Her gentlewomen, like the Nereides,
     So many mermaids, tended her i’ the eyes.
     ...  At the helm
     A seeming mermaid steers....
     ...  From the barge
     A strange invisible perfume hits the sense
     Of the adjacent wharves.  The city cast
     Her people out upon her; and Antony,
     Enthroned i’ the market-place, did sit alone,
     Whistling to th’ air; which, but for vacancy,
     Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too,
     And made a gap in nature.”

On the arrival of this siren queen, Antony had invited her to supper,—­the dinner of the Romans,—­but she, with woman’s instinct, had declined, till he should come to her; and he, with the urbanity of a polished noble,—­for such he probably was,—­complied, and found a banquet which astonished even him, accustomed as he was to senatorial magnificence, and which, with all the treasures of the East, he could not rival.  From that fatal hour he was enslaved.  She conquered him, not merely by her display and her dazzling beauty, but by her wit.  Her very tones were music.  So accomplished was she in languages, that without interpreters she conversed not only with Greeks and Latins, but with Ethiopians, Jews, Arabians, Syrians, Medes, and Parthians.  So dazzled and bewitched was Antony, that, instead of continuing the duties of his great position, he returned with Cleopatra to Alexandria, there to keep holiday and squander riches, and, still worse, his precious time, to the shame and scandal of Rome, inglorious and without excuse,—­a Samson at the feet of Delilah, or a Hercules throwing away his club to seize the distaff of Omphale, confessing to the potency of that mysterious charm which the sage at the court of an Eastern prince pronounced the strongest power on earth.  Never was a strong man more enthralled than was Antony by this bewitching woman, who exhausted every art to please him.  She played at dice with him, drank with him, hunted with him, rambled with him, jested with him, angled with him, flattering and reproving him by turn, always having some new device of pleasure to gratify his senses or stimulate his curiosity.  Thus passed the winter of 41-40, and in the spring he was recalled to Borne by political dissensions there.

At this stage, however, it would seem that ambition was paramount with him, not love; for his wife Fulvia having died, he did not marry Cleopatra, but Octavia, sister of Octavius, his fellow-triumvir and general rival.  It was evidently from political considerations that he married Octavia, who was a stately and noble woman, but tedious in her dignity, and unattractive in her person.  And what a commentary on Roman rank!  The sister of a Roman grandee seemed to the ambitious general a greater match than the Queen of Egypt.  How this must have piqued the proud daughter of the Ptolemies,—­that she, a queen, with all her charms, was not the equal in the eyes of Antony to the sister of Caesar’s heir!