Chapter 4

Antony, on the other hand, was the descendant of a family of that Roman nobility which still preserved much rustic roughness in tastes, ideas, habits; he grew up in times in which the children were still given Spartan training; he came to Egypt from a nation which, notwithstanding its military and diplomatic triumphs, could be considered, compared with Egypt, only poor, rude, and barbarous. Upon this intelligent man, eager for enjoyment, who had, like other noble Romans, already begun to taste the charms of intellectual civilisation, it was not Cleopatra alone that made the keenest of impressions, but all Egypt, the wonderful city of Alexandria, the sumptuous palace of the Ptolemies--all that refined, elegant splendour of which he found himself at one stroke the master. What was there at Rome to compare with Alexandria?--Rome, in spite of its imperial power, abandoned to a fearful disorder by the disregard of factions, encumbered with ruin, its streets narrow and wretched, provided as yet with but a single _forum_, narrow and plain, the sole impressive monument of which was the theatre of Pompey; Rome, where the life was yet crude, and objects of luxury so rare that they had to be brought from the distant Orient? At Alexandria, instead, the Paris of the ancient world, were to be found all the best and most beautiful things of the earth. There was a sumptuosity of public edifices that the ancients never tire of extolling--the quay seven _stadia_ long, the lighthouse famous all over the Mediterranean, the marvellous zoölogical garden, the Museum, the Gymnasium, innumerable temples, the unending palace of the Ptolemies. There was an abundance, unheard of for those times, of objects of luxury--rugs, glass, stuffs, papyruses, jewels, artistic pottery--because they made all these things at Alexandria. There was an abundance, greater than elsewhere, of silk, of perfumes, of gems, of all the things imported from the extreme East, because through Alexandria passed one of the most frequented routes of Indo-Chinese commerce. There, too, were innumerable artists, writers, philosophers, and _savants_; society life and intellectual life alike fervid; continuous movement to and fro of traffic, continual passing of rare and curious things; countless amusements; life, more than elsewhere, safe--at least so it was believed--because at Alexandria were the great schools of medicine and the great scientific physicians.

If other Italians who landed in Alexandria were dazzled by so many splendours, Antony ought to have been blinded; _he_ entered Alexandria as King. He who was born at Rome in the small and simple house of an impoverished noble family who had been brought up with Latin parsimony to eat frugally, to drink wine only on festival occasions, to wear the same clothes a long time, to be served by a single slave--this man found himself lord of the immense palace of the Ptolemies, where the kitchens alone were a hundred times larger than the house of his fathers at Rome; where there were gathered for his pleasure the most precious treasures and the most marvellous collections of works of art; where there were trains of servants at his command, and every wish could be immediately gratified. It is therefore not necessary to suppose that Antony was foolishly enamoured of the Queen of Egypt, to understand the change that took place in him after their marriage, as he tasted the inimitable life of Alexandria, that elegance, that ease, that wealth, that pomp without equal.

A man of action, grown in simplicity, toughened by a rude life, he was all at once carried into the midst of the subtlest and most highly developed civilisation of the ancient world and given the greatest facilities to enjoy and abuse it that ever man had: as might have been expected, he was intoxicated; he contracted an almost insane passion for such a life; he adored Egypt with such ardour as to forget for it the nation of his birth and the modest home of his boyhood. And then began the great tragedy of his life, a tragedy not love-inspired, but political. As the hold of Egypt strengthened on his mind, Cleopatra tried to persuade him not to conquer Persia, but to accept openly the kingdom of Egypt, to found with her and with their children a new dynasty, and to create a great new Egyptian Empire, adding to Egypt the better part of the provinces that Rome possessed in Africa and in Asia, abandoning Italy and the provinces of the West forever to their destiny.

Cleopatra had thought to snatch from Rome its Oriental Empire by the arm of Antony, in that immense disorder of revolution; to reconstruct the great Empire of Egypt, placing at its head the first general of the time, creating an army of Roman legionaries with the gold of the Ptolemies; to make Egypt and its dynasty the prime potentate of Africa and Asia, transferring to Alexandria the political and diplomatic control of the finest parts of the Mediterranean world.

As the move failed, men have deemed it folly and stupidity; but he who knows how easy it is to be wise after events, will judge this confused policy of Cleopatra less curtly. At any rate, it is certain that her scheme failed more because of its own inconsistencies than through the vigour and ability with which Rome tried to thwart it; it is certain that in the execution of the plan, Antony felt first in himself the tragic discord between Orient and Occident that was so long to lacerate the Empire; and of that tragic discord he was the first victim. An enthusiastic admirer of Egypt, an ardent Hellenist, he is lured by his great ambition to be king of Egypt, to renew the famous line of the Ptolemies, to continue in the East the glory and the traditions of Alexander the Great: but the far-away voice of his fatherland still sounds in his ear; he recalls the city of his birth, the Senate in which he rose so many times to speak, the _Forum_ of his orations, the Comitia that elected him to magistracies; Octavia, the gentlewoman he had wedded with the sacred rites of Latin monogamy; the friends and soldiers with whom he had fought through so many countries in so many wars; the foundation principles at home that ruled the family, the state, morality, public and private.

