heart parted betwixt two friends
That do afflict each other,
(III. vi. 77.)

or if Antony describes her equipoise of feeling as

the swan’s down-feather,
That stands upon the swell at full of tide,
And neither way inclines,
(III. ii. 48.)

it is not because she regards them both with equal tenderness. Her brother has her love; her husband, so long as he deserves it, has her duty. But when he forfeits his claim, she has done with him, unlike Plutarch’s Octavia, who pursues him to the end, and beyond the end, with a self-forgetfulness that her mere covenant could never call forth. Of all this there is nothing in the play. Her appeal to Antony in defence of Caesar is far warmer than her appeal to Caesar on behalf of Antony, and when she definitely hears that Antony has not only joined Cleopatra against her brother but has installed Cleopatra in her own place, she merely says, “Is it so?” and falls silent. No wonder. She is following Antony’s instructions to the letter:

Let your best love draw to that point, which seeks
Best to preserve it.
(III. iv. 21.)

And again:

When it appears to you where this begins,
Turn your displeasure that way; for our faults
Can never be so equal that your love
Can equally move with them.
(III. iv. 33.)

But this tacit assumption, fully borne out by her previous words, that the claims of husband and brother are equal in her eyes, and that the precedence is to be determined merely by a comparison of faults, shows how little of wifely affection Octavia felt, though doubtless she would be willing to fulfil her responsibilities to the smallest jot and tittle.

The hurried, loveless and transitory union, into which Antony has entered only to suit his convenience, for as Enobarbus says, “he married but his occasion here,” and into which Octavia has entered only out of deference to her brother who “uses his power unto her,” has thus merely a political and moral but no emotional significance. This Roman marriage lies further apart from the love story of Antony than the marriage in Brittany does from the love story of Tristram. This diplomatic alliance interferes as little with Octavia’s sisterly devotion to Octavius as the political alliances of Marguerite d’Angoulême interfered with her sisterly devotion to Francis I. And much is gained by this for the play. In the first place the hero no longer, as in the biography, offends us by fickleness in his grand idolatry and infidelity to a second attachment, on the one hand, or by ingratitude to a longsuffering and loving wife on the other. But just for that reason Octavia does not really enter into his life, and claims no full delineation. She is hardly visible, and does not disturb our sympathies with the lovers or force on us moral regards by demuring on them and chastising them with her sober eyes. Nevertheless visible at intervals she is, and then she seems to tell of another life than that of Alexandrian indulgence, a narrower life of obligations and pieties beside which the carnival of impulse is both glorified and condemned. And she does this not less effectually, but a great deal less obtrusively, that in her shadowy form as she flits from the mourning-chamber to the altar at the bidding of her brother, and from Athens to Rome to preserve the peace, we see rather the self-devoted sister than the devoted wife. For in the play she is sister first and essentially, and wife only in the second place because her sisterly feeling is so strong.

Still more slightly sketched than the domestic loyalty of Octavia or even than the military loyalty of Scarus, is the loyalty of Eros the servant; but it is the most affecting of all, for it is to the death. Characteristically, he who obtains the highest spiritual honours that are awarded to any person in the play, is one of a class to which in the prime of ancient civilisation the possibility of any moral life would in theory have been denied. Morality was for the free citizen of a free state: the slave was not really capable of it. And indeed it is clear that often for the slave, who might be only one of the goods and chattels of his owner, the sole chance of escape from a condition of spiritual as well as physical servitude would lie in personal enthusiasm for the master, in willing self-absorption in him. But in a world like that of Antony and Cleopatra such personal enthusiasm, as we have seen, is almost the highest thing that remains. So it is the quondam slave, Eros the freedman, bred in the cult of it, who bears away the palm. Antony commands him to slay him:

When I did make thee free, sworest thou not then
To do this when I bade thee? Do it at once;
Or thy precedent services are all
But accidents unpurposed. Draw, and come.
(IV. xiv. 81.)

But Eros by breaking his oath and slaying himself, does his master a better service. He cheers him in his dark hour by this proof of measureless attachment:

Thus do I escape the sorrow
Of Antony’s death.
(IV. xiv. 94.)