esar, aged nineteen, the adopted son
of Caesar the Great, and claimed his patrimony.

Antony laughed at the stripling, and thought to bribe him with a fete in
his honor and a promise, and in the meantime a clerkship where there was
no work to speak of and pay in inverse ratio.

The boy was weak in body and commonplace in mind--in way of culture he
had been overtrained--but he was stubborn.

Mark Antony lived so much on the surface of things that he never
imagined there was a strong party pushing the "Young Augustus" forward.

Finally Antony became impatient with the importuning young man, and
threatened to send him on his way with a guard at his heels to see that
he did not return.

At once a storm broke over the head of Antony. It came from a seemingly
clear sky--Antony had to flee, not Octavius.

The soldiers of the Great Caesar had been remembered in his will with
seventy-five drachmas to every man, and the will must stand or fall as
an entirety. Caesar had provided that Octavius should be his
successor--this will must be respected. Cicero was the man who made the
argument. The army was with the will of the dead man, rather than with
the ambition of the living.

Antony fled, but gathered a goodly army as he went, intending to return.

After some months of hard times passion cooled, and Antony, Octavius and
Lepidus, the chief general of Octavius, met in the field for
consultation. Swayed by the eloquence of Antony, who was still full of
the precedents of the Great Caesar, a Triumvirate was formed, and Antony,
Octavius and Lepidus coolly sat down to divide the world between them.

One strong argument that Antony used for the necessity of this
partnership was that Brutus and Cassius were just across in Macedonia,
waiting and watching for the time when civil war would so weaken Rome
that they could step in and claim their own.

Brutus and his fellow conspirators must be punished.

In two years from that time, they had performed their murderous deed;
Cassius was killed at his own request by his servant, and Brutus had
fallen on his sword to escape the sword of Mark Antony.

In the stress of defeat and impending calamity, Mark Antony was a great
man; he could endure anything but success.

But now there were no more enemies to conquer: unlike Caesar the Great
he was no scholar, so books were not a solace; to build up and beautify
a great State did not occur to him. His camp was turned into a place of
mad riot