Characters and events of Roman History

by Guglielmo Ferrero

As the move failed, men have deemed it folly and stupidity; but he who knows how easy it is to be wise after events, will judge this confused policy of Cleopatra less curtly. At any rate, it is certain that her scheme failed more because of its own inconsistencies than through the vigour and ability with which Rome tried to thwart it; it is certain that in the execution of the plan, Antony felt first in himself the tragic discord between Orient and Occident that was so long to lacerate the Empire; and of that tragic discord he was the first victim. An enthusiastic admirer of Egypt, an ardent Hellenist, he is lured by his great ambition to be king of Egypt, to renew the famous line of the Ptolemies, to continue in the East the glory and the traditions of Alexander the Great: but the far-away voice of his fatherland still sounds in his ear; he recalls the city of his birth, the Senate in which he rose so many times to speak, the Forum of his orations, the Comitia that elected him to magistracies; Octavia, the gentlewoman he had wedded with the sacred rites of Latin monogamy; the friends and soldiers with whom he had fought through so many countries in so many wars; the foundation principles at home that ruled the family, the state, morality, public and private.

Cleopatra's scheme, viewed from Alexandria, was an heroic undertaking, almost divine, that might have lifted him and his scions to the delights of Olympus; seen from Rome, by his childhood's friends, by his comrades in arms, by that people of Italy who still so much admired him, it was the shocking crime of faithlessness to his country; we call it high treason. Therefore he hesitates long, doubting most of all whether he can keep for the new Egyptian Empire the Roman legions, made up largely of Italians, all commanded by Italian officers. He does not know how to oppose a resolute No to the insistences of Cleopatra and loose himself from the fatal bond that keeps him near her; he can not go back to live in Italy after having dwelt as king in Alexandria. Moreover, he does not dare declare his intentions to his Roman friends, fearing they will scatter; to the soldiers, fearing they will revolt; to Italy, fearing her judgment of him as a traitor; and so, little by little, he entangles himself in the crooked policy, full of prevarications, of expedients, of subterfuges, of one mistake upon another, that leads him to Actium.

I think I have shown that Antony succumbed in the famous war not because, mad with love, he abandoned the command in the midst of the battle, but because his armies revolted and abandoned him when they understood what he had not dared declare to them openly: that he meant to dismember the Empire of Rome to create the new Empire of Alexandria. The future Augustus conquered at Actium without effort, merely because the national sentiment of the soldiery, outraged by the unforeseen revelation of Antony's treason, turned against the man who wanted to aggrandise Cleopatra at the expense of his own country.

And then the victorious party, the party of Augustus, created the story of Antony and Cleopatra that has so entertained posterity; this story is but a popular explanation—in part imaginatively exaggerated and fantastic—of the Eastern peril that menaced Rome, of both its political phase and its moral. According to the story that Horace has put into such charming verse, Cleopatra wished to conquer Italy, to enslave Rome, to destroy the Capitol; but Cleopatra alone could not have accomplished so difficult a task; she must have seduced Antony, made him forget his duty to his wife, to his legitimate children, to the Republic, the soldiery, his native land,—all the duties that Latin morals inculcated into the minds of the great, and that a shameless Egyptian woman, rendered perverse by all the arts of the Orient, had blotted out in his soul; therefore Antony's tragic fate should serve as a solemn warning to distrust the voluptuous seductions, of which Cleopatra symbolised the elegant and fatal depravity. The story was magnified, coloured, diffused, not because it was beautiful and romantic, but because it served the interests of the political coterie that gained definite control of the government on the ruin of Antony. At Actium, the future Augustus did not fight a real war, he only passively watched the power of the adversary go to pieces, destroyed by its own internal contradictions. He did not decide to conquer Egypt until the public opinion of Italy, enraged against Antony and Cleopatra, required this vengeance with such insistence that he had to satisfy it.

If Augustus was not a man too quick in action, he was, instead, keenly intelligent in comprehending the situation created by the catastrophe of Antony in Italy, where already, for a decade of years, public spirit, frightened by revolution, was anxious to return to the ways of the past, to the historic sources of the national life. Augustus understood that he ought to stand before Italy, disgusted as it was with long-continued dissension and eager to retrace the way of national tradition, as the embodiment of all the virtues his contemporaries set in opposition to eastern "corruption,"—simplicity, severity of private habits, rigid monogamy, the anti-feministic spirit, the purely virile idea of the state. Naturally, the exaltation of these virtues required the portrayal in his rival of Actium, as far as possible, the opposite defects; therefore the efforts of his friends, like Horace, to colour the story of Antony and Cleopatra, which should magnify to the Italians the idea of the danger from which Augustus had saved them at Actium; which was meant to serve as a barrier against the invading Oriental "corruption," that "corruption" the essence of which I have already analysed.

In a certain sense, the legend of Antony and Cleopatra is chiefly an antifeminist legend, intended to reinforce in the state the power of the masculine principle, to demonstrate how dangerous it may be to leave to women the government of public affairs, or follow their counsel in political business.

The people believed the legend; posterity has believed it. Two years ago when I published in the Revue de Paris an article in which I demonstrated, by obvious arguments, the incongruities and absurdities of the legend, and tried to retrace through it the half-effaced lines of the truth, everybody was amazed. From one end of Europe to the other, the papers résuméd the conclusions of my study as an astounding revelation. An illustrious French statesman, a man of the finest culture in historical study, Joseph Reinach, said to me:

After your article I have re-read Dion and Plutarch. It is indeed singular that for twenty centuries men have read and reread those pages without any one's realising how confused and absurd their accounts are.

It seems to be a law of human psychology that almost all historic personages, from Minos to Mazzini, from Judas to Charlotte Corday, from Xerxes to Napoleon, are imaginary personages; some transfigured into demigods, by admiration and success; the others debased by hate and failure. In reality, the former were often uglier, the latter more attractive than tradition has pictured them, because men in general are neither too good nor too bad, neither too intelligent nor too stupid. In conclusion, historic tradition is full of deformed caricatures and ideal transfigurations; because, when they are dead, the impression of their political contemporaries still serves the ends of parties, states, nations, institutions. Can this man exalt in a people the consciousness of its own power, of its own energy, of its own value? Lo, then they make a god of him, as of Napoleon or Bismarck. Can this other serve to feed in the mass, odium and scorn of another party, of a government, of an order of things that it is desirable to injure? Then they make a monster of him, as happened in Rome to Tiberius, in France to Napoleon III, in Italy to all who for one motive or another opposed the unification of Italy.

It is true that after a time the interests that have coloured certain figures with certain hues and shades disappear; but then the reputation, good or bad, of a personage is already made; his name is stamped on the memory of posterity with an adjective,—the great, the wise, the wicked, the cruel, the rapacious,—and there is no human force that can dissever name from adjective. Some far-away historian, studying all the documents, examining the sequence of events, will confute the tradition in learned books; but his work not only will not succeed in persuading the ignorant multitude, but must also contend against the multiplied objections offered by the instinctive incredulity of people of culture.