Is often left unlov’d.
(III. vi. 42.)
It is quite true that he thinks of what is due to himself, but he does not altogether forget her claims; and even when he regrets the defective “ostentation” of love—a term that is apt to rouse suspicion, no doubt, but less so in Elizabethan than in modern ears—he bases his regret on the just and valid ground that without expression love itself is apt to die. That behind his own “ostentation” of fondness (which of course he is careful not to neglect, for it is a becoming and creditable thing), there is some reality of feeling, is proved by the parting scene. His affectionate farewell and even his gathering tears might be pretence; but he promises to send her regular letters:
Sweet Octavia,
You shall hear from me still.
(III. ii. 58.)
It really means something when a man like Octavius, busy with the affairs of the whole world, spares time for frequent domestic correspondence.
And yet this admirable brother has not hesitated to arrange for his sister a “mariage de convenance” with Antony, a man whom he disapproves and dislikes. From the worldly point of view it is certainly the most brilliant match she could make; and this perhaps to one of Octavius’ arid nature, with its total lack of sympathy, imagination and generous ideals, may have seemed the main consideration. All the same we cannot help feeling that he was thinking mainly of himself, and, though with some regrets, has sacrificed her to the exigencies of statecraft. Menas and Enobarbus, shrewd and unsentimental observers, agree that policy has made more in the marriage than love. So much indeed is obvious, even if its purpose is what on the face of it it professes to be, the reconcilement of the men it makes brothers-in-law. But, as we shall see, Octavius may have a more tortuous device in it than this.
Treating it meanwhile, however, as an expedient for knitting the alliance with his rival, what inference does it suggest? If for the sake of his own interests, Octavius shows himself far from scrupulous in regard to the sister whom he loves and whose material well-being is his care, what may we expect of him in the case of those who are indifferent or dangerous or hostile?
He has no hesitation about ousting his colleague Lepidus, or ruining the reconciled rebel Pompeius, despite his compacts with both. Then it is Antony’s turn; and Antony is a far more formidable antagonist, with all his superiority in material resources, fertility of genius, proven soldiership and strategic skill. It is not because Octavius is the greater man that he succeeds. It is, in the first place, because he concentrates all his narrow nature to a single issue, while Antony with his greater width of outlook disperses his interest on many things at once. How typical of each are the asides with which respectively they enter their momentous conference. Antony is already contemplating other contingencies: