor at Dendera, the south wall behind the sanctuary, Cleopatra and Caesarion stand in pharaonic dress and make offerings to Hathor and the gods of that temple. He is carved there as a co-ruling king in full ritual regalia, the figure his mother wanted Egypt to recognize.

Other likenesses are fewer and less secure. A granite head kept at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina has been identified as him, and some of Cleopatra’s bronze coins show her with an infant taken to be her son. After Egypt fell, a number of his carved figures were damaged or recut. The Dendera wall is the place where that advertised kingship is still readable at full height, lion-headed spouts above the pair and the offering pose intact.

Walk that wall after you have the Roman accounts in mind, and you are looking at the reign the priests recorded, not at the flight. The carving does not choose among Plutarch, Dio, and Suetonius. It only shows the king who was still alive when the stone was cut.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is June 23, 47 BCE Caesarion’s Real Birthday?

The birth belongs in the summer of 47 BCE, and a single day is less secure. A stele from the Serapeum at Memphis is often read as 23 June 47 BCE. That reading is treated as unlikely in a specialist chronology of the Ptolemies, which still places the birth in the summer after Caesar left Egypt, the season Plutarch gives.

Did Caesarion Have Any Children?

No ancient account names a child of his. The written life runs from the royal nursery to the ephebe list and then to the flight, with no marriage and no heir attached to his name. The Ptolemaic children Rome still had to house were his half-sister Cleopatra Selene and her brothers.

Where Was Caesarion Buried?

Nowhere a historian can point to. Antony and Cleopatra were embalmed and laid in one tomb, and Octavian ordered the mausoleum they had started to be finished. The sentences about Caesarion stop at the killing, so a search for his grave runs out of sources at once.

What Happened to Caesarion’s Tutor Rhodon?

He is not heard from again. Plutarch has him talk Caesarion into turning back on a promise of the kingdom, and he sets Rhodon beside Theodorus, Antyllus’s tutor, without recording a bribe or a later penalty. Whether Rhodon believed the offer or was sent to make it is something that passage leaves unsaid.

The wall at Dendera still shows him as a king beside his mother, offering to Hathor in royal dress. The Roman accounts still end at a killing they place differently from one another, and they still name no grave.