Cleopatra and her fortunes and perils played a slight part in Cornelia’s mind, however, that day.  To know Alexandria in its sunlight and shadows was indeed to know a miniature world.  First of all to notice, besides the heterogeneous nature of the crowds on the streets, was the fact that every person, high as well as low, was engaged in some trade.  Very far was the typical Alexandrian from the quiet “leisure” which the average Greek or Latin believed requisite for a refined life—­a life in which slaves did all the necessary work, and amassed an income for the master to expend in polite recreations.  In Rome, for a free citizen to have been a handicraftsman would have been a disgrace; he could be farmer, banker, soldier,—­nothing more.  In Alexandria the glass-workers, paper-makers, and linen weavers were those who were proudest and most jealous of their title of “Men of Macedonia."[173] Money, Cornelia soon discovered, was even a greater god here than in Rome.  Cleomenes himself was not ashamed to spend a large part of the day inspecting his factories, and did not hesitate to declare that during a period when he and his family had been in great distress, following the failure of the banking house of Agias’s father, he had toiled with his own hands to win bread for his daughters.

  [173] The official title of Alexandrian Greek citizens.

The conception that any honest labour, except a certain genteel agriculture, might not make a man the less of a gentleman, or a woman the less of a lady, was as new to Cornelia as the idea that some non-Romans could claim equality with herself.  Neither proposition did she accept consciously.  The prejudice wore quietly away.  But other things about the city she gathered quickly enough from the caustic explanations of Cleomenes.

“Here in Alexandria,” he asserted on one occasion, “we are always ripe for a riot.  Never a chariot race without stone-throwing and throat-cutting after it.  An unpopular official is torn in pieces by a mob.  If you chance to kill a cat, the Egyptians are after you for your life.  The Greeks hate the Jews, and are always ready to plunder their quarter; the Egyptians are on bad terms with both.  We talk about being free citizens of the capital of the Ptolemies, and pretend to go to the Gymnasium for discussion, and claim a right to consult with the king; but our precious Senate, and all our tribes and wards, are only fictions.  We are as much slaves as the poor creatures down in the royal quarries; only we demand the right to riot and give nicknames.  We called the last Ptolemaeus, Auletes “the Piper,” because in that way we have punished him in all history for the way he oppressed us. Euge! Have we not a wonderful city!”

It was on the very next day that Cleopatra was recalled to Cornelia’s mind in a quite marked fashion.  It was rather early, and she was upon the roof-garden, on the third story of the house, where there was a commanding view of the city.  Berenice was busy reading from a papyrus the Egyptian legend of the “Adventures of Sinuhit,” translating into Greek as she read.