THE DIVINE HISTORY OF JESUS CHRIST |
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THE LIFE AND TIMES OF CLEOPATRA, QUEEN OF EGYPTPART
II.
CLEOPATRA
AND ANTONY
CHAPTER XI.
THE
CHARACTER OF ANTONY AND HIS RISE TO POWER.
When Antony and
Octavian first met after the death of Caesar, the former was in possession of
popular confidence; and he did not hesitate to advise Octavian to make no
attempt to claim his inheritance. He snubbed the young man, telling him
that he was mad to think himself capable of assuming the responsibilities
of the Dictator’s heir at so early an age; and as a result of this attitude
dissensions speedily broke out between them. A reconciliation, however,
was arrived at in the following August, BC 44; but early in October
there was much talk in regard to a supposed attempt by Octavian upon
the life of Antony, and, as a result of this, the inevitable quarrel once
more broke out. Antony now spread the story that his young rival had only
been adopted by Caesar in consequence of their immoral relations, and he
accused him of being a low-born adventurer. Towards the end of the year
Antony left Rome, and all men believed that yet another civil war was
about to break out. He was now proclaiming himself the avenger of the
late Dictator, and I think it possible that he had decided definitely to
advance the claims of Cleopatra’s son, Caesarion, against those of Octavian.
After many vicissitudes he was attacked and hunted as an enemy of Rome, and the
triumph of Octavian, thanks to the assistance of Cicero, seemed to be
assured; but, owing to a series of surprising incidents, which we need
not here relate, a reconciliation was at last effected between the
combatants in October, BC 43. The two men, who had not met for many
months, regarded one another with such extreme suspicion that when at
length they were obliged to exchange the embrace of friendship, they
are each said to have taken the opportunity of feeling the other’s person
to ascertain that no sword or dagger was concealed under the folds of the
toga.
As soon as the
reconciliation had been established, Antony, Octavian, and a certain Lepidus
formed a Triumvirate, which was to have effect until December 31, BC 38,
it being agreed that Rome and Italy should be governed jointly by the
three, but that the provinces should fall under distinctive controls,
Antony and Lepidus sharing the larger portion and Octavian receiving
only Africa, Numidia, and the islands. It was then decided that they
should each rid themselves of their enemies by a general proscription and
massacre. A list was drawn up of one hundred senators and about
two thousand other rich and prominent men, and these were hunted down
and murdered in the most ruthless fashion, amidst scenes of horror which
can hardly have been equalled in the world’s
history. Cicero was one of the victims who suffered for his animosity to Antony,
who was now the leading Triumvir, and was in a position to refuse to
consider Octavian’s plea for mercy for the orator. The property of the
proscribed persons was seized, and upon these ill-gotten riches the three
men thrived and conducted their government.
Brutus and Cassius,
the two leaders of the conspiracy which had caused Caesar’s death, had now come
to blows with Antony and Octavian, and were collecting an army in
Macedonia. Cassius, at one time, thought of invading Egypt in order to
obtain possession of Cleopatra’s money and ships; but the Queen, who was
holding herself in readiness for all eventualities, was saved from this
misfortune. She was, of course, the bitter enemy of Brutus and Cassius,
the murderers of her beloved Caesar; but, on the other hand, she could not
well throw in her lot with the Triumvirate, since it included Octavian,
who was the rival of her son Caesarion in the heirship of
the Dictator’s estate. She must have been much troubled by the reconciliation
between Octavian and Antony, for it seemed to show that she could no
longer rely on the latter to act as her champion.
Presently
Dolabella, who was now friendly to Antony and opposed to Brutus and Cassius,
asked Cleopatra to send to his aid the legions left by the Dictator
in Alexandria, and at about the same time a similar request came from
Cassius. Cleopatra very naturally declined the latter, accepting Dolabella’s request. Cassius, however, managed to obtain
from Serapion, the Queen’s viceroy in Cyprus, a
number of Egyptian ships, which were handed over without her permission.1 Dolabella was later defeated by Cassius, but the disaster did
not seriously affect Cleopatra, for her legions had not managed to
reach him in time to be destroyed. The Queen’s next move was naturally
hostile to her enemy Cassius. She made an attempt to join Antony. This manoeuvre, however, was undertaken half-heartedly,
owing to her uncertainty as to his relations with Octavian, her son’s
rival; and when a serious storm had arisen, wrecking many of her ships and
prostrating her with seasickness, she abandoned the attempt.
