set his heart on exhibiting her to the Roman people, on his return to the capital, in his triumphal procession.  He accordingly sent her orders, requiring that she should submit to the treatment prescribed by the physician, and take her food, enforcing these his commands with a certain threat which he imagined might have some influence over her.  And what threat does the reader imagine could possibly be devised to reach a mind so sunk, so desperate, so wretched as hers?  Every thing seemed already lost but life, and life was only an insupportable burden.  What interests, then, had she still remaining upon which a threat could take hold?

Octavius, in looking for some avenue by which he could reach her, reflected that she was a mother.  Caesarion, the son of Julius Caesar, and Alexander, Cleopatra, and Ptolemy, Antony’s children, were still alive.  Octavius imagined that in the secret recesses of her wrecked and ruined soul there might be some lingering principle of maternal affection remaining which he could goad into life and action.  He accordingly sent word to her that, if she did not yield to the physician and take her food, he would kill every one of her children.

The threat produced its effect.  The crazed and frantic patient became calm.  She received her food.  She submitted to the physician.  Under his treatment her wounds began to heal, the fever was allayed, and at length she appeared to be gradually recovering.

When Octavius learned that Cleopatra had become composed, and seemed to be in some sense convalescent, he resolved to pay her a visit.  As he entered the room where she was confined, which seems to have been still the upper chamber of her tomb, he found her lying on a low and miserable bed, in a most wretched condition, and exhibiting such a spectacle of disease and wretchedness that he was shocked at beholding her.  She appeared, in fact, almost wholly bereft of reason.  When Octavius came in, she suddenly leaped out of the bed, half naked as she was, and covered with bruises and wounds, and crawled miserably along to her conqueror’s feet in the attitude of a suppliant.  Her hair was torn from her head, her limbs were swollen and disfigured, and great bandages appeared here and there, indicating that there were still worse injuries than these concealed.  From the midst of all this squalidness and misery there still beamed from her sunken eyes a great portion of their former beauty, and her voice still possessed the same inexpressible charm that had characterized it so strongly in the days of her prime.  Octavius made her go back to her bed again and lie down.