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placed his neck in Octavian’s hands. The latter decided to destroy Antony to advance his own means. By obliterating his enemy he would avenge his slighted sister ; moreover, he could set himself up as Augustus Caesar and become his country’s first emperor. He asked the Senate to declare war against Egypt.
    In 31 BC, Antony’s forces faced Octavian’s in a high-stakes naval battle off the coast of Actium in Greece. The victor would become the undisputed leader of the most powerful country in the world. Cleopatra, in a ship with a gold sail, anxiously awaited its outcome. At a crucial stage in the battle, Cleopatra suddenly gave a signal that signified retreat. At this point Antony had a choice: follow his heart and Cleopatra, or follow his duties as a Roman general. He immediately set off after her, proving that to him power was nothing; his queen was everything. When his legions saw that their leader had abandoned the battle, they did likewise and joined forces with Octavian. Shakespeare, in his play Antony and Cleopatra , wrote of Antony’s action, “The triple pillar of the world transform’d into a strumpet’s fool.” The legions of Rome marched to Alexandria.
    During the ensuing land battle, Cleopatra took refuge in a mausoleum. When Antony heard this news, he assumed his queen was dead. He had made his love the world; without her, there was nothing. No longer willing to go on, in the Roman fashion of suicide, he fell on his own sword. As he lay dying, he was informed that she was merely in hiding. His last order as a general was for his soldiers to carry him to Cleopatra; he died in her arms. The Queen of the Nile had but one course of action: to show how a descendant of kings could die. Ten years earlier she had made a grand entrance to meet Antony; now it was the occasion to make a grand departure.
    She wrote a letter for Octavian, with a plea that she be buried alongside Antony. Cleopatra also ordered her servants to bring her a basket of figs, inside which was concealed a poisonous asp. Dressed in full royal regalia, replete with the pharaoh’s Uraeus headdress, she put the cobra to her breast. She then lay down on a couch of gold to join her ancestors, to join Antony.
    Antony and Cleopatra flung away the two greatest empires of the world and committed suicide for one another, ensuring that their tale would pass from an individual story to an iconic one.
    Postscript
    Plutarch wrote that Cleopatra was found dead, with her handmaiden Iras dying at her feet while another handmaiden, Charmion, was discovered adjusting her queen’s crown before she too succumbed to poison. Octavian honored the couple’s last wish, interring them together in one tomb in Alexandria.
    Egypt’s top archaeologist, Zahi Hawass, who sports an Indiana Jones hat, believes that a temple located thirty miles from Alexandria contains the tomb of the doomed lovers.

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    Prince Khurram and Mumtaz Mahal
    1607
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    T he man who was renowned as king of the world achieved immortality not through empire, but rather through the monument he erected as an immortal tribute to the woman he loved.
    The eastern fairy tale began in India with the birth of Prince Khurram Shihab-ud-din-Muhammad, the third and favorite son of Emperor Jahangir and his second wife. The name Khurram, Persian for “joyful,” was bestowed by his grandfather. As a youth he distinguished himself in martial arts, as a military commander, and in architecture. His destiny, Arjumand Banu Begum, was born in Agra, in what was then the Mogul Empire, which stretched from Russia to China and included modern India, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
    The first time Khurram met Arjumand was when the fifteen-year-old prince was strolling in the Meena Bazaar, the private market attached to the harem. Every female at the marketplace held a torch for the handsome, fabulously wealthy