Beacon Lights of History, Volume 03: Ancient Achievements

But his passion for Cleopatra could not long be suppressed, neither from reasons of state nor from the respect he must have felt for the admirable conduct of Octavia, who was devoted to him, and who was one of the most magnanimous and reproachless women of antiquity. And surely he must have had some great qualities to call out the love of the noblest and proudest woman of the age, in spite of his many vices and his abandonment to a mad passion, forgetful alike both of fame and duty. He had not been two years in Athens, the headquarters of his Eastern Department, before he was called upon to chastise the Parthians, who had thrown off the Roman yoke and invaded other Roman provinces. But hardly had he left Octavia, and set foot again in Asia, before he sent for his Egyptian mistress, and loaded her with presents; not gold, and silver, and precious stones, and silks, and curious works of art merely, but whole provinces even,–Phoenicia, Syria, Cilicia, and a part of Judea and Arabia,–provinces which belonged not to him, but to the Roman Empire. How indignant must have been the Roman people when they heard of such lavish presents, and presents which he had no right to give! And when the artful Cleopatra feigned illness on the approach of Octavia, pretending to be dying of love, and wasting her body by fasting and weeping by turns, and perhaps tearing her hair in a seeming paroxysm of grief,–for an actress can do even this,–Antony was totally disarmed, and gave up his Parthian expedition altogether, which was treason to the State, and returned to Alexandria more submissive than ever. This abandonment of duty and official trust disgusted and incensed the Romans, so that his cause was weakened. Octavius became stronger every day, and now resolved on reigning alone. This meant another civil war. How strong the party of Antony must have been to keep together and sustain him amid such scandals, treasons, and disgrace!

Antony, perceiving a desperate contest before him, ending in his supremacy or ruin, put forth all his energies, assisted by the contributions of Cleopatra, who furnished two hundred ships and twenty thousand talents,–about twenty million dollars. He had five hundred war-vessels, beside galleys, one hundred thousand foot and twelve thousand horse,–one of the largest armies that any Roman general had ever commanded,–and he was attended by vassal kings from the East. The forces of Octavius were not so large, though better disciplined; nor was he a match for Antony in military experience. Antony with his superior forces wished to fight upon the land, but against his better judgment was overruled by Cleopatra, who, having reinforced him with sixty galleys, urged him to contend upon the sea. The rivals met at Actium, where was fought one of the great decisive battles of the world. For a while the fortunes of the day were doubtful, when Cleopatra, from some unexplained motive, or from panic, or possibly from a calculating policy, was seen sailing away with her ships for Egypt. And what was still more extraordinary, Antony abandoned his fleet and followed her. Had he been defeated on the sea, he still had superior forces on the land, and was a match for Octavius. His infatuation ended in a weakness difficult to comprehend in a successful Roman general. And never was infatuation followed by more tragic consequences. Was this madness sent upon him by that awful Power who controls the fate of war and the destinies of nations? Who sent madness upon Nebuchadnezzar? Who blinded Napoleon at the very summit of his greatness? May not that memorable defeat have been ordered by Providence to give consolidation and peace and prosperity to the Roman Empire, so long groaning under the complicated miseries of anarchy and civil war? If an imperial government was necessary for the existing political and social condition of the Roman world,–and this is maintained by most historians,–how fortunate it was that the empire fell into the hands of a man whose subsequent policy was peace, the development of resources of nations, and a vigorous administration of government!

It is generally conceded that the reign of Octavius–or, as he is more generally known, Augustus Caesar–was able, enlightened, and efficient. He laid down the policy which succeeding emperors pursued, and which resulted in the peace and prosperity of the Roman world until vices prepared the way for violence. Augustus was a great organizer, and the machinery of government which he and his ministers perfected kept the empire together until it was overrun by the New Germanic races. Had Antony conquered at Actium, the destinies of the empire might have been far different. But for two hundred years the world never saw a more efficient central power than that exercised by the Roman emperors or by their ministers. Imperialism at last proved fatal to genius and the higher interests of mankind; but imperialism was the creation of Julius Caesar, as a real or supposed necessity; it was efficiently and beneficently continued by his grand-nephew Augustus; and its consolidated strength became an established institution which the civilized world quietly accepted.

