Because I was so happy, I grew more sensible, apt, swift to act, and imaginative in dealing with the issues of my kingdom. Merriment made me more accomplished, firmer. Who could defeat me now?
Antony, however, simply grew more himself with the sheer happiness of love. His inclination to be a child in all things strengthened. Gone was the grimly powerful face, replaced by a full moon shining down on all. He was totally a child, all games and whims and drunkenness. The unrestrained laughter of a child, caprice without peevishness, the endless intoxication of the night. But the child was also the offspring of an idiot, suffering uncontainable puerile rages, the freakishness of a boy general, the infatuation of juvenile poetry.
You had already been inclined to playfulness; your devotion to pleasure was notorious. When Caesar left you in charge in Rome, you toured the streets in your chariot drawn by lions. But now, under the influence of our happiness, you turned yourself into the young lion that true love tames. Learning docility, you were transformed into the innocent who knows neither how to attack nor how to defend himself. Lost were your warring instincts. But like a domesticated lion, you could still inflict wounds at the times when you forgot your own strength and failed to remember your situation.
With so much happiness always on hand, Antony turned himself into a toy. In his walk, in the face he showed to the world, he incarnated an obvious joy that defied all limits. Where the delicate fibers of my being drank in the earth’s strength, his merely fingered the water. Hence the mouth of those tiny roots stiffened with cold in the very presence of the fertile earth. They reached the water but they did not drink; they danced there but absorbed nothing. Our happiness did not help Antony to increase his strength. It did not make him grow or even maintain his power. Merely crazed with love, he turned toward the darker side of himself. There everything shattered to pieces. And as things flew apart, he lost his vigor. His caprices mounted in both number and size. Our love goaded them on. The love potion we both drank produced different types of intoxication in each of us. Mine fed my sanity. His made him twitch and tremble; it kept him day and night in a state of nervous excitement. It ruined him.
Here I refer to the first time we lived together. This was the way our story started. These were the characteristics of Antony’s first visit to Alexandria. We had met in Tarsus, where he had asked the Queen of Egypt to meet him, in hopes of renewing the alliance. How many weeks did we spend making love? How many months? The chronicles of Egypt state 120 days and some hours. Each one of those hours — said the private chronicle of my heart — was 120 times more ample than what we normally call an hour. Antony, for me you were the very definition of happiness at its maximum.
One morning, one of those first happy mornings, when we had gone fishing on Lake Mareotis, you exploded with rage because the fish refused to bite. Again and again, you insisted on changing rods. You were wasting time, instead of attending to the urgent business that the needs of your soldiers and the nonstop mail from Rome required. Your repeated efforts proved useless. You were shifting about more than the fish were, bellowing stupid, pointless curses in your rage. It was not a sight worthy of a triumvir. I ordered my servants to attach a magnificent salted herring to your hook. You felt the bait taken, pulled on the rod, and shouted with infantile glee. When you saw the joke, you laughed till you cried. Between the tears, I said to you, “Leave the fishing to fishermen and return to the proper business of a triumvir.” You kissed me, laughed again, but did not heed my advice. My calling you back to the realities of the world had no effect. From me you wanted a bridge to convey you out of this world. For you, loving me meant turning your back on everything that befitted the mouth of a governor, the eyes of a king, the mind of a triumvir. You used my love to turn your back on everything that required life, nourishment, commitment, tact, astuteness, moderation, and dash. That was why you loved me.
I was different. Love’s intoxication developed in me an appetite for governing and for life. My love for you, Antony, meant having your children, ruling my subjects, increasing my wealth, and adding to the size of my kingdom. My love for you kindled my intelligence; my power of decision learned shortcuts; my ambition caught fire. I wanted to live more, have more, do more. Handsome Mark Antony, Dionysus, your beauty was my delight and my strength. And it became my sanity. Joy brought me well-being.
To kiss you dressed me as a queen and grounded me as a woman. For you, our happiness was a cup to be drained at one gulp. Ruinous forces were let loose. To kiss me was the undoing, the complete destruction of the triumvir. What I call good did you harm, Antony. I did not cloy you, just as fine wine does not cloy the palate. But I could not inspire in you an appetite for greater things. When you saw me, you became blind to yourself. Your joy in me meant turning your back on what was alive, on everything the good earth produces. Intoxicated with loving happiness, you let your eyes stray from yourself; they stared in ecstasy, frozen motionless, indifferent to the world. Oblivious of your own body, you spun about. You were spurning the world; when you looked at yourself, you did so out of blind sockets, empty rims.
If anything disturbed your trance and you were forced to recognize what you had become, you exploded with rage. Fortunately, I was spared the sight of your conduct at Brundisium, for I had left Rome and, more concerned with my future than my past, boarded my ship for Cilicia. Your love brought me the highest imaginable glory but it also inflicted on me the thickest darkness of sorrows. Your madness and your limitless caprices — ever more insistent, frequent, irascible, and unreasonable — did to me what nothing else could — they destroyed my inner strength. Thanks to you, Mark Antony, I learned to dread each dawn, to see day break without glimpsing the very thing that first made me what I was. I mean, a certain coloring, which left me quick to find ingenious solutions, take nonstop pleasures in excess, and voice memorable words. That lively coloring of my mornings and evenings, the unquenched flame that had lit up my life — you left it dimmed where you did not extinguish it. I became vulnerable and open to harm. You turned me into a corpse prematurely, destitute of vital breath. All thanks to your insanity and idleness. Our love gave you no hunger for life, for building, improving, growing. The best moments of our lives were merely your chance to escape reality. You did not use them to make yourself master of Rome, lord of the world, a second Caesar. Your wallowing in our love served only to feed your appetite for self-destruction, for flight, for indulging your caprices to excess; and it was all because you were rotten inside before I ever met you.
Hear, O Selene, from where my love was born!
Antony, you were riddled with rottenness. As rotten as a woman who was once a queen but today is forced to share a bed with the friends of her master. Rotten with the rottenness of a man who fails his city in time of war and who knows that, though he still lives, he has forfeited his last chance to defend his mother, his wife, and his daughters from the assaults of his victorious foes. Rotten as the ignorant fool who cannot see that we nourish our lives on something other than grains, fruits, wines, and spices. Rotten as a king who drinks himself into a stupor, day and night, without attending to the duties of his throne, sowing hunger and hatred throughout his kingdom. Rotten as a leper. Rotten as a prophet who speaks his prophecies in words no one understands. Rotten as a poetaster or a second-rate musician reduced to beggary. Rotten as the man who sleeps with his own mother, forgetful of his condition as a mortal and blind to the anger of the gods. Rotten as a child who, born in the desert, is abandoned to live with beasts, forever ignorant of language, of the names of the gods or the story of Helios, a creature who sheds his human dignity as he dines on thistles and tries to shed his skin like a snake, when the sun beats down with scalding heat. Rotten as the ignoramus who does not realize that in every tree there is life and that within all things, all living beings, the words of the gods lie hidden, awaiting revelation. Rotten as the rebel who defies his own innate wisdom and insists on living his life as a blasphemer, trusting only in the power of his own brain, hoping to crush the helmets of his foes with a blow from a stone and a kick from a horse’s hoof, even as the enemy armies sweep forward in waves of terror. Rotten as the man is rotten who in a fit of fury beats his own mother after he has grown up in the darkest corners of the house, where like a dog he was thrashed with a stick. Rotten as the sluggard who does not know how to work, how to desire and act, even how to dream a reasonable dream.