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[BORN B.C. 68. DIED B.C. 29.]

MERIVALE.

ER personal talents were indeed of the most varied kind; she was an admirable singer and musician; she was skilled in many languages, and possessed intellectual accomplishments rarely found among the staidest of her sex, combined with the archness and humour of the lightest. She exerted herself to pamper her lover's [Antony's] sensual appetites, to stimulate his flagging interests by ingenious surprises, nor less to gratify the revival of his nobler propensities with paintings and sculptures, and works of literature. She encouraged him to take his seat as gymnasiarch, or director of the public amusements, and even to vary his debauches with philosophy and criticism. She amused him by sending divers to fasten salt-fish to the bait of his angling-rod; and when she had pledged herself to consume the value of ten millions of sesterces at a meal, amazed him by dissolving, in the humble cup of vinegar set before her, a pearl of inestimable price.

Her lover attended upon her in the forum, at the theatre, and the tribunals; he rode with her, or followed her chariot on foot, escorted by a train of eunuchs; at night he strolled with her through the city, in the garb of a slave, and encountered abuse and blows from the rabble of the streets; by day he wore the loose Persian robe, and girded himself with the Median dagger, and he designated as his palace the prætorium or general's apartment. Painters and sculptors were charged to group the illustrious pair together, and the coins of the kingdom bore the heads and names of both conjointly. The Roman legionary, with the name of Cleopatra inscribed upon his shield, found himself transformed into a Macedonian body-guard. Masques were presented at the court, in which the versatile Plancus sank into the character of a stage buffoon, and enacted the part of the sea-god Glaucus in curt cerulean vestments, crowned with the feathery heads of the papyrus, and deformed with the tail of a fish.

But when Cleopatra arrayed herself in the garb and usurped the attributes of Isis, and invited her paramour to ape the deity Osiris, the portentous travesty assumed a deeper significance. It had been the policy of the Macedonian sovereigns to form an alliance between the popular superstitions of their Greek and Egyptian subjects. Ptolemæus Soter had prevailed on the native priesthood to sanction the consecration of a new divinity, Serapis, who, if not really of Grecian origin, was confidently identified by the Greeks with their own Pluto, or perhaps with Zeus. The Macedonians had admitted with little scruple their great hero's claims to be the offspring of Ammon, the king of gods, who was worshipped in the Oasis of the desert. The notion that a mere man might become exalted into union with deity, favoured by the rationalising explanations of their popular mythology already current among the learned, had gradually settled into an indulgent admission of the royal right of apotheosis. Antony had assumed the character of Bacchus at Athens. In the metropolis of Grecian scepticism this could only be regarded as a drunken whim; but when he came forward in Alexandria as the Nile-God Osiris, the Bacchus or fructifying power of the Coptic mythology, he claimed as a present deity the veneration of the credulous Egyptians.

Another scene follows the death of Antony. When the ceremonies of interment were finished, Cleopatra allowed herself to be led to the palace of her ancestors. Exhausted with fever by the vehemence of her passionate mourning, she refused the care of her physician, and declared that she would perish by hunger. Octavius [the conqueror of Antony] was alarmed at the avowal of this desperate resolution. He could only prevail upon her to protract her existence by the barbarous threat of murdering her children. He held out also the hope of a personal interview, and again her vanity whispered to her not yet to despair. The artless charms of youth which, as she at least deemed, had enchained the great Julius at a single interview, had long since passed away; the more mature attractions which experience had taught her to cultivate for the conquest of her second lover, might fail under the disastrous ravages of so many years of indulgence and dissipation; but time had not blighted her genius; her distresses claimed compassion; and from pity, she well knew, there is but one step to love. In the retirement of the women's apartments she decked her chamber with sumptuous magnificence, and threw herself on a silken couch in the negligent attire of sickness and woe. She clasped to her bosom the letters of her earliest admirer, and surrounded herself with his busts and portraits, to make an impression on the filial piety of one who claimed to inherit his conquests and sympathise with his dearest interests. When the expected visitor entered, she sprang passionately to meet him, and threw herself at his feet; her eyes were red with weeping, her whole countenance was disordered, her bosom heaved, and her voice trembled with emotion. The marks of blows inflicted on her breast were visible in the disorder of her clothing. She addressed him as her lord, and sighed as she transferred to a stranger the sovereign title she had so long borne herself, and which she had first received from her conqueror's father.

The young Roman acknowledged the charms of female beauty, and had often surrendered to them; but he knew also his own power of resisting them, which he had already sternly practised, and he now guarded himself against her seductions by fixing his eyes obdurately on the ground. Despairing of conquest, she threw herself upon his mercy, handed to him the list of her treasures, and pleaded piteously for bare life. A slave, interrogated and threatened perhaps with torture, declaring that some of her effects were still withheld, she flew at him and tore his face with her nails. Cleopatra had tasked her powers of fascination, and she knew that they had failed. She heard without surprise that even within three days she was to be conveyed away with her children, to adorn the conqueror's triumph. She formed her plan with secresy and decision. She directed her attendants to make ready for the voyage, and repaired with her female companions to Antony's mausoleum. She gave orders for a banquet to be served, and in the meanwhile embraced the dead man's bier, and mingled her tears with the wine she poured upon it. Soon after, she commanded all her attendants to leave her except her two favourite women, Iras and Charmion, and at the same time she sent a sealed packet to be delivered to Octavius. It contained only a brief and passionate request to be buried with her lover. His first impulse was to rush to the spot and prevent the catastrophe it portended; but in the next moment the suspicion of a trick to excite his sympathy flashed across him, and he contented himself with sending persons to inquire. The messengers made all haste; but they arrived too late; the tragedy had been acted out, and the curtain was falling. Bursting into the tomb, they beheld Cleopatra lying dead on a golden couch in royal attire. Of her two women, Iras was dying at her feet, and Charmion, with failing strength, was replacing the diadem on her mistress's brow. The manner of Cleopatra's death was never certainly known.