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In the year 30 B.C., Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemys, killed herself, rather than become a prisoner of the victorious Roman general, Octavianus. That was the end. Egypt became part of the Roman Empire and her life as an independent state ceased for all time. I am going to take you to the top of the highest pyramid. It is a good deal of a climb.
Dootleby was a handsome old man, and he looked very out of place on the Bowery. Not that good looks are wanting in the Bowery, for many a crownless Cleopatra mingles with its crowds. But Mr. Dootleby, as he stood in the shadow of the coffee-vender's booth, seemed to be the one kind of being necessarily incongruous with the midnight Bowery spectacle. Mr.
"Dost thou not see my baby at my breast, That sucks the nurse asleep?" Thus, after having chained in her embrace the two greatest generals that the Roman empire had produced, Julius Cæsar and Mark Antony, at the periods when they were respectively arbiters of the world's fate, perished Cleopatra by her own hand.
The first is that of a priestess of Amoun, whose form is discernible through the bandages, the feet of which are visible, and the third is that of a woman named Cleopatra, of the family of Soter, Archon of Thebes, with a comb in the hair, and upon the bandages the usual sepulchral deities, including the black Anubis, and in the next case is her coffin.
When Ptolemy had written thus, he came suddenly to Ptolemais, and brought his daughter Cleopatra along with him; and as he found Alexander there before him, as he desired him to come, he gave him his child in marriage, and for her portion gave her as much silver and gold as became such a king to give.
His studio is in the Via Sistina; and at a little distance on the other side of the same street is William Story's, where we likewise went, and found him at work on a sitting statue of Cleopatra. William Story looks quite as vivid, in a graver way, as when I saw him last, a very young man.
"Nay rather," interrupted Lysias, "our queen seems to come to us like returning health, since so long as she was not in our midst we felt suffering and sick for longing. Thy presence, Cleopatra, is the most effectual remedy, and restores us to our lost health."
It will translate characters, language and things as nearly as possible into terms comprehensible in our own times: but not so literally, or so extravagantly as to degenerate into the opera-bouffe of, for example, Mr. Shaw's Cæsar and Cleopatra. There will also be no tushery. The method of description which Mr. Belloc employs in these sketches is cool and transparent.
"We talk about love," said the Philosopher, "as though it were a known quantity. After all, to say that a man loves is like saying that he paints or plays the violin; it conveys no meaning until we have witnessed his performance. Yet to hear the subject discussed, one might imagine the love of a Dante or a society Johnny, of a Cleopatra or a Georges Sand, to be precisely the same thing."
But when he was just going to put this matter past all remedy, he heard the news that Caesar was the victor in the war, and that Antony and Cleopatra were both dead, and that he had conquered Egypt; whereupon he made haste to go to meet Caesar, and left the affairs of his family in their present state.
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