Greek Women Part 21

"There were once upon a time two young people of marvellous beauty, called Acontius and Cydippe. All previous attempts on the part of any youth or maiden to gain their affections had been fruitless; and the one went about, a modern Achilles in manly splendor; the other, with the roses and lilies of her cheeks, added a fourth to the number of the Graces. But the G.o.d Eros,--now already the winged urchin of the Anacreontics,--angry at this contumacy, determined to a.s.sert his power.

They met at a feast of Delos, she from Athens, he from Ceos.... Seized with violent love at first sight, the youth inscribes on a quince, which was a fruit used at this particular feast, 'I swear by Artemis that Acontius shall be my husband,' and this he throws at the girl's feet.

Her nurse picks it up and reads the words to the girl, who blushed 'in plots of roses' at the oath which she had never taken. But she too is seized with an absorbing pa.s.sion, and the situation is complicated by the ignorance or hardness of heart of her parents, who had determined to marry her to another man. Her grief prostrates her with sore sickness, and the marriage is postponed. Meanwhile, Acontius flees the city and his parents, and wanders disconsolate through the woods, telling to trees and streams his love, writing 'Cydippe' upon every bark, and filling all the groves with his sighs. Thrice the parents of the maiden prepared the wedding, and thrice her illness rendered their preparation vain. At last the father determined to consult the oracle at Delphi, which revealed to him the facts and ordered him no longer to thwart the lovers. Acontius arrives at Athens. The young couple are married, and the tale ends with an explicit description of their happiness."

Though there were in Alexandrian literature shocking stories of unnatural pa.s.sion, as found later in Ovid, among Roman poets, yet the type of the Acontius and Cydippe tale fascinated the age and held its ground, and its moral elevation in contrast to the prevailing corruption shows how the men and women of the times prized "the original purity of the maiden, and the importance of its preservation until the happy conclusion of marriage."

The son and successor of Philadelphus, the young King Ptolemy III., Euergetes, continued the literary traditions of the parental court. Soon after his father's death, he married the Princess Berenice II. of Cyrene, a young lady of beauty and spirit, who had already experienced the corruption of the court life of the day. Demetrius the Fair had been sent from Macedon to obtain her kingdom with her hand, but, while she was waiting to be of marriageable age, he had beguiled himself by intriguing with her mother. Berenice, in consequence, had him put to death. Doubtless her marriage with the young King of Egypt was a political alliance, but it was based also on mutual liking and appears to have turned out well. This reign of Euergetes and Berenice is, in fact, the one reign of the Ptolemies in which neither rival wives nor mistresses agitated the court. Information concerning this important period is meagre; we know, however, that no sooner had the bride entered upon her new happiness than the bridegroom was called away to Syria to avenge the horrid murder of his sister, also named Berenice, who had been wedded to the old King Antiochus Theos on condition that the latter repudiated his former wife Laodice and her children. But Laodice got the aged king again into her power; and she forthwith poisoned him and had her son proclaimed king. Her party in Antioch at once rose up against the new Egyptian queen and murdered her and her infant child.

Queen Berenice, upon the departure of her husband, consecrated a lock of her hair in the temple of Aphrodite, with a prayer for his safe return.

The lock mysteriously disappeared, and the philosopher Conon, happening just at that time to discover a new constellation, declared that the lock of Berenice's hair had been set among the stars. Callimachus, one of the court poets, seized this occasion to compose a poem ent.i.tled the _Lock of Berenice_,--preserved in Catullus's elegant Latin version,--celebrating the accession to the constellations of this lock of hair, which, according to the conceit of the poet, notwithstanding its high honor, wishes that it had never been severed from Berenice's fair head.

The reigns of Ptolemy Soter, Philadelphus, and Euergetes, with their brilliant queens, mark the golden age of Alexandria. In Ptolemy IV., Philopator, we notice the curious and rapid change of the great family of the Lagidae into debauchees, dilettanti, drunkards, dolts. This sovereign was a feeble and colorless personage who was completely under the control of his minister Sosibius, whom Polybius speaks of as "a wily old baggage and most mischievous to the kingdom; and first he planned the murder of Lysimachus, who was the son of Arsinoe, daughter of Lysimachus, and of Ptolemy; secondly, of Magas, the son of Ptolemy and Berenice, daughter of Magas; thirdly, of Berenice, daughter of Ptolemy and mother of Philopator; fourthly, of Cleomenes the Spartan; and fifthly, of Arsinoe, daughter of Berenice, the king's sister and wife."

