Archetypal Seizure of Mark Antony
Presented on: Tuesday, June 11, 1985
Presented by: Roger Weir
Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 26 of 54
Archetypal Seizure of Mark Antony
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, June 11, 1985
Transcript:
The date is June the 11th, 1985. This is the Tuesday night session at Whirling Rainbow by Roger Weir.
Archetypal Seizure of Marc Antony. Archetypal Seizure.
They spell out Caesar. Caesar, Caesar, Caesar, Caesar, Caesar. Okay. Yeah. It's like an epileptic fit all right. And it's important for us to have this bridge because between Julius Caesar and Augustus there is a definite watershed in world history. And in fact, with Julius Caesar, there is the ambitious personal attempt to seize power, because it's there to have and because you're the best man in the field. But with Augustus, the situation has changed. It's no longer something that you would like to do. It is something that you have to do. A compulsive element rises in world history in the second half of the first century BC, and this compulsive element is like one of those hot desert winds blowing off the Sahara, desiccating everything and creating unease and anxiety in an entire population.
The figure that is the transition is Cleopatra. She is the single embodiment of the transition, and Cleopatra will increasingly, at public ceremonies, display herself in more and more opulent grandeur, more gold, more jewels, more silks, until finally, Cleopatra will display herself in robes which were sacred to the goddess Isis, and she will parade herself as the new Isis. And her first attempt at having a royal consort for this theater of the ages, mad men only, was Julius Caesar. But Cleopatra was a young girl when she met Julius Caesar. Even so, she had a son by him named Caesarion. But when she meets Mark Antony, she is a full-grown woman of 28 - rapacious, capacious.
As Plutarch says, she was easily the most outstanding woman of her time, if not all time. She was fluent in every language under the sun. She could speak with anyone, and she could mix her languages instantaneously. She was a linguistic giant. She spoke ancient Egyptian and was probably the only Ptolemy to ever master that very difficult language. She spoke Hebrew; she spoke Syrian and Armenian, as well as Greek as well as Latin, as well as a dozen other dialects. So that Cleopatra, in our estimation, has to be understood to be an incredibly intelligent woman. But her intelligence is given to us in this facility with language. Her intelligence was not the disciplined, rooted, structured, developed, kind - not built like a tree, but built like a volcano, explosive, able to destroy if not build. The new Isis is actually almost an anti-Isis. Her intense devotion to preserve life meant to preserve the continuity of the tradition which she had inherited at whatever cost. But her most dangerous capacity, aside from the fluency and language, was the mobility and imagery that she was able to evoke out of men, especially men of power, especially the most powerful men of the age. And while she was young and fairly inexperienced with Julius Caesar, she was fully mature when it came to Mark Antony, and she almost made it. And only Augustus would be immune. Only Octavian, having understood so closely by his, I guess we should call them, in deference to FDR, his brain trust saved Augustus from going down the same path.
The difference between Octavian and Mark Antony will be the difference in the men behind them. Mark Antony will have generals behind him. Worldly men experienced with arms and armor and armies. But Octavian will have behind him the most talented intellectuals of the day. He will have his personal friends, the great poet Horace, the epic poet Virgil, the great Etruscan intelligence man Maecenas. He will have trustworthy military men like Agrippa and so forth. But mainly it's the quality of vision behind Augustus tutoring him all the while. And Augustus will start with Cicero, where Julius Caesar left off. But in the frantic heydays of the Second Triumvirate, it will be Augustus who finally sells out Cicero and allows him to be murdered in late 43 BC. And Antony and his voracious hate for a man who understands him will have Cicero's head and right hand cut off and sent to him, and he will don them like caricatures, like masks, and a scepter will prance around his villa, and then he will have them sent to the Roman Senate and nailed to the podium as a sign. And this will be the first major crucifixion in the age is Cicero on the gold, greed, and insane ambition of Mark Antony's imagination, and is the first indication of the seizure of Mark Antony by an archetype. The first indication that he is no longer just a big man getting careless. No longer a strong man getting ambitious. He will be something more. Something with which Julius Caesar was broaching upon in himself. But because he had prepared himself all of his life for it, Caesar, Julius Caesar, was able to handle it. He was able to be, as Shakespeare, said, the pole star, the one constant, unmoving center in an age where everyone else is moving. And the trick was to get them rotating all together around you. And Mark Antony will find that he is not a pole star. He will find that he is a comet blazing in the night, unable to handle the energies that come to him.
