In Greece beauty was the secret of life.  In Egypt it was the secret of death.  The sphinxes that crouched in the avenues, the caryatides at the palace doors, the gods on their pedestals, had an expression enigmatic but identical.  It was as though some of them listened, while others repeated the story of the soul’s career.  In the chambers of the tombs the echo of the story descended.  The dead were dreaming, and draining it.  Saturated with aromatics, wound about with spirals of thin bands, they were dressed as for nuptials.  On their faces was the same beatitude that the statues displayed.

Isis typified that beatitude.  The goddess, in whose mysteries were taught both the immortality of the soul and the secret of its migrations, was one of Ishtar’s many avatars, the only one whose attributes accorded even remotely with the divine.  Egypt adored her.  There were other gods.  There was Osiris, the father; Horus, the son, who with Isis formed the trinity which India and Persia both possessed, and which Byzance afterward perpetuated.  There were other gods also, a hierarchy of great idle divinities with, beneath them, cohorts of inferior fiends.  But the great light was Isis.  Goddess of life and goddess of death, she had for sceptre a lotos and for crown a cormorant; the lotos because it is emblematic of love, and the cormorant because, however replete, it says never Enough.

Isis was the consort of Osiris.  She was also his sister.  It was customary for the queens of Egypt to call themselves after her, and, like her, to marry a brother.  Cleopatra followed the usual custom.  In other ways she must have resembled her.  She was beautiful, but not remarkably so.  The Egyptian women generally were good-looking.  The Asiatics admired them very much.  They were preferred to the Chinese, whose eyes oblique and half-closed perturbed sages, demons even, with whom, Michelet has suggested, they were perhaps akin.  Cleopatra lacked that insidiousness.  Semi-Greek, a daughter of the Ptolomies, she had the charm of the Hellenic hetaira.  To aptitudes natural and very great, she added a varied assortment of accomplishments.  It is said that she could talk to any one in any tongue.  That is probably an exaggeration.  But, though a queen, she was ambitious; though a girl, she was lettered; succinctly, she was masterful, a match for any man except Cæsar.

Cleopatra must have been very heady.  Cæsar knew how to keep his head.  He could not have done what he did, had he not known.  Dissolute, as all men of that epoch had become, he differed from all of them in his epicureanism.  Like Epicurus, he was strictly temperate.  He supped on dry bread.  Cato said that he was the first sober man that had tried to overthrow the republic.  But, then, he had been to school, to the best of schools, which the world is.  His studies in anima vili had taught him many things, among them, how to win and not be won.  Cleopatra might almost have been his granddaughter.  But he was Cæsar.  His eyes blazed with genius.  Besides, he was the most alluring of men.  Tall, slender, not handsome but superb-so superb that Cicero mistook him for a fop from whom the republic had nothing to fear-at seventeen he had fascinated pirates.  Ever since he had fascinated queens.  In the long list, Cleopatra was but another to this man whom the depths of Hither Asia, the mysteries that lay beyond, the diadems of Cyrus and Alexander, the Vistula and the Baltic claimed.  There were his ambitions.  They were immense.  So were also Cleopatra’s.  What he wanted, she wanted for him, and for herself as well.  She wanted him sovereign of the world and herself its empress.

These views, in so far as they concerned her, did not interest him very greatly.  His lack of interest he was, however, too well bred to display.  He solidified her throne, which at the time was not stable, left her a son for souvenir, went away, forgot her, remembered her, invited her to Rome, where, presumably with Calpurnia’s permission, he put her up at his house, and again forgot her.  He was becoming divine, what is superior, immortal.  Even when dead, his name, adopted by the emperors of Rome, survived in Czars and Kaisers.  His power too, coextensive with Rome, persisted.  Severed as it was like his heart when he fell, the booty was divided between Octavius, Lepidus, and Marc Antony.

Their triumvirate-duumvirate rather, Lepidus was nobody-matrimony consolidated.  Octavius married a relative of Antony and Antony married Octavius’ sister.  Then the world was apportioned.  Octavius got the Occident, Antony the Orient.  Rome became the capital of the one, Alexandria that of the other.  At the time Alexandria was Rome’s rival and superior.  Rome, unsightly still with the atrocities of the Tarquíns, had neither art nor commerce.  These things were regarded as the occupations of slaves.  Alexandria, purely Greek, very fair, opulent, and teeming, was the universal centre of both, of learning too, of debauchery as well-elements which its queen, a viper of the Nile, personified.

Before going there Antony made and unmade a dozen kings.  Then, presently, at Tarsus he ordered Cleopatra to come to him.  Indolently, his subject obeyed.

Cæsar claimed descent from Venus.  Antony’s tutelary god was Bacchus, but he claimed descent from Hercules, whom in size and strength he resembled.  The strength was not intellectual.  He was an understudy of genius, a soldier of limited intelligence, who tried to imitate Cæsar and failed to understand him, a big barbarian boy, by accident satrap and god.

At Rome he had seen Cleopatra.  Whether she had noticed him is uncertain.  But the gilded galley with the purple sails, its silver oars, its canopy of enchantments in which she went to him at Tarsus, has been told and retold, sung and painted.