Surely a criminal of the deepest dye, at whose hands the princesses of Alexandria suffered untold horrors! During his later years, the king was under complete subjection to his mistress Agathoclea and her brother Agathocles. The Queen Arsinoe, the mother of the infant heir to the throne, who was young and vigorous, was regarded throughout Egypt as the natural protectress and regent of the young Ptolemy when his father's life was on the wane; but Agathocles and his sister secretly murdered her, and, when the king died, presented the prince to the populace and read a forged will in which they themselves were made his guardians during his minority. But the people learned of the sad fate of Queen Arsinoe, and her ill treatment roused the indignation of the populace; thereupon followed one of the mob riots for which Alexandria was noted.

Polybius gives a dramatic description of the great riot and tells how the wicked regent Agathocles, his sister Agathoclea, and his mother Oenanthe, were seized by the mult.i.tude and torn in pieces, limb by limb, while yet they lived.

When the young King Ptolemy V., Epiphanes, grew up, he took for his queen Cleopatra, daughter of Antiochus III., the Great, and sister of Antiochus IV., Epiphanes. Now for the first time, with this Syrian princess, enters the name of Cleopatra in the annals of Egypt. Previous queens have been named either Berenice or Arsinoe, and from this time on the three names appear in almost inextricable confusion, Cleopatra prevailing and being applied at times even to sisters of the same house.

The first Cleopatra was a great and good queen, and after the death of her husband, whose reign was short and uneventful, and of her elder son, who seems to have died soon after his accession, she became regent of her second son, Ptolemy VI., Philometor, who was not seven years old when he began to reign, Philometor married his sister, Cleopatra II., and was the last of the Ptolemies who could in any sense be called good.

His later years were clouded by the rivalry of his wicked brother Physcon, who sought the throne.

When Philometor was killed in battle, Physcon, or Euergetes II., laid siege to Alexandria, forced the widowed queen Cleopatra II. to marry him, murdered her young son Ptolemy, Philopator Neos, the rightful heir, for whom the mother had made a bold attempt to maintain the throne, and reigned as Ptolemy VII. Physcon even married the queen's daughter, Cleopatra III., and we see this remarkable man managing, at the same time, two ambitious queens, mother and daughter, who were probably at deadly enmity throughout the period in which they were a.s.sociated with him in the royalty. One story, almost too horrible to obtain credence, tells that Physcon served up as a birthday feast to the mother, Cleopatra II., his own heir Memphitis. When this wretch finally ended his days, Cleopatra III., who was as great a monster of ambition, selfishness, and cruelty as Physcon himself, seems to have murdered her queen-mother and to have a.s.sumed the reins of government, at first alone, and later a.s.sociated with her eldest son, Lathyrus Soter II., who reigned as the eighth Ptolemy. Lathyrus first married his sister Cleopatra IV., but was finally compelled by his mother to divorce her and to marry his other sister, Selene. He was finally turned out of his kingdom by his mother, who desired the accession of his younger brother, Alexander I., the ninth Ptolemy; and the latter repaid her maternal interest in him by murdering her as soon as he was secure on the throne.

His queen was Berenice III., with whom he reigned until they were in turn ousted by Lathyrus. Alexander II., Ptolemy X., succeeded Lathyrus, and married his stepmother, Berenice III., whom he speedily murdered, and was himself put to death after a brief reign of nineteen days.

Ptolemy XI., Auletes, an illegitimate son of Soter II., then mounted the throne, his queen being Cleopatra V., Tryphaena. He was the last and the weakest of the Ptolemies, and is worthy of mention merely because of his base dealings with Rome, which introduced Roman intervention into Egyptian affairs, and because he was the father of the great Cleopatra.

We have given this brief chronicle of the later kings and queens of Egypt to prepare us for the consideration of the character of the foremost Egyptian woman of antiquity--Cleopatra. The Ptolemies, we have found, degenerated steadily and became in the end the most abominable and loathsome tyrants that the principle of absolute and irresponsible power ever produced. Regardless of all law, abandoned to the most unnatural vices, thoroughly depraved, and capable of every crime, they showed utter disregard of every virtuous principle and of every domestic tie. The Ptolemaic princesses seem, as a whole, to have been superior to the men. They usually possessed great beauty, great personal charm, and great wealth and influence. Yet among them always existed mutual hatred and disregard of all ties of family and affection. Ambitious to excess, high-spirited and indomitable, they removed every obstacle to the attainment of power, and fratricide and matricide are crimes at which they did not pause. When the student of history sees pa.s.s before him this dismal panorama of vice and crime, he wonders whether human nature had not deserted these women and the spirit of the tigress entered into them.