Our most trustworthy guide in this whole affair is Plutarch, and we have to go to Plutarch rather than any other of the ancient historians. As we will see in about two months, in more detail, Plutarch was a high priest of the mysteries. He was extremely refined. He was extremely moral in the sense that we would understand it today. And he has a kind of religious side to his vision which allows him to see human character in its fulsomeness, to see human character not only in its personal aspect, but in its transpersonal depths and heights, and in transpersonal historical context. And Plutarch, more than any other figure in the ancient world, will be a master of human psychology and human character.
Well, Shakespeare, when he was young, had only Ovid and Plutarch to learn from. And from Plutarch he learned character, and the greatness of Shakespeare's vision of character comes from apprenticing himself to Plutarch's great vision, so you can see and appreciate how efficacious such a person is. The translation I'm going to use is in the Penguin Classics volume the Makers of Rome. Plutarch begins... he tells us about the great descent of Mark Antony's family, how they considered that they were descended from Hercules. And he says, the amazing thing about the reports of Mark Antony was that he looked like the statues of Hercules. He had a well-trimmed full dark beard, a broad forehead, rather musculature in his bearing, an aquiline nose. And Antony, as a young man, prided himself on his profligacy, with women, saying, like my ancestor Hercules, I must leave my seed all over the world. I must rear hundreds of families. He will say this in jest when he is 20, he will mourn for his soul when he is 53, after being seized by this archetypal energy which he so carelessly and carelessly invites upon himself in his youth, as was once carved above a lintel. If the god is called, he will come. Sometimes he comes even when not called. [Itrillionan?] called or uncalled, the god will be there.
Plutarch tells us in his Lives, the Parallel Lives, the parallel biography, that the way in which the gods manifested themselves were as if it were like a wind that blew into human beings. And in fact, when we look for a definition in comprehensive terms of what the action of a god was upon a human being, our best guide is to detain ourselves for a moment and go from Plutarch for just a few minutes to Virgil, who we will get to increasingly because increasingly Virgil will be our best, truest guide to what happened in book six of the Aeneid. There is a section where Aeneas is having to go to the Cumaean Sibyl with the question, where may we settle down? Where may we, flaying Trojans, after all this time, settle down. And he is taken to the Cumaean Sibyl, whose cave was in the area of the Bay of Naples, the northern end of the Bay of Naples. And this area, of course, because of Mount Vesuvius, the underground tectonics of the area are extremely complex, and there are a lot of interesting labyrinthian caves.
For instance, Virgil will describe the Cumaean Sibyl Cave as having one hundred mouths, one hundred entrances and exits, and there will be strange gases in the area and strange winds. Here is Virgil's description of what happens to a human being when the divinity comes and fills them with that prophetic vision.
