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.