“Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
      Her infinite variety.”

She certainly had the power of retaining the conquests she had won,—­which rarely happens except with those who are gifted with intellectual radiance and freshness.  She held her hold on Antony for eleven years, when he was burdened with great public cares and duties, and when he was forty-two years of age.  Such a superior man as he was intellectually, and, after Caesar, the leading man of the empire,—­a statesman as well as soldier,—­would not have been enslaved so long by Cleopatra had she not possessed remarkable gifts and attainments, like those famous women who reigned in the courts of the Bourbons in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and who, by their wit and social fascinations, gathered around their thrones the most distinguished men of France, and made them friends as well as admirers.  The Pompadours of the world have only a brief reign, and at last become repulsive.  But Cleopatra, like Maintenon, was always attractive, although she, could not lay claim to the virtues of the latter.  She was as politic as the French beauty, and as full of expedients to please her lord.  She may have revelled in the banquets she prepared for Antony, as Esther did in those she prepared for Xerxes; but with the same intent, to please him rather than herself, and win, from his weakness, those political favors which in his calmer hours he might have shrunk from granting.  Cleopatra was a politician as well as a luxurious beauty, and it may have been her supreme aim to secure the independence of Egypt.  She wished to beguile Antony as she had sought to beguile Caesar, since they were the masters of the world, and had it in their power to crush her sovereignty and reduce her realm to a mere province of the empire.  Nor is there evidence that in the magnificent banquets she gave to the Roman general she ever lost her self-control.  She drank, and made him drink, but retained her wits, “laughing him out of patience and laughing him into patience,” ascendant over him by raillery, irony, and wit.

And Antony, again, although fond of banquets and ostentation, like other Roman nobles, and utterly unscrupulous and unprincipled, as Roman libertines were, was also general, statesman, and orator.  He grew up amid the dangers and toils and privations of Caesar’s camp.  He was as greedy of honors as was his imperial master.  He was a sunburnt and experienced commander, obliged to be on his guard, and ready for emergencies.  No such man feels that he can afford to indulge his appetites, except on rare occasions.  One of the leading peculiarities of all great generals has been their temperance.  It marked Caesar, Charlemagne, Gustavus Adolphus, Frederic the Great, Cromwell, and Napoleon.  When Alexander gave himself up to banquets, his conquests ended.  Even such a self-indulgent, pleasure-seeking man as Louis XIV. always maintained the decencies of society amid his dissipated courtiers.