perhaps one day will see men, grown more numerous, feel the need
of the ancient wisdom and prudence. It is at least permitted the
philosopher and the historian to ask if this magnificent but unbridled
freedom which we enjoy suits all times, and not only those in which
nations coming into being can find a small dower in their cradle as
you have done--three millions of square miles of land!
The History and Legend of Antony and Cleopatra
In the history of Rome figures of women are rare, because only men
dominated there, imposing everywhere the brute force, the roughness,
and the egoism that lie at the base of their nature: they honoured the
_mater familias_ because she bore children and kept the slaves
from stealing the flour from the bin and drinking the wine from the
_amphore_ on the sly. They despised the woman who made of her beauty
and vivacity an adornment of social life, a prize sought after and
disputed by the men. However, in this virile history there does
appear, on a sudden, the figure of a woman, strange and wonderful, a
kind of living Venus. Plutarch thus describes the arrival of Cleopatra
at Tarsus and her first meeting with Antony:
She was sailing tranquilly along the Cydnus, on a bark with a
golden stern, with sails of purple and oars of silver, and the
dip of the oars was rhythmed to the sound of flutes, blending
with music of lyres. She herself, the Queen, wondrously
clad as Venus is pictured, was lying under an awning gold
embroidered. Boys dressed as Cupids stood at her side, gently
waving fans to refresh her; her maidens, every one beautiful
and clad as a Naiad or a Grace, directed the boat, some at
the rudder, others at the ropes. Both banks of the stream were
sweet with the perfumes burning on the vessel.
Posterity is yet dazzled by this ship, refulgent with purple and
gold and melodious with flutes and lyres. If we are spellbound by
Plutarch's description, it does not seem strange to us that Antony
should be--he who could not only behold in person that wonderful
Venus, but could dine with her _tête-a-tête_, in a splendour of
torches indescribable. Surely this is a setting in no wise improbable
for the beginning of the famous romance of the love of Antony and
Cleopatra, and its development as probable as its beginning; the
follies committed by Antony for the seductive Queen of the Orient,
the divorce of Octavia, the war for love of Cleopatra, kindled in the
whole Empire, and the miserable catastrophe. Are there not to be seen
in recent centuries many men of power putting their greatness to risk
and sometimes to ruin for love of a woman? Are not the love letters
of great statesmen--for instance, those of Mirabeau and
of Gambetta--admitted to the semi-official part of modern
history-writing? And so also Antony could love a queen and, like so
many modern statesmen, commit follies for her. A French critic of my
book, burning his ships behind him, has said that Antony was a Roman
_Boulanger_.
The romance pleases: art takes it as subject and re-takes it; but that
does not keep off the brutal hands of criticism. Before all, it should
be observed that moderns feel and interpret the romance of Antony
and Cleopatra in a way very different from that of the ancients. From
Shakespeare to De Heredia and Henri Houssaye, artists and historians
have described with sympathy, even almost idealised, this passion that
throws away in a lightning flash every human greatness, to pursue
the mantle of a fleeing woman; they find in the follies of Antony
something profoundly human that moves them, fascinates them, and makes
them indulgent. To the ancients, on the contrary, the _amours_ of
Antony and Cleopatra were but a dishonourable degeneration of the
passion. They have no excuse for the man whom love for a woman
impelled to desert in battle, to abandon soldiers, friends, relatives,
to conspire against the greatness of Rome.
This very same difference of interpretation recurs in the history of
the _amours_ of Cæsar. Modern writers regard what the ancients tell
us of the numerous loves--real or imaginary--of Cæsar, as almost a
new laurel with which to decorate his figure. On the contrary, the
ancients recounted and spread abroad, and perhaps in part invented,
these storiettes of gallantry for quite opposite reasons--as source of
dishonour, to discredit him, to demonstrate that Cæsar was effeminate,
that he could not give guarantee of knowing how to lead the armies
and to fulfil the virile and arduous duties that awaited every eminent
Roman. There is in our way of thinking a vein of romanticism wanting
in the ancient mind. We see in love a certain forgetfulness of
ourselves, a certain blindness of egoism and the more material
passions, a kind of power of self-abnegation, which, inasmuch as it is
unconscious, confers a certain nobility and dignity; therefore we are
indulgent to mistakes and follies committed for the sake of passion,
while the ancients were very severe. We pardon with a certain
compassion the man who for love of a woman has not hesitated to bury
himself under the ruin of his own greatness; the ancients, on the
contrary, considered him the most dangerous and despicable of the
insane.
