When the news of the coming celebrations was conveyed to Antony in his hermitage, he seems to have been much disturbed by it. Cæsarion and his rights had been to a large extent the cause of his ruin, and he must have been somewhat frightened at the audacity of the Queen in thus giving Octavian further cause for annoyance. Here was Alexandria preparing to celebrate in the most triumphant manner the coming of age of Octavian’s rival, the claimant to Julius Cæsar’s powers and estate. Was the move to be regarded as clever policy or as reckless effrontery? Leaving the passive solitude of his little Timonium, he seems to have entered once more into active discussions with Cleopatra; and as a result of these conversations, he appears to have received the impression that his wife’s desire was now to resign her power to a large extent into her son’s hands, thus leaving to the energy of youth the labours which middle age had failed to accomplish. This aspect of the movement appealed to him, and he determined in like manner to be represented in future by a younger generation. His son by Fulvia, Antyllus, who was a year or so younger than Cæsarion, was living in the Alexandrian Palace; and Antony therefore arranged with Cleopatra that the two youths should together be declared of age (_ephebi_), Antyllus thenceforth being authorised to wear the legal dress of Roman manhood. Cleopatra then appears to have persuaded her husband to give up his ridiculous affectation of misanthropy, and either to make himself useful in organising her schemes of defence, or to leave Egypt altogether. Antony was by this time heartily tired of his solitary life, and he was glad enough to abandon his Timonian pose. He therefore took up his residence once more in the Palace, and both he and Cleopatra made some attempt to renew their old relationship. Their paths had diverged, however, too far ever to resume any sort of unity. Antony had brooded in solitude over his supposed wrongs, and he now regarded his wife with a sort of suspicion; and she, on her part, accepted him no longer as her equal, but as a creature deserving her contempt, though arousing to some extent her generous pity.
The birthday celebrations were conducted on the most magnificent lines, and the whole city was given over to feasting and revelling for many days. The impending storm was put away from the minds of all, and it would have been indeed difficult for a visitor to Alexandria during that time to believe that he had entered a city whose rulers had recently been defeated by an enemy already preparing to invade Egypt itself. Cleopatra, in fact, could not be brought to admit that the game was up; and in spite of the misery and anxiety weighing upon her mind she kept a cheerful and hopeful demeanour which ought to have won for her the admiration of all historians. Antony, on the other hand, was completely demoralised by the situation; and the birthday festivities having whetted his appetite once more for the pleasures of riotous living, he decided to bring his life to a close in a round of mad dissipation. Calling together the members of the order of Inimitable Livers, the banqueting club which he had founded some years before,[130] he invited them to sign their names to the roll of membership of a new society which he named the _Synapotha-noumenoi_ or the “Die-togethers.” “Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die,” must have been his motto; and he seems to have thrown himself into this new phase with as much shallow profundity as he had displayed in his adoption of the Timonian pose. Having no longer a world-wide audience before whom he could play the jovial _rôle_ of Bacchus or Hercules, he now acted his dramatic parts before the eyes of an inner love of pretence; and with a kind of honest and boyish charlatanism he paraded the halls of the Palace in the grim but not original character of the reveller who banqueted with his good friend Death. Antony actually had no intention of dying: he hoped to be allowed to retire, like his late colleague, Lepidus, the third triumvir, into an unmolested private life; but the paradoxical situation in which he now found himself, that of a state prisoner sent back, as it were, on bail to the luxuries of his home, could not fail to be turned to account by this “colossal child.”