For several days the two armies were face to face. Octavius, desirous to engage, endeavored by every feint to draw his adversary into action either on land or sea. Antony, uneasy, anxious, hesitating, could not decide what step to take. He embarked the greater portion of his troops and transferred them to the coast of Epirus, as if to attack the Roman camp; then he changed his mind and recrossed into Acarnania. The officers of Antony, auguring ill of the manœuvring qualities of his huge vessels, and, at the same time, full of confidence in the valor of the legionaries, counseled him to fight the battle on land. This was also the desire of the army. At a review he was accosted by an old centurion all seamed with scars: “Oh, Emperor, dost thou distrust these wounds and this sword, that thou puttest thy hope in rotten wood? Let the men of Egypt and Phœnicia fight on the sea, but to us, give us the land where we are used to hold our own, and where we know how to conquer or to die.” But Antony was disturbed by sinister omens. In many places his statues and those of Cleopatra had been struck by lightning; at Alba a marble statue, erected in honor of the triumvir, had been found covered with sweat. “A sign still more alarming,” says Plutarch, “some swallows, having built their nests under the stern of the _Antoniad_, Cleopatra’s flagship, other swallows came, drove the first away, and killed their young ones.” Frequent defeats in the skirmishes around Actium, the desertion of Domitius Ænobarbus, who suddenly passed over to the enemy, the defection of two of the allied kings, who, with their forces, abandoned the army, confirmed these evil omens in the superstitious soul of Antony. He suspected everything and everybody—his fortune, his soldiers, his friends, Cleopatra herself. Seeing her sad, discouraged, a prey to gloomy thoughts—for she, too, dwelt on the omens of the swallows of the _Antoniad_ and the shattered statues—he fancied that she wished to poison him, that by this crime she might secure the favor of Octavius. For days he would take neither food nor drink that she had not first tasted. Out of pity for her lover, Cleopatra lent herself willingly to this caprice. One night, however, at the close of the supper, she took a rose from her crown and lightly dipped it into a cup of wine which she handed smilingly to Antony. He put it to his lips, when she arrested his hand and gave the poisoned wine to a slave to drink, who immediately fell to the floor writhing in mortal agony. “O Antony!” exclaimed Cleopatra, “what a woman you suspect. See now that neither means nor opportunities to slay you would fail me if I could live without you!”