The murder of Cæsar did not raise the character of the Romans, or make them more fit for self-government. It was followed by the well-known civil war; and when, by the battle of Philippi and the death of Brutus and Cassius, his party was again uppermost, the Romans willingly bowed their necks to his adopted son Octavianus, and his friend Mark Antony.
It is not easy to determine which side Cleopatra meant to take in the war between Antony and the murderers of Cæsar; she did not openly declare herself, and she probably waited to join that which fortune favoured. Allienus had been sent to her by Dolobella to ask for such troops as she could spare to help Antony, and he led a little army of four Roman legions out of Egypt into Syria; but when there he added them to the force which Cassius had assembled against Antony. Whether he acted through treachery to the queen or by her orders is doubtful, for Cassius felt more gratitude to Allienus than to Cleopatra. Serapion also, the Egyptian governor of Cyprus, joined what was then the stronger side, and sent all the ships that he had in his ports to the assistance of Cassius. Cleopatra herself was getting ready another large fleet, but since the war was over, and Brutus and Cassius dead before it sailed, she said it was meant to help Octavianus and Antony. Thus, by the acts of her generals and her own hesitation, Cleopatra fairly laid herself open to the reproach of ingratitude to her late friend Cæsar, or at least of thinking that the interests of his son Cæsarion were opposed to those of his nephew Octavianus; and accordingly, as Antony was passing through Cilicia with his army, he sent orders to her to come from Egypt and meet him at Tarsus, to answer the charge of having helped Brutus and Cassius in the late military campaign.
Dellius, the bearer of the message, showed that he understood the meaning of it, by beginning himself to pay court to her as his queen. He advised her to go, like Juno in the Iliad, “tricked in her best attire,” and told her that she had nothing to fear from the kind and gallant Antony. On this she sailed for Cilicia laden with money and treasures for presents, full of trust in her beauty and power of pleasing. She had won the heart of Cæsar when, though younger, she was less skilled in the arts of love, and she was still only twenty-five years old; and, carrying with her such gifts and treasures as became her rank, she entered the river Cydnus with the Egyptian fleet in a magnificent galley. The stern was covered with gold; the sails were of scarlet cloth: and the silver oars beat time to the music of flutes and harps. The queen, dressed like Venus, lay under an awning embroidered with gold, while pretty dimpled boys, like Cupids, stood on each side of the sofa fanning her. Her maidens, dressed like sea-nymphs and graces, handled the silken tackle and steered the vessel. As she approached the town of Tarsus the winds wafted the perfumes and the scent of the burning incense to the shores, which were lined with crowds who had come out to see her land; and Antony, who was 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 Cæsar; 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 costly manner, she told him that the dinner of the next day should cost ten thousand ses-tertia, or three hundred thousand dollars. This he would not believe, and laid her a wager that she would fail in her promise. When the day came the dinner was as grand and dainty as those of the former days; but when Antony called upon her to count up the cost of the meats and wines, she said that she did not reckon them, but that she should herself soon eat and drink the ten thousand sestertia. She wore in her ears two pearls, the largest known in the world, which, like the diamonds of European kings, had come to her with her crown and kingdom, and were together valued at that large sum.
On the servants removing the meats, they set before her a glass of vinegar, and she took one of these earrings from her ear and dropped it into the glass, and when dissolved drank it off. Plancus, one of the guests, who had been made judge of the wager, snatched the other from the queen’s ear, and saved it from being drunk up like the first, and then declared that Antony had lost his bet. The pearl which was saved was afterwards cut in two and made into a pair of earrings for the statue of Venus in the Pantheon at Rome; and the fame of the wager may be said to have made the two half pearls at least as valuable as the two whole ones.
The beauty, sweetness, and gaiety of this young queen, joined to her great powers of mind, which were all turned to the art of pleasing, had quite overcome Antony; he had sent for her as her master, but he was now her slave. Her playful wit was delightful; her voice was as an instrument of many strings; she spoke readily to every ambassador in his own language; and was said to be the only sovereign of Egypt who could understand the languages of all her subjects: Greek, Egyptian, Ethiopie, Troglodytic, Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac. With these charms, at the age of five-and-twenty, the luxurious Antony could deny her nothing. The first favour which she asked of her lover equals any cruelty that we have met with in this history: it was, that he would have her sister Arsinoë put to death. Cæsar had spared her life, after his triumph, through love of Cleopatra; but he was mistaken in the heart of his mistress; she would have been then better pleased at Arsinoe’s death; and Antony, at her bidding, had her murdered in the temple of Diana, at Ephesus.