THE CHARACTER OF ANTONY AND HIS RISE TO POWER.
When Antony and Octavian first met after the death of Cæsar, 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, B.C. 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 Cæsar 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, Cæsarion, 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, B.C. 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, B.C. 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
Cæsar’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 Cæsar;
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
Cæsarion 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.[80]
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 manœuvre, 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 B.C. 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 B.C. 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
Cæsar 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)[81] 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 prize-fighter, 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.
[Illustration:
_Vatican_] [_Photograph by Anderson_
ANTONY.]
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 Cæsar 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 Cæsar, 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 above-mentioned 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
Cæsar’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 Cæsar, 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 _rôle_ 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
night’s halt, the billeting of these somewhat surprising young women in
the houses of “serious fathers and mothers of families,” as Plutarch
puts it, caused much resentment, and suggested an attitude of mind in
Antony which cannot altogether be attributed to a boyish desire to
shock. There can be no doubt that he enjoyed upsetting decorum, and
took kindly to those people whom others considered to be outcasts. Like
Charles Lamb, he may have expressed a preference for “man as he ought
_not_ to be,” which, to a controlled and limited extent, may be an
admirable attitude. But it is more probable that actions such as that
just recorded were merely thoughtless, and were not tempered by much
consideration for the feelings of others until those outraged feelings
were pointed out to him, whereupon, so Plutarch tells us, he could be
frankly repentant.
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.”[82] 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 Cæsar 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 Cæsar’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 Cæsar 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 Cæsar was in eclipse,
Antony read his chief’s letters in the Senate with such effect that
he obtained many adherents to their cause. His public speech at the
funeral of Cæsar 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.
Cæsar 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.