Cleopatra had sailed from Greece some days before Antony. She was in haste to return to Egypt, fearing that the news of the disaster of Actium might provoke a revolution. To mislead the people for a few days, and thus gain time to take her measures, she entered the port of Alexandria with all the parade of a triumph. Her ships, their prows adorned with crowns, resounded with the songs of victory and the music of flutes and sistra. No sooner was she reinstalled in the palace than she put to death many whose intrigues she feared. These executions, which benefited the royal treasury, for death involved the confiscation of the wealth of the real or pretended guilty, delivered Cleopatra from all fear of an immediate revolution, but she none the less felt a mortal terror about the future. She still suffered from the horror of Actium;—at times haunted by the idea of suicide, she contemplated a death as pompous as had been her life, and she erected at the extremity of Cape Lochias an immense tomb, in which to consume herself and her treasures. At other times she thought of flight, and by her orders a number of her largest ships were transported with great reënforcements of men, engines, and beasts of burden across the isthmus to the Red Sea. She had a vision of embarking with all her wealth for some unknown country of Asia or Africa, there to renew her existence of lust and pleasure. Antony soon returned to Alexandria. He was in a state of gloomy discouragement; his army in Acarnania, deserted by Canidius, who had taken flight, had surrendered to Octavius after a week of hesitation; in Cyrenaica he could not even obtain a meeting with his lieutenant Scarpus, who, having taken sides with the Cæsarians, had threatened his life; Herod, his creature, whom he had made king of the Jews, had offered his allegiance to the conqueror of Actium; defection on all sides with his allies as with his legions. Antony reached the point of doubting even Cleopatra; he would scarcely see her. Exasperated at the cruelty of the gods, and still more so at the perfidy of men, he resolved to pass in solitude the wretched days that his enemies might yet permit him to live. The story of Timon, the misanthrope of Athens, which he had heard in happier days, recurred to his memory, and, determined to live like Timon, he settled in the barren mole of Poseidon, and busied himself there in erecting a tower which he intended to call the Timonion.