[from the Rolfe Humphries translation] "The story held them; They would have studied it longer, but Achates came from his mission; with him came the priestess, Deiphobe, daughter of Glaucus, who tends the temple for Phoebus and Diana; She warned Aeneas: It is no such sights the time demands; far better to offer sacrifice, seven chosen bullocks, seven chosen ewes, a herd without corruption.' They were prompt in their obedience, and the priestess summoned the Trojans to the lofty temple. The rocks vast side is hollowed into a cavern with a hundred mouths, a hundred open portals, whence voices rush, the answers of the Sibyl. They had reached the threshold, and the virgin cried: It is time to seek the fates; the god is here, the god is here, behold him.' And as she spoke before the entrance, her countenance and color changed, and her hair tossed loose, and her heart was heaving, her bosom swollen with frenzy; she seemed taller, her voice not human at all, as the god's presence drew nearer, and took hold on her. Aeneas,' she cried, Aeneas, are you praying? Are you being swift in prayer? Until you are, the house of the gods will not be moved, nor open its mighty portals.' More than her speech, her silence made the Trojans cold with terror, and Aeneas prayed from the depth of his heart
"
Virgil is one of the greats. As you can well appreciate, this presence of the divine had always been in things. It had been in weird chasms in the ground. It had been in strange sacred groves. It had been in very peculiarly shaped mountains. The gods had been in things, and men had made sacred things from time immemorial. They had made temples where the presence of the god could happen. They had made statues which could be filled with the presence of the god. But men had now made men and not statues. They had made personalities instead of temples. They had stood out and over against nature, so that they were more than mountains, more than groves. The human person was now the target of the manifestation of divinity. And in this last half of the first century BC, again and again, we see the spectacle of human beings being grabbed and seized, electrocuted by divine power.
Mark Antony will become the most conspicuous person for this, and Octavian Caesar, remembering his uncle Julius Caesar and seeing what happened to Mark Antony, will guard himself well, and we will see when we get to Augustus, that one of the first things he does to consolidate his power is that he will call in all of the Sibylline Oracles to one place a special building, which he will build in the forum of Rome, the Ara Pacis, the Temple of Peace. And he will bring all of the prophetic writings together, and it will be a state crime to hold back any prophetic writings from this collection, so that he will gather all the metaphysical lightning together in one place and hope to ground it. And in the bottom of the Temple of Peace will be a sacred mural that will run around the whole periphery, and the imagery will be based upon a great ceremony. In frieze-sculptured form, a ceremonial procession leading up to a divine family, and the divine family will be centered around the divine mother, who will be seated on the throne, and under her will be carved in Latin the words, tellus mater - mother earth - who will ground this divine energy from the gods that has now come and terrorized man. For the gods no longer come to the temples of the statues of the groves of the mountains. They come to human beings who are more and more frenetic targets for divine arrows of energy, which they are unable to handle. Having called forth these capacities, mankind will be in terror of them.
Antony was born in 83 BC, so he comes just at the time when Sulla was having his heyday with his prescriptions and becoming the first dictator in Roman history to grab, momentarily, control of the entire state. Who will put to death thousands of individuals so that he can seize their property? So, Marc Antony comes in with this kind of a background. In fact, his grandfather had been killed by a precursor of Sulla, the tyrant named Marius, a demagogue who was there just before Sulla. His father will be a military commander, who will earn the nickname of Creticus, because he lost a lot of Roman troops in a battle in Crete. When Mark Antony's mother was of the Julian clan, the same clan that Julius Caesar will come from, and so she was of the Caesar family. And Mark Antony's father will actually be put to death by Cicero because he was in the Catiline conspiracy. And part of the great hatred that Mark Antony had for Cicero was that his father, as well as the other conspirators, were executed without a trial. And if you recall, this was one of the great issues of the day. Are you to save the Roman Republic by completely denying all of the legal basis upon which the protection of the individual had been developed? And of course, Antony hated Cicero for this.
In his first development, Mark Antony was given a great education, a great background, but he fell in with the generation that was going for power in any way that it could. He became one of these young men around Rome who helped drum up the mobs to go out on parade so that they would protest against individuals by getting a gang with clubs and go out and beat someone in the public forum, or they would go in and smash someone's villa or they would steal their property. All of this to intimidate. So, he was in on these goon squads, and one of the influential people behind Mark Antony's youth was the very important tribune named Curio. And Mark Antony received all of the worst education from Curio's bad habits, his love of gambling, his seducing of other men's wives, his hard drinking bouts. Most of this came with keeping companion with Curio.
