Meanwhile the three children of Cleopatra and Antony found a generous refuge in the house of Octavia, Antony’s discarded wife. With admirable tact Octavian seems to have insisted upon this solution of the difficulty as to what to do with them. Their execution would have been deeply resented by the Egyptians, and, since Octavian was now posing as the legal heir to the throne of Egypt, the dynastic successor of Cleopatra, and not a foreign usurper, it was well that his own sister should look after these members of the royal family. Octavia, always meek and dutiful, accepted the arrangement nobly, and was probably unvaryingly kind to these children of her faithless husband, whom she brought up with her two daughters, Antonia Major and Minor, and Julius Antonius, the second son of Antony and Fulvia, and brother of the murdered Antyllus. When the little Cleopatra Selene grew up she was married to Juba, the King of Numidia, a learned and scholarly monarch, who was later made King of Mauretania. The son of this marriage was named Ptolemy, and succeeded his father about A.D. 19. He was murdered by Caligula, who, by the strange workings of Fate, was also a descendant of Antony. We do not know what became of Alexander Helios and his brother Ptolemy. Tacitus tells us[152] that Antonius Felix, Procurator of Judæa under the Emperor Nero, married (as his second wife) Drusilla, a granddaughter of Cleopatra and Antony, who was probably another of the Mauretanian family. Octavia died in B.C. 11. Antony’s son, Julius Antonius, in B.C. 2, was put to death for his immoral relations with Octavian’s own daughter Julia, she herself being banished to the barren island of Pandateria. Octavian himself, covered with honours and full of years, died in A.D. 14, being succeeded upon the thrones of Egypt and of Rome by Tiberius, his son.
During the latter part of the reign of Octavian, or Augustus, as one must call him, the influence of Alexandria upon the life of Rome began to be felt in an astonishing degree; and so greatly did Egyptian thought alter the conditions in the capital that it might well be fancied that the spirit of the dead Cleopatra was presiding over that throne which she had striven to ascend. Ferrero goes so far as to suggest that the main ideas of splendid monarchic government and sumptuous Oriental refinement which now developed in Rome were due to the direct influence of Alexandria, and perhaps to the fact that the new emperors were primarily Kings of Egypt. Alexandrian artists and artisans swarmed over the sea to Italy, and the hundreds of Romans who had snatched estates for themselves in Egypt travelled frequently to that country on business, and unconsciously familiarised themselves with its arts and crafts. Alexandrian sculpture and painting was seen in every villa, and the poetry and literature of the Alexandrian school were read by all fashionable persons. Every Roman wanted to employ Alexandrians to decorate his house, everybody studied the manners and refinements of the Græco-Egyptians. The old austerity went to pieces before the buoyancy of Cleopatra’s subjects, just as the aloofness of London has disappeared under the Continental invasion of the last few years.