Antony and Cleopatra had been here, sailing the River Cydnus—the same Cydnus in whose cold waters Alexander bathed, overheated by the tropic sun, and almost lost his life. And poor Antony, also overheated, lost body and soul together by the no less tropic love glances of the Egyptian Queen. And who could wonder at it, if, as Shakespeare tells us—
“The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Burned on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were lovesick 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—