Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

by Tom Holland

But not all the way, of course—not yet. Octavian had no intention of surrendering his triumviral powers while Antony held on to his, and for Antony, far distant from his native city, the restoration of the Republic hardly registered as a pressing issue. Instead, his ambitions were tending in a very different direction. For three hundred years, ever since Alexander, dreams of universal empire had haunted the imaginings of the Greeks, dreams that the Republic too, in the end, had come to share. Yet its suspicion of them had lingered, and even the greatest of its citizens—even Pompey, even Caesar himself—had feared to pursue them to the limits. So too had Antony—who had fled the temptings of a Macedonian queen to become the husband of a sober Roman matron. But four years had passed, four years of naked power such as no citizen had ever exercised in the East before—and the temptations, as they were fed, continued to gnaw. In the end Antony proved too self-indulgent, too besotted by his own pretensions, to resist them. Octavia—who was to remain loyal to her husband’s memory to the very end—was sent back to Rome. Meanwhile, once again, Aphrodite was summoned to the presence of the new Dionysus.