Criticism has not contented itself with re-giving to the ancient
romance the significance it had for those that made it and the
public that first read it. Archaeologists have discovered upon
coins portraits of Cleopatra, and now critics have confronted these
portraits with the poetic descriptions given by Roman historians and
have found the descriptions generously fanciful: in the portraits we
do not see the countenance of a Venus, delicate, gracious, smiling,
nor even the fine and sensuous beauty of a Marquise de Pompadour, but
a face fleshy and, as the French would say, _bouffie_; the nose,
a powerful aquiline; the face of a woman on in years, ambitious,
imperious, one which recalls that of Maria Theresa. It will be said
that judgments as to beauty are personal; that Antony, who saw her
alive, could decide better than we who see her portraits half effaced
by the centuries; that the attractive power of a woman emanates not
only from corporal beauty, but also--and yet more--from her spirit.
The taste of Cleopatra, her vivacity, her cleverness, her exquisite
art in conversation, is vaunted by all.
Perhaps, however, Cleopatra, beautiful or ugly, is of little
consequence; when one studies the history of her relations with
Antony, there is small place, and that but toward the end, for the
passion of love. It will be easy to persuade you of this if you follow
the simple chronological exposition of facts I shall give you. Antony
makes the acquaintance of Cleopatra at Tarsus toward the end of 41
B.C., passes the winter of 41-40 with her at Alexandria; leaves her in
the spring of 40 and stays away from her more than three years, till
the autumn of 37. There is no proof that during this time Antony
sighed for the Queen of Egypt as a lover far away; on the contrary, he
attends, with alacrity worthy of praise, to preparing the conquest of
Persia, to putting into execution the great design conceived by Cæsar,
the plan of war that Antony had come upon among the papers of the
Dictator the evening of the fifteenth of March, 44 B.C. All order
social and political, the army, the state, public finance, wealth
private and public, is going to pieces around him. The triumvirate
power, built up on the uncertain foundation of these ruins, is
tottering; Antony realises that only a great external success can
give to him and his party the authority and the money necessary to
establish a solid government, and resolves to enter into possession of
the political legacy of his teacher and patron, taking up its central
idea, the conquest of Persia.
The difficulties are grave. Soldiers are not wanting, but money. The
revolution has ruined the Empire and Italy; all the reserve funds have
been dissipated; the finances of the state are in such straits that
not even the soldiers can be paid punctually and the legions every now
and then claim their dues by revolt. Antony is not discouraged. The
historians, however antagonistic to him, describe him as exceedingly
busy in those four years, extracting from all parts of the Empire that
bit of money still in circulation. Then at one stroke, in the second
half of 37, when, preparations finished, it is time to put hand to the
execution, the ancient historians without in any way explaining to us
this sudden act, most unforeseen, make him depart for Antioch to meet
Cleopatra, who has been invited by him to join him. For what reason
does Antony after three years, all of a sudden, re-join Cleopatra?
The secret of the story of Antony and Cleopatra lies entirely in this
question.
Plutarch says that Antony went to Antioch borne by the fiery and
untamed courser of his own spirit; in other words, because passion
was already beginning to make him lose common sense. Not finding other
explanations in the ancient writers, posterity has accepted this,
which was simple enough; but about a century ago an erudite Frenchman,
Letronne, studying certain coins, and comparing with them certain
passages in ancient historians, until then remaining obscure, was able
to demonstrate that in 36 B.C., at Antioch, Antony married Cleopatra
with all the dynastic ceremonies of Egypt, and that thereupon Antony
became King of Egypt, although he did not dare assume the title.