Cleopatra, the last Queen of Egypt, was the heiress of generations of legalized license, of cultured sensuality, of refined cruelty, and of moral turpitude, and she differed from her predecessors only in that she had redeeming qualities which offset in some degree the wickedness that she had inherited. To the thoughtful mind her character presents one of the most difficult of psychological problems, and to solve the enigma thus presented we have to consider her antecedents, her early training, and the part which she was compelled to play in the world's history.

Her early years were spent in the storm and turmoil of the conflict between her father Auletes and her sister Berenice. Ptolemy XI., Auletes, called "the Piper,"--because of his only accomplishment, his skill in playing the flute,--was perhaps the most degraded, dissipated, and corrupt of all the sovereigns of the dynasty. He inspired his contemporaries with scorn for his weakness of character and with abhorrence for his vices and crimes. His one redeeming trait was his love for his younger children, and he seems to have brought them up with every obtainable advantage and as much as possible removed from the turmoil of the court. For fear of losing his kingdom, he sought recognition from Rome and paid Caesar enormous sums of money for his patronage. The people rose in revolt against the heavy taxes, and Ptolemy fled to Rome for aid. Berenice IV., his eldest daughter, was raised to the throne by the Alexandrians, and she began her reign in great splendor. Hoping to strengthen her position by marriage with a royal prince, she first wedded Seleucus of Syria. But she soon found him not to her taste, and disposed of him by strangling--in true Ptolemaic fashion. After many intrigues, she found a second husband in Archelaus, a prince of Asia Minor. She then made every preparation to offer effectual resistance to her father. Auletes succeeded in gaining a hearing at Rome, and a Roman army under Gabinius, with Mark Antony as his lieutenant, marched against the forces of Berenice and Archelaus.

After many battles, the Romans were victorious. Archelaus was slain; Berenice was taken prisoner; her government was overthrown; and Auletes was restored to power, as a va.s.sal of Rome. Ptolemy was filled with savage joy at his daughter's capture, and at once ordered her execution.

After a reign of three years, Auletes died, leaving the kingdom jointly to Cleopatra, now eighteen years of age, and her brother Ptolemy, aged ten; and the brother and sister, in obedience to the custom of the Ptolemies, were married, that they might rule together.

Amid such scenes and excitements, a constant witness of the cruelty of her father and elder sister, Cleopatra had grown up, and with such examples before her she entered upon her reign. Her training, under most skilful masters, had been of the broadest character, and her intellectual endowments have seldom been surpa.s.sed. She was very learned, and is said to have mastered eight or ten languages; so that she could address in his own tongue whoever approached her--whether Egyptian, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, or Syriac.

"With a fondness for philosophy she united a love of letters as rare as it is attractive; and in the companionship of scholars and poets her mind expanded as it added to its priceless store of wealth. She was not only familiar with the heroic tales and traditions, the poetic myths and chronicles, and the religious legends, of ancient Egypt, but she was well versed, too, in the literature and science of Phoenicia and Chaldaea, of Greece and Rome; she was skilled also in metallurgy and chemistry; and a proficient in astronomy and the other sciences cultivated in the age in which she lived. Her skill in music found none to equal it. Her voice itself was perfect melody, and touched by her fingers the cithara seemed instinct with life, and from its strings there rolled a gushing flood of glorious symphonies. She was eloquent and imaginative, witty and animated. Her conversation, therefore, was charming; and if she exhibited caprice, which she sometimes did, it was forgotten in the inevitable grace of her manner."

Essentially Greek in all her characteristics, she possessed the wisdom of Athena, the dignity of Hera, and the witchery of Aphrodite. An enthusiastic writer has thus described her: "She was tall of stature and queenly in gait and appearance. The warm sun of that southern clime had tinged her cheek with a hue of brown, but her complexion was as clear and pure as the serene sky that smiled above her head, and distinctly traced beneath it were the delicate veins filled with the rich blood that danced so wildly when inflamed with hate or heated with pa.s.sion.