In October of BC.
42 Antony defeated Brutus and Cassius at the battle of Philippi, Cassius being
killed and Brutus committing suicide. Octavian, who was ill, took
little part in the battle, and all the glory of the victory was given to
Antony. The unpopularity of Octavian was clearly demonstrated after the
fight was over, for the prisoners who were led before the
two generals saluted Antony with respect, but cursed Octavian in the
foulest language. It was decided that Antony should now travel through the
East to collect money and to assert the authority of the Triumvirate,
while Octavian should attempt to restore order in Italy, the
African provinces being handed over to the insignificant Lepidus. The
fact that Antony chose for his sphere of influence the eastern provinces,
is a clear indication that Octavian was still in the background; for these
rich lands constituted the main part of the Roman dominions. With a
large army Antony passed on his triumphal way through Greece, and
thence through Asia Minor; and at length, in the late summer of BC 41, he
made his temporary headquarters at Tarsus.
From Tarsus Antony
sent a certain officer named Dellius to Alexandria to
invite Cleopatra to meet him in order to discuss the situation. It was
suggested by Antony that she had given some assistance to the
party of Brutus; but she, on the other hand, must have accused Antony
of abandoning her by his league with Octavian. She could not afford to
quarrel with him, however, for he was now the most powerful man in the world;
and she therefore determined to sail across to Tarsus at once.
She knew already
the kind of man he was. She had seen him in Rome on many occasions, though no
direct record is left of any such event, and she had probably made
some sort of alliance with him; while she must constantly have heard of
his faults and his virtues both from Julius Caesar and from her Roman
friends. The envoy Dellius, whom he had sent to
her, had told her of his pacific intentions, and had described him as
the gentlest and kindest of soldiers, while, as she well knew, a
considerable part of the world called him a good fellow. He was at that
time the most conspicuous figure on the face of the earth, and his nature
and personality must have formed a subject of interested discussion in
the palace at Alexandria as in every other court. Renan has called
Antony a “colossal child, capable of conquering a world, incapable of
resisting a pleasure”; and already this must have been the popular
estimate of his character. The weight of his stature stood over the
nations, dominating the incident of life; and, with a kind of boisterous divinity,
his hand played alike with kings and common soldiers. To many men he was a
good-natured giant, a personification of Bacchus, the Giver of Joy; but in
the ruined lands upon which he had trampled he was named the Devourer,
and the fear of him was almighty.
He was a man of
remarkable appearance. Tall, and heavily built, his muscles developed like
those of a gladiator, and his thick hair curling about his head, he
reminded those who saw him of the statues and paintings of Hercules, from
whom he claimed lineal descent. His forehead was broad, his nose aquiline,
and his mouth and chin, though somewhat heavy, were strong and well formed. His
expression was open and frank; and there was a suggestion of good-humour about his lips and eyes (as seen in the Vatican
bust) which must have been most engaging. His physical strength and
his noble appearance evoked an unbounded admiration amongst his
fellow-men, whilst to most women his masculine attraction was
irresistible: a power of which he made ungoverned use. Cicero, who was his
most bitter enemy, described him as a sort of butcher or prizefighter,
with his heavy jaw, powerful neck, and mighty flanks; but this, perhaps,
is a natural, and certainly an easy, misinterpretation of features that
may well have inspired envy.
His nature, in
spite of many gross faults, was unusually lovable. He was adored by his
soldiers, who, it is said, preferred his good opinion of them to their
very lives. This devotion, says Plutarch, was due to many causes: to
the nobility of his family, his eloquence, his frank and open manners, his
liberal and magnificent habits, his familiarity in talking with everybody,
and his kindness in visiting and pitying the sick and joining in all
their pains. After a battle he would go from tent to tent to comfort
the wounded, himself breaking into a very passion of grief at the
sufferings of his men; and they, with radiant faces, would seize his hands
and call him their emperor and their general. The simplicity of
his character commanded affection; for, amidst the deep complexities
and insincerities of human life, an open and intelligible nature is always
most eagerly appreciated.
