Antony

Plutarch

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

Lute-players like Anaxenor, flute-players like Xanthus, one Metrodorus, a dancer, and such other rabble of Asiatic performers, who surpassed in impudence and effrontery the pests from Italy, poured like a flood into his quarters and held sway there. It was past all endurance that everything was devoted to these extravagances.

For all Asia, like the famous city of Sophocles,[*](Thebes, in the Oedipus Rex, 4.)

  1. was filled alike with incense offerings,
  2. Alike with paeans, too, and voice of heavy groans.
At any rate, when Antony made his entry into Ephesus, women arrayed like Bacchanals, and men and boys like Satyrs and Pans, led the way before him, and the city was full of ivy and thyrsus-wands and harps and pipes and flutes, the people hailing him as Dionysus Giver of Joy and Beneficent. For he was such, undoubtedly, to some; but to the greater part he was Dionysus Carnivorous and Savage.

For he took their property from well-born men and bestowed it on flatterers and scoundrels. From many, too, who were actually alive, men got their property by asking him for it on the plea that the owners were dead. The house of a man of Magnesia he gave to a cook, who, as we are told, had won reputation by a single supper.

But finally, when he was imposing a second contribution on the cities, Hybreas, speaking in behalf of Asia, plucked up courage to say this: If thou canst take a contribution twice in one year, thou hast power also to make summer for us twice, and harvest-time twice. These words were rhetorical, it is true, and agreeable to Antony’s taste; but the speaker added in plain and bold words that Asia had given him two hundred thousand talents; If, said he, thou hast not received this money, demand it from those who took it; but if thou didst receive it, and hast it not, we are undone.