Page:Plutarch's Lives (Clough, v.5, 1865).djvu/242

 234 ANTONY. Many kings and great commanders made petition to CtBsar for the body of Antony, to give him his funeral rites ; but he would not take away his corpse from Cleo- patra, by whose hands he was buried with royal splendor and magnificence, it being granted to her to employ what she pleased on his funeral. In this extremity of grief and sorrow, and having inflamed and ulcerated her breasts with beating them, she fell into a high fever, and was very glad of the occasion, housing, under this pretext, to abstain from food, and so to die in quiet without inter- ference. She had her ovm physician, Olympus, to whom she told the truth, and asked his advice and help to put an end to herself, as Olympus himself has told us, in a narrative which he wrote of these events. But Cassar, suspecting her pui'pose, took to menacing language about her children, and excited her fears for them, before which engines her purpose shook and gave way, so that she suf- fered those about her to give her what meat or medicine they pleased. Some few days after, Csesar himself came to make her a visit and comfort her. She lay then upon her pallet- bed in undress, and, on his entering in, sprang up from off her bed, having nothing on but the one garment next her body, and flung herself at his feet, her hair and face looking wild and disfigured, her voice quivering, and her eyes sunk in her head. The marks of the blows she had given herself were visible about her bosom, and altogether her whole person seemed no less afflicted than her soul. But, for all this, her old charm, and the boldness of her youthful beauty had not wholly left her, and, in spite of her present condition, still sparkled from within, and let itself appear in all the movements of her countenance. ouk ngathon poluai3.vie being a form of Coesar ; .and ffb/rmi, or ^(ij- slight variation upon ouk agathon ranos, is a captain or chief. polukoir-Anie. Kaisar is the Greek