Antony

At the same time they also sent an embassy to Caesar in Asia, Cleopatra asking the realm of Egypt for her children, and Antony requesting that he might live as a private person at Athens, if he could not do so in Egypt. But owing to their lack of friends and the distrust which they felt on account of desertions, Euphronius, the teacher of the children, was sent on the embassy.

For Alexas the Laodicean, who had been made known to Antony in Rome through Timagenes and had more influence with him than any other Greek, who had also been Cleopatra’s most effective instrument against Antony and had overthrown the considerations arising in his mind in favour of Octavia, had been sent to keep Herod the king from apostasy;

but after remaining there and betraying Antony he had the audacity to come into Caesar’s presence, relying on Herod. Herod, however, could not help him, but the traitor was at once confined and carried in fetters to his own country, where he was put to death by Caesar’s orders. Such was the penalty for his treachery which Alexas paid to Antony while Antony was yet alive.

Caesar would not listen to the proposals for Antony, but he sent back word to Cleopatra that she would receive all reasonable treatment if she either put Antony to death or cast him out. He also sent with the messengers one of his own freedmen, Thyrsus, a man of no mean parts, and one who would persuasively convey messages from a young general to a woman who was haughty and astonishingly proud in the matter of beauty.

This man had longer interviews with Cleopatra than the rest, and was conspicuously honoured by her, so that he roused suspicion in Antony, who seized him and gave him a flogging, and then sent him back to Caesar with a written message stating that Thyrsus, by his insolent and haughty airs, had irritated him, at a time when misfortunes made him easily irritated. But if thou dost not like the thing, he said, thou hast my freedman Hipparchus[*](See chapter lxvii. 7.); hang him up and give him a flogging, and we shall be quits.