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