In the mean time, while Antony was thus wasting his time in luxury and pleasure with Cleopatra, his public duties were neglected, and every thing was getting into confusion. Fulvia remained in Italy. Her position and her character gave her a commanding political influence, and she exerted herself in a very energetic manner to sustain, in that quarter of the world, the interests of her husband's cause. She was surrounded with difficulties and dangers, the details of which can not, however, be here particularly described. She wrote continually to Antony, urgently entreating him to come to Rome, and displaying in her letters all those marks of agitation and distress which a wife would naturally feel under the circumstances in which she was placed. The thought that her husband had been so completely drawn away from her by the guilty arts of such a woman, and led by her to abandon his wife and his family, and leave in neglect and confusion concerns of such momentous magnitude as those which demanded his attention at home, produced an excitement in her mind bordering upon phrensy. Antony was at length so far influenced by the urgency of the case that he determined to return. He broke up his quarters at Tarsus and moved south toward Tyre, which was a great naval port and station in those days. Cleopatra went with him. They were to separate at Tyre. She was to embark there for Egypt, and he for Rome. At least that was Antony's plan, but it was not Cleopatra's. She had determined that Antony should go with her to Alexandria. As might have been expected, when the time came for the decision, the woman gained the day. Her flatteries, her arts, her caresses, her tears, prevailed. After a brief struggle between the sentiment of love on the one hand and those of ambition and of duty combined on the other, Antony gave up the contest. Abandoning every thing else, he surrendered himself wholly to Cleopatra's control, and went with her to Alexandria. He spent the winter there, giving himself up with her to every species of sensual indulgence that the most remorseless license could tolerate, and the most unbounded wealth procure.