seated on the tribunal waiting
to receive her, found himself left alone.

Tarsus on the river Cydnus was situated at the foot of the wooded slopes
of Mount Taurus, and it guarded the great pass in that range between the
Phrygian tribes and the Phoenician tribes. It was a city half-Greek
and half-Asiatic, and had from the earliest days been famed for
ship-building and commerce. Mount Taurus supplied it with timber, and
around the mouth of its river, as it widens into a quiet lake, were the
ancient dockyards which had made the ships of Tarshish proverbial with
the Hebrew writers. Its merchants, enriched by industry and enlightened
by foreign trade, had ornamented their city with public buildings, and
established a school of Greek learning. Its philosophers, however, were
more known as travelling teachers than as scholars. No learned men came
to Tarsus; but it sent forth its rhetoricians in its own ships, who
spread themselves as teachers over the neighbouring coasts. In Rome
there were more professors of rhetoric, oratory, and poetry from Tarsus
than from Alexandria or Athens. Athenodorus Cordylion, the stoic, taught
Cato; Athenodorus, the son of Sandon, taught Caesar; Nestor a little
later taught the young Marcellus; while Demetrius was one of the first
men of learning who sailed to the distant island of Britain. This
school, in the next generation, sent forth the apostle Paul, who taught
Christianity throughout the same coasts.

Tarsus was now to be amused by the costly follies and extravagances of
Cleopatra. As an initial display, soon after landing, she invited Antony
and his generals to a dinner, at which the whole of the dishes placed
before them were of gold, set with precious stones, and the room and the
twelve couches were ornamented with purple and gold. On his praising the
splendour of the sight, as passing anything he had before seen, she said
it was a trifle, and begged that he would take the whole of it as a gift
from her. The next day he again dined with her, and brought a larger
number of his friends and generals, and was of course startled to see a
costliness which made that of the day before seem nothing; and she again
gave him the whole of the gold upon the table, and gave to each of his
friends the couch upon which he sat.

These costly and delicate dinners were continued every day; and one
evening, when Antony playfully blamed her wastefulness, and said that it
was not possible to fare in a more co