Then, when Julius Caesar unleashed Clodius, the fierce character villain who was specifically to intimidate Cicero, Mark Antony joined Clodius' group. And then, because of the great expose that Cicero was able to bring to bear Mark Antony left Rome. The city became a little bit too hot to handle, and he went east. He went to Greece. He learned rhetoric and public speaking there. He learned how to declaim himself with eloquence. And then he went into the Roman armed forces. One of the generals around Pompey named Gabinius. And under Gabinius, Mark Antony was introduced to Judea - Syria and Judea. And they put down a Jewish revolt that a man named Aristobulus instituted around 57 BC.
Remember in our background that the Jewish community had broken into three distinct parties. Two of them were political - the Pharisees and the Sadducees - and the third was religious - the Essenes. We've talked about this before, and we've talked about how when the religious deepening of man's consciousness gets to a certain point where he is faced with a choice of being either egotistical or of being selfless, his reliance goes back a space. Is back to a context, the most immediate context that he has, and he looks for some balance in the realm of expressive form to base himself on. It's then that a displacement happens and the old feeling toned mythological stage that was, so to speak, subconscious, tends to rise to the surface, and the conscious development of expressive form tends to want to sink below consciousness, below the discursive thought levels of consciousness, into a subconscious mode. But when the mythological imagery rises into consciousness with this dilemma, this moral dilemma at issue, it tends to change its nature as it comes into consciousness and becomes politicized. And it's on this basis that the Jewish community was split into three: the Sadducees and the Pharisees became political parties, not religious groups; the Essenes, who refuse to let expressive form sink out of consciousness, became a religious body so that the Jewish community was in three parts. Two parts of it were political polarities that fought against each other. The third resolving part, which would have been a resolving part for the two political parties if they had been on the same horizon, but because they were religious and not political, because they were after personal religious experience and not a political theological understanding, they were exiled, they were outcast. They were not allowed to participate. They were impractical, is how the phrase runs every time. So, they retreated to the desert. They retreated to their small communities. They retreated to underground groups within the cities.
There were certain key passwords and handshakes and so forth that would identify you. And so, if you went to the Essenes, you dropped out of the political polarity. That political polarity became increasingly unstable, as we saw, because it no longer had any kind of a conscious control. There was no kind of an expressive form matrix which allowed for it to have a sense of proportion and sanity. And increasingly the Jewish mind became politically unstable. And in one of these swings, a man named Aristobulus grabbed power. But Judea had already become a state in the Roman protection. And so, the Roman army under Pompey, which was in charge of keeping order in the east, sent Gabinius and young Mark Antony in to quell this disturbance.
When they went in, Mark Antony had his first experience with the Jewish people, and this was followed up by his first experience with the Egyptian people, the Alexandrians, and this is the first time that he meets Cleopatra. She's about 14 years of age. Cleopatra's father, the last of the regular Ptolemies - Ptolemy Auletes - had been ousted from his kingdom, had been thrown out, and his daughter Berenice had taken control. And it was through Roman might that Ptolemy Auletes was put back into power. This was done even though Egypt was not a Roman province. They were paid ostensibly as mercenaries, but the sum was astounding. It was 10,000 talents. A talent was about a shoebox full of gold. 10,000 of them is an enormous sum.
The interference by Rome in the affairs of Egypt is what gave Julius Caesar the right, later on, to go in and wage personal war against the Alexandrians for their betrayal of Pompey. And as we saw last week, Egypt was not made a Roman province. It was not added to the Roman state. It was the personal possession of Julius Caesar. And so, when Mark Antony will go in, he will go in with the idea of regaining Egypt as a personal possession. And this will be the forerunner to considering, as Augustus will eventually, that the Roman Empire is really the personal possession of the emperor and its subjects are like his family, and he is like the pater familias to man. And so, the father of all mankind will rise as an archetypal significance around the turn of the millennium. It will be in the air and everywhere, and its origins are here.
