often I have heard my uncle say
that Antony and Cleopatra were fired with the most ardent love for each
other! Never did the arrows of Eros pierce two hearts more deeply. Then
it became necessary to save the state from civil war and bloodshed.
Antony consented to form an alliance with his rival, and, as security
for the sincerity of the reconciliation, he gave his hand in marriage to
Octavia, whose first husband, Marcellus, had just died--his hand, I say,
only his hand, for his heart was captive to the Queen of Egypt. And if
Antony was faithless to the wife to whom statecraft had bound him,
he kept his pledge to the other, who had an earlier, better title.
If Cleopatra did not give up the man to whom she had sworn fidelity
forever, she was right--a thousand times right! In my eyes--no matter
how often my mother rebukes me--Cleopatra, in the eyes of the immortals,
is and always will be Antony's real wife; the other, though on her
marriage day no custom, no word, no stroke of the stylus, no gesture
was omitted, is the intruder in a bond of love which rejoices the
gods, however it may anger mortals, and--forgive me, mother--virtuous
matrons."

Berenike had listened with blushing cheeks to her vivacious daughter;
now with timid earnestness she interrupted: "I know that those are the
views of the new times; that Antony in the eyes of the Egyptians, and
probably also according to their customs, is the rightful husband of the
Queen. I know, too, that you are both against me. Yet Cleopatra is in
reality a Greek, and therefore--eternal gods!--I can sincerely pity her;
but the marriage has been solemnized, and I cannot blame Octavia.
She rears and cherishes, as if they were her own, the children of her
faithless husband and Fulvia, his first wife, who have no claim upon
her. It is more than human to take the stones from the path of the man
who became her foe, as she does. No woman In Alexandria can pray more
fervently than I that Cleopatra and her friend may conquer Octavianus.
His cold nature, highly as my brother esteems him, is repellent to
me. But when I gaze at Octavia's beautiful, chaste, queenly, noble
countenance, the mirror of true womanly purity--"

"You can rejoice," Archibius added, completing the sentence, and laying
his right hand soothingly on the arm of the excited woman, "only it
would be advisable at this time to put the portrait elsewhere, and rest
satisfied with confiding your opinion of Octavia to your broth