Back in Alexandria again, she watched the second duel—that between Mark Antony and Caesar’s murderers. She helped neither party, and when Antony won he summoned her to explain her neutrality. She came, not in a carpet but in a gilded barge, and her life henceforward belongs less to history than to poetry. It is almost impossible to think of the later Cleopatra as an ordinary person. She has joined the company of Helen and Iseult. Yet her character remained the same. Voluptuous but watchful, she treated her new lover as she had treated her old. She never bored him, and since grossness means monotony she sharpened his mind to those more delicate delights, where sense verges into spirit. Her infinite variety lay in that. She was the last of a secluded and subtle race, she was a flower that Alexandria had taken three hundred years to produce and that eternity cannot wither, and she unfolded herself to a simple but intelligent Roman soldier. Alexandria, now reconciled to her fate and protected by the legions of Antony, became the capital of the Eastern world. The Western belonged to Octavian, Caesar’s nephew, and a third duel was inevitable. It was postponed for some years, during which Antony acquired and deserted a Roman wife, and Cleopatra bore him several children. Her son by Julius Caesar was crowned as Ptolemy XVI, with the additional title of King of Kings. Antony himself became a God, and she built a temple to him, afterwards called the Caesareum, and adorned by two ancient obelisks (Cleopatra’s Needles). This period of happiness and splendour ended in the naval disaster of Actium in the Adriatic, where Octavian defeated their combined fleets. The defeat was hastened by Cleopatra’s cowardice. At the decisive moment she fled with sixty ships, actually breaking her way through Antony’s line from the rear, and throwing it into confusion. He followed her to Alexandria, and there, when the recriminations had ceased, they resumed their life of pleasures that were both shadowed and sharpened by the approach of death. They made no attempt to oppose the pursuing Octavian. Instead, they formed a Suicide Club, and Antony, to imitate the misanthrope Timon, built a hermitage in the Western Harbour which he called Timonium. Nor was religion silent. The god Hercules, whom he loved and who loved him, was heard passing away from Alexandria one night in exquisite music and song.