The immense number and variety, too, of the meats and wines, and of the vessels of gold and silver, with which the tables were loaded, and the magnificence and splendor of the dresses worn by Cleopatra and her attendants, combined to render the whole scene one of bewildering enchantment.
The next day, Antony invited Cleopatra to come and return his visit; but, though he made every possible effort to provide a banquet as sumptuous and as sumptuously served as hers, he failed entirely in this attempt, and acknowledged himself completely outdone.

Antony was, moreover, at these interviews, perfectly fascinated with Cleopatra's charms.

Her beauty, her wit, her thousand accomplishments, and, above all, the tact, and adroitness, and self-possession which she displayed in assuming at once so boldly, and carrying out so adroitly, the idea of her social superiority over him, that he yielded his heart almost immediately to her undisputed sway.
The first use which Cleopatra made of her power was to ask Antony, for her sake, to order her sister Arsinoe to be slain.

Arsinoe had gone, it will be recollected, to Rome, to grace Caesar's triumph there, and had afterward retired to Asia, where she was now living an exile.

Cleopatra, either from a sentiment of past revenge, or else from some apprehensions of future danger, now desired that her sister should die.