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Octavian was there, when Antony’s replies arrived at the Senate, and a handful days later, when Valerius Messalla proposed the demolition of Antony’s statues in the city. The speech he remembered so clearly words to words, and how it stirred up all the right emotions from the hoard of senators.
Octavian remembers the sounds of his heart beating when he first visited Antony in what had formerly been Pompey’s villa. He remembers how he shivered from the coolness of the tablet they used to draft the names for proscription. He remembers the susurrations at Brundisium, the smile and the cosmetic red on Antony’s face from all the unwatered wine on his wedding night -
He remembers. He remembered and remembers and will become a living embodiment of remembrance, of his time, of Marcus Antonius, beyond his last breath -
Long Lives Imperator-Whoever-Wins!
You see? This is the true narrative here, not the kind of story any decent history teacher would dare to tell his pupils. Beyond the smorgasbord of slandering and vulgarities that’s been to-and-froed between Rome and Alexandria, he and Antony, they did not really hate each other. Say what you want of the venomous speeches on the rostra, those open fights in the Senate, murders in the mud-spattered back lanes - oh they’ve had their fair share - the life they’ve chosen for themselves, it did not even allow enough time for proper hatred to flourish. Call it impulse. Call it second nature, the spur of the moment, the new norm - whatever you like. But anything near “hatred” would be...
Over-praising, to say the least.
They didn’t fight for the greater good, either. What do you expect? Did Caesar’s murderers die for the republic?
The republic, muttered Octavian. Was he just part of some greater machinery to bring to it its long overdue destruction? Octavian had never quite got the chance to know what Antony thought of this - of him -when they first met, when he first outsmarted him at Mutina, when they finally met at the negotiation table as equals - once, twice - when...
Let's not get into that, for the moment.
Looking down at Antony’s corpse - butchered open, streams of blood dried on the vermilion linen carpet of deplorable Ptolemaic taste, it feels almost like some form of retaliation. He was almost jealous of Antony, for many reasons, but none of them shall matter any more. Such little tingling sensation germinated in the sultry Alexandrian palace will soon end up sequestered, like many other things that has shadowed over the back of his heart in the past. How could he not remember? How could he not take the burden, when Antony can no longer? The sheer thought thrills him. When the dust settles, only the victor will be so privileged: only the victor gets the luxury of feeling defeated. Only the victor gets to forgive, weep, and mourn.
He has his sword in his right hand; the letters between him and Antony in his left. All the important ones - thirteen years of his life there, in ink, neat and assuring. He’d read them out loud to the legates and the soldiers later, to prove a point, to persuade them, or to persuade himself. He does not know.
It’s not like he meant them, after all.