![]() ![]() ![]() Vast, rich, fertile, and unstable, it offered a potential power base for rival claimants to the throne. This was the only province of the Roman Empire to which such travel restrictions applied. Germanicus’ trip, however, did not go down well with his adoptive father, the reigning emperor Tiberius, since the young man had broken the rules by going to Egypt without the emperor’s express permission. In fact, Germanicus took an antiquarian cruise up the Nile, visiting the “vast ruins of Thebes” and the Valley of the Kings, just as his great- grandfather Julius Caesar had done in the company of Cleopatra herself in 47 BC. But the real reason, Tacitus insists, was sight-seeing-for the monuments of the Egyptian pharaohs, already thousands of years old in 19 AD, were almost as much an attraction to Roman visitors as they are to modern tourists. ![]() According to the historian Tacitus, the ostensible purpose of this imperial visit was to relieve the famine then afflicting the country (which he did by simply opening up some granaries where grain was stored). In 19 AD, almost fifty years after the death of Cleopatra, the Roman prince Germanicus paid a visit to Alexandria, the city that had once been the capital of her kingdom, and was now the administrative center of the Roman province of Egypt. Warren William, as Julius Caesar, and Claudette Colbert in Cleopatra, 1934 ![]()
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