en had the courage to join his land forces; but he sailed away in a
fright with Cleopatra, leaving an army larger than that of Octavianus,
which would not believe that he was gone. They landed at Parastonium in
Libya, where he remained in the desert with Aristocrates the rhetorician
and one or two other friends, and sent Cleopatra forward to Alexandria.
There she talked of carrying her ships across the isthmus to the head
of the Red Sea, along the canal from Bubastis to the Bitter Lakes, and
thence flying to some unknown land from the power of the conqueror.
Antony soon however followed her, but not to join in society. He
locked himself up in his despair in a small fortress by the side of
the harbour, which he named his Timonium, after Timon, the Athenian
philosopher who forsook the society of men. When the news, however,
arrived that his land forces had joined Octavianus, and his allies had
deserted him, he came out of his Timonium and joined the queen.

In Alexandria, Antony and Cleopatra only so far regained their courage
as to forget their losses, and to plunge into the same round of costly
feasts and shows that they had amused themselves with before their fall;
but, while they were wasting these few weeks in pleasure, Octavianus was
moving his fleet and army upon Egypt.

When he landed on the coast, Egypt held three millions of people; he
might have been met by three hundred thousand men able to bear arms.
As for money, which has sometimes been called the sinews of war, though
there might have been none in the treasury, yet it could not have been
wanting in Alexandria. But the Egyptians, like the ass in the fable, had
nothing to fear from a change of masters; they could hardly be kicked
and cuffed worse than they had been; and, though they themselves
were the prize struggled for, they looked on with the idle stare of a
bystander. Some few of the garrisons made a show of holding out; but, as
Antony had left the whole of his army in Greece when he fled away after
the battle of Actium, he had lost all chance of safety.

When Pelusium was taken, it was said by some that Seleucus the commander
had given it up by Cleopatra's orders; but the queen, to justify
herself, put the wife and children of Seleucus into the hands of Antony
to be punished if he thought fit. When Octavianus arrived in front of
Alexandria he encamped not far from the hippodrome, a few miles from the
Canopic or eastern gate. On this Antony made a bris