Unable to think of the happiness enjoyed in the past or to hope for it in the future, she gave herself up to uncontrolled despair, and no woman of the people could have yielded more absolutely to the consuming grief which rent her heart, or expressed it in wilder, more frantic language, than did this great Queen, this woman who as a child had been so sensitive to the slightest suffering, and whose after-life had certainly not taught her to bear sorrow with patience.  After Charmian, at the dying man’s request, had given him some wine, he found strength to speak coherently, instead of moaning and sighing.

He tenderly urged Cleopatra to secure her own safety, if it could be done without dishonour, and mentioned Proculejus as the man most worthy of her confidence among the friends of Octavianus.  Then he entreated her not to mourn for him, but to consider him happy; for he had enjoyed the richest favours of Fortune.  He owed his brightest hours to her love; but he had also been the first and most powerful man on earth.  Now he was dying in the arms of Love, honourable as a Roman who succumbed to Romans.

In this conviction he died after a short struggle.

Cleopatra had watched his last breath, closed his eyes, and then thrown herself tearlessly on her lover’s body.  At last she fainted, and lay unconscious with her head upon his marble breast.

The private secretary had witnessed all this, and then returned with tearful eyes to the second story.  There he met Gorgias, who had climbed the scaffolding, and told him what he had seen and heard from the stairs.  But his story was scarcely ended when a carriage stopped at the Corner of the Muses and an aristocratic Roman alighted.  This was the very Proculejus whom the dying Antony had recommended to the woman he loved as worthy of her confidence.

“In fact,” Gorgias continued, “he seemed in form and features one of the noblest of his haughty race.  He came commissioned by Octavianus, and is said to be warmly devoted to the Caesar, and a well-disposed man.  We have also heard him mentioned as a poet and a brother-in-law of Maecenas.  A wealthy aristocrat, he is a generous patron of literature, and also holds art and science in high esteem.  Timagenes lauds his culture and noble nature.  Perhaps the historian was right; but where the object in question is the state and its advantage, what we here regard as worthy of a free man appears to be considered of little moment at the court of Octavianus.  The lord to whom he gives his services intrusted him with a difficult task, and Proculejus doubtless considered it his duty to make every effort to perform it—­and yet——­If I see aright, a day will come when he will curse this, and the obedience with which he, a free man, aided Caesar But listen.

“Erect and haughty in his splendid suit of armour, he knocked at the door of the tomb.  Cleopatra had regained consciousness and asked—­she must have known him in Rome—­what he desired.