Cleopatra's scheme, viewed from Alexandria, was an heroic undertaking, almost divine, that might have lifted him and his scions to the delights of Olympus; seen from Rome, by his childhood's friends, by his comrades in arms, by that people of Italy who still so much admired him, it was the shocking crime of faithlessness to his country; we call it high treason. Therefore he hesitates long, doubting most of all whether he can keep for the new Egyptian Empire the Roman legions, made up largely of Italians, all commanded by Italian officers. He does not know how to oppose a resolute _No_ to the insistences of Cleopatra and loose himself from the fatal bond that keeps him near her; he can not go back to live in Italy after having dwelt as king in Alexandria. Moreover, he does not dare declare his intentions to his Roman friends, fearing they will scatter; to the soldiers, fearing they will revolt; to Italy, fearing her judgment of him as a traitor; and so, little by little, he entangles himself in the crooked policy, full of prevarications, of expedients, of subterfuges, of one mistake upon another, that leads him to Actium.

I think I have shown that Antony succumbed in the famous war not because, mad with love, he abandoned the command in the midst of the battle, but because his armies revolted and abandoned him when they understood what he had not dared declare to them openly: that he meant to dismember the Empire of Rome to create the new Empire of Alexandria. The future Augustus conquered at Actium without effort, merely because the national sentiment of the soldiery, outraged by the unforeseen revelation of Antony's treason, turned against the man who wanted to aggrandise Cleopatra at the expense of his own country.

And then the victorious party, the party of Augustus, created the story of Antony and Cleopatra that has so entertained posterity; this story is but a popular explanation--in part imaginatively exaggerated and fantastic--of the Eastern peril that menaced Rome, of both its political phase and its moral. According to the story that Horace has put into such charming verse, Cleopatra wished to conquer Italy, to enslave Rome, to destroy the Capitol; but Cleopatra alone could not have accomplished so difficult a task; she must have seduced Antony, made him forget his duty to his wife, to his legitimate children, to the Republic, the soldiery, his native land,--all the duties that Latin morals inculcated into the minds of the great, and that a shameless Egyptian woman, rendered perverse by all the arts of the Orient, had blotted out in his soul; therefore Antony's tragic fate should serve as a solemn warning to distrust the voluptuous seductions, of which Cleopatra symbolised the elegant and fatal depravity. The story was magnified, coloured, diffused, not because it was beautiful and romantic, but because it served the interests of the political _coterie_ that gained definite control of the government on the ruin of Antony. At Actium, the future Augustus did not fight a real war, he only passively watched the power of the adversary go to pieces, destroyed by its own internal contradictions. He did not decide to conquer Egypt until the public opinion of Italy, enraged against Antony and Cleopatra, required this vengeance with such insistence that he had to satisfy it.

If Augustus was not a man too quick in action, he was, instead, keenly intelligent in comprehending the situation created by the catastrophe of Antony in Italy, where already, for a decade of years, public spirit, frightened by revolution, was anxious to return to the ways of the past, to the historic sources of the national life. Augustus understood that he ought to stand before Italy, disgusted as it was with long-continued dissension and eager to retrace the way of national tradition, as the embodiment of all the virtues his contemporaries set in opposition to eastern "corruption,"--simplicity, severity of private habits, rigid monogamy, the anti-feministic spirit, the purely virile idea of the state. Naturally, the exaltation of these virtues required the portrayal in his rival of Actium, as far as possible, the opposite defects; therefore the efforts of his friends, like Horace, to colour the story of Antony and Cleopatra, which should magnify to the Italians the idea of the danger from which Augustus had saved them at Actium; which was meant to serve as a barrier against the invading Oriental "corruption," that "corruption" the essence of which I have already analysed.

In a certain sense, the legend of Antony and Cleopatra is chiefly an antifeminist legend, intended to reinforce in the state the power of the masculine principle, to demonstrate how dangerous it may be to leave to women the government of public affairs, or follow their counsel in political business.

