could love a queen and, like so
many modern statesmen, commit follies for her. A French critic of my
book, burning his ships behind him, has said that Antony was a Roman
_Boulanger_.

The romance pleases: art takes it as subject and re-takes it; but that
does not keep off the brutal hands of criticism. Before all, it should
be observed that moderns feel and interpret the romance of Antony
and Cleopatra in a way very different from that of the ancients. From
Shakespeare to De Heredia and Henri Houssaye, artists and historians
have described with sympathy, even almost idealised, this passion that
throws away in a lightning flash every human greatness, to pursue
the mantle of a fleeing woman; they find in the follies of Antony
something profoundly human that moves them, fascinates them, and makes
them indulgent. To the ancients, on the contrary, the _amours_ of
Antony and Cleopatra were but a dishonourable degeneration of the
passion. They have no excuse for the man whom love for a woman
impelled to desert in battle, to abandon soldiers, friends, relatives,
to conspire against the greatness of Rome.

This very same difference of interpretation recurs in the history of
the _amours_ of Caesar. Modern writers regard what the ancients tell
us of the numerous loves--real or imaginary--of Caesar, as almost a
new laurel with which to decorate his figure. On the contrary, the
ancients recounted and spread abroad, and perhaps in part invented,
these storiettes of gallantry for quite opposite reasons--as source of
dishonour, to discredit him, to demonstrate that Caesar was effeminate,
that he could not give guarantee of knowing how to lead the armies
and to fulfil the virile and arduous duties that awaited every eminent
Roman. There is in our way of thinking a vein of romanticism wanting
in the ancient mind. We see in love a certain forgetfulness of
ourselves, a certain blindness of egoism and the more material
passions, a kind of power of self-abnegation, which, inasmuch as it is
unconscious, confers a certain nobility and dignity; therefore we are
indulgent to mistakes and follies committed for the sake of passion,
while the ancients were very severe. We pardon with a certain
compassion the man who for love of a woman has not hesitated to bury
himself under the ruin of his own greatness; the ancients, on the
contrary, considered him the most dangerous and despicable of the
insane.

Criticism has not contented itself with re-g