Her lover attended upon her in the forum, at the theatre, and the tribunals; he rode with her, or followed her chariot on foot, escorted by a train of eunuchs; at night he strolled with her through the city, in the garb of a slave, and encountered abuse and blows from the rabble of the streets; by day he wore the loose Persian robe, and girded himself with the Median dagger, and he designated as his palace the praetorium or general's apartment. Painters and sculptors were charged to group the illustrious pair together, and the coins of the kingdom bore the heads and names of both conjointly. The Roman legionary, with the name of Cleopatra inscribed upon his shield, found himself transformed into a Macedonian body-guard. Masques were presented at the court, in which the versatile Plancus sank into the character of a stage buffoon, and enacted the part of the sea-god Glaucus in curt cerulean vestments, crowned with the feathery heads of the papyrus, and deformed with the tail of a fish. But when Cleopatra arrayed herself in the garb and usurped the attributes of Isis, and invited her paramour to ape the deity Osiris, the portentous travesty assumed a deeper significance. It had been the policy of the Macedonian sovereigns to form an alliance between the popular superstitions of their Greek and Egyptian subjects. Ptolemaeus Soter had prevailed on the native priesthood to sanction the consecration of a new divinity, Serapis, who, if not really of Grecian origin, was confidently identified by the Greeks with their own Pluto, or perhaps with Zeus. The Macedonians had admitted with little scruple their great hero's claims to be the offspring of Ammon, the king of gods, who was worshipped in the Oasis of the desert. The notion that a mere man might become exalted into union with deity, favoured by the rationalising explanations of their popular mythology already current among the learned, had gradually settled into an indulgent admission of the royal right of apotheosis. Antony had assumed the character of Bacchus at Athens. In the metropolis of Grecian scepticism this could only be regarded as a drunken whim; but when he came forward in Alexandria as the Nile-God Osiris, the Bacchus or fructifying power of the Coptic mythology, he claimed as a present deity the veneration of the credulous Egyptians.