Her eyes and hair were like jet and as glossy as the raven's plume. The former were large and, as was characteristic of her race, apparently half-shut and slightly turned up at the outer angles, thus adding to the naturally arch expression of her countenance; but they were full, too, of brilliancy and fire. Both nose and chin were small, but fashioned as with all the nicety of the sculptor's art; and her pearly teeth nestled lovingly between the coral lips whose kisses were as sweet as honey from the hives of Hybla."

Plutarch expresses himself rather differently from the modern writer,--who draws largely on his imagination,--and perhaps more truthfully:

"There was nothing so incomparable in her beauty as to compel admiration; but by the charm of her physiognomy, the grace of her whole person, the fascination of her presence, Cleopatra left a sting in the soul." Hence, as has been said, she probably possessed not supreme beauty, but supreme seductiveness.

Her social and moral qualities at this time seem not to have been inferior to her beauty or her intellectual endowments. Falsehood and hypocrisy were foreign to her. She gained her ends by the winningness of her disposition, the melody of her voice, the gentleness of her manner.

Says Ebers, who of modern writers has drawn the most attractive picture of her character: "The fundamental principles which dominated this rare creature's life and character were two ceaseless desires: first, to surpa.s.s everyone, even in the most difficult achievements; and, secondly, to love and be loved in return." Ambition and love were the two ruling principles in her nature which raised her above all other women of her time.

Such was Cleopatra when she began to reign. But neither her learning nor her beauty nor the charm of her manner protected her from the machinations of the court. Ptolemy XII., her boy husband, was under the control of his tutor, Pothinus, who, becoming jealous of Cleopatra's growing power, organized a conspiracy against her; and she was compelled to flee to Syria, where she began to raise an army to a.s.sert her rights.

But a greater power now intervened in the affairs of Egypt. Caesar entered upon the scene. Cleopatra appealed to him, and, rolled in a bale of carpet, gained admittance to his presence. When the carpet was unrolled and the queen appeared to view, the great conqueror was captivated at the spectacle. She was now about twenty-one, slender and graceful and of bewitching manner. Caesar was about fifty-two, but thoroughly susceptible to the charms of youth and beauty. He warmly espoused her cause, and, after a conflict which nearly ended his career, restored her to the throne; and as Ptolemy XII. had been accidentally drowned in the Nile, he a.s.sociated a younger brother, Ptolemy XIII., as her consort in the kingdom.

This is perhaps the most fascinating period in the life of Cleopatra, when, just entering upon her womanhood, she captivates the great commander and becomes, for a season, his Aspasia. In Egyptian eyes their union was regarded as a marriage, and the relations of these two never a.s.sumed the grossness and voluptuousness that were later exhibited by Antony and Cleopatra. Caesar, with all his lofty intelligence, no doubt found in her one whose intellectual faculties rose to the level of his own. He pa.s.sed the winter in her company, but at last had strength of mind enough to break away from her seductions, that he might continue his conquests and establish his dictatorship at Rome. When at the height of his power, he summoned to Rome Cleopatra, with his young son, Caesarion, and gave them a residence in his villa on the Tiber. Here she lived in splendid state, and exercised a dominating influence over the ruler of the world, much to the disgust of the Romans. It was the height of her ambition to have Caesar proclaim their son Caesarion his heir, but the dictator in this regard resisted her allurements, and remained true to Roman traditions. Upon Caesar's a.s.sa.s.sination, Cleopatra, disappointed in her fondest hopes, hastily returned to Egypt and her throne. There now appears a great change in the character of Cleopatra. The simplicity of nature and gentleness of spirit of earlier years gradually give place to a nature selfish, heartless, and designing. Jealous of her little brother, now fast approaching the age of fifteen, when he would share her power, she caused him to be poisoned. She was troubled by no conscientious scruples which might interfere with the fullest and most unrestrained indulgence of every propensity of her heart. In all her subsequent life she showed herself pa.s.sionate and ambitious, cunning and politic, luxurious and pleasure-seeking.

Cleopatra was in her twenty-ninth year when she first met Antony--"a period of life," says Plutarch, "when woman's beauty is most splendid, and her intellect is in full maturity."

