Cleopatra was not a great queen, regarded as a ruler, yet she did a great service to her country in preserving its independence for a score of years after it had reached its end by a natural process of degeneracy; but she accomplished this end by the arts of intrigue. Cleopatra was too essentially a woman to be a great ruler, having all a woman's weaknesses, a woman's faults, and yet withal the charms and graces that make woman beautiful and lovable. Yet when we weigh her character with due reference to the times in which she lived, to the family influences which moulded her early years, and to the degeneracy of the Ptolemies to which she fell heir, she must rank as one of the best of her dynasty. Horace, the Roman poet, called Cleopatra: "_non humilis mulier_ [a woman capable of no baseness];" and the phrase gains in importance from the fact that it occurs in the hymn which the poet dedicated to Octavius in honor of his victory over Antony and Cleopatra. In thus characterizing, in such an ode, the victor's foe, Horace gives us an estimate of the "Serpent of the Nile" which may stand as an epitome of her character and as a just claim to the partial respect and admiration of posterity. "Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale Her infinite variety." Cleopatra's intimate relations with Rome's greatest men, and the conversion of her kingdom into a Roman province after her death, but emphasize the fact that all Hellenistic lands were at that time in the power of Rome and that the period of Graeco-Roman culture had begun much earlier. In B.C. 146 had occurred the destruction of Corinth and the absorption of Old Greece into a part of the Roman province of Macedon, and from that time Rome exerted a marked influence over the social life of Hellas. One of the chief characteristics of this age was the freer life of women of all classes. Even in Athens and Boeotia, the mistress of the house obtained her rights as mother and hostess. Perhaps it was in imitation of what they saw in Rome, perhaps it was merely the natural process of evolution, but, at any rate, the recognition of the capabilities and the elevated position of woman was general. Plutarch is the best chronicler of Greek life in the first century after the Christian era, and his works abound in precepts on the relations of the sexes, in whose equality he was a firm believer, and on the proper training and education of woman. His own wife, Timoxena, paid visits and received guests even when her husband was absent, shared fully the intellectual life of her husband, and took part in all his public interests.