and used him for her own ends, although we do not know that she was perfidious and false to him.  But for her he would have ruled the world.  He showed himself capable of an enormous sacrifice.  She made no sacrifices for him.  She could even have transferred her affections, since she afterwards sought to play her blandishments upon his rival.  Conceive of Antony, if you can, as loving any one else than her who led him on to ruin.  In the very degradation of love we see its sacredness.  In his fidelity we find some palliation.  Nor does it seem that Octavia, the slighted wife of Antony, gave way to vengeance.  Her sense of injury was overshadowed by her pity.  This lofty and dignified matron even took his six surviving children, three of whom were Cleopatra’s, and brought them up in her own house as her own.  Can Paganism show a greater magnanimity?

The fate of Cleopatra was tragic also.  She too destroyed herself, not probably by the bite of asps, as is the popular opinion, but by some potent and subtile poison that she ever carried with her, and which had the effect of benumbing the body and making her insensible to pain.  Yet she does not kill herself because she cannot survive the death of Antony, but because she is too proud to be carried to Rome to grace the triumph of the new Caesar.  She will not be led a captive princess up the Capitoline Hill.  She has an overbearing pride.  “Know, sir,” says she to Proculeius, “that I

     “Will not wait pinion’d at your master’s court,
     Nor once be chastis’d with the sober eye
     Of dull Octavia....
      ...  Rather a ditch in Egypt
     Be gentle grave to me!”

But whether pride or whether shame was the more powerful motive in committing suicide, I do not read that she was a victim of remorse.  She had no moral sense.  Nor did she give way to sentimental grief on the death of Antony.  Her grief was blended with disappointment and rage.  Nor did she hide her head, but wore a face of brass.  She used all her arts to win Octavius.  Her resources did not fail her; but she expended them on one of the coldest, most politic, and most astute men that ever lived.  And the disappointment that followed her defeat—­that she could not enslave another conqueror—­was greater than the grief for Antony.  Nor during her whole career do we see any signs of that sorrow and humility which, it would seem, should mark a woman who has made so great and fatal a mistake,—­cut off hopelessly from the respect of the world and the peace of her own soul.  We see grief, rage, despair, in her miserable end, as we see pride and shamefacedness in her gilded life, but not remorse or shame.  And when she dies by her own hand, it is not in madness, but to escape humiliation.  Suicide was one of the worst features of Pagan antiquity.  It was a base and cowardly reluctance to meet the evils of life, as much as indifference to the future and a blunted moral sense.

So much for the woman herself, her selfish spirit, her vile career; but as Cleopatra is one of the best known and most striking examples of a Pagan woman, with qualities and in circumstances peculiarly characteristic of Paganism, I must make a few remarks on these points.