Plutarch tells us that the bravado, the daring do of Mark Antony impressed Julius Caesar so much that when he made his triumphal entry into the city of Rome, he invited Mark Antony to ride with him in his chariot so that the two of them entered Rome together. Augustus, the future Augustus Octavian Caesar was only 16 at this time, and he rode on horseback behind Julius Caesar. We know that Julius Caesar's will left everything to Octavian on the surface. In personal relationships, Mark Antony was his chosen deputy, his master of the horse, which was the Roman title. When the dictator was not in Rome, the master of the horse was in charge of affairs, but in his will, he left everything to Octavian and was preparing Octavian to take over. This was to be a family affair, the Caesars. And as we know in retrospect, there would be twelve great Caesars before the line would completely run itself out in madness and terror. This is just the beginning of it.
So, this development of Mark Antony's personality by ruffians like Curio, by those inflated individuals like Julius Caesar, by those events which made him an implacable foe against people like Cicero, who were the embodiment of reasoned intelligence in his day, all contributed to the instability of Mark Antony's character when he came back from Egypt, from Asia. When he came back with Julius Caesar and had spoken on his behalf in the Senate many times, and then had fled in a disguise as a slave - he loved to put on a slave's disguise - and fled the Senate when the going was too rough and had reported to Caesar that the entire Senate was against him. And Cicero recorded that as Helen of Troy started the Trojan War, Marc Antony started the Civil War. Well, it was not quite that cut and dry. Julius Caesar had been preparing for thirty years to take control, but it was that event that precipitated it.
After the assassination of Julius Caesar, right after the assassination, in order to balance the situation out, Marc Antony did not deliver his famous funeral speech of Julius Caesar. That's how Shakespeare puts it. Actually, what happened is he invited those who had murdered Julius Caesar to a dinner. He invited Brutus to his house, and Octavian invited Cassius to his house in order to keep the peace, in order to keep a lid on the thing. It was such a tremendous event. It was so filled with poignancy that they were numbed; they were stunned. And for the first twelve to fifteen hours, it didn't manifest itself. In fact, things went along so well that the body of Julius Caesar, still clad in the bloodstained toga, was placed on a bier in the Roman Forum, and great crowds of aristocrats and freedmen and other powerful individuals throng this great open area. Crowd, probably of somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000, and Mark Antony was chosen to give the eulogy by all concerned - by the conspirators, as well as those associated with the victim - and in fact, the first parts of his speech were very calm and praising. It was only during the speaking, seeing the body of the god-man tattered in front of him, and seeing over this visage, over this body, the eyes of the individuals there, that Mark Antony became more and more possessed by the spirit of the moment, by the momentousness of the event. And as the speech went on, his rhetoric and pitch raised, his hackles went up, and he was literally possessed and taken over. So, at the end of the speech, he grabbed the bloodstained toga off and wrapped it around himself and shouted out that the murderers must be caught. And this heinous crime of all time must be avenged.
And this tremendous violent reaction broke out and the conspirators and their supporters had to flee for their lives. They fled Italy. They went just in the same pattern that Pompey had gone, fleeing before Julius Caesar. Remember, Pompey was filled with terror at the aspect of facing Caesar, not Caesar the man, but Caesar the giant, the spectacle. It's difficult for us to appreciate this. Maybe some of the older people can remember the specter of Hitler somewhat larger than life, terrifying because of a maniac kind of quality. It was this kind of quality that Pompey saw in Julius Caesar. It was this kind of quality that Cassius and Brutus and the other conspirators saw in Julius Caesar and evoked the murder. They had to kill him. It was an archetypal event. They were compelled by the situation, by the contents to perpetrate this assassination. And this event lingered in the air, psychologically seeped into the depths in terms of the feeling tone, and in fact, energized the whole mythological tapestry that Julius Caesar had set up so that it rose to the surface and pursuer, and pursued alike reenacted again the same events that Julius Caesar and Pompey and Crassus - the First Triumvirate - had enacted. Brutus and Cassius fled to Greece, just like Pompey had Mark Antony and Octavian getting together with a general named Lepidus, whom they left in charge of Rome, then took their forces and went to Greece, crossing southern Italy into Greece, and fought against Mark Antony almost in the same location as the Battle of Pharsalus, the Battle of Philippi.