The battle of Actium virtually settled the civil war and the fortunes of Antony, although he afterwards fought bravely and energetically; but all to no purpose. And then, at last, his eyes were opened, and Shakspeare makes him bitterly exclaim,–

         "All is lost!     This foul Egyptian hath betrayed me.         … Betray'd I am:     O this false soul of Egypt!"

And with his ruin the ruin of his paramour was also settled; yet her resources were not utterly exhausted. She retired into a castle or mausoleum she had prepared for herself in case of necessity, with her most valuable treasures, and sent messengers to Antony, who reported to him that she was dead,–that she had killed herself in despair. He believed it all. His wrath now vanished in his grief. He could not live, or did not wish to live, without her; and he fell upon his own sword. The wound was mortal, but death did not immediately follow. He lived to learn that Cleopatra had again deceived him,–that she was still alive. Even amid the agonies of the shadow of death, and in view of this last fatal lie of hers, he did not upbraid her, but ordered his servants to bear him to her retreat. Covered with blood, the dying general was drawn up by ropes and through a window–the only entrance to the queen's retreat that was left unbarred–into her presence, and soon expired. Shakspeare has Antony greet Cleopatra with the words, "I am dying, Egypt, dying!" This suggestive theme has been enlarged in a modern song of pathetic eloquence:–

     I am dying, Egypt, dying,       Ebbs the crimson life-tide fast,     And the dark Plutonian shadows       Gather on the evening blast;     Let thine arms, O Queen, enfold me,       Hush thy sobs and bow thine ear,     Listen to the great heart-secretsThou, and thou alone, must hear.     Should the base plebeian rabble       Dare assail my name at Rome,     Where my noble spouse Octavia       Weeps within her widow'd home,     Seek her; say the gods bear witness–       Altars, augurs, circling wings–     That her blood, with mine commingled,       Yet shall mount the throne of kings.     As for thee, star-ey'd Egyptian!       Glorious sorceress of the Nile!     Light the path to Stygian horrors       With the splendors of thy smile     I can scorn the Senate's triumphs,       Triumphing in love like thine.     Ah! no more amid the battle       Shall my heart exulting swell:     Isis and Osiris guard thee!       Cleopatra–Rome–farewell!

Thus perished the great Triumvir, dying like a Roman, whose blinded but persistent love, whatever were its elements, ever shall make his name memorable. All the ages will point to him as a man who gave the world away for the caresses of a woman, and a woman who deceived and ruined him.

As for her,–this selfish, heartless sorceress, gifted and beautiful as she was,–what does she do when she sees her lover dead,–dying for her? Does she share his fate? Not she. What selfish woman ever killed herself for love?

     "Some natural tears she shed, but wiped them soon."

She may have torn her clothes, and beaten her breast, and disfigured her face, and given vent to mourning and lamentations. But she does not seek death, nor surrender herself to grief, nor court despair. She renews her strength. She reserves her arts for another victim. She hopes to win Octavius as she had won Julius and Antony; for she was only thirty-nine, and still a queen. And for what? That she might retain her own sovereignty, or the independence of Egypt,–still the most fertile of countries, rich, splendid, and with grand traditions which went back thousands of years; the oldest, and once the most powerful of monarchies. Her love was ever subservient to her interests. Antony gave up ambition for love,–whatever that love was. It took possession of his whole being, not pure and tender, but powerful, strange; doubtless a mad infatuation, and perhaps something more, since it never passed away,–admiration allied with desire, the worship of dazzling gifts, though not of moral virtues. Would such a love have been permanent? Probably not, since the object of it did not shine in the beauty of the soul, but rather in the graces and adornments of the body, intensified indeed by the lustre of bewitching social qualities and the brightness of a cultivated intellect. It is hard to analyze a passionate love between highly gifted people who have an intense development of both the higher and the lower natures, and still more difficult when the idol is a Venus Polyhymnia rather than a Venus Urania. But the love of Antony, whether unwise, or mysterious, or unfortunate, was not feigned or forced: it was real, and it was irresistible; he could not help it. He was enslaved, bound hand and foot. His reason may have rallied to his support, but his will was fettered. He may have had at times dark and gloomy suspicions,–that he was played with, that he was cheated, that he would be deserted, that Cleopatra was false and treacherous. And yet she reigned over him; he could not live without her. She was all in all to him, so long as the infatuation lasted; and it had lasted fourteen years, with increasing force, in spite of duty and pressing labors, the calls of ambition and the lust of power. In this consuming and abandoned passion, for fourteen years,–so strange and inglorious, and for a woman so unworthy, even if he were no better than she,–we see one of the great mysteries of our complex nature, not uncommon, but insoluble.

