The case was proved and Caesar became all action.  A squad of legionaries haled Pothinus away to an execution not long delayed.  Other legionaries disarmed and replaced the detachment of the royal guard that controlled the palace gates and walls.  And barely had these steps been taken, when a courier thundered into the palace, hardly escaped through the raging mob that was gaining control of the city.  Achillas, he reported, had wantonly murdered Dioscorides and Serapion, whom Caesar had sent as envoys to Pelusium, and was marching on the city with his whole army of Italian renegades, Syrian banditti, convicts, and runaway slaves, twenty thousand strong.

There was nothing to do but to prepare to weather the storm in the palace enclosure, which, with its high walls, was practically a fortress in itself.  There were only four thousand Romans, and yet there was a long circuit of defences to man.  But Drusus never saw his general putting forth greater energy.  That night, instead of feasting, the soldiers laboured, piling up the ramparts by the light of torches.  The city was surging and thundering without the palace gates.  Caesar had placed the king under guard, but Arsinoe—­his younger sister—­had slipped out of the palace to join herself to the advancing host of Achillas, and speedily that general would be at hand.  Caesar as usual was everywhere, with new schemes for the defences, new enthusiasm for his officers, new inspiration for his men.  No one slept nor cared to sleep inside the palace walls.  They toiled for dear life, for with morning, at most, Achillas would be upon them; and by morning, if Pothinus’s plans had not failed, they would have been drugged and helpless to a man, none able to draw sword from scabbard.  It was a new experience to one and all, for these Romans to stand on the defensive.  For once Caesar had made a false step—­he ought to have taken on his voyage more men.  He stood with his handful, with the sea on one side of him and a great city and a nation in arms against him on the other.  The struggle was not to be for empire, but for life.  But the Romans were too busy that night to realize anything save the need of untiring exertion.  If they had counted the odds against them, four thousand against a nation, they might well have despaired, though their chieftain were Caesar.

Two years earlier Drusus, as he hurried to and fro transmitting orders for his general, might have been fain to draw aside and muse on the strangeness of the night scene.  The sky was clear, as almost always in a land where a thunder-storm is often as rare as an eclipse; the stars twinkled out of heavens of soft blackness; the crescent of a new moon hung like a silvered bow out over the harbour, and made a thin pathway of lustre across the moving, shimmering waters.  Dimly the sky-line was visible; by the Pharos and its mole loomed the vague tracery of masts.  On the west and the south lay the white and dark masses of the city, now and then brought into clearer relief