Antony, when the first effects of his panic subsided, began to grow mad with vexation and resentment against all mankind.  He determined that he would have nothing to do with Cleopatra or with any of her friends, but went off in a fit of sullen rage, and built a hermitage in a lonely place, on the island of Pharos, where he lived for a time, cursing his folly and his wretched fate, and uttering the bitterest invectives against all who had been concerned in it.  Here tidings came continually in, informing him of the defection of one after another of his armies, of the fall of his provinces in Greece and Asia Minor, and of the irresistible progress which Octavius was now making toward universal dominion.  The tidings of these disasters coming incessantly upon him kept him in a continual fever of resentment and rage.

At last he became tired of his misanthropic solitude, a sort of reconciliation ensued between himself and Cleopatra, and he went back again to the city.  Here he joined himself once more to Cleopatra, and, collecting together what remained of their joint resources, they plunged again into a life of dissipation and vice, with the vain attempt to drown in mirth and wine the bitter regrets and the anxious forebodings which filled their souls.  They joined with them a company of revelers as abandoned as themselves, and strove very hard to disguise and conceal their cares in their forced and unnatural gayety.  They could not, however, accomplish this purpose.  Octavius was gradually advancing in his progress, and they knew very well that the time of his dreadful reckoning with them must soon come; nor was there any place on earth in which they could look with any hope of finding a refuge in it from his vindictive hostility.

Cleopatra, warned by dreadful presentiments of what would probably at last be her fate, amused herself in studying the nature of poisons—­not theoretically, but practically—­making experiments with them on wretched prisoners and captives whom she compelled to take them in order that she and Antony might see the effects which they produced.  She made a collection of all the poisons which she could procure, and administered portions of them all, that she might see which were sudden and which were slow in their effects, and also learn which produced the greatest distress and suffering, and which, on the other hand, only benumbed and stupefied the faculties, and thus extinguished life with the least infliction of pain.  These experiments were not confined to such vegetable and mineral poisons as could be mingled with the food or administered in a potion.  Cleopatra took an equal interest in the effects of the bite of venomous serpents and reptiles.  She procured specimens of all these animals, and tried them upon her prisoners, causing the men to be stung and bitten by them, and then watching the effects.  These investigations were made, not directly with a view to any practical use, which she was to make of the knowledge thus acquired, but rather as an agreeable occupation, to divert her mind, and to amuse Antony and her guests.  The variety in the forms and expressions which the agony of her poisoned victims assumed,—­their writhings, their cries, their convulsions, and the distortions of their features when struggling with death, furnished exactly the kind and degree of excitement which she needed to occupy and amuse her mind.