I have no respect for Antony, and but little admiration. I speak of such mad infatuation as a humiliating exhibition of human weakness. Any one under its fearful spell is an object of pity. But I have more sympathy for him than for Cleopatra, although she was doubtless a very gifted woman. He was her victim; she was not his. If extravagant and reckless and sensual, he was frank, generous, eloquent, brave, and true to her. She was artful, designing, and selfish, and used him for her own ends, although we do not know that she was perfidious and false to him. But for her he would have ruled the world. He showed himself capable of an enormous sacrifice. She made no sacrifices for him. She could even have transferred her affections, since she afterwards sought to play her blandishments upon his rival. Conceive of Antony, if you can, as loving any one else than her who led him on to ruin. In the very degradation of love we see its sacredness. In his fidelity we find some palliation. Nor does it seem that Octavia, the slighted wife of Antony, gave way to vengeance. Her sense of injury was overshadowed by her pity. This lofty and dignified matron even took his six surviving children, three of whom were Cleopatra's, and brought them up in her own house as her own. Can Paganism show a greater magnanimity?

The fate of Cleopatra was tragic also. She too destroyed herself, not probably by the bite of asps, as is the popular opinion, but by some potent and subtile poison that she ever carried with her, and which had the effect of benumbing the body and making her insensible to pain. Yet she does not kill herself because she cannot survive the death of Antony, but because she is too proud to be carried to Rome to grace the triumph of the new Caesar. She will not be led a captive princess up the Capitoline Hill. She has an overbearing pride. "Know, sir," says she to Proculeius, "that I

     "Will not wait pinion'd at your master's court,     Nor once be chastis'd with the sober eye     Of dull Octavia....      … Rather a ditch in Egypt     Be gentle grave to me!"

But whether pride or whether shame was the more powerful motive in committing suicide, I do not read that she was a victim of remorse. She had no moral sense. Nor did she give way to sentimental grief on the death of Antony. Her grief was blended with disappointment and rage. Nor did she hide her head, but wore a face of brass. She used all her arts to win Octavius. Her resources did not fail her; but she expended them on one of the coldest, most politic, and most astute men that ever lived. And the disappointment that followed her defeat–that she could not enslave another conqueror–was greater than the grief for Antony. Nor during her whole career do we see any signs of that sorrow and humility which, it would seem, should mark a woman who has made so great and fatal a mistake,–cut off hopelessly from the respect of the world and the peace of her own soul. We see grief, rage, despair, in her miserable end, as we see pride and shamefacedness in her gilded life, but not remorse or shame. And when she dies by her own hand, it is not in madness, but to escape humiliation. Suicide was one of the worst features of Pagan antiquity. It was a base and cowardly reluctance to meet the evils of life, as much as indifference to the future and a blunted moral sense.

So much for the woman herself, her selfish spirit, her vile career; but as Cleopatra is one of the best known and most striking examples of a Pagan woman, with qualities and in circumstances peculiarly characteristic of Paganism, I must make a few remarks on these points.

One of the most noticeable of these is that immorality seems to have been no bar to social position. Some of those who were most attractive and sought after were notoriously immoral. Aspasia, whom Socrates and Pericles equally admired, and whose house was the resort of poets, philosophers, statesmen, and artists, and who is said to have been one of the most cultivated women of antiquity, bore a sullied name. Sappho, who was ever exalted by Grecian poets for the sweetness of her verses, attempted to reconcile a life of pleasure with a life of letters, and threw herself into the sea because of a disappointed passion. Lais, a professional courtesan, was the associate of kings and sages as well as the idol of poets and priests. Agrippina, whose very name is infamy, was the admiration of courtiers and statesmen. Lucilla, who armed her assassins against her own brother, seems to have ruled the court of Marcus Aurelius.

And all these women, and more who could be mentioned, were–like Cleopatra–cultivated, intellectual, and brilliant. They seem to have reigned for their social fascinations as much as by their physical beauty. Hence, that class of women who with us are shunned and excluded from society were not only flattered and honored, but the class itself seems to have been recruited by those who were the most attractive for their intellectual gifts as well as for physical beauty. No woman, if bright, witty, and beautiful, was avoided because she was immoral. It was the immoral women who often aspired to the highest culture. They sought to reign by making their homes attractive to distinguished men. Their houses seem to have been what the salons of noble and fascinating duchesses were in France in the last two centuries. The homes of virtuous and domestic women were dull and wearisome. In fact, the modest wives and daughters of most men were confined to monotonous domestic duties; they were household slaves; they saw but little of what we now call society. I do not say that virtue was not held in honor. I know of no age, however corrupt, when it was not prized by husbands and fathers. I know of no age when virtuous women did not shine at home, and exert a healthful influence upon men, and secure the proud regard of their husbands. But these were not the women whose society was most sought. The drudgeries and slaveries of domestic life among the ancients made women unattractive to the world. The women who were most attractive were those who gave or attended sumptuous banquets, and indulged in pleasures that were demoralizing. Not domestic women, but bright women, carried away those prizes which turned the brain. Those who shone were those that attached themselves to men through their senses, and possibly through their intellects, and who were themselves strong in proportion as men were weak. For a woman to appear in public assemblies with braided and decorated hair and ostentatious dress, and especially if she displayed any gifts of eloquence or culture, was to proclaim herself one of the immoral, leisurely, educated, dissolute class. This gives point to Saint Paul's strict injunctions to the women of Corinth to dress soberly, to keep silence in the assemblies, etc. The modest woman was to "be in subjection." Those Pagan converts to the "New Way" were to avoid even the appearance of evil.

Thus under Paganism the general influence of women was to pull men down rather than to elevate them, especially those who were attractive in society. Virtuous and domestic women were not sufficiently educated to have much influence except in a narrow circle. Even they, in a social point of view, were slaves. They could be given in marriage without their consent; they were restricted in their intercourse with men; they were confined to their homes; they had but few privileges; they had no books; they led a life of terror from the caprices of their lords and masters, and hence inspired no veneration. The wives and daughters of the rich tyrannized over their servants, decked themselves with costly ornaments, and were merely gilded toys, whose society was vapid and uninteresting. The wives and daughters of the poor were drudges and menials, without attraction or influence; noisy, quarrelsome, garrulous women, who said the least when they talked the most.

Hence under Paganism home had none of those attractions which, in Christian countries, invest it with such charms. The home of the poor was squalid and repulsive; the home of the rich was gaudy and tinselled enough, but was dull and uninspiring. What is home when women are ignorant, stupid, and slavish? What glitter or artistic splendor can make home attractive when women are mere butterflies or slaves with gilded fetters? Deprive women of education, and especially of that respect which Christian chivalry inspires, and they cannot rise to be the equal companions of men. They are simply their victims or their slaves. What is a home where women are treated as inferiors? Paganism never recognized their equality with men; and if they ever ruled men, it was by appealing to their lower qualities, or resorting to arts and devices which are subversive of all dignity of character. When their personal beauty fled, their power also departed. A faded or homely woman, without intelligence or wit, was a forlorn object in a Pagan home,–to be avoided, derided, despised,–a melancholy object of pity or neglect, so far as companionship goes. She may have been valued as a cook or drudge, but she was only a menial. Of all those sins of omission of which Paganism is accused, the worst was that it gave to women no mental resources to assist them in poverty, or neglect, or isolation, when beauty or fortune deserted them. No home can be attractive where women have no resources; and women can have no resources outside of domestic duties, unless educated to some art or something calculated to draw out their energies and higher faculties by which they win the respect and admiration, not of men only, but of their own sex.

