In a few minutes he recovers consciousness. He calls and entreats the slaves, the soldiers, to put an end to him, but none dare to comply, and he is left alone, howling and struggling on the couch. Meanwhile the queen has been informed of the fact. Her grief is bitter and profound—the more bitter that it is mingled with remorse. She must see Antony again; she commands that he be brought, dead or alive. Diomedes, her secretary, hastens to the palace. Antony is at the last gasp, but the joy at hearing that the queen is not dead revives him, and “he rises,” says Dion Cassius, “as if he might still live!” Slaves bear him in their arms, and, to hasten their movements, he utters entreaties, invectives, threats, which mingle with the death-rattle. They reach the tomb; the queen leans from a window of the upper story; fearing a surprise, she will not have the portcullis raised, but she throws down some ropes, and commands them to be fastened round Antony. Then, aided by Iras and Charmion, the only ones she has allowed to enter the mausoleum, she begins to drag him up. “It was not easy,” says Plutarch, “for women thus to lift a man of Antony’s size.” Never, say those who witnessed it, was a sadder or more pitiful sight. Cleopatra, with arms stiff and brow contracted, dragged painfully at the ropes, whilst Antony, bleeding and dying, raised himself as much as possible, extending towards her his dying hands. At last he reached her, and they laid him on a bed, where she long held him in a close embrace. Her grief spent itself in tears, in sobs, in despairing kisses. She called him her husband, her master, her emperor; she struck her breast, tore it with her nails, then again casting herself upon him, she kissed his wound, wiping off on her face the blood that flowed from it. Antony endeavored to calm and console her, and entreated her to care for her own safety. Burning with fever, he begged for a drink, and swallowed a cup of wine. Death was rapidly approaching. Cleopatra renewed her lamentations. “Do not grieve,” said he, “for this last misfortune; rather congratulate me for the blessings I have enjoyed in my life, and the happiness that has been mine in being the most powerful and illustrious of men; congratulate me on this, that, being a Roman, none but a Roman has conquered me.” He expired in the arms of Cleopatra, dying, as Shakspeare says, where he had wished to live.