children should be punished if she hurt herself; but she deceived her
guards and put herself to death, either by poison, or, as was more
commonly thought, by the bite of an asp brought to her in a basket
of fruit. She was thirty-nine years of age, having reigned twenty-two
years, of which the last seven were in conjunction with Antony; and she
was buried in his tomb with all regal splendour.

The death of Cleopatra was hailed at Rome as a relief from a sad
disgrace by others besides the flatterers of the conqueror. When
governed by Julius Caesar, and afterwards by Antony, the Romans sometimes
fancied they were receiving orders from the barbarian queen to
whom their master was a slave. When Antony was in arms against his
countrymen, they were not without alarm at Cleopatra's boast that she
would yet make her power felt in the Capitol; and many feared that even
when Antony was overthrown the conqueror might himself be willing to
wear her chains. But the prudent Augustus was in no danger of being
dazzled by beauty. He saw clearly all that was within his reach; he did
not want her help to the sovereignty of Egypt; and from the day that he
entered the empty palace in Alexandria, his reign began as sole master
of Rome and its dependent provinces.

While we have in this history been looking at the Romans from afar, and
only seen their dealings with foreign kings, we have been able to note
some of the changes in their manners nearly as well as if we had stood
in the Forum. When Epiphanes, Philometor, and Euergetes II. owed their
crowns to Roman help, Rome gained nothing but thanks, and that weight in
their councils which is fairly due to usefulness: the senate asked for
no tribute, and the citizens took no bribes. But with the growth
of power came the love of conquest and of its spoils. Macedonia
was conquered in what might be called self-defence; in the reign of
Cleopatra Cocce, Cyrene was won by fraud, and Cyprus was then seized
without a plea. The senators were even more eager for bribes than the
senate for provinces. The nobles who governed these wide provinces
grew too powerful for the senate, and found that they could heap up
ill-gotten wealth faster by patronising kings than by conquering them;
and the Egyptian monarchy was left to stand in the reigns of Auletes
and Cleopatra, because the Romans were still more greedy than when they
seized Cyrene and Cyprus. And, lastly, when the Romans were worn out by
quarrels and th