Cleopatra and the Decurion by Bernard Capes

On the headland of Lochias, where it pushed towards the overlapping promontory of Pharos, stood the palace and gardens of the Ptolemies. The great lighthouse on the opposite shore glowed across the strait, and in the deep waters between were planted a number of islets, like gigantic stepping-stones, their intervals closed with booms and chains. These, and the arms of land, enlocked the harbour of Alexandria, all round whose mighty circumference the city flamed like a belt of fire, impassable, magnificent. It was thirty years before the birth of Christ, and the battle of Actium had been fought and, for all that it meant to Egypt and the world, lost. Cleopatra was doomed, and Magdalen, perhaps, conceived.

Mark Antony, desperate, though infatuated still, had come out of his retirement on Pharos, whither he had retreated to brood over his leman's treachery. The two were reconciled in a way, and sought perpetually to drown in revelry the horror of an impending judgment. The beautiful queen, last expression of a monstrous demonism, its heir and epitome, had no instinct at the last but to gore the world that crushed her -- to glut herself with blood and suffering. In these final days her inhumanity surpassed itself. And crowned Antony, glooming in his purple and diamonds, watched and was silent.