“You see how thankless a thing it is for me to let my heart speak for once, like other people.  I am like the boy in the fable when the wolf came!  I have so often behaved in an unbrotherly fashion that when I show the aspect of a brother you think I have put on a mask.  If I had had anything special to ask of you I should have waited till to-morrow, for in this part of the country even a blind beggar does not like to refuse his lame comrade anything on his birthday.”

“If only we knew what you wish for!  Philometor and I would do it more than gladly, although you always want something monstrous.  Our performance to-morrow will—­at any rate—­but—­Zoe, pray be good enough to retire with the maids; I have a few words to say to my brother alone.”

As soon as the queen’s ladies had withdrawn, she went on: 

“It is a real grief to use, but the best part of the festival in honor of your birthday will not be particularly successful, for the priests of Serapis spitefully refuse us the Hebe about whom Lysias has made us so curious.  Asclepiodorus, it would seem, keeps her in concealment, and carries his audacity so far as to tell us that someone has carried her off from the temple.  He insinuates that we have stolen her, and demands her restitution in the name of all his associates.”

“You are doing the man an injustice; our dove has followed the lure of a dove-catcher who will not allow me to have her, and who is now billing and cooing with her in his own nest.  I am cheated, but I can scarcely be angry with the Roman, for his claim was of older standing than mine.”

“The Roman?” asked Cleopatra, rising from her seat and turning pale.  “But that is impossible.  You are making common cause with Eulaeus, and want to set me against Publius Scipio.  At the banquet last night you showed plainly enough your ill-feeling against him.”

“You seem to feel more warmly towards him.  But before I prove to you that I am neither lying nor joking, may I enquire what has this man, this many-named Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica, to recommend him above any handsome well-grown Macedonian, who is resolute in my cause, in the whole corps of your body guard, excepting his patrician pride?  He is as bitter and ungenial as a sour apple, and all the very best that you—­a subtle thinker, a brilliant and cultivated philosopher—­can find to say is no more appreciated by his meanly cultivated intellect than the odes of Sappho by a Nubian boatman.”

“It is exactly for that,” cried the queen, “that I value him; he is different from all of us; we who—­how shall I express myself—­who always think at second-hand, and always set our foot in the rut trodden by the master of the school we adhere to; who squeeze our minds into the moulds that others have carved out, and when we speak hesitate to step beyond the outlines of those figures of rhetoric which we learned at school!  You have burst these bonds, but even your mighty spirit still shows traces