ancients recounted and spread abroad, and perhaps in part invented,
these storiettes of gallantry for quite opposite reasons--as source of
dishonour, to discredit him, to demonstrate that Cæsar was effeminate,
that he could not give guarantee of knowing how to lead the armies
and to fulfil the virile and arduous duties that awaited every eminent
Roman. There is in our way of thinking a vein of romanticism wanting
in the ancient mind. We see in love a certain forgetfulness of
ourselves, a certain blindness of egoism and the more material
passions, a kind of power of self-abnegation, which, inasmuch as it is
unconscious, confers a certain nobility and dignity; therefore we are
indulgent to mistakes and follies committed for the sake of passion,
while the ancients were very severe. We pardon with a certain
compassion the man who for love of a woman has not hesitated to bury
himself under the ruin of his own greatness; the ancients, on the
contrary, considered him the most dangerous and despicable of the
insane.

Criticism has not contented itself with re-giving to the ancient
romance the significance it had for those that made it and the
public that first read it. Archaeologists have discovered upon
coins portraits of Cleopatra, and now critics have confronted these
portraits with the poetic descriptions given by Roman historians and
have found the descriptions generously fanciful: in the portraits we
do not see the countenance of a Venus, delicate, gracious, smiling,
nor even the fine and sensuous beauty of a Marquise de Pompadour, but
a face fleshy and, as the French would say, _bouffie_; the nose,
a powerful aquiline; the face of a woman on in years, ambitious,
imperious, one which recalls that of Maria Theresa. It will be said
that judgments as to beauty are personal; that Antony, who saw her
alive, could decide better than we who see her portraits half effaced