reed.  His genius was greater, at any rate more many-sided and mobile, than mine.  He succeeded, too, in pursuing different objects at the same time with equal devotion.  I am wholly absorbed in the cares of state, of government, and war.  I feel grateful when I can permit our poets to adorn my leisure for a brief space.  Overburdened with toil, I have no time to yield myself captive, as my uncle did in these very rooms, to the most charming of women.  If I could follow my own will, you would be the first from whom I would seek the gifts of Eros.  But it may not be!  We Romans learn to curb even the most ardent wishes when duty and morality command.  There is no city in the world where half so many gods are worshipped as here; and what strange deities are numbered among them!  It needs a special effort of the intellect to understand them.  But the simple duties of the domestic hearth!—­they are too prosaic for you Alexandrians, who imbibe philosophy with your mothers’ milk.  What marvel, if I looked for them in vain?  True, they would find little satisfaction—­our household gods I mean—­here, where the rigid demands of Hymen are mute before the ardent pleadings of Eros.  Marriage is scarcely reckoned among the sacred things of life.  But this opinion seems to displease you.”

“Because it is false,” cried Cleopatra, repressing with difficulty a fresh outburst of indignation.  “Yet, if I see aright, your reproach is aimed only at the bond which united me to the man who was called your sister’s husband.  But I will I would gladly remain silent, but you force me to speak, and I will do so, though your own friend, Proculejus, is signing to me to be cautious.  I—­I, Cleopatra, was the wife of Mark Antony according to the customs of this country, when you wedded him to the widow of Marcellus, who had scarcely closed his eyes.  Not she, but I, was the deserted wife—­I to whom his heart belonged until the hour of his death, not the unloved consort wedded—­” Here her voice fell.  She had yielded to the passionate impulse which urged her to express her feelings in the matter, and now continued in a tone of gentle explanation:  “I know that you proposed this alliance solely for the peace and welfare of Rome—­”

“To guard both, and to spare the blood of tens of thousands,” Octavianus added with proud decision.  “Your clear brain perceived the true state of affairs.  If, spite of the grave importance of these motives, you—­But what voices would not that of the heart silence with you women!  The man, the Roman, succeeded in closing his ears to its siren song.  Were it otherwise, I would never have chosen for my sister a husband by whom I knew her happiness would be so ill-guarded—­I would, as I have already said, be unable to master my own admiration of the loveliest of women.  But I ought scarcely to boast of that.  I fear that a heart like yours opens less quickly to the modest Octavianus than to a Julius Caesar or the brilliant Mark Antony.  Yet I may be permitted to confess that perhaps I might have avoided conducting this unhappy war against my friend to the end under my own guidance, and appearing myself in Egypt, had I not been urged by the longing to see once more the woman who had dazzled my boyish eyes.  Now, in my mature manhood, I desired to comprehend those marvellous gifts of mind, that matchless sagacity—­”