of his
own. He passed 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 dictatorship 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 assassination, 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 passionate 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 Cassius 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 poop 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