This was the language of the cold-hearted foe, secure of superior power.  How sadly, too, she had been disappointed in the hope—­that the veterans who had served under Antony would desert their new commander at the first summons and flock to his standard!—­for all her husband’s efforts in this direction, spite of the bewitching power of his eloquence, failed, while every hour brought tidings of the treacherous desertion from his army of individual warriors and whole maniples.  His foe deemed his cause so weak that he did not even resist Mark Antony’s attempts to win the soldiers by promises.

From all these signs Cleopatra now saw plainly, in her lover’s victory, only the last flicker of a dying fire; but so long as it burned he should see her follow its light.

Therefore she had entered the festal hall with the victor of the day.  She had witnessed a strange festival.  It began with tears and reminded Cleopatra of the saying that she herself resembled a banquet served to celebrate a victory before the battle was won.  The cup-bearers had scarcely advanced to the guests with their golden vessels when Antony turned to them, exclaiming:  “Pour generously, men; perhaps to-morrow you will serve another master!”

Then, unlike his usual self, he grew thoughtful and murmured under his breath, “And I shall probably be lying outside a corpse, a miserable nothing.”

Loud sobs from the cup-bearers and servants followed these words; but he addressed them calmly, assuring them that he would not take them into a battle from which he expected an honourable death rather than rescue and victory.

At this Cleopatra’s tears flowed also.  If this reckless man of pleasure, this notorious spendthrift and disturber of the public peace, with his insatiate desires, had inspired bitter hostility, few had gained the warm love of so many hearts.  One glance at his heroic figure; one memory of the days when even his foes conceded that he was never greater than in the presence of the most imminent peril, never more capable of awakening in others the hope of brighter times than amid the sorest privations; one tone of the orator’s deep, resonant voice, which so often came from the heart and therefore gained hearts with such resistless power; the recollection of numberless instances of the bright cheerfulness of his nature and his boundless generosity sufficiently explained the lamentations which burst forth at that banquet, the tears which flowed —­tears of genuine feeling.  They were also shed for the beautiful Queen who, unmindful of the spectators, rested her noble brow, with its coronal of pearls, upon his mighty shoulder.

But the grief did not last long, for Mark Antony, shouted:  “Hence with melancholy!  We do not need the larva!