By her suicide, Cleopatra escaped contributing to the triumph of Octavius,[16] but failing her person he had her effigy, and the statue of Cleopatra with a serpent wound about her arm was borne in the triumphal procession. Does it not seem that the statue of this illustrious queen, who had subdued the greatest of the Romans, who had made Rome tremble, and who preferred death to assisting at her own humiliation, had by her death triumphed over her conqueror, and still defied the senate and the people on the way to the Capitol?
We can easily conceive of Cleopatra as a great queen, the rival of the mythic Semiramis, and the elder sister of the Zenobias, the Isabellas, the Maria-Theresas, and the Catharines; but, in truth, only those queens are great who possess manly virtues, who rule nations and compel events as a great king might do. Cleopatra was too essentially a woman to be reckoned among these glorious androgynuses. If for twenty years she preserved her throne and maintained the independence of Egypt, it was done by mere womanly means—intrigue, gallantry, grace, and weakness which is also a grace. Her sole method of governing was, in reality, by becoming the mistress of Cæsar and the mistress of Mark Antony. It was the Roman sword that sustained the throne of the Lagidæ. When by the fault of Cleopatra the weapon was broken, the throne tottered and fell. Ambition, her only royal virtue, would have been limited to the exercise of her hereditary government if circumstances had not developed and exalted it.
Knowing herself weak, without genius and without mental force, she reckoned wholly on her lovers for the accomplishment of her designs, and it too often happened to this woman, fatal to others as to herself, to retard the execution of these, dominated, as she ever was, by the imperious desire of some entertainment or some pleasure. This queen had the recklessness of the courtesan; women of gallantry might have considered her their august and tragic ancestress. She only lived for love, pomp, and magnificence; wherefore, when her lover was slain, her beauty marred, her wealth lost, and her crown shattered, she found, to face death, the masculine courage which had failed her in life.
No, Cleopatra was not a great queen. But for her connection with Antony, she would be forgotten with Arsinoë or Berenice. If her renown is immortal, it is because she is the heroine of the most dramatic love-story of antiquity.
FOOTNOTES
[1]Cicero to Atticus.—In this letter, dated from Brundusium, June 14, 706 A. U. C., Cicero speaks of the long sojourn of Cæsar at Alexandria. There is thought to be much trouble there, “valde esse impedimentum.” This “impedimentum,” of which Cæsar makes no complaint, was Cleopatra.
[2]If this were true, Cleopatra would have been as fatal to Cæsar as she afterwards became to Antony.
[3]We must not judge Antony wholly by the passionate attacks of Cicero. Plutarch quotes a number of clever retorts of this brave and excellent soldier; and, in another order of ideas, his letter to Octavius and Hirtius, from which we find long extracts in the “Third Philippic,” is the work of a skillful politician as well as a model of wit.
[4]A curious inscription, discovered in Alexandria by M. C. Vescher, is as follows: “Antony the Great, the Inimitable.”