dangers, the details of which can not, however, be here particularly described.  She wrote continually to Antony, urgently entreating him to come to Rome, and displaying in her letters all those marks of agitation and distress which a wife would naturally feel under the circumstances in which she was placed.  The thought that her husband had been so completely drawn away from her by the guilty arts of such a woman, and led by her to abandon his wife and his family, and leave in neglect and confusion concerns of such momentous magnitude as those which demanded his attention at home, produced an excitement in her mind bordering upon frensy.  Antony was at length so far influenced by the urgency of the case that he determined to return.  He broke up his quarters at Tarsus and moved south toward Tyre, which was a great naval port and station in those days.  Cleopatra went with him.  They were to separate at Tyre.  She was to embark there for Egypt, and he for Rome.

At least that was Antony’s plan, but it was not Cleopatra’s.  She had determined that Antony should go with her to Alexandria.  As might have been expected, when the time came for the decision, the woman gained the day.  Her flatteries, her arts, her caresses, her tears, prevailed.  After a brief struggle between the sentiment of love on the one hand and those of ambition and of duty combined on the other, Antony gave up the contest.  Abandoning every thing else, he surrendered himself wholly to Cleopatra’s control, and went with her to Alexandria.  He spent the winter there, giving himself up with her to every species of sensual indulgence that the most remorseless license could tolerate, and the most unbounded wealth procure.

There seemed, in fact, to be no bounds to the extravagance and infatuation which Antony displayed during the winter in Alexandria.  Cleopatra devoted herself to him incessantly, day and night, filling up every moment of time with some new form of pleasure, in order that he might have no time to think of his absent wife, or to listen to the reproaches of his conscience.  Antony, on his part, surrendered himself a willing victim to these wiles, and entered with all his heart into the thousand plans of gayety and merry-making which Cleopatra devised.  They had each a separate establishment in the city, which was maintained at an enormous cost, and they made a arrangement by which each was the guest of the other on alternate days.  These visits were spent in games, sports, spectacles, feasting, drinking, and in every species of riot, irregularity, and excess.

A curious instance is afforded of the accidental manner in which intelligence in respect to the scenes and incidents of private life in those ancient days is sometimes obtained, in a circumstance which occurred at this time at Antony’s court.  It seems that there was a young medical student at Alexandria that winter, named Philotas, who happened, in some way or other, to have formed an acquaintance with one