Alexandria: A History and a Guide

Back in Alexandria again, [Cleopatra] watched the second duel—that between Mark Antony and Caesar’s murderers. She helped neither party, and when Antony won he summoned her… She came, not in a carpet but in a gilded barge, and her life henceforward belongs less to history than to poetry… Voluptuous but watchful, she treated her new lover as she had treated her old. She never bored him, and since grossness means monotony she sharpened his mind to those more delicate delights, where sense ver...