Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: a Roman thought
- 1 Roman historians and the myth of Rome
- 2 The wronged Lucretia and the early republic
- 3 Self-inflicted wounds
- 4 ‘Like a Colossus’: Julius Caesar
- 5 Ben Jonson's Rome
- 6 O'erflowing the measure: Antony and Cleopatra
- 7 The city and the battlefield: Coriolanus
- 8 Tyranny and empire
- 9 Ancient Britons and Romans
- Postscript: Shakespeare and the republican tradition
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - O'erflowing the measure: Antony and Cleopatra
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 March 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: a Roman thought
- 1 Roman historians and the myth of Rome
- 2 The wronged Lucretia and the early republic
- 3 Self-inflicted wounds
- 4 ‘Like a Colossus’: Julius Caesar
- 5 Ben Jonson's Rome
- 6 O'erflowing the measure: Antony and Cleopatra
- 7 The city and the battlefield: Coriolanus
- 8 Tyranny and empire
- 9 Ancient Britons and Romans
- Postscript: Shakespeare and the republican tradition
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
CLEOPATRA AND THE DESTINY OF ROME
In Horace's ‘Cleopatra’ ode (Odes, 1.37), celebrating Octavius's victory at Actium, Cleopatra is presented as the enemy of Rome, and, initially at least, described in hostile terms, as a kind of monster. She is a ‘frenzied queen’, plotting destruction against Rome as a city and empire, surrounded by ‘a mob of polluted, foul creatures’, mad and drunk with her unrealistic hopes of conquest. One oddity of this poem is that Antony is never mentioned. The battle of Actium, rather than being a confrontation of Roman against Roman, in which the two most powerful political leaders in Rome, Antony and Octavius, contend for supremacy, with the issue very much in doubt, is presented as an unequal contest between virtuous Rome and a foreign enemy. In Horace's Epode 9, also celebrating the victory at Actium, Antony is described as behaving in a shameful manner, unworthy of any Roman. The charge against Antony here resembles the bitter reproach of Scarus in Antony and Cleopatra, after Antony, following Cleopatra, flees from the sea-battle.
scarus. I never saw an action of such shame.
Experience, manhood, honour, ne'er before
Did violate so itself.
(3.10.22–4)In Horace's Epode, the shameful act is not fleeing from the battle, abandoning his men, but going into battle at the head of an Egyptian army on behalf of a woman, in effect emasculating himself.
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- The Myth of Rome in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries , pp. 135 - 164Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011