Warned by the letter of Cleopatra, Octavius sent in haste to the apartments. His officers found the guards at their post, ignorant of what had occurred. They forced the door and beheld Cleopatra, clad in her royal robes, lying lifeless on her golden couch, and at her feet the corpse of Iras. Charmion was still alive; leaning over Cleopatra, she was arranging with her dying hands the diadem around the head of the queen. A soldier exclaimed in a voice of wrath: “Is this well done, Charmion?” “Yes,” said the dying Charmion, “it is well done, and worthy of a queen, the descendants of so many kings!” Octavius put to death Cæsarion, the son of Cæsar and Cleopatra, but he was merciful to the dead body of the queen. Granting the mournful prayer she had made to him in her last letter, he permitted her to be buried beside Antony. He also granted honorable burial to the faithful slaves, Charmion and Iras, who had accompanied their mistress to the world of shadows. By her suicide, Cleopatra escaped contributing to the triumph of Octavius,[16] but failing her person he had her effigy, and the statue of Cleopatra with a serpent wound about her arm was borne in the triumphal procession. Does it not seem that the statue of this illustrious queen, who had subdued the greatest of the Romans, who had made Rome tremble, and who preferred death to assisting at her own humiliation, had by her death triumphed over her conqueror, and still defied the senate and the people on the way to the Capitol? We can easily conceive of Cleopatra as a great queen, the rival of the mythic Semiramis, and the elder sister of the Zenobias, the Isabellas, the Maria-Theresas, and the Catharines; but, in truth, only those queens are great who possess manly virtues, who rule nations and compel events as a great king might do. Cleopatra was too essentially a woman to be reckoned among these glorious androgynuses. If for twenty years she preserved her throne and maintained the independence of Egypt, it was done by mere womanly means—intrigue, gallantry, grace, and weakness which is also a grace. Her sole method of governing was, in reality, by becoming the mistress of Cæsar and the mistress of Mark Antony. It was the Roman sword that sustained the throne of the Lagidæ. When by the fault of Cleopatra the weapon was broken, the throne tottered and fell. Ambition, her only royal virtue, would have been limited to the exercise of her hereditary government if circumstances had not developed and exalted it.