five-and-twenty, the luxurious Antony could deny her nothing.  The first favour which she asked of her lover equals any cruelty that we have met with in this history:  it was, that he would have her sister Arsinoe put to death.  Caesar had spared her life, after his triumph, through love of Cleopatra; but he was mistaken in the heart of his mistress; she would have been then better pleased at Arsinoe’s death; and Antony, at her bidding, had her murdered in the temple of Diana, at Ephesus.

Though Fulvia, the faithful wife of Antony, could scarcely keep together his party at Rome against the power of Octavianus, his colleague in the triumvirate, and though Labienus, with the Parthian legions, was ready to march into Syria against him, yet he was so entangled in the artful nets of Cleopatra, that she led him captive to Alexandria; and there the old warrior fell into every idle amusement, and offered up at the shrine of pleasure one of the greatest of sacrifices, the sacrifice of his time.  The lovers visited each other every day, and the waste of their entertainments passed belief.  Philotas, a physician who was following his studies at Alexandria, told Plutarch’s grandfather that he was once invited to see Antony’s dinner cooked, and among other meats were eight wild boars roasting whole; and the cook explained to him that, though there were only twelve guests, yet as each dish had to be roasted to a single turn of the spit, and Antony did not know at what hour he should dine, it was necessary to cook at least eight dinners.  But the most costly of the luxuries then used in Egypt were the scents and the ointments.  Gold, silver, and jewels, as Pliny remarks, will pass to a man’s heirs, even clothes will last a few months or weeks, but scents fly off and are lost at the first moment that they are admired; and yet ointments, like the attar of roses, which melted and gave out their scent, and passed into air when placed upon the back of the hand, as the coolest part of the body, were sold for four hundred denarii the pound.  But the ointment was not meant to be used quite so wastefully.  It was usually sealed up in small alabaster jars, which were made in the town of Alabastron, on the east of the Nile, and thence received their name.  These were long in shape, without a foot, and had a narrow mouth.  They were meant never to be opened, but to let the scent escape slowly and sparingly through the porous stone.  In these Egyptian jars scented ointment was carried by trade to the banks of the Tigris and to the shores of the Mediterranean.

The tenth and eleventh years of the queen’s reign were marked by a famine through the land, caused by the Nile’s not rising to the wished-for height and by the want of the usual overflow; and an inscription which was written both in the Greek and Egyptian languages declares the gratitude of the Theban priests and elders and citizens to Callimachus, the prefect of the Theban taxes, who did what he could to lessen the sufferings