Οι Αχιμητοδιοι: “Those whose life is inimitable.” This, moreover, was the name assumed by Antony and Cleopatra and the intimate companions of their pleasures.[4] Plutarch and Dion relate that festival succeeded to festival, entertainment to entertainment, and hunting parties to excursions on the Nile. Cleopatra quitted Antony neither day nor night. She drank with him, she gambled with him, hunted with him, she was even present at his military exercises when by chance this man of war, remembering that he was a soldier, took a fancy to review his legions. It is further related that Cleopatra was incessantly inventing some new diversion, some unexpected pleasure. But this list is very brief, this sketch a very modest and faint description to give an idea of the superb orgies, the unrestrained voluptuousness, and the nameless prodigalities of the “Inimitables.” Pliny alone of the ancient writers has summed them up, perhaps unknown to himself, in the legend, more or less symbolic, of the Pearl. One day, says this writer, when Antony was extolling the luxuriousness and profusion of a certain entertainment, he exclaimed that no other could surpass it. Cleopatra, who always affected to put no limit to the possible, replied that the present feast was a wretched affair, and she laid a wager that the next day she would give one on which she would expend ten millions of sesterces (two millions one hundred thousand francs). Antony took the bet. The next day the feast, magnificent as it was, had nothing to distinguish it from the preceding, and Antony did not fail to rally Cleopatra. “Per Bacchus,” cried he, “this would never cost ten millions of sesterces!” “I know that,” replied the queen, “but you see only the accessories. I myself will drink alone the ten millions,” and at once detaching from her ear a single pearl—the largest and most perfect ever seen—she threw it into a golden cup, in which it was dissolved in the vinegar there prepared, and swallowed at one draught the acid beverage. She was about to sacrifice the second pearl when L. Plancus, the umpire of the wager, arrested her hand by declaring that she had won.[5]