ate
acts and reserve her for the degradation of his triumph. This impression
was confirmed when all instruments by which death could be inflicted
were found to have been removed from her apartments. But she was not to
be so baffled. She pretended all submission; but when the ministers of
Octavian came to carry her away, they found her lying dead upon her
couch, attended by her faithful waiting-women, Iras and Charmion. The
manner of her death was never ascertained; popular belief ascribed it to
the bite of an asp which had been conveyed to her in a basket of fruit.

Thus died Antony and Cleopatra. Antony was by nature a genial,
open-hearted Roman, a good soldier, quick, resolute, and vigorous, but
reckless and self-indulgent, devoid alike of prudence and of principle.
The corruptions of the age, the seductions of power, and the evil
influence of Cleopatra paralyzed a nature capable of better things. We
know him chiefly through the exaggerated assaults of Cicero in his
_Philippic_, and the narratives of writers devoted to Octavian. But
after all deductions for partial representation, enough remains to show
that Antony had all the faults of Caesar, with little of his redeeming
greatness.

Cleopatra was an extraordinary person. At her death she was but
thirty-eight years of age. Her power rested not so much on actual beauty
as on her fascinating manners and her extreme readiness of wit. In her
follies there was a certain magnificence which excites even a dull
imagination. We may estimate the real power of her mental qualities by
observing the impression her character made upon the Roman poets of the
time. No meditated praises could have borne such testimony to her
greatness as the lofty strain in which Horace celebrates her fall and
congratulates the Roman world on its escape from the ruin which she was
threatening to the Capitol.

Octavian dated the years of his imperial monarchy from the day of the
battle of Actium. But it was not till two years after (the summer of
B.C. 29) that he established himself in Rome as ruler of the Roman
world. Then he celebrated three magnificent triumphs, after the example
of his uncle the great dictator, for his victories in Dalmatia, at
Actium, and in Egypt. At the same time the temple of Janus was
closed--notwithstanding that border wars still continued in Gaul and
Spain--for the first time since the year B.C. 235. All men drew breath
more freely, and all except the soldiery looked for