The explanation of Letronne, which is founded on official documents
and coins, is without doubt more dependable than that of Plutarch,
which is reducible to an imaginative metaphor; and the discovery
of Letronne, concluding that concatenation of facts that I have set
forth, finally persuades me to affirm that not a passion of love,
suddenly re-awakened, led Antony in the second half of 37 B.C. to
Antioch to meet the Queen of Egypt, but a political scheme well
thought out. Antony wanted Egypt and not the beautiful person of
its queen; he meant by this dynastic marriage to establish the Roman
protectorate in the valley of the Nile, and to be able to dispose,
for the Persian campaign, of the treasures of the Kingdom of the
Ptolemies. At that time, after the plunderings of other regions of
the Orient by the politicians of Rome, there was but one state rich
in reserves of precious metals, Egypt. Since, little by little, the
economic crisis of the Roman Empire was aggravating, the Roman polity
had to gravitate perforce toward Egypt, as toward the country capable
of providing Rome with the capital necessary to continue its policy in
every part of the Empire.
Cæsar already understood this; his mysterious and obscure connection
with Cleopatra had certainly for ultimate motive and reason this
political necessity; and Antony, in marrying Cleopatra, probably only
applied more or less shrewdly the ideas that Cæsar had originated in
the refulgent crepuscle of his tempestuous career. You will ask me
why Antony, if he had need of the valley of the Nile, recurred to this
strange expedient of a marriage, instead of conquering the kingdom,
and why Cleopatra bemeaned herself to marry the triumvir. The reply
is not difficult to him who knows the history of Rome. There was
a long-standing tradition in Roman policy to exploit Egypt but
to respect its independence; it may be, because the country was
considered more difficult to govern than in truth it was, or because
there existed for this most ancient land, the seat of all the most
refined arts, the most learned schools, the choicest industries,
exceedingly rich and highly civilised, a regard that somewhat
resembles what France imposes on the world to-day. Finally, it may be
because it was held that if Egypt were annexed, its influence on Italy
would be too much in the ascendent, and the traditions of the old
Roman life would be conclusively overwhelmed by the invasion of the
customs, the ideas, the refinements--in a word, by the corruptions
of Egypt. Antony, who was set in the idea of repeating in Persia
the adventure of Alexander the Great, did not dare bring about an
annexation which would have been severely judged in Italy and which
he, like the others, thought more dangerous than in reality it was.
On the other hand, with a dynastic marriage, he was able to secure for
himself all the advantages of effective possession, without running
the risks of annexation; so he resolved upon this artifice, which,
I repeat, had probably been imagined by Cæsar. As to Cleopatra, her
government was menaced by a strong internal opposition, the causes for
which are ill known; marrying Antony, she gathered about her throne,
to protect it, formidable guards, the Roman legions.
To sum up, the romance of Antony and Cleopatra covers, at least in its
beginnings, a political treaty. With the marriage, Cleopatra seeks
to steady her wavering power; Antony, to place the valley of the Nile
under the Roman protectorate. How then was the famous romance born?
The actual history of Antony and Cleopatra is one of the most tragic
episodes of a struggle that lacerated the Roman Empire for four
centuries, until it finally destroyed it, the struggle between Orient
and Occident. During the age of Cæsar, little by little, without any
one's realising it at first, there arose and fulfilled itself a fact
of the gravest importance; that is, the eastern part of the Empire had
grown out of proportion: first, from the conquest of the Pontus, made
by Lucullus, who had added immense territory in Asia Minor; then by
Pompey's conquest of Syria, and the protectorate extended by him over
all Palestine and a considerable part of Arabia. These new districts
were not only enormous in extension; they were also populous, wealthy,
fertile, celebrated for ancient culture; they held the busiest
industrial cities, the best cultivated regions of the ancient world,
the most famous seats of arts, letters, science, therefore their
annexation, made rapidly in few years, could but trouble the already
unstable equilibrium of the Empire. Italy was then, compared with
these provinces, a poor and barbarous land; because southern Italy was
ruined by the wars of preceding epochs, and northern Italy, naturally
the wealthier part, was still crude and in the beginning of its
development. The other western provinces nearer Italy were poorer and
less civilised than Italy, except Gallia Narbonensis and certain parts
of southern Spain. So that Rome, the capital of the Empire, came to
find itself far from the richest and most populous regions, among
