Part 21 (2/2)
But a greater power now intervened in the affairs of Egypt. Caesar entered upon the scene. Cleopatra appealed to him, and, rolled in a bale of carpet, gained admittance to his presence. When the carpet was unrolled and the queen appeared to view, the great conqueror was captivated at the spectacle. She was now about twenty-one, slender and graceful and of bewitching manner. Caesar was about fifty-two, but thoroughly susceptible to the charms of youth and beauty. He warmly espoused her cause, and, after a conflict which nearly ended his career, restored her to the throne; and as Ptolemy XII. had been accidentally drowned in the Nile, he a.s.sociated a younger brother, Ptolemy XIII., as her consort in the kingdom.
This is perhaps the most fascinating period in the life of Cleopatra, when, just entering upon her womanhood, she captivates the great commander and becomes, for a season, his Aspasia. In Egyptian eyes their union was regarded as a marriage, and the relations of these two never a.s.sumed the grossness and voluptuousness that were later exhibited by Antony and Cleopatra. Caesar, with all his lofty intelligence, no doubt found in her one whose intellectual faculties rose to the level of his own. He pa.s.sed the winter in her company, but at last had strength of mind enough to break away from her seductions, that he might continue his conquests and establish his dictators.h.i.+p at Rome. When at the height of his power, he summoned to Rome Cleopatra, with his young son, Caesarion, and gave them a residence in his villa on the Tiber. Here she lived in splendid state, and exercised a dominating influence over the ruler of the world, much to the disgust of the Romans. It was the height of her ambition to have Caesar proclaim their son Caesarion his heir, but the dictator in this regard resisted her allurements, and remained true to Roman traditions. Upon Caesar's a.s.sa.s.sination, Cleopatra, disappointed in her fondest hopes, hastily returned to Egypt and her throne. There now appears a great change in the character of Cleopatra. The simplicity of nature and gentleness of spirit of earlier years gradually give place to a nature selfish, heartless, and designing. Jealous of her little brother, now fast approaching the age of fifteen, when he would share her power, she caused him to be poisoned. She was troubled by no conscientious scruples which might interfere with the fullest and most unrestrained indulgence of every propensity of her heart. In all her subsequent life she showed herself pa.s.sionate and ambitious, cunning and politic, luxurious and pleasure-seeking.
Cleopatra was in her twenty-ninth year when she first met Antony--”a period of life,” says Plutarch, ”when woman's beauty is most splendid, and her intellect is in full maturity.”
When Antony summoned Cleopatra to appear before him at Tarsus to answer charges brought against her for aiding Ca.s.sius 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 p.o.o.p 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) O'er-picturing that Venus, where we see The fancy outwork nature: on each side her Stood pretty dimpl'd boys, like smiling Cupids, With diverse-color'd fans....
Her gentlewomen, like the Nereides, So many mermaids, tended her i' the eyes.
... At the helm A seeming mermaid steers....
... From the barge A strange invisible perfume hits the sense Of the adjacent wharves. The city cast Her people out upon her; and Antony, Enthroned i' the market-place, did sit alone, Whistling to th' air; which, but for vacancy, Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too, And made a gap in nature.”
Antony was completely fascinated with her charms. Her beauty, her wit, and, above all, the tact, adroitness, and self-possession which she displayed in consenting thus to appear before him, forced him to yield his heart almost immediately to her undisputed sway. Cleopatra remained at Tarsus for some time, in an incessant round of gayety and revelry, and by her flatteries and caresses she prevailed on Antony, forgetful of his wife Fulvia and his duty as a Roman, to spend the winter at Alexandria, where the pair engaged in continual feastings, spectacles, and sports, as well as in every species of riot, irregularity, and excess. It is not our purpose to follow the well-known career of Cleopatra during these years of turmoil, or to dwell on the circ.u.mstances that caused her to prove the destruction of Antony's hopes at the battle of Actium; neither shall we describe in detail those closing days when both committed suicide rather than suffer the consequences of humiliation and defeat.
The case of Mark Antony is the most conspicuous example in history of the complete subjugation by the arts and fascinations of a woman of a will stern and indomitable, if reckless, and of a heart that was naturally generous and n.o.ble. Cleopatra led him to betray every public trust, to alienate from himself the affections of all his countrymen, to repel most cruelly the kindness and devotedness of a beautiful and faithful wife; and at last she led him away in a most cowardly and ign.o.ble flight from the field of duty as a soldier, he knowing full well that she was hurrying him on to disgrace and destruction, and yet being utterly without power to break from the control of her irresistible charms.
Yet they were lovers--lovers who sacrificed wealth, ambition, duty, honor, on the altar of Aphrodite. It was a love which brought destruction; still, we may charitably account for the weakness exhibited by each as the natural consequence of that romantic love, than which history has given us no greater example.
Dire was the fate of Cleopatra. Hopes all frustrated,--Antony dying in her arms,--Octavius impervious to all her allurements,--rather than grace the conqueror's triumph, the most fascinating of Greek women ended her days, according to the prevailing tradition, by the bite of an asp, in her thirty-ninth year.
Cleopatra's character is a most fascinating and baffling study. Of many faults and vices she was guilty, but they were characteristic of her age. Her virtues must have been also many, for had she not possessed virtues she would not have been loved and admired by all who knew her.