The abysmal
intellect of the genius gives delight to the highly cultured, but to the
average man the child-like frankness of an Antony makes a greater appeal.
Antony was not a genius: he was a gigantic commonplace. One sees in
him an ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances, dominating success and
towering above misfortune, until at the end he gives way unmeritoriously to the pressure of events.
The naturalness and
ingenuousness of his character are surprisingly apparent in some of the
anecdotes related by Plutarch. His wife, Fulvia,
is described as a matron “ not born for spinning or housewifery, nor one
who could be content with ruling a private husband, but a
woman prepared to govern a first magistrate or give orders to a
commander-in-chief.” To keep this strong-minded woman in a good-humour the guileless Antony was wont to play upon her
all manner of boyish pranks; and it would seem that he took delight in
bouncing out at her from dark corners of the house and the like. When Caesar
was returning from the war in Spain a rumour spread
that he had been defeated and that the enemy were marching on Rome. Antony
had gone out to meet his chief, and found in this rumour an opportunity for another practical joke at his stern wife’s expense.
He therefore disguised himself as a camp-follower and made his way
back to his house, to which he obtained admittance by declaring that he had a
terribly urgent letter from Antony to deliver into Fulvia’s hands. He was shown into the presence of the agitated matron,
and stood there before her, a muffled, mysterious figure, no doubt
much like a Spanish brigand in a modern comic opera. Fulvia asked dramatically if aught had befallen her husband, but, without
replying, the silent figure thrust a letter at her; and then, as she was
nervously opening it, he suddenly dashed aside the cloak, took her about
the neck, and kissed her. After which he returned to Caesar, and entered
Rome in the utmost pomp, riding in the Dictator’s chariot with all the
solemnity befitting the occasion.
In later years he
was constantly playing such tricks at Alexandria, and in the company of
Cleopatra he was wont to wander about the city at night, disguised as
a servant, and used to disturb and worry his friends by tapping at
their doors and windows, for which, says Plutarch, he was often scurvily
treated and even beaten, though most people guessed who he was.
Antony remained a boy all his days; and it must have been largely
this boisterous inconsequence during the most anxious periods that gave an
air of Bacchic divinity to his personality. His friends must have thought
that there was surely a touch of the divine in one who could romp
through times of peril as he did.
He allowed little
to stand in the way of his pleasures; and he played at empire-making as it were
between meals. On a certain morning in Rome it was necessary for him
to make an important public speech while he was yet suffering from the
effects of immoderate drinking all night at the wedding of Hippias, a
comedian, who was a particular friend of his. Standing unsteadily before
the eager political audience, he was about to begin his address when
he was overcome with nausea, and outraged nature was revenged upon him in the
sight of all men. Incidents of this kind made him at times, as Cicero
states, absolutely odious to the upper classes in Rome; but it is
necessary to state that the abovementioned accident occurred when he was still
a young man, and that his excesses were not so crude in later years.
During the greater part of his life his feasting and drinking were
intemperate; but there is no reason to suppose that he was, except perhaps
towards the end of his life, besotted to a chronic extent. One does
not picture him imbibing continuously or secretly in the manner of an
habitual drunkard; but at feasts and ceremonies he swallowed the wine with
a will and drank with any man. When food and wine were short,
as often happened during his campaigns, Antony became abstemious
without effort. Once when Cicero had caused him and his legions to be
driven out of Rome, he gave, in Plutarch’s words, “a most wonderful
example to his soldiers. He who had just quitted so much luxury
and sumptuous living, made no difficulty now of drinking foul water
and feeding on wild fruits and roots.”
Antony was, of
course, something of a barbarian, and his excesses often put one in mind of the
habits of the Goths or Vikings. He drank hard, jested
uproariously, was on occasion brutal, enjoyed the love of
women, brawled like a schoolboy, and probably swore like a trooper.