When Antony summoned Cleopatra to appear before him at Tarsus to answer charges brought against her for aiding Ca.s.sius and Brutus in the late war, she, fired with the idea of achieving a second time the conquest of the greatest general and highest potentate in the world, employed all the resources of her kingdom in making preparation for her journey.

Shakespeare has most admirably described the splendor of her barge and the scene of enchantment that greeted Antony as she sailed up the Cydnus to meet him, a veritable Aphrodite surrounded by the Graces:

"The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne, Burn'd on the water; the p.o.o.p was beaten gold; Purple the sails, and so perfum'd that The winds were love-sick with them: the oars were silver, Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made The water, which they beat, to follow faster, As amorous of their strokes. For her own person, It beggar'd all description: she did lie In her pavilion (cloth-of-gold of tissue) O'er-picturing that Venus, where we see The fancy outwork nature: on each side her Stood pretty dimpl'd boys, like smiling Cupids, With diverse-color'd fans....

Her gentlewomen, like the Nereides, So many mermaids, tended her i' the eyes.

... At the helm A seeming mermaid steers....

... From the barge A strange invisible perfume hits the sense Of the adjacent wharves. The city cast Her people out upon her; and Antony, Enthroned i' the market-place, did sit alone, Whistling to th' air; which, but for vacancy, Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too, And made a gap in nature."

Antony was completely fascinated with her charms. Her beauty, her wit, and, above all, the tact, adroitness, and self-possession which she displayed in consenting thus to appear before him, forced him to yield his heart almost immediately to her undisputed sway. Cleopatra remained at Tarsus for some time, in an incessant round of gayety and revelry, and by her flatteries and caresses she prevailed on Antony, forgetful of his wife Fulvia and his duty as a Roman, to spend the winter at Alexandria, where the pair engaged in continual feastings, spectacles, and sports, as well as in every species of riot, irregularity, and excess. It is not our purpose to follow the well-known career of Cleopatra during these years of turmoil, or to dwell on the circ.u.mstances that caused her to prove the destruction of Antony's hopes at the battle of Actium; neither shall we describe in detail those closing days when both committed suicide rather than suffer the consequences of humiliation and defeat.

The case of Mark Antony is the most conspicuous example in history of the complete subjugation by the arts and fascinations of a woman of a will stern and indomitable, if reckless, and of a heart that was naturally generous and n.o.ble. Cleopatra led him to betray every public trust, to alienate from himself the affections of all his countrymen, to repel most cruelly the kindness and devotedness of a beautiful and faithful wife; and at last she led him away in a most cowardly and ign.o.ble flight from the field of duty as a soldier, he knowing full well that she was hurrying him on to disgrace and destruction, and yet being utterly without power to break from the control of her irresistible charms.

Yet they were lovers--lovers who sacrificed wealth, ambition, duty, honor, on the altar of Aphrodite. It was a love which brought destruction; still, we may charitably account for the weakness exhibited by each as the natural consequence of that romantic love, than which history has given us no greater example.

Dire was the fate of Cleopatra. Hopes all frustrated,--Antony dying in her arms,--Octavius impervious to all her allurements,--rather than grace the conqueror's triumph, the most fascinating of Greek women ended her days, according to the prevailing tradition, by the bite of an asp, in her thirty-ninth year.

Cleopatra's character is a most fascinating and baffling study. Of many faults and vices she was guilty, but they were characteristic of her age. Her virtues must have been also many, for had she not possessed virtues she would not have been loved and admired by all who knew her.

Her faithful attendants, Iras and Charmion, sacrificed themselves over her dead body, and by their devotion made even the Roman Proculius exclaim, in the words of Plutarch: "No other woman on earth was ever so admired by the greatest, so loved by the loftiest. Her fame echoed from nation to nation throughout the world. It will continue to resound from generation to generation; but, however loudly men may extol the bewitching charm, the fervor of the love which survived death, her intellect, her knowledge, the heroic courage with which she preferred the tomb to ignominy--the praise of these two must not be forgotten.

Their fidelity deserves it. By their marvellous end they unconsciously erected the most beautiful monument to their mistress; for what genuine goodness and lovableness must have been possessed by the woman who, after the greatest reverses, made it seem more desirable to those nearest to her person to die rather than to live without her!"

Cleopatra was not a great queen, regarded as a ruler, yet she did a great service to her country in preserving its independence for a score of years after it had reached its end by a natural process of degeneracy; but she accomplished this end by the arts of intrigue.