It was this lack of education which Paganism withheld from women which not only destroyed the radiance of home, but which really made women inferior to men. All writers, poets, and satirists alike speak of the inferiority of women to men,–not physically only, but even intellectually; and some authors made them more vicious than men in natural inclination. And when the mind was both neglected and undervalued, how could respect and admiration be kindled, or continue after sensual charms had passed away? Paganism taught the inequality of the sexes, and produced it; and when this inequality is taught, or believed in, or insisted upon, then farewell to the glory of homes, to all unbought charms, to the graces of domestic life, to everything that gilds our brief existence with the radiance of imperishable joy.

Nor did Paganism offer any consolations to the down-trodden, injured, neglected, uninteresting woman of antiquity. She could not rise above the condition in which she was born. No sympathetic priest directed her thoughts to another and higher and endless life. Nobody wiped away her tears; nobody gave encouragement to those visions of beauty and serenity for which the burdened spirit will, under any oppressions, sometimes aspire to enjoy. No one told her of immortality and a God of forgiveness, who binds up the bleeding heart and promises a future peace and bliss. Paganism was merciful only in this,–that it did not open wounds it could not heal; that it did not hold out hopes and promises it could not fulfil; that it did not remind the afflicted of miseries from which they could not rise; that it did not let in a vision of glories which could never be enjoyed; that it did not provoke the soul to indulge in a bitterness in view of evils for which there was no remedy; that it did not educate the mind for enjoyments which could never be reached; that it did not kindle a discontent with a condition from which there is no escape. If one cannot rise above debasement or misery, there is no use in pointing it out. If the Pagan woman was not seemingly aware of the degradation which kept her down, and from which it was impossible to rise, Paganism did not add stings to her misery by presenting it as an accident which it was easy to surmount. There would be no contentment or submission among animals if they were endowed with the reason of men. Give to a healthy, but ignorant, coarse, uncultivated country girl, surrounded only with pigs and chickens, almost without neighbors, a glimpse of the glories of cities, the wonders of art, the charms of social life, the triumphs of mind, the capacities of the soul, and would she be any happier, if obliged to remain for life in her rustic obscurity and labor, and with no possible chance of improving her condition? Such was woman under Paganism. She could rise only so far as men lifted her up; and they lifted her up only further to consummate her degradation.

But there was another thing which kept women in degradation. Paganism did not recognize the immaterial and immortal soul: it only had regard to the wants of the body. Of course there were exceptions. There were sages and philosophers among the men who speculated on the grandest subjects which can elevate the mind to the regions of immortal truth,–like Socrates, Plato, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius,–even as there were women who rose above all the vile temptations which surrounded them, and were poets, heroines, and benefactors,–like Telessa, who saved Argos by her courage; and Volumnia, who screened Rome from the vengeance of her angry son; and Lucretia, who destroyed herself rather than survive the dishonor of her house. There are some people who rise and triumph over every kind of oppression and injury. Under Paganism there was the possibility of the emancipation of the soul, but not the probability. Its genius was directed to the welfare of the body,–to utilitarian ends of life, to ornaments and riches, to luxury and voluptuousness, to the pleasures which are brief, to the charms of physical beauty and grace. It could stimulate ambition and inculcate patriotism and sing of love, if it coupled the praises of Venus with the praises of wine. But everything it praised or honored had reference to this life and to the mortal body. It may have recognized the mind, but not the soul, which is greater than the mind. It had no aspirations for future happiness; it had no fears of future misery. Hence the frequency of suicide under disappointment, or ennui, or satiated desire, or fear of poverty, or disgrace, or pain.