The case of Mark Antony
The case of Mark Antony affords one of the most extraordinary examples
of the power of unlawful love to lead its deluded and infatuated victim
into the very jaws of open and recognized destruction that history
records. Cases similar in character occur by thousands in common life;
but Antony's, though perhaps not more striking in itself than a great
multitude of others have been, is the most conspicuous instance that has
ever been held up to the observation of mankind.
In early life, Antony was remarkable, as we have already seen, for a
certain savage ruggedness of character, and for a stern and indomitable
recklessness of will, so great that it seemed impossible that any thing
human should be able to tame him. He was under the control, too, of an
ambition so lofty and aspiring that it appeared to know no bounds; and
yet we find him taken possession of, in the very midst of his career,
and in the height of his prosperity and success, by a woman, and so
subdued by her arts and fascinations as to yield himself wholly to her
guidance, and allow himself to be led about by her entirely at her will.
She displaces whatever there might have been that was noble and generous
in his heart, and substitutes therefor her own principles of malice and
cruelty. She extinguishes all the fires of his ambition, originally so
magnificent in its aims that the world seemed hardly large enough to
afford it scope, and instead of this lofty passion, fills his soul with
a love of the lowest, vilest, and most ignoble pleasures. She leads him
to betray every public trust, to alienate from himself all the
affections of his countrymen, to repel most cruelly the kindness and
devotedness of a beautiful and faithful wife, and, finally to expel this
wife and all of his own legitimate family from his house; and now, at
last, she conducts him away in a most cowardly and ignoble flight from
the field of his duty as a soldier--he knowing, all the time, that she
is hurrying him to disgrace and destruction, and yet utterly without
power to break from the control of his invisible chains.