The same kinds of events were happening again. For those who were watching the age, it was like a nightmare pattern had begun to engrave itself upon the Roman character, and as the events became more and more charged with energy, they began to run in a rut, and one could see that this was going to - like a nightmare - happen again and again and again. This will be the convincing argument that Octavian will use for the Roman people. He will say, we must stop this now, or we are condemned to live these events again and again and again. And Octavian will convince the Roman people that the scapegoat in this whole nightmare is not, was not, Julius Caesar and is not Mark Antony, but is Cleopatra. And when he wages the final war, the Roman people as a people will declare war not on Mark Antony, but on Cleopatra. It was written out, it was engraved. There was a whole process of declaring war. There was a ceremonial throwing of the spear before the Temple of Bologna, and the entire event was gauged against this monster from the east. Cleopatra, who had unleashed these unholy energies and men, had drawn out of them these monstrous capacities, these recurrent nightmares, which the wholesome Roman people were now prey to on a wholesale basis, that she must be exterminated before it can happen again.
And it'll be on that basis that Octavian will win the day. And when he wins, he will not only build this special temple to house all the prophecies to ground them, he will close the doors of the Janus Temple, the oldest surviving temple from Roman antiquity. It had been there for almost 700 years. It had been built by Numa Pompilius, who had laid the basic structure of the Roman constitution from its beginnings. Numa Pompilius was rather like our Benjamin Franklin. And the doors to the Temple of Janus were closed when the Roman people were at peace and open when they were at war, and they had not been closed, except for one brief day since the time of Numa Pompilius, some 700 years before. And Augustus will be absolutely frantic to get them closed and keep them closed. And three times in a five-year period he will, with great ceremony, close them. There'll be an outbreak and he'll have to open them up and quench it with overkill and come back and close them and the same thing will happen again. And then finally he will close them, and then he will proclaim for the world the Pax Romana, the Roman peace, and it will be his effect of saying to the gods, to the divinity, all man is at peace. Therefore, you can quit haunting us now. The world is unified and at peace, and there is no reason to come into human affairs anymore. And this Pax Romana will last for the lifetime of Augustus. It will even last for his heir, Tiberius Caesar.
And then, almost because of the volcanic pressures, again it will start to break out. And in every season after that, it will be one nightmare after another. And they will believe that a Pandora's box of divinity has been released upon the world. And they will try, in all kinds of strategies, to ride the whirlwind. Caligula will actually promote madness in himself, hoping thereby to be safe from the terror because of insanity. Nero will try to be as evil as a man can possibly be, thinking that one will then be so accursed that the gods will just leave you alone out of disgust. And so on and so on. And none of it will work because none of them went to the root of the problem. And in fact, there will be almost no peace in the Roman Empire again until the time of Trajan, a hundred years after.
It'll be a century of madness. All of this has its origins, now, in what happened to Julius Caesar and what happened to Mark Antony. And the temporary universal solution that Octavian will choose for himself. Plutarch tells us about Cleopatra. He says the love for Cleopatra, which now entered his life came is the final and crowning mischief which could befall him. It excited to the point of madness many passions which corrupted all those redeeming qualities in him which were still capable of resisting temptation. The occasion on which he lost his heart came as follows. While he was preparing for the campaign against the Parthians, he sent word to Cleopatra, ordering him to meet him in Cilicia to answer the charge that she had raised money for Cassius, one of the conspirators who killed Julius Caesar. So, he sent one of his triumvirs, one of his men - Delius. And Delius went to Cleopatra, and he said, you know, Mark Antony is a very kindly man with the emphasis on man, if you will put on all of your fancy cosmetics and go in style, I'm sure that he'll receive you with his manly kindliness. And she got the message. And so, she turned up. They met - where else - at Tarsus. What was Tarsus? You remember? Tarsus is where Cicero went and set up a school. And it's the place where Saint Paul will be born.