But with it all he retained until some two years before his death a very
fair capacity for hard work, as is evidenced by the fact that he was Julius Caesar’s
right-hand man, and afterwards absolute autocrat of the East. His nature was so
forceful, and yet his character so built up of the magnified virtues
and failings of mankind, that by his very resemblance to the ordinary
soldier, his conformity to the type of the average citizen, he won an
absolute ascendancy over the minds of normal men. It touched the vanity
of every individual that a man, by the exercise of brains and
faculties no greater than his own, was become lord of half the world. It
was no prodigious intellectual genius who ruled the earth with
incomprehensible ability, but a burly, virile, simple, brave, vulgar
man. It was related with satisfaction that when Antony was shown the
little senate-house at Megara, which seems to have been an ancient
architectural gem of which the cultured inhabitants were justly proud, he
told them that it was “not very large, but extremely ruinous”—a remark
which recalls the comment of the American tourist in Oxford, that the
buildings were very much out of repair. A little honest Philistinism is a
very useful thing.
A touch of purple,
too, as Stevenson has reminded us, is not without its value. Antony was always
something of an actor, and enjoyed a display in a manner as theatrical as
it was unforced. When he made his public orations, he attempted to attract
the eye of his audience at the same time that he tickled their
ears. In his famous funeral oration after the death of Caesar, we
have seen how he exhibited, at the psychological moment, the gory clothes
of the murdered Dictator, showing to the crowd the holes made by the
daggers of the assassins and the stains of his blood. Desiring to
make a profound effect upon his harassed troops during the retreat from
Media, he clothed himself in a dismal mourning habit, and was only with
difficulty persuaded by his officers to change it for the
scarlet cloak of a general. He enjoyed dressing himself to suit the
part of a Hercules, for which nature, indeed, had already caused him to be
cast; and in public assemblies he would often appear with “ his tunic
girt low about his hips, a broadsword at his side, and over all a
large, coarse mantle,” cutting, one may suppose, a very fine figure. In
cultured Athens he thought it was perhaps more fitting to present himself in a
pacific guise, and we find him at the public games clad in the gown
and white shoes of a steward, the wands of that gentle office carried
before him. On this occasion, however, he introduced the herculean role to
this extent, that he parted the combatants by seizing the scruff of their
necks and holding them from one another at arm’s length. In later life his
love of display led him into strange habits; and, while he was often
clothed in the guise of Bacchus, his garments for daily use were of the
richest purple, and were clasped with enormous jewels.
The glamour of the
stage always appealed to his nature, and he found, moreover, that the society
of players and comedians held peculiar attractions for him. The actor Sergius was one of his best friends in Rome; and
he was so proud of his acquaintance with an actress named Cytheris that he often invited her to accompany him
upon some excursion, and assigned to her a litter not inferior to that of
his own mother, which might have been extremely galling to the elder
lady. On these journeys he would cause pavilions to be erected, and
sumptuous repasts prepared under the trees beside the Tiber, his
guests being served with priceless wines in golden cups. When he made
his more public progress through the land a very circus-show accompanied
him, and the populace were entertained by the spectacle of
buffoons, musicians, and chariots drawn by lions. On these journeys Cytheris would often accompany him, as though to amuse
him, and a number of dancing-girls and singers would form part of his
retinue. At the
He cared little for
public opinion, and had no idea of the annoyance and distress caused by his
actions. He was much in the hands of his courtiers and friends, and
so long as all about him appeared to be happy and jolly, he found no
reason for further inquiry. While in Asia he considered it needful to the
good condition of his army to levy a tax upon the cities which had
already paid their tribute to him, and orders were given to
this effect, without the matter receiving much consideration by him.
In fact, it would seem that the first tribute had slipped his memory. A
certain Hybreas, therefore, complained to him in
the name of the Asiatic cities, reminding him of the earlier tax. “ If it
has not been paid to you,” he said, “ ask your collectors for it; if
it has, and is all gone, we are ruined men.” Antony at once saw the
sense of this, realised the suffering he
was about to cause, and being, so it is said, touched to the quick,
promptly made other arrangements. Having a very good opinion of himself, and
being in a rough sort of manner much flattered by his friends, he
was slow to see his own faults; but when he was of opinion that he
had been in the wrong, he became profoundly repentant, and was never
ashamed of asking the pardon of those he had injured. With boyish extravagance
he made reparation to them, lavishing gifts upon them in such a manner
that his generosity on these occasions is said to have exceeded by far
his severity on others.
