Believe’t, till I wept too.
(III. ii. 51.)
It is therefore not hard to understand how, when Antony wilfully sacrifices his advantages and rushes on his ruin, his henchman’s feelings should be outraged and his fidelity should receive a shock. After the flight at Actium, Cleopatra asks him: “Is Antony or we in fault for this?” And Enobarbus, though he had opposed the presence and plans of the Queen, is inexorable in laying the blame on the right shoulders:
Antony only, that would make his will
Lord of his reason.
(III. xiii. 3.)
He is raised above the common run of the legionaries by his devotion to his master; but his devotion is half instinctive, half critical; and, as a rational man, he can suppress in his nature the faithful dog. For the tragedy of Enobarbus’ position lies in this: that in that evil time his reason can furnish him with no motive for his loyalty except self-interest and confidence in his leader’s capacity; or, failing these, the unsubstantial recompense of fame. He is not Antony’s man from principle, in order to uphold a great cause,—no one in the play has chosen his side on such a ground; and fidelity at all costs to a person is a forgotten phrase among the cosmopolitan materialists who are competing for the spoils of the Roman world. So what is he to do? His instincts pull him one way, his reason another, and in such an one instincts unjustified by reason lose half their strength. At first he fights valiantly on behalf of his inarticulate natural feeling. When Canidius deserts, he still refuses in the face of evidence to accept the example:
I’ll yet follow
The wounded chance of Antony, though my reason
Sits in the wind against me.