The people believed the legend; posterity has believed it. Two years ago when I published in the _Revue de Paris_ an article in which I demonstrated, by obvious arguments, the incongruities and absurdities of the legend, and tried to retrace through it the half-effaced lines of the truth, everybody was amazed. From one end of Europe to the other, the papers résuméd the conclusions of my study as an astounding revelation. An illustrious French statesman, a man of the finest culture in historical study, Joseph Reinach, said to me:

After your article I have re-read Dion and Plutarch. It is indeed singular that for twenty centuries men have read and reread those pages without any one's realising how confused and absurd their accounts are.

It seems to be a law of human psychology that almost all historic personages, from Minos to Mazzini, from Judas to Charlotte Corday, from Xerxes to Napoleon, are imaginary personages; some transfigured into demigods, by admiration and success; the others debased by hate and failure. In reality, the former were often uglier, the latter more attractive than tradition has pictured them, because men in general are neither too good nor too bad, neither too intelligent nor too stupid. In conclusion, historic tradition is full of deformed caricatures and ideal transfigurations; because, when they are dead, the impression of their political contemporaries still serves the ends of parties, states, nations, institutions. Can this man exalt in a people the consciousness of its own power, of its own energy, of its own value? Lo, then they make a god of him, as of Napoleon or Bismarck. Can this other serve to feed in the mass, odium and scorn of another party, of a government, of an order of things that it is desirable to injure? Then they make a monster of him, as happened in Rome to Tiberius, in France to Napoleon III, in Italy to all who for one motive or another opposed the unification of Italy.

It is true that after a time the interests that have coloured certain figures with certain hues and shades disappear; but then the reputation, good or bad, of a personage is already made; his name is stamped on the memory of posterity with an adjective,--the great, the wise, the wicked, the cruel, the rapacious,--and there is no human force that can dissever name from adjective. Some far-away historian, studying all the documents, examining the sequence of events, will confute the tradition in learned books; but his work not only will not succeed in persuading the ignorant multitude, but must also contend against the multiplied objections offered by the instinctive incredulity of people of culture.

You will say to me, "What is the use of writing history? Why spend so much effort to correct the errors in which people will persist just as if the histories were never written?" I reply that I do not believe that the office of history is to give to men who have guided the great human events a posthumous justice. It is already work serious enough for every generation to give a little justice to the living, rather than occupy itself rendering it to the dead, who indeed, in contradistinction from the living, have no need of it. The study of history, the rectification of stories of the past, ought to serve another and practical end; that is, train the men who govern nations to discern more clearly than may be possible from their own environment the truth underlying the legends. As I have already said, passions, interests, present historic personages in a thousand forms when they are alive, transfiguring not only the persons themselves, but events the most diverse, the character of institutions, the conditions of nations.

It is generally believed that legends are found only at the dawn of history, in the poetic period; that is a great mistake; the legend--the legend that deceives, that deforms, that misdirects--is everywhere, in all ages, in the present as in the past--in the present even more than in the past, because it is the consequence of certain universal forms of thought and of sentiment. To-day, just as ten or twenty centuries ago, interests and passions dominate events, alter them and distort them, creating about them veritable romances, more or less probable. The present, which appears to all to be the same reality, is instead, for most people, only a huge legend, traversed by contemporaries stirred by the most widely differing sentiments.

However the mass may content itself with this legend, throbbing with hate and love, with hope and the fear of its own self-created phantoms, those who guide and govern the masses ought to try to divine the truth, as far as they can. A great man of state is distinguished from a mediocre by his greater ability to divine the real in his world of action beneath its superfice of confused legends; by his greater ability to discriminate in everything what is true from what is merely apparently true, in the prestige of states and institutions, in the forces of parties, in the energy attributed to certain men, in the purposes claimed by parties and men, often different from their real designs. To do that, some natural disposition is necessary, a liveliness of intuition that must come with birth; but this faculty can be refined and trained by a practical knowledge of men, by experience in things, and by the study of history. In the ages dead, when the interests that created their legends have disappeared, we can discover how those great popular delusions, which are one of the greatest forces of history, are made and how they work. We may thus fortify the spirit to withstand the cheating illusions that surround us, coming from every part of the vast modern world, in which so many interests dispute dominion over thoughts and will. In this sense alone, I believe that history may teach, not the multitude, which will never learn anything from it, but, impelled by the same passions, will always repeat the same errors and the same foolishnesses; but the chosen few, who, charged with directing the game of history, have concern in knowing as well as they can its inner law. Taken in this way, history may be a great teacher, in its every page, every line, and the study of the legend of Antony and Cleopatra may itself even serve to prepare the spirit of a diplomat, who must treat between state and state the complicated economic and political affairs of the modern world. And so, in conclusion, history and life interchange mutual services; life teaches history, and history, life; observing the present, we help ourselves to know the past, and from the study of the past we can return to our present the better tempered and prepared to observe and comprehend it. In present and in past, history can form a kind of wisdom set apart, in a certain sense aristocratic, above what the masses know, at least as to the universal laws that govern the life of nations.

