Caesar's death made guesswork out of what had once been certainty. Should the Egyptian queen run or should she stay? Cleopatra had never lacked nerve and she decided to wait. The reading of Caesar's will gave her no comfort. He gave his gardens on the Tiber to the people of Rome as well as 300 sestercii for each. But more importantly to Cleopatra, there was no mention of their son, instead he made his great nephew Octavius the adopted successor and spiritual heir.

However, in the eyes of Rome, Caesar was not married to Cleopatra and any child born by her would not have been legitimate, even if Caesar had claimed paternity - and Marc Antony informed the Senate on one occasion that he did - he could not make Caesarion his heir. Consequently, it should not have been expected to find the boy's name in the will.

In the chaos of the time, when the consul Antony played on the Senate and the conspirators with such skill, the name of Cleopatra flickered through the pages of Cicero's correspondence. Cicero had been implicated by his sympathies and his meddling and he was desperate for information and to catch the drift of events. A month after the murder he wrote, "I see nothing to object in the flight of the queen.", yet in the second week in May we find she was still in Rome. Eventually, the Roman contest began anew and Cleopatra for the moment had no place in it. The sensible road for her lead back to Egypt. She had been preparing for it before Caesar's death and now she went.

These remarks by Cicero (written in 44 BC) most likely reflect what most Romans thought of their royal guest and her attendants:

I dislike Her Majesty........The arrogance of the Queen herself when she was living on the estate across Tiber makes my blood boil to recall. So I want nothing to do with them. They must think I have no spirit, or rather that I hardly have a spleen.

(Letters to Atticus 15.15.2)

In trying to protect herself and the Egyptian monarchy by going to Rome, Cleopatra had been neglecting Egypt itself. When she returned, she found there as a great deal of work to be done. For two consecutive years, the Nile flood had fallen below the measures known as 'the cubits of death' and hardship and famine followed as they always did after these disasters.

Disease followed famine. With the impartial curiosity of Alexandrian science, Dioscurides Phacas, known as Freckles, tracked the spread of the pestilence. He noted the distended black blotches and the suppurations from lymphatic glands and in doing so described for the first time the symptoms and the course of the bubonic plague.

To address the troubles of the kingdom required a most delicate balance. To some degree, the rights and duties of the regions in such a large diverse land were irreconcilable. But agriculture was of the first importance, and Cleopatra was forced to make some very difficult decisions. In the emergency, she made a distribution from the royal granaries. The large Jewish community in the Delta quarter of Alexandria was excluded from the distribution. Even though the community had been established for generations, the law placed Jews as foreigners and outside the largesse of the state. Though she could hardly have hesitated between her own people and the Jewish population, her decision won her an enduring Jewish enmity. Much more difficult for her were the judgments that had to be made between the groups of her own subjects, as a decree from Heracleopolis, dated April 41 BC, showed. In the face of shortages local administrators in the countryside were placing extra burdens and dues on Alexandrians who did agricultural work outside the city. The queen declared herself to be 'exceedingly indignant' and ordered that no excessive demands should be made on these workers.

'Nor shall their goods be destrained for such contributions, nor shall any new tax be required of them, but when they have once paid the essential dues, in kind or in money, for corn-land or for vine-land, which have regularly in the past been assigned to the royal treasury, they shall not be molested for anything further, on any pretext whatsoever.'

Slowly, some of the neglect was put to right and production began to increase. Cleopatra, ever the adept propagandist, placed on the reverse of her coins the double cornucopia and the fillet of the royal diadem formerly used by her predecessor Arsinoe II, the queen remembered as the Lady of Abundance.

The other business that Cleopatra gave immediate attention to was the enduring preoccupation of her reign: to secure her own position and the future of her dynasty. Very soon after her return to Egypt, her brother-husband Ptolemy XIV was heard of no more. The unfriendly Jewish historian Josephus, stated that the young king had been poisoned. Muder within the family was a hazard of Ptolemaic rule. When the chance came a few years later, Cleopatra demanded the execution of her sister Arsinoe. With Ptolemy XIV gone, Caesarion was raised to be her fellow monarch.

To Egyptians, the marriage within the crown of a mother and her infant son was a formal trifle, easily swallowed. More difficult was the illegitimacy of the child, though he was clearly within the Ptolemaic line through the mother. The offence that caught in the throat of the Alexandrians especially was the father of the child....a Roman. But for Cleopatra, the decision, though very provocative, was very logical. She felt the best counter she had to any further Roman designs on Egypt was Caesar's child and gambled that the elevation of a half Roman to be co ruler of Egypt already brought the kingdom within the orbit of Roman Imperium. With Ptolemy Caesar - Caesarion - Rome would need no greater presence in Egypt. Cleopatra had always understood that she needed Romans to save her country from Rome.

For a bright moment, it looked as if Cleopatra might have succeeded in her plans to secure both her own present and her son's future. Conditions in Egypt were slowly improving. The queen was building a new fleet and restocking the royal granaries. The Roman legions left behind by Caesar had subdued the hostile Alexandrians into a surly obedience.

In the days after the murder, Antony averted worse disaster with the skill of his diplomacy. He set himself as the standard bearer if Caesar's following but the forces pulled to strongly for him to control for very long. He formed an uneasy alliance with Octavian whom he referred to as "the boy who owed everything to a name". But the name that Octavian had assumed was the great name of the dead man and this was the most powerful rallying cry of all.

In the summer of 44 BC the leaders of the assassins, Brutus and Cassius, abandoned Italy for Asia Minor where they hoped to raise men and money for the inevitable contest. Much of the East had already joined Brutus and Cassius, and Cassius was now demanding assistance from Egypt. From the safety of Egypt, Cleopatra had watched these events with cautious concern and her instinct warned her to not get involved in the internal struggles of the Roman state. She was naturally of Caesar's party so it's very doubtful that she would have sent the ships to help the men who'd assassinated Caesar.

If Cleopatra was not ready to support Cassius, she was also in doubt about Octavian. She knew Antony as Caesar's friend and admirer and her sympathies lay with his faction. When Cassius had asked Cleopatra for aid, she had fended him off with a plea of poverty, owing to disease and famine in the kingdom. But she did put to sea with her own fleet, commanding it herself, to help the triumvirs. A gale which tore the fleet apart forced her to turn back. She was getting together another fleet in the autumn of 42 BC when news came that Brutus and Cassius had been defeated and killed at Philippi. With them, the Republican cause in Rome also died.

At the beginning of 41 BC, Antony arrived in Ephesus to take on the role of the East assigned to him by the triumvirs and was given the task of establishing order after the war and to raise additional funds. As he began to set up his administration, Antony summoned all governors, princes and client kings to his court to account for their actions and to be told of his plans. He wrote letters to Cleopatra summoning her to attend on him. He wanted her to explain for Egypt's rather limp support for the triumvirs in the recent war. She considered her small foray with the fleet had shown more than enough enthusiasm, and otherwise meant to keep her usual policy of polite non cooperation, saying perhaps and meaning no, while she tried to read the new pattern of the pieces in Rome. Antony persisted. He sent Quintus Dellius to her with some persuasive arguments and no doubt a hint of a threat. After a delay which suited a goddess queen of the most distinguished lineage of the Mediterranean world (during which she glimpsed a way to handle this importunate Roman), the queen set out to meet Antony at Tarsus in Asia Minor.