Cleopatra was too essentially a woman to be a great ruler, having all a woman's weaknesses, a woman's faults, and yet withal the charms and graces that make woman beautiful and lovable. Yet when we weigh her character with due reference to the times in which she lived, to the family influences which moulded her early years, and to the degeneracy of the Ptolemies to which she fell heir, she must rank as one of the best of her dynasty. Horace, the Roman poet, called Cleopatra: "_non humilis mulier_ [a woman capable of no baseness];" and the phrase gains in importance from the fact that it occurs in the hymn which the poet dedicated to Octavius in honor of his victory over Antony and Cleopatra.

In thus characterizing, in such an ode, the victor's foe, Horace gives us an estimate of the "Serpent of the Nile" which may stand as an epitome of her character and as a just claim to the partial respect and admiration of posterity.

"Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale Her infinite variety."

Cleopatra's intimate relations with Rome's greatest men, and the conversion of her kingdom into a Roman province after her death, but emphasize the fact that all h.e.l.lenistic lands were at that time in the power of Rome and that the period of Graeco-Roman culture had begun much earlier. In B.C. 146 had occurred the destruction of Corinth and the absorption of Old Greece into a part of the Roman province of Macedon, and from that time Rome exerted a marked influence over the social life of h.e.l.las. One of the chief characteristics of this age was the freer life of women of all cla.s.ses. Even in Athens and Boeotia, the mistress of the house obtained her rights as mother and hostess. Perhaps it was in imitation of what they saw in Rome, perhaps it was merely the natural process of evolution, but, at any rate, the recognition of the capabilities and the elevated position of woman was general. Plutarch is the best chronicler of Greek life in the first century after the Christian era, and his works abound in precepts on the relations of the s.e.xes, in whose equality he was a firm believer, and on the proper training and education of woman. His own wife, Timoxena, paid visits and received guests even when her husband was absent, shared fully the intellectual life of her husband, and took part in all his public interests.

The age was mending its manners. New ideas were prevailing among men.

Woman was becoming more and more fully a factor in the world. Yet, for her complete emanc.i.p.ation, there was need of a new dogma, a great revelation, which would bring about startling reforms in the moral and social life of mankind. Already "the Word had been made flesh, and dwelt among them full of grace and truth"; yet the great writers of the first century of our era, Dion, Plutarch, even Josephus, seem never to have heard of the new teaching which had been preached throughout Asia Minor and at Athens and Corinth--the new teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, which was destined to overturn the prevailing conception of woman and her status and to lead her into a fulness of life such as had never been conceived in the imagination of even the most elevated of her s.e.x.

[Ill.u.s.tration 384 _CLEOPATRA After the painting by Alexandre Cabanel.

From the period when the last Pharaoh died until it fell under the Roman domination, Egypt was ruled by the Greek Ptolemies, and the last of the rulers of Greek descent was the world-famous Cleopatra._

_Plutarch, in his life of Antony, states that after the defeat of Actium, Cleopatra, feeling the end of her reign imminent, busied herself in making a collection of poisons; and in order to see which of them was the least painful in operation, she had them tried upon prisoners condemned to die._]

In Cleopatra and other Greek women considered in the volume, we have observed from time to time the highest development of feminine endowments, physical, intellectual, or sensuous. The ethereal beauty of Helen, the poetic fervor of Sappho, the intellectual temper of Aspasia, the artistic temperament of Phryne, and the seductive sensibility of Cleopatra--these exhibit phases of feminine perfection that have not found their counterparts in modern times. Yet in each instance mentioned there was the one thing needful--the corresponding development of the moral and spiritual nature. These women were but pagans. Each sought in her own way to attain the highest perfection possible to woman; still, for them the truth was but seen in a gla.s.s darkly, and their philosophy had not yet taught them concerning the higher life of the spirit as distinct from the body.

Yet the dominion established by Julius Caesar, which embraced all the h.e.l.lenistic lands, was even in Cleopatra's time preparing the way for the dominion of the Son of Man, who brought into the world new conceptions of womanhood, new influences destined to elevate and enn.o.ble the s.e.x and emphasize the higher elements in human character that the ancients had so sadly neglected. Pagan Woman attained unrivalled excellence in physical beauty, intellectual endowment, and sensuous charm; to Christian Woman was vouchsafed the light which dispelled the moral darkness of antiquity and made attainable the highest spiritual excellence.