To sum up, the romance of Antony and Cleopatra covers, at least in its beginnings, a political treaty.  With the marriage, Cleopatra seeks to steady her wavering power; Antony, to place the valley of the Nile under the Roman protectorate.  How then was the famous romance born?  The actual history of Antony and Cleopatra is one of the most tragic episodes of a struggle that lacerated the Roman Empire for four centuries, until it finally destroyed it, the struggle between Orient and Occident.  During the age of Caesar, little by little, without any one’s realising it at first, there arose and fulfilled itself a fact of the gravest importance; that is, the eastern part of the Empire had grown out of proportion:  first, from the conquest of the Pontus, made by Lucullus, who had added immense territory in Asia Minor; then by Pompey’s conquest of Syria, and the protectorate extended by him over all Palestine and a considerable part of Arabia.  These new districts were not only enormous in extension; they were also populous, wealthy, fertile, celebrated for ancient culture; they held the busiest industrial cities, the best cultivated regions of the ancient world, the most famous seats of arts, letters, science, therefore their annexation, made rapidly in few years, could but trouble the already unstable equilibrium of the Empire.  Italy was then, compared with these provinces, a poor and barbarous land; because southern Italy was ruined by the wars of preceding epochs, and northern Italy, naturally the wealthier part, was still crude and in the beginning of its development.  The other western provinces nearer Italy were poorer and less civilised than Italy, except Gallia Narbonensis and certain parts of southern Spain.  So that Rome, the capital of the Empire, came to find itself far from the richest and most populous regions, among territories poor and despoiled, on the frontiers of barbarism—­in such a situation as the Russian Empire might find itself to-day if it had a capital at Vladivostok or Kharbin.  You know that during the last years of the life of Caesar it was rumoured several times that the Dictator wished to remove the capital of the Empire; it was said, to Alexandria in Egypt, to Ilium in the district where Troy arose.  It is impossible to judge whether these reports were true or merely invented by enemies of Caesar to damage him; at any rate, true or false, they show that public opinion was beginning to concern itself with the “Eastern peril”; that is, with the danger that the seat of empire must be shifted toward the Orient and the too ample Asiatic and African territory, and that Italy be one day uncrowned of her metropolitan predominance, conquered by so many wars.  Such hear-says must have seemed, even if not true, the more likely, because, in his last two years, Caesar planned the conquest of Persia.  Now the natural basis of operations for the conquest of Persia was to be found, not in Italy, but in Asia Minor, and if Persia had been conquered,