Antony

Plutarch

Plutarch. Plutarch's Lives, Vol. IX. Perrin, Bernadotte, translator. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1920.

His uncle, Lucius Caesar, being sought for and pursued, took refuge with his sister. She, when the executioners were at hand and trying to force their way into her chamber, stood in the doorway, spread out her arms, and cried repeatedly: Ye shall not slay Lucius Caesar unless ye first slay me, the mother of your imperator. By such behaviour, then, she got her brother out of the way and saved his life.

Now, for the most part, the government of the triumvirate was odious to the Romans; and Antony bore most of the blame, since he was older than Caesar, more powerful than Lepidus, and threw himself once more into his old life of pleasure and dissipation as soon as he had shaken off some of his troubles.

And to his general ill-repute there was added the great hatred caused by the house in which he dwelt. It had been that of Pompey the Great, a man no less admired for sobriety and for the orderly and democratic disposition of his life than because of his three triumphs. Men were distressed, therefore, to see the house closed for the most part against commanders, magistrates, and ambassadors, who were thrust with insolence from its doors, and filled instead with mimes, jugglers, and drunken flatterers, on whom were squandered the greater part of the moneys got in the most violent and cruel manner.

For the triumvirate not only sold the properties of those whom they slew, bringing false charges against their wives and kindred, while they set on foot every kind of taxation, but learning that there were deposits with the Vestal Virgins made by both strangers and citizens, they went and took them.