If we compose well here, to Parthia:
Hark, Ventidius.
(II. ii. 15.)
Octavius will not be diverted from the immediate business:
I do not know,
Mecaenas; ask Agrippa.
(II. ii. 16.)
So, too, when the composition has taken place, Antony squanders his strength in the invasion of Parthia, the conquest of Armenia and other annexations, not to mention his grand distraction in Egypt. But Octavius pursues his one purpose with the dogged tenacity of a sleuth hound, removes Pompey who might be troublesome, seizes the resources of Lepidus, and is able to oppose the solid mass of the West to Antony’s loose congeries of Asiatic allies and underlings, whose disunited crowd seems to typify his own unreconciled ambitions.
But even so it is not so much that Octavius wins, as that Antony loses. In another sense than he means, the words of the latter are true:
Not Caesar’s valour hath o’erthrown Antony,