He was at all times
generous, both to his friends and to his enemies. He seems to have inherited
this quality from his father, who, from the brief reference to him
in Plutarch, appears to have been a kindly old man, somewhat afraid of his
wife, and given to making presents to his friends behind her back.
Antony’s “generous ways,” says Plutarch, “ his open and lavish hand in
gifts and favours to his friends and
fellow-soldiers, did a great deal for him in his first advance to power;
and after he had become great, long maintained his fortunes, when a
thousand follies were hastening their overthrow.” So lavish were his presents
to his friends and his hospitality that he was always in debt, and even
in his early manhood he owed his creditors a huge fortune. He had
little idea of the value of money, and his extravagances were the talk of the
world. On one occasion he ordered his steward to pay a certain large
sum of money to one of his needy friends, and the amount so shocked
that official that he counted it out in small silver decies,
which he caused to be piled into a heap in a conspicuous place where it
should catch the donor’s eye, and, by its size, cause him to change his
mind. In due course Antony came upon the heap of money, and asked what was
its purpose. The steward replied in a significant tone that it was the
amount which was to be given to his friend. “Oh,” said Antony, quite
unmoved, “I should have thought the decies would have been much more. It is too little: let the amount be doubled.”
He was as generous,
moreover, in his dealings as in his gifts. After his Alexandrian Triumph he did
not put to death the conquered Armenian King Artavasdes,
who had been led in golden chains through the streets, although such an
execution was customary according to Roman usage. Just previous to the
battle of Actium, the consul Domitius Ahenobarbus deserted and went over to Octavian, leaving behind him all his
goods and chattels and his entire retinue. With a splendid
nobility Antony sent his baggage after him, not deigning to enrich
himself at the expense of his treacherous friend, nor to revenge himself
by maltreating any of those whom the consul had left in such jeopardy.
After the battle of Philippi, Antony was eager to take his
enemy, Brutus, alive; but a certain officer named Lucilius heroically prevented this by pretending to be the defeated general, and by
giving himself up to Antony’s soldiers. The men brought their captive in
triumph to Antony, but as soon as he was come into his presence he
explained that he was not Brutus, and that he had pretended to be so in order
to save his master, and was now prepared to pay with his life the penalty
for his deception. Thereupon Antony, addressing the angry and excited
crowd, said: “I see, comrades, that you are upset, and take it ill that
you have been thus deceived, and think yourselves abused and insulted
by it; but you must know that you have met with a prize better than
that you sought. For you were in search of an enemy, but you have brought me
here a friend. And of this I am sure, that it is better to have
such men as this Lucilius our friends than our enemies.” And
with these words he embraced the brave officer, and gave him a free
pardon. Shortly after this, when Brutus, the murderer both of his old
friend Julius Caesar and of his own brother Caius, had committed
suicide, he did not revenge himself upon the body by exposing it to
insult, as was so often done, but covered it decently with his own scarlet
mantle, and gave orders that it should be buried at his private expense
with the honours of war. Similarly, after the
capture of Pelusium and the defeat and death of
Archelaus, Antony sought out the body of his conquered enemy and buried it
with royal honours. In his earlier years, his
treatment of Lepidus, whose army he had won over from him,
was courteous in the extreme. Although absolute master of the
situation, and Lepidus a prisoner in his hands, he insisted upon the
fallen general remaining commander of the army, and always addressed him
respectfully as Father.
Many of his actions
were due to a kind of youthful impulsiveness. He gave his cook a fine house in
Magnesia—the property, by the way, of somebody else—in reward for a single
successful supper. This impetuosity was manifest in other ways, for, by
its nature, which allowed of no delay in putting into action the
thought dominant in his mind, it must be defined as a kind of impatience.
As a young man desiring rapid fame, he had suddenly thrown in his lot with Clodius, “the most insolent and outrageous demagogue
of the time,” leading with him a life of violence and disorder; and as
suddenly he had severed that partnership, going to Greece to
study with enthusiasm the polite arts. In later years his
sudden invasion of Media, with such haste that he was obliged to leave
behind him all his engines of war, is the most notable example of this
impatience. The battle of Actium, which ended his career, was lost by a
sudden impulse on his part; and, at the last, the taking of his own
life was to some extent the impatient anticipation of the processes of
nature.
