She was sailing tranquilly along the Cydnus, on a bark with a golden stern, with sails of purple and oars of silver, and the dip of the oars was rhythmed to the sound of flutes, blending with music of lyres.  She herself, the Queen, wondrously clad as Venus is pictured, was lying under an awning gold embroidered.  Boys dressed as Cupids stood at her side, gently waving fans to refresh her; her maidens, every one beautiful and clad as a Naiad or a Grace, directed the boat, some at the rudder, others at the ropes.  Both banks of the stream were sweet with the perfumes burning on the vessel.

Posterity is yet dazzled by this ship, refulgent with purple and gold and melodious with flutes and lyres.  If we are spellbound by Plutarch’s description, it does not seem strange to us that Antony should be—­he who could not only behold in person that wonderful Venus, but could dine with her tete-a-tete, in a splendour of torches indescribable.  Surely this is a setting in no wise improbable for the beginning of the famous romance of the love of Antony and Cleopatra, and its development as probable as its beginning; the follies committed by Antony for the seductive Queen of the Orient, the divorce of Octavia, the war for love of Cleopatra, kindled in the whole Empire, and the miserable catastrophe.  Are there not to be seen in recent centuries many men of power putting their greatness to risk and sometimes to ruin for love of a woman?  Are not the love letters of great statesmen—­for instance, those of Mirabeau and of Gambetta—­admitted to the semi-official part of modern history-writing?  And so also Antony could love a queen and, like so many modern statesmen, commit follies for her.  A French critic of my book, burning his ships behind him, has said that Antony was a Roman Boulanger.

The romance pleases:  art takes it as subject and re-takes it; but that does not keep off the brutal hands of criticism.  Before all, it should be observed that moderns feel and interpret the romance of Antony and Cleopatra in a way very different from that of the ancients.  From Shakespeare to De Heredia and Henri Houssaye, artists and historians have described with sympathy, even almost idealised, this passion that throws away in a lightning flash every human greatness, to pursue the mantle of a fleeing woman; they find in the follies of Antony something profoundly human that moves them, fascinates them, and makes them indulgent.  To the ancients, on the contrary, the amours of Antony and Cleopatra were but a dishonourable degeneration of the passion.  They have no excuse for the man whom love for a woman impelled to desert in battle, to abandon soldiers, friends, relatives, to conspire against the greatness of Rome.