The fatal meeting between Antony and Cleopatra was at Tarsus. The Roman camp was miles long, and Antony was seated with his generals in his tent, plotting in a manly fashion. And there was a great commotion. And after several hours of this great commotion, Antony came out of his general's tent, and he realized that the city was empty - all the troops were gone. That everybody was down at the river, and they could hear these great cheers coming up, because coming up the river on her royal barge was Cleopatra, decked out as Venus lying on her couch. And the barge was tended not by men, but by women in all kinds of skimpy costumes handling the thing. And there were so many incense burners on the barge that the fragrance went miles inland. And she sent a message to Antony that she would like to meet him. Well, Antony showed up and she fettered him with a meal so sumptuous that Plutarch says it is fabled, even in later Roman Empire annals. In fact, Antony tried for weeks afterwards to outdo her and found that he didn't have enough money or goods to outdo the dinner that she had prepared for him.
In fact, Plutarch tells us that his grandfather was a friend of a certain individual who knew one of the cooks at these Cleopatra dinners, and the cook told this friend of Plutarch's grandfather that they didn't prepare just one meal. They prepared about a dozen meals because they didn't know just at what moment it - in a lull of lovemaking and frivolity and game playing - they would want to have dinner, so you had to have a dozen meals in different stages of prepare so that when they ask for it, you could give them a meal instantly with all the trimmings.
This is sumptuous, and this is a personal history from Plutarch's grandfather's friend. She brought out in Mark Antony the daring feelings that were alive in the old Greek mythological realm. The figures of Greek mythology at that period were untamed. They were still alive. It's difficult for us to appreciate that now, except that for us the Christian mythological figures are still alive, and we have to intuit by comparison the tremendous efficacy that this had, especially on a susceptible individual like Mark Antony, who is already permeated by fantasies of being descended from Hercules. In fact, the people in Cilicia in Asia Minor began a program of convincing Mark Antony that he was Dionysius. They began having great festivals and parades where they'd have the grapevine, the thyrsus staff, and all of the other Dionysian aspects, and they promoted the alliance between Antony and Cleopatra as the meeting of Isis and Dionysius - the final consummation of the age.
And what is surprising is that this imagery began to evoke a response in millions of people, and it didn't matter whether they were guarded, old fashioned, Republican Romans or whether they were devious, clever, and conniving Alexandrians, or whether they were unfettered barbarians from the wilds of what is now Turkey. All of these people of that time began to respond to this image base, and the fact that there were human beings who were living out these figures drew those energies out more than ever and began - as Uncle Carl Jung would say - to constellate the archetype not only in the person, but in the people of the age. The energy was in the air like a broadcast, and any time you tuned into a feeling a little more deeper than just a regular response, it was there. It was like a hypnotic quality. Plutarch says in many places that towards the end, Mark Antony's men began to fear for him because of the glazed look in his eyes that he would be seeing things that were larger than what life could hold.
We're running out of time, so I have to condense this somewhat.
Octavian was wise. He was a wise man. It's true that he could be cruel. He could throw away a man like Cicero when it was expedient to do so. But he was wise. He was wise largely because of the people behind him. And they counseled him. They said that Antony is larger than life. You cannot beat Mark Antony as a general, but you can't even attempt to touch him now because he is white hot with mythological energy. So, you're going to have to find some way to tone him down and work him in. And so, Octavian hit upon a plan. He looked at his recently widowed sister, Octavia, who was one of the grandest Roman ladies of her day: regal, dignified, intelligent, loyal. And she was a fantastic woman. And so, they lured Mark Antony back to Rome and made another alliance. Octavian and Mark Antony. And this time they brought in not only Lepidus, but one of the sons of Pompey - Sextus Pompeius - and they decided that this was going to be a stable relationship. And in order to cement the relationship, the bridge between Octavian and Antony had to be healed, and Mark Antony was then to marry the sister of Octavian.