At the approach of Isis, the Tarsians crowded the shore.  Bacchus, deserted on his throne, sent an officer to fetch her to him.  Cleopatra insisted that he come to her.  Antony, amused at the impertinence, complied.  The infinite variety of this woman, that made her a suite of surprises, instantly enthralled him.  From that moment he was hers, a lion in leash, led captive into Alexandria, where, initiated by her into the inimitable life, probably into the refinements of the savoir-vivre as well, Bacchus developed into Osiris, while Isis transformed herself anew.  She drank with him, fished with him, hunted with him, drilled with him, played tricks on him, and, at night, in slave’s dress, romped with him in Rhakotis-a local slum-broke windows, beat the watch, captivating the captive wholly.

Where she had failed with Cæsar she determined to succeed with him, and would have succeeded, had Antony been Cæsar.  Octavius was not Cæsar, either.  Any man of ability, with the power and resources of which Antony disposed, could have taken the Occident from him and, with Cleopatra, ruled the world.

Together they dreamed of it.  It was a beautiful dream, inimitable like their life.  Rumors of the one and of the other reached Octavius.  He waited, not impatiently and not long.  Meanwhile Antony was still the husband of Octavia.  But Cleopatra had poisoned her brother-husband.  There being, therefore, no lawful reason why she and Antony should not marry, they did.  Together, in the splendid palace of the Bruchium-an antique gem of which the historic brilliance still persists-they seated themselves, he as Osiris, she as Isis, on thrones of gold.  Their children they declared kings of kings.  Armenia, Phoenicia, Media, and Parthea, were allotted to them.  To Cleopatra’s realm Antony added Syria, Lydia, and Cyprus.  These distributions constituted just so many dismemberments of the res publica, Antony thought them so entirely within the scope of his prerogatives that he sent an account of the proceedings to the senate.  With the account there went to Octavia a bill of divorce.  Rome stood by indignant.  It was precisely what Octavius wanted.

Octavius had divorced his wife and married a married woman.  According to the ethics of the day, he was a model citizen, whereas Antony throning as Osiris with a female Mithridates for consort, was as oblivious of Roman dignity as of conjugal faith.  In addition, it was found that he had made a will by which Rome, in the event of capture, was devised as tributary city to Cleopatra.  Moreover, a senator, who had visited Antony at the Bruchium, testified that he had seen him upholding the woman’s litter like a slave.  It was obvious that he was mad, demented by her aphrodisiacs.  But it was obvious also that the gods of the East were rising, that Isis with her cormorant, her lotos and her spangled arms, was arrayed against the Roman penates.

War was declared.  At Actium the clash occurred.  Antony might have won.  But before he had had time to lose, Cleopatra, with singular clairvoyance, deserted him.  Her reasons for believing that he would be defeated are not clear, but her motive in going is obvious.  She wanted to rule the world’s ruler, whoever he might be, and she thought by prompt defection to find favor with Octavius.

At the sight of her scudding sail Antony lost his senses.  Instead of remaining and winning, as he might have, he followed her.  Together they reached Alexandria.  But there it was no longer the inimitable life that they led, rather that of the inséparables in death, or at least Antony so fancied.  Cleopatra intoxicated him with funereal delights while corresponding in secret with Octavius who had written engagingly to her.  In the Bruchium the nights were festivals.  By day she experimented on slaves with different poisons.  Antony believed that she was preparing to die with him.  She had no such intention.  She was preparing to be rid of him.  Then, suddenly, the enemy was at the gates.  Antony challenged Octavius to single combat.  Octavius sent him word that there were many other ways in which he could end his life.  At that the lion roared.  Even then he thought he might demolish him.  He tried.  He went forth to fight.  But Cleopatra had other views.  The infantry, the cavalry, the flotilla, joined the Roman forces.  The viper of the Nile had betrayed him.  Bacchus had also.  The night had been stirred by the hum of harps and the cries of bacchantes bearing the tutelary god to the Romans.

Antony, staggering back to the palace, was told that Cleopatra had killed herself.  She had not, but fearful lest he kill her, she had hidden with her treasure in a temple.  Antony, after the Roman fashion, kept always with him a slave who should kill him when his hour was come.  The slave’s name, Plutarch said, was Eros.  Antony called him.  Eros raised a sword, but instead of striking his master, struck himself.  Antony reddened and imitated him.  Another slave then told him that Cleopatra still lived.  He had himself taken to where she was, and died while attempting to console this woman who was preparing for the consolations of Octavius.

It is said that she received the conqueror magnificently.  But his engaging letters had been ruses de guerre.  They had triumphed.  The new Cæsar wanted to triumph still further.  He wanted Cleopatra, a chain about her neck, dragged after his chariot through Rome.  He wanted in that abjection to triumph over the entire East.  Instead of yielding to her, as she had expected, he threatened to kill her children if she eluded him by killing herself.  The threat was horrible.  But more horrible still was the thought of the infamy to be.

Shortly, on a bed of gold, dressed as for nuptials, she was found dead among her expiring women, one of whom even then was putting back on her head her diadem which had fallen.  At last the cormorant had cried “Enough!”

Said Horace:  “Nunc est bibendum.”