Plutarch. Josephus, Antiq. xv. 4. Plutarch. snatched the other from the queen's ear, and saved it from being drunk up like the first, and then declared that Antony had lost his bet. The pearl which was saved was afterwards cut in two, and made into a pair of ear-rings for the statue of Venus in the Pantheon at Rome; and the fame of the wager may be said to have made the two half pearls at least as valuable as the two whole ones. The beauty, sweetness, and gaiety of this young queen, joined to her great powers of mind, which were all turned to the art of pleasing, had quite overcome Antony: he had sent for her as her master, but he was now her slave. She sang beautifully; she spoke readily to every ambassador in his own language; and was said to be the only sovereign of Egypt who could understand the languages of all her subjects: Greek, Egyptian, Ethiopic, Troglodytic, Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac. With these charms, at the age of fiveand-twenty, the luxurious Antony could deny her nothing. The first favour which she asked of her lover equals any cruelty that we have met with in this history: it was, that he would have her sister Arsinoë put to death. Cæsar had spared her life, after his triumph, through love of Cleopatra; but he was mistaken in the heart of his mistress, she would have been then better pleased at Arsinoë's death; and Antony, at her bidding, had her murdered in the temple of Diana at Ephesus. Though Fulvia, the faithful wife of Antony, could scarcely keep together his party at Rome, against the power of Octavianus his colleague in the triumvirate, and though Labienus, with the Parthian legions, was ready to march into Syria against him, yet he was so entangled in the artful nets of Cleopatra, that she led him captive to Alexandria, where the old warrior fell into every idle amusement, and offered up, at the shrine of pleasure, one of the greatest of sacrifices, the sacrifice of his time. The lovers visited each other every day, and the waste of their entertainments passed belief. Philotas, a physician who was then following his studies at Alexandria, told Plutarch's grandfather that he once saw Antony's dinner cooked, and, among other meats, were eight wild boars roasting whole; and the cook explained to him that, though there were only twelve guests, yet as each dish had to be roasted to a single turn of the spit, and Antony did not know at what hour he should dine, it was necessary to cook at least eight dinners. But the most costly of the luxuries then used in Egypt were the scents and the ointments. Gold, silver, and jewels, as Pliny remarks, will pass to a man's heirs, even clothes will last a few months or weeks, but scents fly off and are lost at the first moment that they are admired; and yet ointments, like the attar of roses, which melted and gave out their scent, and passed into air when placed upon the back of the hand, as the coolest part of the body, were sold for four hundred denarii the pound. Cleopatra, who held her power at the pleasure of the Roman legions, spared no pains to please Antony. She had borne him first a son, and then a son and a daughter, twins. She gamed, she drank, she hunted, she reviewed the troops with him, and she followed him in his midnight rambles through the city; and nothing that youth, beauty, wealth, and elegance could do to throw a cloak over the grossness of vice and crime, was forgotten by her. But in the middle of this gaiety and feasting, he was recalled to Europe, by letters which told him that his wife and brother had been driven out of Rome by Octavianus. In the next year, however, he was again in Syria, and he sent to Alexandria to beg Cleopatra to join him there. On her coming, he made her perhaps the largest gift which lover ever gave to his Pliny, lib. xiii. 3, 4. Plutarch. Antony. Josephus, mistress he gave her the wide provinces of Phenicia, Colo-Syria, Cyprus, part of Cilicia, part of Judæa, and part of Arabia Nabatæa. These large gifts only made her ask for more, and she begged him lib. i. 13, 15. to put to death Herod king of Judæa, and Malichus king of Arabia Nabatæa, the former of whom had advised Antony to break through the disgraceful ties which bound him to Cleopatra, as the only means of saving himself from being crushed by the rising power of Octavianus. But Antony had not so far forgotten himself as to yield to these commands; and he only gave her the balsam country round Jericho, and a rent-charge of two hundred talents, or three thousand five hundred pounds, a year, on the revenues of Judæa. Porphyrius, On receiving this large addition to her kingdom, and perhaps in honour of Antony, who had then lost all power in Italy but was the real king of Egypt and its Greek provinces, Cleopatra