But at this time there was no thought of death. Day followed day, wholly given over to the joy of living. Every moment spent together created new dreams to be carried out; each desire gratified gave birth to a new desire. They seemed to have within them an inexhaustible spring from which they drank without ever quenching their thirst. The only perfect love is that where flesh and spirit are satisfied in turn, where heart and soul share in the ecstasy. To Cleopatra, who had never loved before, this feeling was a new experience. To Antony it was a surprise which plunged him in unspeakable delight. After his life of excess it would have seemed impossible for him to be thrilled by this new joy. But all other experiences were wiped out, and in this love he was born again. Like to the fire which rises, impervious to corruption, his passion for Cleopatra had burned away all stains of the past.
Their mutual happiness seemed to affect all their environment. The Queen took an exquisite pleasure in pointing out the charms of the Bruchium, that incomparable museum of art and nature. She wanted to share all its wonders with her lover. Even if she picked a rose she wanted him to inhale its fragrance as though it were an ethereal fragment of herself, and its perfume were her own breath. In showing him a marble statue from the chisel of Praxiteles, the bronze Hercules that Ptolemy VII had brought from Corinth, a bas-relief covered with figures from the Iliad; in music, or some page from a Greek drama, she sought that close contact of mind and spirit which should make them one being.
But if Antony yielded at times to the refining influence of the daughter of the Lagidæ, at other moments his own virile nature had the mastery and controlled them both.
The orgies of the Bruchium are matters of history. The moderation of modern life, with its democratic views, its lesser fortunes, its law-restricted vices, gives no hint of the extravagant living of the ancients. The scale is entirely different. There is no comparison between the provincial fêtes of to-day and the saturnalian revelries of the Romans. Our hygienic repasts offer no idea of the gluttonous feasts of Balthazar. Modern monuments, modern buildings, how pitifully poor they are compared with those colossal structures that Rameses or Darius employed thirty years of their reign in completing, and which have survived them for as many centuries! What a contrast between our richest palaces and those massive retreats of ancient kings, with their stupendous ramparts, their avenues of obelisks, the forest of columns which surrounded them! The most magnificent court of Europe would seem paltry set by the side of one of any satrap or Roman proconsul.