Page:Plutarch's Lives (Clough, v.5, 1865).djvu/231

 ANTONY. 223 When Antony came into Africa, he sent on Cleopatra from ParsBtonium into Egypt, and staid himself in the most entire solitude that he could desire, roaming and wandering about with only two friends, one a Greek, Aristocrates, a rhetorician, and the other a Roman, Lucil- ius, of whom we have elsewhere spoken, how, at Philippi, to give Brutus time to escape, he suffered himself to be taken by the pursuers, pretending he was Brutus. An- tony gave him his life, and on this account he remained true and faithful to him to the last. But when also the officer who commanded for him in Africa, to whose care he had committed all his forces there, took them over to Csesar, he resolved to kill himself, but was hindered by his friends. And coming to Alexandria, he found Cleopatra busied in a most bold and wonderful enterprise. Over the small space of land which divides the Red Sea from the sea near Egypt, which may be con- sidered also the bomidary between Asia and Africa, and in the narrowest place is not much above three hundred furlongs across, over this neck of land Cleopatra had formed a project of dragging her fleet, and setting it afloat in the Arabian Gulf, thus with her soldiers and her treasure to secure herself a home on the other side, where she might live in peace, far away from war and slavery. But the first galleys which were carried over being burnt by the Arabians of Petra, and Antony not knowing but that the army before Actium still held together, she desisted from her enterprise, and gave orders for the fortifying all the approaches to Egypt But Antony, leaving the city and the conversation of hia friends, built him a dwelling-place in the water, near Pharos, upon a little mole which he cast up in the sea, and there, secluding himself from the company of man- kind, said he deshed nothing but to live the life of Timon ; as, indeed, his case was the same, and the ingratitude and