When Antony summoned Cleopatra to appear before him at Tarsus to answer charges brought against her for aiding Cassius and Brutus in the late war, she, fired with the idea of achieving a second time the conquest of the greatest general and highest potentate in the world, employed all the resources of her kingdom in making preparation for her journey. Shakespeare has most admirably described the splendor of her barge and the scene of enchantment that greeted Antony as she sailed up the Cydnus to meet him, a veritable Aphrodite surrounded by the Graces:
"The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne,
Burn'd on the water; the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfum'd that
The winds were love-sick with them: the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water, which they beat, to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggar'd all description: she did lie
In her pavilion (cloth-of-gold of tissue)