In the autumn of B.C. 37 these considerations bore their inevitable fruit. On his way to Corfu, in pursuit of his Parthian schemes, he came to the conclusion that he would once and for all cut himself off from Rome until that day when he should return to it as the earth’s conqueror. He therefore sent his wife Octavia back to Italy, determined never to see her again; and at the same time he despatched a certain Fonteius Capito to Alexandria to invite Cleopatra to meet him in Syria. Octavia was a woman of extreme sweetness, goodness, and domesticity. Her gentle influence always made for peace; and her invariable good behaviour and meekness must have almost driven Antony crazy. No doubt she wanted to make his clothes for him, as she had made those of her brother; and she seems always to have been anxious to bring before his notice, in her sweet way, the charms of old-fashioned, respectable, family life, a condition which absolutely nauseated Antony. She now accepted her marching orders with a wifely meekness which can hardly command one’s respect; and in pathetic obedience she returned forthwith to Rome. I cannot help thinking that if only she had now shown some spirit, and had been able to substitute energy for sweetness in the movements of her mind, the history of the period would have been entirely altered.
It must surely be clear to the impartial reader that Antony’s change of attitude was due more to political than to romantic considerations.[93] We have heard so much of the arts of seduction practised by Cleopatra that it is not easy at first to rid the mind of the traditional interpretation of this reunion; and we are, at the outset, inclined to accept Plutarch’s definition of the affair when he tells us that “Antony’s passion for Cleopatra, which better thoughts had seemed to have lulled and charmed into oblivion, now gathered strength again, and broke into flame; and like Plato’s restive and rebellious horse of the human soul, flinging off all good and wholesome counsel, and fairly breaking loose, he sent Fonteius Capito to bring her into Syria.” But it is to be remembered that this “passion” for the Queen had not been strong enough to hold him from marrying Octavia a few months after he had left the arms of Cleopatra; and now three and a half years had passed since he had seen the Queen,--a period which, to a memory so short as Antony’s, constituted a very complete hiatus in this particular love-story. So slight, indeed, was his affection for her at this time that, in speaking of the twins with which she had presented him, he made the famous remark already quoted, that he had no intention of confining his hopes of progeny to any one woman, but, like his ancestor Hercules, he hoped to let nature take her will with him, the best way of circulating noble blood through the world being thus personally to beget in every country a new line of kings. Antony doubtless looked forward with youthful excitement to a renewal of his relations with the Queen, and, to some extent, it may be true that he now joyously broke loose from the gentle, and, for that reason, galling, bonds of domesticity; but actually he purposed, for political reasons, to make a definite alliance with Cleopatra, and it is unreasonable to suppose that any flames of ungoverned passion burnt within his jolly heart at this time.