began to count the years of her reign afresh: what was really the sixteenth of her reign she called the first, and reckoned them in the same way till her death. ap. Scalig. Vaillant, Hist. Ptolem. Plutarch. On the early coins of Cleopatra we see her head on the one side and the eagle or the cornucopia on the other side, with the words BAƐIMIZZHƐ KAЄOПATPAZ, 'of queen Cleopatra.' On the later coins we find the head of Antony joined with hers, as king and queen, with the words, AYTOKPATWP, emperor,' and OEA NEWTEPA, 'the young goddess.' After she had borne him children, we find the words round their heads, ANTONI ARMENIA DEVICTA,' of Antony, on the conquest of Armenia; CLEOPATRÆ REGINÆ REGVM FILIORVM REGVM, of Cleopatra the queen, and of the kings the children of kings.' But after wondering at the wasteful feasts and gifts, in which pearls and provinces were alike trifled with, we are reminded that even Cleopatra was of the family of the Lagidæ, and that she was NEW LIBRARY. 205 well aware how much the library of the Museum had added to the glory of Alexandria. It had been burnt by the Roman troops under Cæsar, and, to make amends for this, Antony gave her the large library of the city of Pergamus, by which Eumenes and Attalus had hoped to raise a school that should equal the Museum of Alexandria. Cleopatra placed these two hundred thousand volumes in the temple of Serapis, and Alexandria again held the largest library in the world. By the help of this new library, the city still kept its high rank as a school of letters; and when the once proud kingdom of Egypt was a province of Rome, and when almost every trace of the monarchy was lost, and centuries after Philo the Jewish philosopher of Alexandria had asked, 'Where are now the Ptolemies?' the his- Philo de Jos. torian could have found an answer by pointing to the mathemati cal schools and the library of the Serapeum. With whom the blame should rest for the loss of these valuable books we do not well know. Many seem to have been destroyed when the temple of Serapis was attacked by the Christians in the fourth century, and Orosius tells us that he then saw the empty shelves. All that escaped these quarrels, or were afterwards added, were burnt when the city was taken by the Arabs in the seventh century. The Arabic historian tells us that, when Alexandria opened its gates to the army of Amru Ben al Aas, he set his seal upon all the public property in the city. But John, a learned grammarian, who though he had lost his rank in the church because he would not receive the trinitarian faith has gained the thanks of every friend to knowledge, begged that the books might be left in the public library, as they would be of no use to the conquerors. Amru, a man of kind feelings and good sense, would have granted this Orosius, lib. iv. 15. AbulPharagius, Dyn. ix. Abdollatif, cap. iv. favour if he had not thought it necessary to ask leave of the Calif. He therefore wrote to Omar for orders, who answered him, that if the books were the same as the Coran they were useless, but if not the same, they were worse than useless; and that in either case they were to be burnt. Amru obeyed this order, and sent the books, most of which were of papyrus, to the public baths of Alexandria, which were heated with them for the space of six months. In weighing the loss that befel the world in the burning of these great libraries, that of the Museum and that of the Serapeum, or as they should perhaps be called that of Alexandria and that of Pergamus, we must remember that by no care could the manuscripts have escaped the wear and tear of time, and lived till printing came into use. We have very few manuscripts on vellum more than a thousand years old, and most of those volumes were written on papyrus, a much less lasting substance. Hence we must think only of what the men of learning then lost, and of the copies that might have been made from them. When Egypt was conquered by the Arabs in the seventh century, and the schools of Alexandria were overthrown, and the books fell into the hands of men with so little knowledge that they could burn them, we see at once that we should have gained little by their being left unhurt, but at the same time unread and uncopied. And though it was otherwise when the library of the Museum was burnt by Julius Cæsar, when the schools, crowded with foreign students, were at once robbed of their books, and the writers, who were there earning their livelihood by copying, were at once stopped in their work, yet the loss was more easily repaired from the other copies in the hands of the learned. Upon the whole it may perhaps be shown that the loss to the world of the numerous valuable Greek works is more owing to the cloud of darkness which over |