The first advantage Cleopatra took of her power was to have her son, by Cæsar, Ptolemy-Cæsarion, recognized as legitimate heir to the crown of Egypt. At Antony’s request the decree was immediately ratified by his colleagues, Octavius and Lepidus. Antony alleged as a pretext for this favor to Cleopatra, the services she rendered to the Romans during the civil war. After having satisfied her ambition, Antony became without difficulty the executor of her revenge. Like most women the beautiful queen was vindictive, and like Dionysius the Tyrant, she carried her prudence to the extent of crime. Her sister Arsinoë had escaped from Rome, where she had contributed to Cæsar’s triumph; she had found an asylum at Miletus. Whether Cleopatra feared that, ambitious and intriguing as she had already shown herself in the War of Alexandria, she might again create trouble in Egypt, or simply to avenge herself for Arsinoë’s former conduct, the queen besought Antony to have her put to death. One crime more or less weighed but little on the conscience of the proscriber of the year 711 A. U. C. The unfortunate Arsinoë was murdered in the temple of Artemis Leucophryne, where she had sought refuge from the hired assassins of Antony. An Egyptian, also a refugee in Asia Minor where he passed himself off as Ptolemy XII., drowned as was well-known in the Nile, was also put to death. Cleopatra bore an ill-will, the cause of which is not known, also to Megabyses, of the great temple of Ephesus. He was arrested by Antony’s order, and his life was saved only by the interference of the magistrates of the city, speaking in the name of the people, who rose in insurrection to rescue him. At the same time, Sarapion, the former commander of the Egyptian squadron at Cyprus, was beheaded by the order of Antony, thus avenging Cleopatra for the defection of her officer and Antony for the aid given to Cassius. When Cleopatra arrived at Tarsus in the summer of 41 B. C., Antony was preparing to march against the Parthians. At the end of a month the concentration of his troops was accomplished, the fleets ready, and no obstacle remained to the departure of the army. But this month had been passed with Cleopatra, and Antony had found it very short. Listening only to his passion, he put off the expedition till the spring and followed the queen into Egypt. Then began that mad life of pleasure and debauchery, that long and sumptuous orgy, which even in the third century of our era, and after the excesses of Nero and Heliogabalus, was still quoted in the Roman world, though then slaves to every corruption and exhausted in efforts of magnificence, as an inimitable model.