Cleopatra had never acted justly towards her Jewish subjects; and, during a late famine, had denied to them their share of the wheat distributed out of the public granaries to the citizens of Alexandria. The Jews in return showed no loyalty to Cleopatra, nor regret at her enemy’s success; and on this defeat of her troops her rage fell upon them. She made a boast of her cruelty towards them, and thought if she could have killed all the Jews with her own hand she should have been repaid for the loss of the city. On the other hand, Antony thought that he had been betrayed by Cleopatra, as she had received many messengers from Octavianus. To avoid his anger, therefore, she fled to a monument which she had built near the temple of Isis, and in which she had before placed her treasure, her gold, silver, emeralds, pearls, ebony, ivory, and cinnamon, together with a large quantity of flax and a number of torches, as though to burn herself and her wealth in one flame. Here she retired with two of her women, and secured herself with bars and bolts, and sent word to Antony that she was dead. Antony, when he heard it, believing that she had killed herself, and wishing not to be outdone in courage by a woman, plunged his sword into his breast. But the wound was not fatal, and when Cleopatra heard of it she sent to beg that he would come to her. Accordingly his servants carried him to the door of her monument. But the queen, in fear of treachery, would not suffer the door to be opened; but she let a cord down from the window, and she with her two women drew him up. Nothing could be more affecting than the sight to all who were near; Antony covered with blood, in the agonies of death, stretching out his hands to Cleopatra, and she straining every nerve and every feature of her face with the effort she was making. He was at last lifted in at the window, but died soon afterwards. By this time the city was in the power of Octavianus; he had not found it necessary to storm the walls, for Antony’s troops had all joined him, and he sent in Gallus to endeavour to take Cleopatra alive. This he succeeded in doing by drawing her into conversation at the door of her monument, while three men scaled the window and snatched out of her hand the dagger with which she would have stabbed herself.
Octavianus, henceforth called Augustus, began by promising his soldiers two hundred and fifty drachmas each as prize money, for not being allowed to plunder Alexandria. He soon afterwards entered the city, not on horseback armed at the head of his victorious legions, but on foot, leaning on the arm of the philosopher Arius; and, as he wished to be thought as great a lover of learning as of mercy, he gave out that he spared the place to the prayers of his Alexandrian friend. He called the Greek citizens together in the gymnasium, and, mounting the tribunal, promised that they should not be hurt. Cleopatra’s three children by Antony, who had not the misfortune to be of the same blood with the conqueror, were kindly treated and taken care of; while Cæsarion, her son by Julius Cæsar, who was betrayed by his tutor Rhodon while flying towards Ethiopia, was put to death as a rival. The flatterers of the conqueror would of course say that Cæsarion was not the son of Julius, but of Ptolemy, the elder of the two boys who had been called Cleopatra’s husbands. The feelings of humanity might have answered that, if he was not the only son of the uncle to whom Octavianus owed everything, he was at least helpless and friendless, and that he never could trouble the undisputed master of the world; but Augustus, with the heartless cruelty which murdered Cicero, and the cold caution which marked his character through life, listening to the remark of Arius, that there ought not to be two Cæsars, had him at once put to death.
Augustus gave orders that Cleopatra should be carefully guarded lest she should put an end to her own life; he wished to carry her with him to Rome as the ornament of his triumph. He paid her a visit of condolence and consolation. He promised her she should receive honourable treatment. He allowed her to bury Antony. He threatened that her 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 Cæsar, 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 the want of a steady government, and were ready to obey any master who could put a stop to civil bloodshed, they made Octavianus autocrat of Rome; he then gained for himself whatever he seized in the name of the republic, and he at once put an end to the Egyptian monarchy.
Thus fell the family of the Ptolemies, a family that had perhaps done more for arts and letters than any that can be pointed out in history. Like other kings who have bought the praises of poets, orators, and historians, they may have misled the talents which they wished to guide, and have smothered the fire which they seemed to foster; but, in rewarding the industry of the mathematicians and anatomists, of the critics, commentators, and compilers, they seem to have been highly successful. It is true that Alexandria never sent forth works with the high tone of philosophy, the lofty moral aim and the pure taste which mark the writings of Greece in its best ages, and which ennoble the mind and mend the heart; but it was the school to which the world long looked for knowledge in all those sciences which help the body and improve the arts of life, and which are sometimes called useful knowledge. Though great and good actions may not have been unknown in Alexandria, so few valued them that none took the trouble to record them. The well-paid writers never wrote the lives of the Ptolemies. The muse of history had no seat in the museum, but it was almost the birthplace of anatomy, geometry, conic sections, geography, astronomy, and hydrostatics.
If we retrace the steps by which this Græco-Egyptian monarchy rose and fell, we shall see that virtue and vice, wisdom and folly, care and thoughtlessness, were for the most part followed by the rewards which to us seem natural. The Egyptian gold which first tempted the Greeks into the country, and then helped their energies to raise the monarchy, afterwards undermined those same energies, and became one of the principal causes of its final overthrow.