It does not suit him to suggest that Antony ever deviated from his passion for Cleopatra or bestowed his affection elsewhere: indeed, on the eve of his marriage, he reveals his heart and intentions clearly enough. But Shakespeare also knows that without affection to bring it out, there will be no answering affection in a woman like Octavia. She will be true to all her obligations, so long as they are obligations, but no love will be roused to make her do more than is in her bond. And of love there is in the play as little trace on her part as on Antony's. It is brother and sister, not husband and wife, that exchange the most endearing terms: "Sweet Octavia," "My dearest sister," and "my noble brother," "most dear Caesar"; while to Antony she is "Octavia," "gentle Octavia," or at most "Dear Lady," and to her he is "Good my lord." At the parting in Rome Caesar has a cloud in his face and her eyes drop tears like April showers. At the parting in Athens there is only the formal permission to leave, on the one hand, and the formal acknowledgment on the other. Evidently, if, as she says, she has her

it is not because she regards them both with equal tenderness. Her brother has her love; her husband, so long as he deserves it, has her duty. But when he forfeits his claim, she has done with him, unlike Plutarch's Octavia, who pursues him to the end, and beyond the end, with a self-forgetfulness that her mere covenant could never call forth. Of all this there is nothing in the play. Her appeal to Antony in defence of Caesar is far warmer than her appeal

to Caesar on behalf of Antony, and when she definitely hears that Antony has not only joined Cleopatra against her brother but has installed Cleopatra in her own place, she merely says, "Is it so?" and falls silent. No wonder. She is following Antony's instructions to the letter:

Let your best love draw to that point, which seeks
Best to preserve it.

And again;

(III. iv. 21.)

When it appears to you where this begins,
Turn your displeasure that way; for our faults
Can never be so equal that your love
Can equally move with them.

(III. iv. 33.)

But this tacit assumption, fully borne out by her previous words, that the claims of husband and brother are equal in her eyes, and that the precedence is to be determined merely by a comparison of faults, shows how little of wifely affection Octavia felt, though doubtless she would be willing to fulfil her responsibilities to the smallest jot and tittle.

The hurried, loveless and transitory union, into which Antony has entered only to suit his convenience, for as Enobarbus says, "he married but his occasion here," and into which Octavia has entered only out of deference to her brother who "uses his power unto her," has thus merely a political and moral but no emotional significance. This Roman marriage lies further apart from the love story of Antony than the marriage in Brittany does from the love story of Tristram. This diplomatic alliance interferes as little with Octavia's sisterly devotion to Octavius as the political alliances of Marguerite d'Angoulême interfered with her sisterly devotion to Francis I. And much is gained by this for the play. In the first place the hero no longer, as in the biography, offends us by fickleness in his grand idolatry and infidelity to a second

But

attachment, on the one hand, or by ingratitude to a long-suffering and loving wife on the other. just for that reason Octavia does not really enter into his life, and claims no full delineation. She is hardly visible, and does not disturb our sympathies with the lovers or force on us moral regards by demuring on them and chastising them with her sober eyes. Nevertheless visible at intervals she is, and then she seems to tell of another life than that of Alexandrian indulgence, a narrower life of obligations and pieties beside which the carnival of impulse is both glorified and condemned. And she does this not less effectually, but a great deal less obtrusively, that in her shadowy form as she flits from the mourning-chamber to the altar at the bidding of her brother, and from Athens to Rome to preserve the peace, we see rather the self-devoted sister than the devoted wife. For in the play she is sister first and essentially, and wife only in the second place because her sisterly feeling is so strong.

Still more slightly sketched than the domestic loyalty of Octavia or even than the military loyalty of Scarus, is the loyalty of Eros the servant; but it is the most affecting of all, for it is to the death. Characteristically, he who obtains the highest spiritual honours that are awarded to any person in the play, is one of a class to which in the prime of ancient civilisation the possibilty of any moral life would in theory have been denied. Morality was for the free citizen of a free state: the slave was not really capable of it. And indeed it is clear that often for the slave, who might be only one of the goods and chattels of his owner, the sole chance of escape from a condition of spiritual as well as physical servitude would lie in personal enthusiasm for the master, in willing self-absorption in him. But in a world like that of Antony and Cleopatra such personal enthusiasm, as we have seen, is almost

the highest thing that remains. So it is the quondam slave, Eros the freedman, bred in the cult of it, who bears away the palm. Antony commands him to slay him:

When I did make thee free, sworest thou not then
To do this when I bade thee? Do it at once;
Or thy precedent services are all

But accidents unpurposed. Draw, and come.

(IV. xiv. 81.)

But Eros by breaking his oath and slaying himself, does his master a better service. He cheers him in his dark hour by this proof of measureless attach

ment:

Thus do I escape the sorrow

Of Antony's death.

(IV. xiv. 94.)

CHAPTER IV

THE POLITICAL LEADERS

So much for the freedman whom Antony hails as his master, thrice nobler than himself. But what about his betters, the "great fellows" as Menas calls them, his rivals and associates in Empire?

Let us run through the series of them; and despite his pride of place we cannot begin lower than with the third Triumvir.

Lepidus, the "slight unmeritable man, meet to be sent on errands," as he is described in Julius Caesar, maintains the same character here, and is hardly to be talked of "but as a property." In the first scene where he appears, when he and Octavius are discussing Antony's absence, he is a mere cypher. Even in this hour of need, Octavius unconsciously and as a matter of course treats Antony's negligence as a wrong not to them both but only to himself. The messenger never addresses Lepidus, and assumes that the question is between Caesar and Pompey alone. At the close this titular partner "beseeches to be informed of what takes place, and Octavius acknowledges that it is his "bond," but clearly it is not his choice.

No doubt on the surface he pleases by his moderate and conciliatory attitude. When Octavius is indicting his absent colleague, Lepidus is frank in his excuse: