If for these reasons I have thought it prudent not to accept in my work the stories and anecdotes that the ancients recount of Antony and Cleopatra, without indeed risking to declare them false, it is, on the contrary, not possible to deny that Cleopatra gradually acquired great ascendency over the mind of Antony.  The circumstance is of itself highly probable.  That Cleopatra was perhaps a Venus, as the ancients say, or that she was provided with but a mediocre beauty, as declare the portraits, matters little:  it is, however, certain that she was a woman of great cleverness and culture; as woman and queen of the richest and most civilised realm of the ancient world, she was mistress of all those arts of pleasure, of luxury, of elegance, that are the most delicate and intoxicating fruit of all mature civilisations.  Cleopatra might refigure, in the ancient world, the wealthiest, most elegant, and cultured Parisian lady in the world of to-day.

Antony, on the other hand, was the descendant of a family of that Roman nobility which still preserved much rustic roughness in tastes, ideas, habits; he grew up in times in which the children were still given Spartan training; he came to Egypt from a nation which, notwithstanding its military and diplomatic triumphs, could be considered, compared with Egypt, only poor, rude, and barbarous.  Upon this intelligent man, eager for enjoyment, who had, like other noble Romans, already begun to taste the charms of intellectual civilisation, it was not Cleopatra alone that made the keenest of impressions, but all Egypt, the wonderful city of Alexandria, the sumptuous palace of the Ptolemies—­all that refined, elegant splendour of which he found himself at one stroke the master.  What was there at Rome to compare with Alexandria?—­Rome, in spite of its imperial power, abandoned to a fearful disorder by the disregard of factions, encumbered with ruin, its streets narrow and wretched, provided as yet with but a single forum, narrow and plain, the sole impressive monument of which was the theatre of Pompey; Rome, where the life was yet crude, and objects of luxury so rare that they had to be brought from the distant Orient?  At Alexandria, instead, the Paris of the ancient world, were to be found all the best and most beautiful things of the earth.  There was a sumptuosity of public edifices that the ancients never tire of extolling—­the quay seven stadia long, the lighthouse famous all over the Mediterranean, the marvellous zoological garden, the Museum, the Gymnasium, innumerable temples, the unending palace of the Ptolemies.  There was an abundance, unheard of for those times, of objects of luxury—­rugs, glass, stuffs, papyruses, jewels, artistic pottery—­because they made all these things at Alexandria.  There was an abundance, greater than elsewhere, of silk, of perfumes, of gems, of all the things imported from the extreme East, because through Alexandria passed one of the most frequented routes of Indo-Chinese commerce.  There, too, were innumerable artists, writers, philosophers, and savants; society life and intellectual life alike fervid; continuous movement to and fro of traffic, continual passing of rare and curious things; countless amusements; life, more than elsewhere, safe—­at least so it was believed—­because at Alexandria were the great schools of medicine and the great scientific physicians.