Her faithful attendants, Iras and Charmion, sacrificed themselves over her dead body, and by their devotion made even the Roman Proculius exclaim, in the words of Plutarch: ”No other woman on earth was ever so admired by the greatest, so loved by the loftiest. Her fame echoed from nation to nation throughout the world. It will continue to resound from generation to generation; but, however loudly men may extol the bewitching charm, the fervor of the love which survived death, her intellect, her knowledge, the heroic courage with which she preferred the tomb to ignominy--the praise of these two must not be forgotten.
Their fidelity deserves it. By their marvellous end they unconsciously erected the most beautiful monument to their mistress; for what genuine goodness and lovableness must have been possessed by the woman who, after the greatest reverses, made it seem more desirable to those nearest to her person to die rather than to live without her!”
Cleopatra was not a great queen, regarded as a ruler, yet she did a great service to her country in preserving its independence for a score of years after it had reached its end by a natural process of degeneracy; but she accomplished this end by the arts of intrigue.
Cleopatra was too essentially a woman to be a great ruler, having all a woman's weaknesses, a woman's faults, and yet withal the charms and graces that make woman beautiful and lovable. Yet when we weigh her character with due reference to the times in which she lived, to the family influences which moulded her early years, and to the degeneracy of the Ptolemies to which she fell heir, she must rank as one of the best of her dynasty. Horace, the Roman poet, called Cleopatra: ”_non humilis mulier_ [a woman capable of no baseness];” and the phrase gains in importance from the fact that it occurs in the hymn which the poet dedicated to Octavius in honor of his victory over Antony and Cleopatra.
In thus characterizing, in such an ode, the victor's foe, Horace gives us an estimate of the ”Serpent of the Nile” which may stand as an epitome of her character and as a just claim to the partial respect and admiration of posterity.
”Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale Her infinite variety.”
Cleopatra's intimate relations with Rome's greatest men, and the conversion of her kingdom into a Roman province after her death, but emphasize the fact that all h.e.l.lenistic lands were at that time in the power of Rome and that the period of Graeco-Roman culture had begun much earlier. In B.C. 146 had occurred the destruction of Corinth and the absorption of Old Greece into a part of the Roman province of Macedon, and from that time Rome exerted a marked influence over the social life of h.e.l.las. One of the chief characteristics of this age was the freer life of women of all cla.s.ses. Even in Athens and Boeotia, the mistress of the house obtained her rights as mother and hostess. Perhaps it was in imitation of what they saw in Rome, perhaps it was merely the natural process of evolution, but, at any rate, the recognition of the capabilities and the elevated position of woman was general. Plutarch is the best chronicler of Greek life in the first century after the Christian era, and his works abound in precepts on the relations of the s.e.xes, in whose equality he was a firm believer, and on the proper training and education of woman. His own wife, Timoxena, paid visits and received guests even when her husband was absent, shared fully the intellectual life of her husband, and took part in all his public interests.
The age was mending its manners. New ideas were prevailing among men.
Woman was becoming more and more fully a factor in the world. Yet, for her complete emanc.i.p.ation, there was need of a new dogma, a great revelation, which would bring about startling reforms in the moral and social life of mankind. Already ”the Word had been made flesh, and dwelt among them full of grace and truth”; yet the great writers of the first century of our era, Dion, Plutarch, even Josephus, seem never to have heard of the new teaching which had been preached throughout Asia Minor and at Athens and Corinth--the new teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, which was destined to overturn the prevailing conception of woman and her status and to lead her into a fulness of life such as had never been conceived in the imagination of even the most elevated of her s.e.x.
[Ill.u.s.tration 384 _CLEOPATRA After the painting by Alexandre Cabanel.
From the period when the last Pharaoh died until it fell under the Roman domination, Egypt was ruled by the Greek Ptolemies, and the last of the rulers of Greek descent was the world-famous Cleopatra._
_Plutarch, in his life of Antony, states that after the defeat of Actium, Cleopatra, feeling the end of her reign imminent, busied herself in making a collection of poisons; and in order to see which of them was the least painful in operation, she had them tried upon prisoners condemned to die._]
In Cleopatra and other Greek women considered in the volume, we have observed from time to time the highest development of feminine endowments, physical, intellectual, or sensuous. The ethereal beauty of Helen, the poetic fervor of Sappho, the intellectual temper of Aspasia, the artistic temperament of Phryne, and the seductive sensibility of Cleopatra--these exhibit phases of feminine perfection that have not found their counterparts in modern times. Yet in each instance mentioned there was the one thing needful--the corresponding development of the moral and spiritual nature. These women were but pagans. Each sought in her own way to attain the highest perfection possible to woman; still, for them the truth was but seen in a gla.s.s darkly, and their philosophy had not yet taught them concerning the higher life of the spirit as distinct from the body.
Yet the dominion established by Julius Caesar, which embraced all the h.e.l.lenistic lands, was even in Cleopatra's time preparing the way for the dominion of the Son of Man, who brought into the world new conceptions of womanhood, new influences destined to elevate and enn.o.ble the s.e.x and emphasize the higher elements in human character that the ancients had so sadly neglected. Pagan Woman attained unrivalled excellence in physical beauty, intellectual endowment, and sensuous charm; to Christian Woman was vouchsafed the light which dispelled the moral darkness of antiquity and made attainable the highest spiritual excellence.
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