territories poor and despoiled, on the frontiers of barbarism--in such
a situation as the Russian Empire might find itself to-day if it had a
capital at Vladivostok or Kharbin. You know that during the last years
of the life of Cæsar it was rumoured several times that the Dictator
wished to remove the capital of the Empire; it was said, to Alexandria
in Egypt, to Ilium in the district where Troy arose. It is impossible
to judge whether these reports were true or merely invented by enemies
of Cæsar to damage him; at any rate, true or false, they show that
public opinion was beginning to concern itself with the "Eastern
peril"; that is, with the danger that the seat of empire must be
shifted toward the Orient and the too ample Asiatic and African
territory, and that Italy be one day uncrowned of her metropolitan
predominance, conquered by so many wars. Such hear-says must have
seemed, even if not true, the more likely, because, in his last two
years, Cæsar planned the conquest of Persia. Now the natural basis of
operations for the conquest of Persia was to be found, not in Italy,
but in Asia Minor, and if Persia had been conquered, it would not have
been possible to govern in Rome an empire so immeasurably enlarged
in the Orient. Everything therefore induces to the belief that this
question was at least discussed in the coterie of the friends of
Cæsar; and it was a serious question, because in it the traditions,
the aspirations, the interests of Italy were in irreconcilable
conflict with a supreme necessity of state which one day or other
would impose itself, if some unforeseen event did not intervene to
solve it.
In the light of these considerations, the conduct of Antony becomes
very clear. The marriage at Antioch, by which he places Egypt under
the Roman protectorate, is the decisive act of a policy that looks
to transporting the centre of his government toward the Orient, to be
able to accomplish more securely the conquest of Persia. Antony, the
heir of Cæsar, the man who held the papers of the Dictator, who knew
his hidden thoughts, who wished to complete the plans cut off by his
death, proposes to conquer Persia; to conquer Persia, he must rely on
the Oriental provinces that were the natural basis of operations for
the great enterprise; among these, Antony must support himself above
all on Egypt, the richest and most civilised and most able to supply
him with the necessary funds, of which he was quite in want. Therefore
he married the Cleopatra whom, it was said at Rome, Cæsar himself had
wished to marry--with whom, at any rate, Cæsar had much dallied and
intrigued. Does not this juxtaposition of facts seem luminous to you?
In 36 B.C., Antony marries Cleopatra, as a few years before he had
married Octavia, the sister of the future Augustus, for political
reasons--in order to be able to dispose of the political subsidies and
finances of Egypt, for the conquest of Persia. The conquest of Persia
is the ultimate motive of all his policy, the supreme explanation of
his every act.
However, little by little, this move, made on both sides from
considerations of political interest, altered its character under the
action of events, of time, through the personal influence of Antony
and Cleopatra upon each other, and above all, the power that Cleopatra
acquired over Antony: here is truly the most important part of all
this story. Those who have read my history know that I have recounted
hardly any of the anecdotes, more or less odd or entertaining,
with which ancient writers describe the intimate life of Antony and
Cleopatra, because it is impossible to discriminate in them the part
that is fact from that which was invented or exaggerated by political
enmity. In history the difficulty of recognising the truth gradually
increases as one passes from political to private life; because in
politics the acts of men and of parties are always bound together by
either causes or effects of which a certain number is always exactly
known; private life, on the other hand, is, as it were, isolated and
secret, almost invariably impenetrable. What a great man of state does
in his own house, his valet knows better than the historians of later
times.
If for these reasons I have thought it prudent not to accept in my
work the stories and anecdotes that the ancients recount of Antony and
Cleopatra, without indeed risking to declare them false, it is, on the
contrary, not possible to deny that Cleopatra gradually acquired great
ascendency over the mind of Antony. The circumstance is of itself
highly probable. That Cleopatra was perhaps a Venus, as the ancients
say, or that she was provided with but a mediocre beauty, as declare
the portraits, matters little: it is, however, certain that she was
a woman of great cleverness and culture; as woman and queen of
the richest and most civilised realm of the ancient world, she was
mistress of all those arts of pleasure, of luxury, of elegance,
that are the most delicate and intoxicating fruit of all mature
civilisations. Cleopatra might refigure, in the ancient world, the
wealthiest, most elegant, and cultured Parisian lady in the world of
to-day.
