[V.9] I will do so: I will do as I have said. Not 'I will cross you.' At this time Octavius was but twenty-one years old, and Antony was old enough to be his father. At the time of Cæsar's death, when Octavius was in his nineteenth year, Antony thought he was going to manage him easily and have it all his own way with him; but he found the youngster as stiff as a crowbar, and could do nothing with him. Cæsar's youngest sister, Julia, was married to Marcus Atius Balbus, and their daughter Atia, again, was married to Caius Octavius, a nobleman of the plebeian order. From this marriage sprang the present Octavius, who afterwards became the Emperor Augustus. He was mainly educated by his great-uncle, was advanced to the patrician order, and was adopted as his son and heir; so that his full and proper designation at this time was Caius Julius Cæsar Octavianus. The text gives a right taste of the man, who always stood firm as a post against Antony, till the latter finally knocked himself to pieces against him.
[V.10] Scene II Pope.
[V.11] Lucilius, Titinius ... | Ff omit.
[V.12] The posture of your blows: where your blows are to fall.
[V.13] are. The verb is attracted into the plural by the nearest substantive. Cf. 'was,' [IV, iii, 5]. Abbott calls this idiom 'confusion of proximity.'
[V.14] Hybla, a hill in Sicily, was noted for its thyme and its honey. So Vergil, Eclogues, I, 54-55: "the hedge whose willow bloom is quaffed by Hybla's bees." Cf. 1 Henry IV, I, ii, 47: "As the honey of Hybla, my old lad of the castle." Antony could not be so 'honey-tongued' unless he had quite exhausted thyme-flavored Hybla.
[V.15] These graphic details are from Plutarch's two accounts (in Julius Cæsar and Marcus Brutus) of the assassination of Cæsar.
[V.16] teeth F3 F4 | teethes F1F2.
[V.17] l. 41 Two lines in Ff.
[V.18] Struck F3F4 | Strooke F1F2.