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As to the war there, some say that it might have been avoided and that it broke out in consequence of his passion for Kleopatra and was discreditable to him and hazardous; but others blame the King's party and chiefly the eunuch Potheinus,who possessed the chief power, and having lately cut off Pompeius and driven out Kleopatra, was now secretly plotting against Cæsar; and on this account they say that Cæsar from that time passed the nights in drinking in order to protect himself.
Cæsar being made acquainted with their design, placed a guard around the apartment, and put Potheinus to death. Achillas escaped to the camp, and raised about Cæsar a dangerous and difficult war for one who with so few troops had to resist so large a city and force.
It was indeed a sad thing that such men should deliberate about Pompeius Magnus, as Potheinus the eunuch and Theodotus of Chios who was hired as a teacher of rhetoric and the Egyptian Achillas: for these were the chief advisers of the king among the eunuchs and others who had the care of his person; and such was the court whose decision Pompeius was waiting for at anchor some distance from the shore and tossed by the waves, he who thought it beneath him to be indebted to Cæsar for his life.
A feast was held to celebrate the reconciliation, during which a slave of Cæsar, his barber, owing to his timidity in which he had no equal, leaving nothing unscrutinized, and listening and making himself very busy, found out that a plot against Cæsar was forming by Achillas the general and Potheinus the eunuch.
This alone, it is said diverted Pompeius from proceeding to the Euphrates; if indeed any reflection still guided Pompeius, and he was not rather directed by a dæmon to the way that he took. Now Ptolemæus was very young, and Potheinus who managed everything, summoned a council of the chief persons; and the chief persons were those whom he chose to make so, and he bade each man give his opinion.
He put to death Achillas and Potheinus, and the king himself being defeated in battle was lost somewhere near the river.
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