Antony, on the other hand, was the descendant of a family of that
Roman nobility which still preserved much rustic roughness in tastes,
ideas, habits; he grew up in times in which the children were
still given Spartan training; he came to Egypt from a nation which,
notwithstanding its military and diplomatic triumphs, could be
considered, compared with Egypt, only poor, rude, and barbarous. Upon
this intelligent man, eager for enjoyment, who had, like other
noble Romans, already begun to taste the charms of intellectual
civilisation, it was not Cleopatra alone that made the keenest of
impressions, but all Egypt, the wonderful city of Alexandria, the
sumptuous palace of the Ptolemies--all that refined, elegant splendour
of which he found himself at one stroke the master. What was there
at Rome to compare with Alexandria?--Rome, in spite of its imperial
power, abandoned to a fearful disorder by the disregard of factions,
encumbered with ruin, its streets narrow and wretched, provided as
yet with but a single _forum_, narrow and plain, the sole impressive
monument of which was the theatre of Pompey; Rome, where the life was
yet crude, and objects of luxury so rare that they had to be brought
from the distant Orient? At Alexandria, instead, the Paris of the
ancient world, were to be found all the best and most beautiful things
of the earth. There was a sumptuosity of public edifices that the
ancients never tire of extolling--the quay seven _stadia_ long,
the lighthouse famous all over the Mediterranean, the marvellous
zoölogical garden, the Museum, the Gymnasium, innumerable temples, the
unending palace of the Ptolemies. There was an abundance, unheard of
for those times, of objects of luxury--rugs, glass, stuffs, papyruses,
jewels, artistic pottery--because they made all these things at
Alexandria. There was an abundance, greater than elsewhere, of silk,
of perfumes, of gems, of all the things imported from the extreme
East, because through Alexandria passed one of the most frequented
routes of Indo-Chinese commerce. There, too, were innumerable artists,
writers, philosophers, and _savants_; society life and intellectual
life alike fervid; continuous movement to and fro of traffic,
continual passing of rare and curious things; countless amusements;
life, more than elsewhere, safe--at least so it was believed--because
at Alexandria were the great schools of medicine and the great
scientific physicians.
If other Italians who landed in Alexandria were dazzled by so many
splendours, Antony ought to have been blinded; _he_ entered Alexandria
as King. He who was born at Rome in the small and simple house of an
impoverished noble family who had been brought up with Latin parsimony
to eat frugally, to drink wine only on festival occasions, to wear
the same clothes a long time, to be served by a single slave--this man
found himself lord of the immense palace of the Ptolemies, where
the kitchens alone were a hundred times larger than the house of his
fathers at Rome; where there were gathered for his pleasure the most
precious treasures and the most marvellous collections of works of
art; where there were trains of servants at his command, and every
wish could be immediately gratified. It is therefore not necessary to
suppose that Antony was foolishly enamoured of the Queen of Egypt, to
understand the change that took place in him after their marriage, as
he tasted the inimitable life of Alexandria, that elegance, that ease,
that wealth, that pomp without equal.
A man of action, grown in simplicity, toughened by a rude life, he
was all at once carried into the midst of the subtlest and most highly
developed civilisation of the ancient world and given the greatest
facilities to enjoy and abuse it that ever man had: as might have been
expected, he was intoxicated; he contracted an almost insane passion
for such a life; he adored Egypt with such ardour as to forget for it
the nation of his birth and the modest home of his boyhood. And then
began the great tragedy of his life, a tragedy not love-inspired, but
political. As the hold of Egypt strengthened on his mind, Cleopatra
tried to persuade him not to conquer Persia, but to accept openly
the kingdom of Egypt, to found with her and with their children a new
dynasty, and to create a great new Egyptian Empire, adding to Egypt
the better part of the provinces that Rome possessed in Africa and in
Asia, abandoning Italy and the provinces of the West forever to their
destiny.