he faithful wife of Antony, could scarcely keep together
his party at Rome against the power of Octavianus, his colleague in the
triumvirate, and though Labienus, with the Parthian legions, was ready
to march into Syria against him, yet he was so entangled in the artful
nets of Cleopatra, that she led him captive to Alexandria; and there the
old warrior fell into every idle amusement, and offered up at the shrine
of pleasure one of the greatest of sacrifices, the sacrifice of his
time. The lovers visited each other every day, and the waste of their
entertainments passed belief. Philotas, a physician who was following
his studies at Alexandria, told Plutarch's grandfather that he was once
invited to see Antony's dinner cooked, and among other meats were eight
wild boars roasting whole; and the cook explained to him that, though
there were only twelve guests, yet as each dish had to be roasted to a
single turn of the spit, and Antony did not know at what hour he should
dine, it was necessary to cook at least eight dinners. But the most
costly of the luxuries then used in Egypt were the scents and the
ointments. Gold, silver, and jewels, as Pliny remarks, will pass to a
man's heirs, even clothes will last a few months or weeks, but scents
fly off and are lost at the first moment that they are admired; and
yet ointments, like the attar of roses, which melted and gave out their
scent, and passed into air when placed upon the back of the hand, as the
coolest part of the body, were sold for four hundred denarii the pound.
But the ointment was not meant to be used quite so wastefully. It was
usually sealed up in small alabaster jars, which were made in the town
of Alabastron, on the east of the Nile, and thence received their name.
These were long in shape, without a foot, and had a narrow mouth. They
were meant never to be opened, but to let the scent escape slowly and
sparingly through the porous stone. In these Egyptian jars scented
ointment was carried by trade to the banks of the Tigris and to the
shores of the Mediterranean.

The tenth and eleventh years of the queen's reign were marked by
a famine through the land, caused by the Nile's not rising to the
wished-for height and by the want of the usual overflow; and an
inscription which was written both in the Greek and Egyptian languages
declares the gratitude of the Theban priests and elders and citizens to
Callimachus, the prefect of the Theban taxes, who did what he coul