atra, "the fishing rod, autocrat, to
us poor sovereigns of Pharos and Canopus; your game is cities, kingdoms,
and continents."

Plutarch does not mention the most tragic and the most characteristic
proof of Cleopatra's complete conquest of Antony. Among his other crimes
of obedience he sent by her orders and put to death the Princess
Arsinoe, who, knowing well her danger, had taken refuge as a suppliant
in the temple of Artemis Leucophryne at Miletus.

It is not our duty to follow the various complications of war and
diplomacy, accompanied by the marriage with the serious and gentle
Octavia, whereby the brilliant but dissolute Antony was weaned, as it
were, from his follies, and persuaded to live a life of public activity.
Whether the wily Octavian did not foresee the result, whether he did not
even sacrifice his sister to accumulate odium against his dangerous
rival, is not for us to determine. But when it was arranged (in B.C. 36)
that Antony should lead an expedition against the Parthians, any man of
ordinary sense must have known that he would come within the reach of
the eastern siren, and was sure to be again attracted by her fatal
voice. It is hard to account for her strange patience during these four
years. She had borne twins to Antony, probably after the meeting in
Cilicia. Though she still maintained the claims of her eldest son
Caesarion to be the divine Julius' only direct heir, we do not hear of
her sending requests to Antony to support him, or that any agents were
working in her interests at Rome. She was too subtle a woman to solicit
his return to Alexandria. There are mistaken insinuations that she
thought the chances of Sextus Pompey, with his naval supremacy, better
than those of Antony, but these stories refer to his brother Cnaeus, who
visited Egypt before Pharsalia.

It is probably to this pause in her life, as we know it, that we may
refer her activity in repairing and enlarging the national temples. The
splendid edifice at Dendera, at present among the most perfect of
Egyptian temples, bears no older names than those of Cleopatra and her
son Caesarion, and their portraits represent the latter as a growing lad,
his mother as an essentially Egyptian figure, conventionally drawn
according to the rules which had determined the figures of gods and
kings for fifteen hundred years. Under these circumstances it is idle to
speak of this well-known relief picture as a portrait of the Queen. It
is no mor