Antony was, of course, something of a barbarian, and his excesses often put one in mind of the habits of the Goths or Vikings. He drank hard, jested uproariously, was on occasion brutal, enjoyed the love of women, brawled like a schoolboy, and probably swore like a trooper. But with it all he retained until some two years before his death a very fair capacity for hard work, as is evidenced by the fact that he was Julius Cæsar’s right-hand man, and afterwards absolute autocrat of the East. His nature was so forceful, and yet his character so built up of the magnified virtues and failings of mankind, that by his very resemblance to the ordinary soldier, his conformity to the type of the average citizen, he won an absolute ascendancy over the minds of normal men. It touched the vanity of every individual that a man, by the exercise of brains and faculties no greater than his own, was become lord of half the world. It was no prodigious intellectual genius who ruled the earth with incomprehensible ability, but a burly, virile, simple, brave, vulgar man. It was related with satisfaction that when Antony was shown the little senate-house at Megara, which seems to have been an ancient architectural gem of which the cultured inhabitants were justly proud, he told them that it was “not very large, but extremely _ruinous_”--a remark which recalls the comment of the American tourist in Oxford, that the buildings were very much out of repair. A little honest Philistinism is a very useful thing.
A touch of purple, too, as Stevenson has reminded us, is not without its value. Antony was always something of an actor, and enjoyed a display in a manner as theatrical as it was unforced. When he made his public orations, he attempted to attract the eye of his audience at the same time that he tickled their ears. In his famous funeral oration after the death of Cæsar, we have seen how he exhibited, at the psychological moment, the gory clothes of the murdered Dictator, showing to the crowd the holes made by the daggers of the assassins and the stains of his blood. Desiring to make a profound effect upon his harassed troops during the retreat from Media, he clothed himself in a dismal mourning habit, and was only with difficulty persuaded by his officers to change it for the scarlet cloak of a general. He enjoyed dressing himself to suit the part of a Hercules, for which nature, indeed, had already caused him to be cast; and in public assemblies he would often appear with “his tunic girt low about his hips, a broadsword at his side, and over all a large, coarse mantle,” cutting, one may suppose, a very fine figure. In cultured Athens he thought it was perhaps more fitting to present himself in a pacific guise, and we find him at the public games clad in the gown and white shoes of a steward, the wands of that gentle office carried before him. On this occasion, however, he introduced the herculean _rôle_ to this extent, that he parted the combatants by seizing the scruff of their necks and holding them from one another at arm’s length. In later life his love of display led him into strange habits; and, while he was often clothed in the guise of Bacchus, his garments for daily use were of the richest purple, and were clasped with enormous jewels.