[Illustration:  CLEOPATRA TESTING THE POISONS UPON THE SLAVES]

Antony was not entirely at ease, however, during the progress of these terrible experiments.  His foolish and childish fondness for Cleopatra was mingled with jealousy, suspicion, and distrust; and he was so afraid that Cleopatra might secretly poison him, that he would never take any food or wine without requiring that she should taste it before him.  At length, one day, Cleopatra caused the petals of some flowers to be poisoned, and then had the flowers woven into the chaplet which Antony was to wear at supper.  In the midst of the feast, she pulled off the leaves of the flowers from her own chaplet and put them playfully into her wine, and then proposed that Antony should do the same with his chaplet, and that they should then drink the wine, tinctured, as it would be, with the color and the perfume of the flowers.  Antony entered very readily into this proposal, and when he was about to drink the wine, she arrested his hand, and told him that it was poisoned.  “You see now,” said she, “how vain it is for you to watch against me.  If it were possible for me to live without you, how easy it would be for me to devise ways and means to kill you.”  Then, to prove that her words were true, she ordered one of the servants to drink Antony’s wine.  He did so, and died before their sight in dreadful agony.

The experiments which Cleopatra thus made on the nature and effects of poison were not, however, wholly without practical result.  Cleopatra learned from them, it is said, that the bite of the asp was the easiest and least painful mode of death.  The effect of the venom of that animal appeared to her to be the lulling of the sensorium into a lethargy or stupor, which soon ended in death, without the intervention of pain.  This knowledge she seems to have laid up in her mind for future use.

The thoughts of Cleopatra appear, in fact, to have been much disposed, at this time, to flow in gloomy channels, for she occupied herself a great deal in building for herself a sepulchral monument in a certain sacred portion of the city.  This monument had, in fact, been commenced many years ago, in accordance with a custom prevailing among Egyptian sovereigns, of expending a portion of their revenues during their life-time in building and decorating their own tombs.  Cleopatra now turned her mind with new interest to her own mausoleum.  She finished it, provided it with the strongest possible bolts and bars, and, in a word, seemed to be preparing it in all respects for occupation.

In the mean time, Octavius, having made himself master of all the countries which had formerly been under Antony’s sway, now advanced, meeting none to oppose him, from Asia Minor into Syria, and from Syria toward Egypt.  Antony and Cleopatra made one attempt, while he was thus advancing toward Alexandria, to avert the storm which was impending over them, by sending an embassage to ask for some terms of peace.