riumphs, could be
considered, compared with Egypt, only poor, rude, and barbarous. Upon
this intelligent man, eager for enjoyment, who had, like other
noble Romans, already begun to taste the charms of intellectual
civilisation, it was not Cleopatra alone that made the keenest of
impressions, but all Egypt, the wonderful city of Alexandria, the
sumptuous palace of the Ptolemies--all that refined, elegant splendour
of which he found himself at one stroke the master. What was there
at Rome to compare with Alexandria?--Rome, in spite of its imperial
power, abandoned to a fearful disorder by the disregard of factions,
encumbered with ruin, its streets narrow and wretched, provided as
yet with but a single _forum_, narrow and plain, the sole impressive
monument of which was the theatre of Pompey; Rome, where the life was
yet crude, and objects of luxury so rare that they had to be brought
from the distant Orient? At Alexandria, instead, the Paris of the
ancient world, were to be found all the best and most beautiful things
of the earth. There was a sumptuosity of public edifices that the
ancients never tire of extolling--the quay seven _stadia_ long,
the lighthouse famous all over the Mediterranean, the marvellous
zoological garden, the Museum, the Gymnasium, innumerable temples, the
unending palace of the Ptolemies. There was an abundance, unheard of
for those times, of objects of luxury--rugs, glass, stuffs, papyruses,
jewels, artistic pottery--because they made all these things at
Alexandria. There was an abundance, greater than elsewhere, of silk,
of perfumes, of gems, of all the things imported from the extreme
East, because through Alexandria passed one of the most frequented
routes of Indo-Chinese commerce. There, too, were innumerable artists,
writers, philosophers, and _savants_; society life and intellectual
life alike fervid; continuous movement to and fro of traffic,
continual passing of rare and curious things; countless amusements;
life, more than elsewhere, safe--at least so it was believed--because
at Alexandria were the great schools of medicine and the great
scientific physicians.

If other Italians who landed in Alexandria were dazzled by so many
splendours, Antony ought to have been blinded; _he_ entered Alexandria
as King. He who was born at Rome in the small and simple house of an
impoverished noble family who had been brought up with Latin parsimony
to eat frugally, to drink wine only on festival occa