Cæsar stared in delighted interest. He saw, standing gracefully--and wholly undraped--before him, a slender, red-haired girl, snub-nosed and of no special beauty. But, at a glance, this man who saw everything, saw, too, that she possessed an unnameable fascination--a magnetism--that was greater by far than that of any other woman he had known in all his fifty-eight years.
It was Julius Cæsar's first introduction to a super-woman; to the super-woman of super-women; to a woman beside whose snub-nosed, plain face, under its shock of red hair, the memory of the Roman beauties who had so often charmed his idle hours grew dim and confused.
Cleopatra, on her part, saw nothing so impressive as an elephant-tiger-dragon monster. She beheld a thin, undersized man, nearly sixty years old, hawk-nosed, inscrutable of eye, on whose thin gray locks, to mask his fast-growing baldness, rested a chaplet of laurel leaves.
This was the hero whose cunning and whose war genius had caused sceptered men to grovel at his feet, and had made stubborn republican Rome his cringing servant. But he was also the man whose weakness was an attractive woman. And on this weakness Cleopatra at once proceeded to play.
Yet she speedily found that Cæsar's was but a surface weakness, and that beneath it lay iron. Gladly he consented to save her from her foes, and even in a measure to let her punish such of those foes as were of no use to him. But as for making her the undisputed Queen of Egypt and setting her triumphantly and independently on the throne of her ancestors, at Rome's expense--he had not the remotest idea of doing that.
Nor could all her most bewildering blandishments wring such a foolish concession from him. He made love to her--ardent love; but he did not let love interfere in any way with politics.
Instead of carrying her to the throne, through seas of her enemies' blood, he carried Cleopatra back to Rome with him and, to the scandal of the whole city, installed her in a huge marble villa there.
And there, no secret being made of Cæsar's infatuation for her, Cleopatra remained for the next few years; indeed, until Cæsar's death. There, too, Cæsar's son, Cæsarion, was born; and with the boy's birth came to Cleopatra the hope that Cæsar would will to him all his vast estates and other wealth; which would have been some slight compensation for the nonrestoring of her throne.