Isaac Asimov - Asimov’s Guide To Shakespear. Volume 1

(Incidentally, in this play Octavius Caesar is always referred to as "Caesar," where he was always referred to as "Octavius" in Julius Caesar. I shall call him "Octavius Caesar" in order to avoid confusing him with Julius Caesar.)

Cleopatra gets what she wants. The baited Antony cries out:

—Act I, scene i, lines 33-34

He refuses to hear the messengers and leaves.

The soldiers, Philo and Demetrius, who have watched these proceedings with surprise and disapproval, cannot believe that Antony can be so careless of his own interests. Demetrius says:

—Act I, scene i, line 56

Demetrius, fresh from Rome, knows what Octavius Caesar is doing, if Antony does not.

Octavius Caesar, young though he was, was one of the master politicians of history. He lost no time in frivolity of any kind. He was a cold, shrewd man, who never made a serious mistake, and whose destiny it was to carry through to a conclusion the plans of his great-uncle, Julius Caesar. He was not, perhaps, as brilliant as the great Julius in war or literature, but he was even wiser in politics, for he carried through the necessary governmental reforms without ever making use of the hated word "king," but making himself in the end far greater than a king.

Nor did Octavius Caesar have the romantic appeal of Antony, or Antony's ability to orate, or his talent for putting on a kind of bluff, hail-fellow-well-met exterior that made him tremendously popular with the soldiers. Octavius could never be loved till age, and the realization at last of his greatness, had made him a father figure to the people.

Antony always underrated him and did not realize that the young man was building a network of alliances with politicians and generals, binding them to himself by self-interest rather than love, and weaving a net that would end by making him all-powerful.

Shakespeare too underprizes him, but this is necessary for the sake of the drama. The audience sympathy must be with the lovable profligate and not with the cool politician.

Nevertheless, though all audiences must "root" for Antony (for Shakespeare wills it so, and wins me over too), truth compels one to say that Octavius Caesar was by far the greater man of the two and that it would have been a world tragedy if circumstance had allowed Mark Antony to beat him.

—Act I, scene i, lines 59-61

Octavius Caesar, in his ceaseless war against Antony, made skillful use of propaganda. When the two triumvirs were at peace, Octavius carefully sapped the other's strength in the West by spreading tales of his profligacy.

Cicero's fiery and vituperative speeches in the last year of his life had covered Antony with slime. And though Cicero's invective was remorselessly exaggerated, much of it stuck. Antony, who did carouse and who loved luxury, gave all too much ground for believing much worse about him than was true.

Octavius Caesar made use of Cicero's speeches and also made use of the new matter that Antony offered. Antony was with this "foreign queen." Rome had fought many wars with Eastern monarchs and it was easy to escalate this affair with Cleopatra into threatened treason.

In contrast, Octavius Caesar never stopped playing the part of the true Roman, industrious, grave, honorable, and devoted to public affairs.

He himself was in love with no exotic temptress. He had been married twice to fine Roman girls. He had had no sons, though. His first wife was childless and his second had one daughter. He was soon to marry a third and last time, however, to the best one yet, a girl named Livia.

Livia was not yet twenty, but she was already married, had a fine young son, and was pregnant with (as it turned out) a second son. She divorced her husband to marry Octavius Caesar, but there was no stigma attached to divorce in those days. She became a model Roman matron, who remained Octavius' wife for the rest of his long life; they remained married for fifty-two years, a phenomenal length of time for a marriage in those days. Livia then lived on as his revered widow for fifteen more years. What's more, although she had no children by Octavius Caesar, her own children by her earlier marriage proved capable warriors and one of them succeeded his stepfather to the rule of all Rome.

The city of Rome was filled, then, with talk of how wicked Mark Antony was and how noble and good Octavius Caesar was, and this played an important part in Octavius' schemes. It was part of Antony's folly that he continually gave men cause to look upon these exaggerated rumors as true (as Demetrius points out) and that he never made an effort to set up effective counterpropaganda of his own. He was entirely too trusting in his own reputation and capacity as a warrior. -As though that were everything.

The scene shifts to Cleopatra's palace, where we find the Queen's ladies in waiting having fun at the expense of a soothsayer, who nevertheless makes some statements which turn out to have dramatic irony. He predicts, for instance, that Cleopatra's lady in waiting Charmian will outlive her mistress, and so she does in the end-by about a minute.

At one point, though, Charmian asks him to predict some ridiculous fortunes, including:

—Act I, scene ii, lines 27-28

This serves to set the time of the play in a way peculiarly useful to Shakespeare's audience. It is the time in which Herod "the Great" is on the throne of Judea.

Judea had lost its independence in 63 b.c. (twenty-two years before the time this play opens), when Pompey (see page I-255) had absorbed it into the Roman realm. It had been given some internal freedom, however, and Pompey made the capable Antipater its king. Antipater was from Idumaea (the biblical Edom) and was not a Jew by birth, though he had become one by conversion. He was assassinated in 43 b.c., just a year after Julius Caesar had been.

His eldest surviving son, Herod, also a converted Jew, and now thirty years old, was the natural successor, but the Eastern provinces were in a ferment. Brutus and Cassius were trying to strengthen themselves for the fight against Mark Antony and Octavius, and the Parthians were doing their best to take advantage of the disorder in Rome. In fact, after the Battle of Philippi, the Parthians swarmed all over Syria and Judea, and Herod was forced to flee.

He came to Antony for support, and this Antony gave him and continued to give him even though Cleopatra bitterly opposed Herod. Herod became King of Judea, then, at just about the time that Charmian refers to him so jestingly. Still, things didn't settle sufficiently for Herod actually to enter Jerusalem and take the throne till 37 B.C.

The reference to the child to whom Herod might do homage is clear enough too. Whenever the political fortunes of the Jews declined, then-hopes for an ideal king or "anointed one" rose. (The Hebrew word for "anointed one" is "Messiah.")

Now that the briefly independent Jewish kingdom under the Maccabees had fallen and the Romans were in control, Messianic hopes rose. All Judea seemed to wait for some child to be born who would be the ideal king and under whom the world system would finally break apart, with Jerusalem becoming the capital of the world and all the nations confessing the one true God.