These follies did not turn the Alexandrians against the triumvir as much as might have been supposed. If they had little esteem for him, they liked him for his good humor, and the ease with which he was approached. They delighted to say: “Antony wears for the Romans a tragic mask, but here he lays it aside, and assumes for us the mask of comedy.” His intimate companions and his officers, who shared without scruple his voluptuous and unbridled excesses, were still less inclined to resent them, for, like himself, they yielded to the bewitching charm of Cleopatra. They loved, they admired her, they bore cheerfully her snubs and sarcasms, and were not shocked, even if in the midst of a feast, at a sign from Antony, she quitted the banquet hall with him, and returning after a short absence resumed her position on the couch of the triclinium. They studied to please and divert her, each strove to be the vilest toady to the queen—“humillimus assentator reginæ”—for a smile of Cleopatra they sacrificed all dignity. Once, L. Plancus, a man of consular dignity, crowned with rushes, a fish’s tail attached to his loins, and his naked body painted blue, actually performed in her presence the dance of Glaukos. With Cæsar, Cleopatra had instinctively played the part of a crowned Aspasia, ever bewitching, but uniting dignity with grace, concealing the courtesan beneath the robe of a queen, ever equable in mood, expressing herself in the choicest language, talking politics, art, literature, her marvelous faculties rising without effort to the level of the lofty intelligence of the dictator: with Antony, Cleopatra, at first through policy, afterwards through love, played the part of a Laïs born by chance to a throne. Seeing at once that the inclinations of Antony were coarse and low, that his wit was commonplace and his language very loose, she immediately set herself to the same tone. She kept pace with this great drinker, remaining even till dawn with the foaming flagons and goblets continually replenished; she accompanied him by night into the suspicious streets of Rhakotis, the old portion of Alexandria; she jested cynically, sang amatory songs, recited licentious poems; she quarreled with him, provoking and returning both abuse and blows. Nothing delighted Antony like the sight of that ravishing little hand threatening and beating him, or to hear from those divine lips, fit for the choruses of Sophocles or the odes of Sappho, the same words that he had heard bandied among the guard of the Esquiline gate and in the unmentionable dens of the Suburra. [Illustration] V.