The Development of Gaul

In estimating distant historical events, one is often the victim of an error of perspective; that is, one is disposed to consider as the outcome of a pre-established plan of human wisdom what is the final result, quite unforeseen, of causes that acted beyond the foresight of contemporaries. At the distance of centuries, turning back to consider the past, we can easily find out that the efforts of one or two generations have produced certain effects on the actual condition of the world; and then we conclude that those generations meant to reach that result. On the contrary, men almost always face the future proposing to themselves impossible ends; notwithstanding which, their efforts, accumulating, destroying, interweaving, bring into being consequences that no one had foreseen or planned, the novelty or importance of which often only future generations realise. Columbus, who, fixed in the idea of reaching India by sailing west, finds America on his way and does not recognise it at once but is persuaded that he has landed in India, symbolises the lot of man in history.

Of this phenomenon, which is to me a fundamental law of history, there is a classic example in the story of Rome: the conquest of Gaul. Without doubt, one of the greatest works of Rome was the conquest and Romanisation of Gaul: indeed that conquest and Romanisation of Gaul is the beginning of European civilisation; for before the Græco-Latin civilisation reached the Rhine over the ways opened by the Roman sword, the continent of Europe had centres of civilisation on the coast or in its projecting extremities, like Italy, Bætica, Narbonensis; but the interior was still entirely in the power of a turbulent and restless barbarism, like the African continent to-day. Moreover, what Rome created in Asia and Africa was almost entirely destroyed by ages following; on the contrary, Rome yet lives in France, to which it gave its language, its spirit, and the traditions of its thought. Exactly for this reason it is particularly important to explain how such an outcome was brought about, and by what historic forces. From the propensity to consider every great historical event as wholly a masterpiece of human genius, many historians have attributed also this accomplishment to a prodigious, well-nigh divine wisdom on the part of the Romans, and Julius Cæsar is regarded as a demigod who had fixed his gaze upon the far, far distant future. However, it is not difficult, studying the ancient documents with critical spirit, to persuade oneself that even if Cæsar was a man of genius, he was not a god; that from beginning to end, the real story of the conquest of Gaul is very different from the commonly accepted version.

I hope to demonstrate that Cæsar threw himself into the midst of Gallic affairs, impelled by slight incidents of internal politics, not only without giving any thought whatever to the future destiny of Gaul, but without even knowing well the conditions existing there. Gaul was then for all Romans a barbarous region, poor, gloomy, full of swamps and forests in which there would be much fighting and little booty: no one was thinking then of having Roman territory cross the Alps; everyone was infatuated by the story of Alexander the Great, dreaming only of conquering like him all the rich and civilised Orient; everyone, even Cæsar. Only a sequence of political accidents pushed him in spite of himself into Gaul.

In 62 B.C., Pompey had returned from the Orient, where he had finished the conquest of Pontus, begun by Lucullus, and annexed Syria. On his return, the conservative party, irritated against him because he had gone over to the opposite side, and having been given something to think of by the prestige that the policy of expansion was winning for the popular party, had succeeded by many intrigues in keeping the Senate from ratifying what he had done in the East. This internal struggle closed the Orient for several years to the adventurous initiatives of the political imperialists; for as long as the administration of Pompey remained unapproved, it was impossible to think of undertaking new enterprises or conquests in Asia and Africa; and therefore, of necessity, Roman politics, burning for conquest and adventure, had to turn to another part of Europe.

The letters of Cicero prove to us that Cæsar was not the first to think that Rome, having its hands tied for the moment in the East, ought to interfere in the affairs of Gaul. The man who first had the idea of a Gallic policy was Quintus Metellus Celerus, husband of the famous Clodia, and consul the year before Cæsar. Taking advantage of certain disturbances arisen in Gaul from the constant wars between the differing parts, Metellus had persuaded the Senate to authorise him to make war on the Helvetians. At the beginning of the year 59, that is, the year in which Cæsar was consul, Metellus was already preparing to depart for the war in Gaul, when suddenly he died; and then Cæsar, profiting by the interest in Rome for Gallic affairs, had the mission previously entrusted to Metellus given to himself and took up both Metellus's office and his plan. Here you see at the beginning of this story the first accident,--the death of Metellus. An historian curious of nice and unanswerable questions might ask himself what would have been the history of the world if Metellus had not died. Certainly Rome would have been occupied with Gallic concerns a year sooner and by a different man; Cæsar would probably have had to seek elsewhere a brilliant proconsulship and things Gallic would have for ever escaped his energy.