ve suspicion. He divorced her in
consequence and married Calpurnia, not for love but for place. Her father
was consul. Caesar wanted his aid and got it. Then, after creating a
solitude and calling it peace, after turning over two million people into
so many dead flies, after giving geography such a twist that to-day whoso
says Caesar says history--after these pauses in the ascending scale of his
unequalled life, at the age of fifty, bald, tired, and very pale, there
was brought to him at Alexandria a bundle, from which, when opened, there
emerged a little wonder called Cleopatra, but who was Isis unveiled.[19]

VIII

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA.

In Greece beauty was the secret of life. In Egypt it was the secret of
death. The sphinxes that crouched in the avenues, the caryatides at the
palace doors, the gods on their pedestals, had an expression enigmatic but
identical. It was as though some of them listened, while others repeated
the story of the soul's career. In the chambers of the tombs the echo of
the story descended. The dead were dreaming, and draining it. Saturated
with aromatics, wound about with spirals of thin bands, they were dressed
as for nuptials. On their faces was the same beatitude that the statues
displayed.

Isis typified that beatitude. The goddess, in whose mysteries were taught
both the immortality of the soul and the secret of its migrations, was one
of Ishtar's many avatars, the only one whose attributes accorded even
remotely with the divine. Egypt adored her. There were other gods. There
was Osiris, the father; Horus, the son, who with Isis formed the trinity
which India and Persia both possessed, and which Byzance afterward
perpetuated. There were other gods also, a hierarchy of great idle
divinities with, beneath them, cohorts of inferior fiends. But the great
light was Isis. Goddess of life and goddess of death, she had for sceptre
a lotos and for crown a cormorant; the lotos because it is emblematic of
love, and the cormorant because, however replete, it says never Enough.

Isis was the consort of Osiris. She was also his sister. It was customary
for the queens of Egypt to call themselves after her, and, like her, to
marry a brother. Cleopatra followed the usual custom. In other ways she
must have resembled her. She was beautiful, but not remarkably so. The
Egyptian women generally were good-looking. The Asiatics admired them very
much. They were preferred to the Chinese, whose eyes