HE grand-niece of Julius Cæsar and sister of Augustus, was one of the most illustrious dames of ancient Rome. She was married first to Claudius Marcellus, who was consul in the year of Rome 704; and very soon after his death she married Marc Antony, a union very much desired by the friends of both the parties, as likely to conciliate Antony and Cæsar, and thereby promote peace. Octavia, herself a highly virtuous woman, was well formed to promote this desirable object; but her husband afterwards so completely abandoned himself to his passion for Cleopatra, that he seemed to have lost all rational control over himself. Before he fell under this slavery of an unholy love, Octavia by her counsels exercised much power over him for good; but now matters were changed, and he left her in Italy, when in 717 he sailed from Tarentum for the East. Some time after, she went forth upon the world to try to find him; but having learned from letters received from him that he desired she should stop at Athens, she arrested her steps at that city, even while she was aware that he was merely deceiving and laughing at her. She then returned to Rome, but would not, though recommended by Augustus, remove from the house of her husband; there she remained, taking upon her domestic cares and managing all things as if she still had in the faithless Antony an object of admiration. She evinced towards his children by Fulvia, his former wife, the same affection she had hitherto shown them, and reared and educated them with the same vigilance. She was willing to suffer all, but that the injuries she received at the hands of her husband should be the cause of a civil war, and in subsequently obeying his command to leave his house, her only regret was that she saw that it would be held to be the cause of political commotion. By such conduct she injured the character of Antony, even while she was not aware of the effects of her conduct; for the natural consequence was an increase of the indignation and contempt for the man who could leave such a woman for such another as Cleopatra.
The war which followed terminated, as every one knows, by the entire ruin of Marc Antony. Subsequently fortune seemed to promise Octavia a high measure of happiness. She had a son of great promise, who married the daughter of Augustus, and was viewed as the heir of the Empire; but he died in the flower of his age, and this was a shock to Octavia for which she would receive no consolation. She plunged herself into solitude and incurable melancholy. She could bear to see no image of Marcellus her son, nor even to hear his name mentioned. Hating all mothers, she raved principally against Livia, to whose son passed the honours and glory that were promised to her own. Sunk in darkness and solitude, she would not even see her brother Augustus, nor would she hear the songs of praise which had been offered to the many virtues of the son she had so dearly loved. Not even the glory of her brother had any influence in ameliorating her melancholy, if it was not that she viewed his success with aversion; and thus segregated from all human sympathies, she lived only in the exercise of the solemn offices of religion.
CLEOPATRA.
[BORN B.C. 68. DIED B.C. 29.]
MERIVALE.
ER personal talents were indeed of the most varied kind; she was an admirable singer and musician; she was skilled in many languages, and possessed intellectual accomplishments rarely found among the staidest of her sex, combined with the archness and humour of the lightest. She exerted herself to pamper her lover's [Antony's] sensual appetites, to stimulate his flagging interests by ingenious surprises, nor less to gratify the revival of his nobler propensities with paintings and sculptures, and works of literature. She encouraged him to take his seat as gymnasiarch, or director of the public amusements, and even to vary his debauches with philosophy and criticism. She amused him by sending divers to fasten salt-fish to the bait of his angling-rod; and when she had pledged herself to consume the value of ten millions of sesterces at a meal, amazed him by dissolving, in the humble cup of vinegar set before her, a pearl of inestimable price.
Her lover attended upon her in the forum, at the theatre, and the tribunals; he rode with her, or followed her chariot on foot, escorted by a train of eunuchs; at night he strolled with her through the city, in the garb of a slave, and encountered abuse and blows from the rabble of the streets; by day he wore the loose Persian robe, and girded himself with the Median dagger, and he designated as his palace the prætorium or general's apartment. Painters and sculptors were charged to group the illustrious pair together, and the coins of the kingdom bore the heads and names of both conjointly. The Roman legionary, with the name of Cleopatra inscribed upon his shield, found himself transformed into a Macedonian body-guard. Masques were presented at the court, in which the versatile Plancus sank into the character of a stage buffoon, and enacted the part of the sea-god Glaucus in curt cerulean vestments, crowned with the feathery heads of the papyrus, and deformed with the tail of a fish.
But when Cleopatra arrayed herself in the garb and usurped the attributes of Isis, and invited her paramour to ape the deity Osiris, the portentous travesty assumed a deeper significance. It had been the policy of the Macedonian sovereigns to form an alliance between the popular superstitions of their Greek and Egyptian subjects. Ptolemæus Soter had prevailed on the native priesthood to sanction the consecration of a new divinity, Serapis, who, if not really of Grecian origin, was confidently identified by the Greeks with their own Pluto, or perhaps with Zeus. The Macedonians had admitted with little scruple their great hero's claims to be the offspring of Ammon, the king of gods, who was worshipped in the Oasis of the desert. The notion that a mere man might become exalted into union with deity, favoured by the rationalising explanations of their popular mythology already current among the learned, had gradually settled into an indulgent admission of the royal right of apotheosis. Antony had assumed the character of Bacchus at Athens. In the metropolis of Grecian scepticism this could only be regarded as a drunken whim; but when he came forward in Alexandria as the Nile-God Osiris, the Bacchus or fructifying power of the Coptic mythology, he claimed as a present deity the veneration of the credulous Egyptians.