This trait in his
character, combined with an inherent bravery, caused him to cut a very dashing
figure in warfare, and when fortune was with him, made of him a brilliant
general. He stood in fear of nothing, and dangers seem to have presented
themselves to him as pleasant relaxations of the humdrum of life. In
the battle which opened the war against Aristobulus he was the first
man to scale the enemy’s works; and in a pitched battle he routed a force
far larger than his own, took Aristobulus and his son prisoners, and,
like an avenging deity, slaughtered almost the entire hostile army.
At another time his dash across the desert to Pelusium,
and his brilliant capture of that fortress, brought him considerable fame.
Again, in the war against Pompey, “there was not one of the
many battles,” says Plutarch, “ in which he did not signalise himself:
twice he stopped the army in its full flight, led them back to a charge,
and gained the victory, so that his reputation, next to Caesar’s,
was the greatest in the army.” In the disastrous retreat from Media
he showed the greatest bravery; and it was no common courage that
allowed him, after the horrors of the march back to Armenia, to prepare for a
second campaign.
His generalship was
not extraordinarily skilful, though it is true that
at Pharsalia Caesar placed him in command of the left wing of the army, himself
taking the right; but his great courage, and the confidence
and devotion which he inspired in his men, served to make him a
trustworthy commander. His popularity amongst his soldiers, as has been
said, was unbounded. His magnificent, manly appearance appealed to that
sense of the dramatic in which a soldier, by military display, is very
properly trained. His familiarity with his men, moreover, introduced a
very personal note into their devotion, and each soldier felt that his
general’s eye was upon him. He would sometimes go amongst them at the
common mess, sit down with them at their tables, and eat or drink with
them. He joined with them in their exercises, and seems to have been able
to run, wrestle, or box with the best. He jested with high and low,
and liked them to answer him back. “ His raillery,” says Plutarch, “was
sharp and insulting, but the edge of it was taken off by his readiness to
submit to any kind of repartee; for he was as well contented to be
rallied as he was pleased to rally others.” In a word, he was “the delight
and pleasure of the army.”
His eloquence was
very marked, a faculty which he seems to have inherited from his grandfather,
who was a famous pleader and advocate. As a young man he studied the
art at Athens, and took to a style known as the Asiatic, which was
somewhat flowery and ostentatious. When Pompey’s power at Rome was at its height,
and Caesar was in eclipse, Antony read his chiefs letters in the Senate
with such effect that he obtained many adherents to their cause. His public
speech at the funeral of Caesar led to the downfall of the assassins. When
he himself was driven out of Rome he made such an impression by his words
upon the army of Lepidus, to which he had fled, that an order was given to
sound the trumpets in order to drown his appealing voice. “There was
no man of his time like him for addressing a multitude,” says Plutarch,
“or for carrying soldiers with him by the force of words.” It was in
eloquence, perhaps, that he made his nearest approach to a diversion from
the ordinary; though even in this it is possible to find no more than an
exalted mediocrity. A fine presence, a frank utterance, and a vigorous
delivery make a great impression upon a crowd; and common
sincerity is the most electrifying agent in man’s employment.
Yet another of the
causes of his popularity both amongst his troops and with his friends was the
sympathy which he always showed with the intrigues and troubles of lovers.
“ In love affairs,” says Plutarch, “he was very agreeable; he gained
friends by the assistance he gave them in theirs, and took other people’s raillery
upon his own with good-humour.” He used to lose
his heart to women with the utmost ease and the greatest frequency; and
they, by reason of his splendid physique and noble bearing, not
infrequently followed suit. Amongst serious - minded people he had an
ill name for familiarity with other men’s wives; but the domestic
habits of the age were very irregular, and his own wife Antonia had
carried on an intrigue with his friend Dolabella for which Antony had
divorced her, thereafter marrying the strong-minded Fulvia.
Antony was a full-blooded, virile man, unrestrained by any
strong principles of morality and possessed of no standard of domestic
constancy either by education or by inclination. He was not ashamed of the
consequences of his promiscuous amours, but allowed nature to have her
will with him. Like his ancestor Hercules, he was so proud of his
stock that he wished it multiplied in many lands, and he never confined
his hopes of progeny to any one woman.
There was a certain
brutality in his nature, and of this the particular instance is the murder of
Cicero. The orator had incurred his bitter hostility in the
first place by putting to death, and perhaps denying burial to
Antony’s stepfather, Cornelius Lentulus. Later
he was the cause of Antony’s ejection from Rome and of his privations
while making the passage of the Alps. The traitorous Dolabella was
Cicero’s son-in-law, which must have added something to the family feud.
Moreover, Cicero’s orations and writings against Antony were continuous
and full of invective. It is perhaps not to be wondered at, therefore,
that when Octavian, Antony, and Lepidus decided to rid the State of
certain undesirable persons, as we have already seen, Cicero was proscribed
and put to death. Plutarch tells us that his head and right hand were hung
up above the speaker’s place in the Forum, and that Antony
laughed when he saw them, perhaps because, in his simple way, he did
not know what else to do to carry off a situation of which he was somewhat
ashamed.
As a rule, however,
Antony was kind-hearted and humane, and, as has already been shown, was
seldom severe or cruel to his enemies. To many people he embodied and
personified good-nature, jollity, and strength: he seemed to them to be
a blending of Bacchus with Hercules; and if his morals were not of a
lofty character, it may be said in his defence that
they were consistent with the part for which nature had cast him.
Little is known as
to his attitude towards religion, and one cannot tell whether he entertained
any of the atheistic doctrines which were then so widely
preached, nor does the fact that he allowed himself to be worshipped as
Bacchus help us to form an opinion in this regard. It is probable, however,
that his faith was of a simple kind in conformity with his character; and
it is known that he was superstitious and aware of the presence of
the supernatural. A certain Egyptian diviner made a profound impression
upon him by foreshadowing the future events of his life and warning
him against the power of Octavian. And again, when he set out upon
his Parthian campaign, he carried with him a vessel containing the water
of the Clepsydra, an oracle having urged him to do so, while, at the same
time, he took with him a wreath made of the leaves of the sacred
olive-tree. He believed implicitly in the divine nature of dreams, and we
are told of one occasion upon which he dreamed that his right
hand was thunderstruck, and thereupon discovered a plot against his life.
Such superstitions, however, were very general, even amongst educated
people; and Antony’s belief in omens has only to be noted here because
it played some part in his career. Until the last year of his life he
was attended with good luck, and a friendly fortune helped him out of many
difficult situations into which his impetuosity had led him. It seemed to
many that Bacchus had really identified himself with Antony, bringing
to his aid the powers of his godhead; and when at the end his downfall was
complete, several persons declared that they actually heard the clatter
and the processional music which marked the departure of the deity from
the destinies of the fallen giant. The historian cannot but find
extenuating circumstances in the majority of the culpable acts of the
“colossal child and amongst these excuses there is none so urgent
as this continuous presence of a smiling fortune. “Antony in
misfortune,” says Plutarch, “was most nearly a virtuous man”; and if we wish to
form a true estimate of his character we must give prominence to his
hardy and noble attitude in the days of his flight from Rome or of
his retreat from Media. It was then that he had done with his boyish
inconsequence and played the man. At all other times he was the spoilt
child of fortune, rollicking on his triumphant way; jesting,
drinking, loving, and fighting; careless of public opinion; and, like
a god, sporting at will with the ball of the world.
When Dellius came to bring Cleopatra to him he was at the height
of his power. Absolute master of the East, he was courted by kings and
princes, who saw in him the future ruler of the entire Roman Empire.
Caesar must have often told the Queen of his faults and abilities, and she
herself must have noticed the frank simplicity of his character. She set
out, therefore, prepared to meet not with a complex genius, but with an
ordinary man, representative, in a monstrous manner, of the
victories and the blunders of common human nature, and, incidentally, a
man somewhat plagued by an emancipated wife.
CHAPTER XII.
THE
ALLIANCE BETWEEN CLEOPATRA AND ANTONY.
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