In celebration of this marriage, Virgil wrote the Fourth Eclogue, which is called The Messianic Eclogue, which looks forward to the birth of a new king, a new superhero, to come from these most magnificent parents. The child of this marriage between Marc Antony, the descendant of Hercules and the sister of Octavia was to have been a super child. But in the quiet, traditional Roman way, there were two daughters born out of this marriage, and Octavia was pregnant with a third when Antony slipped out of the Roman net that had been made for him to save himself. And he went back to Asia, and he went back to Cleopatra. And Cleopatra, sensing that this was the last chance that she might have stayed with him day and night, wherever he would go she was there - she was there on the battlefields, she was there in the evenings, she was there for every function and every event. They became inseparable. If he wanted to play dice, she played dice. If he wanted to don disguises and go around as a slave and just listen to the city life, she would go with him. If he wanted to go to some other kingdom and negotiate, she would go.
Increasingly, though, Mark Antony, evoked by Cleopatra's capacity to illicit out this mythological energy, overcharged his political visionary capacity, and a final battle was finally set up at Actium in 31 BC, and Cleopatra was there with him before the battle. They went to the island of Samos, and they reveled for weeks on end as god and goddess, thinking to themselves, it is our children who are the heirs or inheritors of the age. They had had two sons, twins, and they had named them Alexander and Ptolemy Philadelphus. Mark Antony said, this is the sun and the moon of humanity. He had 800 ships when he went to Actium, but he couldn't function. And Octavian, not as great a military general but able to handle the energies, able to handle the proportions, the titanic armed forces.
Plutarch says it was as if the entire world held its breath on the days of the Battle of Actium, because the fate of the entire world was being settled in one grand final battle, an Armageddon, if there ever was one. And from the ruins of Actium, Mark Antony, and Cleopatra, still inseparable, went back to Alexandria and Mark Antony, haunted by now by the divine visions which just coursed and seethed through him, played kaleidoscopic carousels with his imagination and his memory, exiled himself to a little hut which he had built at the end of a long pier that he had built out into the great harbor of Alexandria. And he called this hut the Timonium, named after an ancient recluse in Athenian times. Two women who lived as a beggar recluse in the heart of Athens, in a little lean-to shed and the Athenian Forum. And he called this his temple, his Timonium, this little mud hut at the end of this mole, going out into the great harbor of Alexandria. If you remember now, the city of Alexandria was the largest urban skyline in the world at the time. The guard towers of Alexandria were 10 to 15 stories high. The Pharos Tower was 40 stories high. And here, surrounded by this urban landscape, is this mud hut holding the inheritor of Hercules energy. And he broke down. He got himself together enough to make one last charge. Augustus Octavian, by now become Augustus, had massed his Roman legions. Legion upon legion upon legion surrounding the entire city of Alexandria. He had finally brought to bear to show Cleopatra that Roman power was based upon a measured, controlled response, and that whatever the situation required, the Roman people would finance and send enough men, enough measured controlled response to win. And the entire city of Alexandria on the desert side, surrounded by Octavian's legions.
And Marc Antony got enough courage, got himself mentally back together, enough to mount a horse by himself with sword drawn and rushed out in battle, trying to evoke some Roman to come out of this massive line of tens of thousands of soldiers to give him a soldier's death, and no one would do it. They looked upon him with pity and horror that a Roman could sink so low, could be fried in this archetypal oil to a frazzle. He was despicable beyond all men.
When we get to Octavian, you'll see that these images never left him. That he was always conscious there, but for the measured, structured response. [unintelligible] and the basic impress that Augustus gave to world history was that of the Principate. That if you are going to rule with divine powers over man, you have to count yourself among men and not among the gods. You may be first among men, but you have to count yourself among men and not among the gods. And the basis of Roman power, the Roman Empire, the Roman church, the entire Roman mind structure, is that the community of man rises up to divinity but does not participate in it. That is for them, but always the Greek daring, the Greek mind is that the divine is attainable for man individually, and he should do it. He should go because that's his true realm. Only there is he free.
Well, that's about as much as we can do for tonight.
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