Despite his initial advantages, Antony was slow to prepare his forces, and he was outmaneuvered by Octavian’s brilliant and experienced admiral, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa. Then, at a crucial moment in the naval battle, Cleopatra fled, sailing straight through a gap between the two fleets and out of reach of Octavian’s ships. Had Antony let her go, he could still have won the day. Instead, at that moment, says Plutarch, Antony “proved the truth of the saying which was once uttered as a jest, namely that a lover’s soul dwells in the body of another.” Instead of regrouping his ships, he immediately abandoned them and “hurried after the woman who had already ruined him and would soon complete his destruction.”

In the version of the battle given by Virgil, the great epic poet of Augustan Rome, Antony’s army and Antony’s fleet were made up of:

Barbarian aids, and troops of eastern kings;

The Arabians near, and the Bactrians from afar,

Of tongues discordant and a mingled war:

And, rich in gaudy robes, and midst the strife,

His ill fate follows him—the Egyptian wife.¹

It is almost possible to hear the hiss of disgust in that last line, the hiss, too, of that famous asp, rumored to be Cleopatra’s final undoing: sequiturque nefas—Aegyptia coniunx. This is how his countrymen were to remember the man Shakespeare dubbed the “triple pillar of the world,” a noble Roman corrupted by insidious foreign ways, in thrall to an alien and “oriental” woman. “Henceforth then, let no one consider him to be a Roman citizen,” sneered the Greek senator Cassius Dio over half a century later, “but rather an Egyptian: let us not call him Antony, but rather Sarapis [Osiris], nor think of him as ever having been consul or imperator, but only gymnasiarch.”

Cleopatra transformed her lover into Shakespeare’s “strumpet’s fool.” Without her gripping beauty, Antony might have returned in triumph to Rome with Octavian in chains. Instead, he and Cleopatra fled back to Alexandria where both committed suicide. Caesarion’s unhappy fate was to be murdered by Octavian shortly thereafter, thus finishing off any potential further rivals.

OCTAVIAN WAS to go on to be the architect of what is known as the “Principate,” the period during which Rome was ruled not by a system of elected officials but by a “princeps” (“chief man of the state”) who was also an “emperor.” This arrangement lasted from its creation in 27 BCE until the final collapse of the Roman Empire in the west in the fifth century. What we think of today as the “Roman Empire,” as distinct from the “Roman Republic,” was originally Octavian’s creation. But—and this was the real point of Pascal’s question—if Antony had assumed power in 31 BCE, might he not have restored the republic and thus preserved the power sharing between the plebeians and the patricians which Machiavelli later identified as the source of Rome’s success?

As it was, the Principate gradually transformed the nascent Roman Empire into a population-in-arms; a military culture which embraced the entire free male population. Toward the end, Roman society became a place in which scribes were soldiers, bishops were soldiers, local governors were soldiers and, of course, the emperor was a soldier. The state was under the yoke of the army, and the military was at best uncontrollable and incapable, as all armies have subsequently proved to be, of adequately managing civil life or the finances of the state. Octavian’s (and Mark Antony’s) descendants, known as the “Julio-Claudians,” showed themselves each more corrupt and abusive than the last, until finally Nero, who reportedly ordered the murder of his mother and preferred playing his lyre to dealing with a Rome deep in crisis, was declared by the Senate, in a rare moment of solidarity, “a public enemy.” The tyrannical emperor committed suicide to “widespread general rejoicing.”

Nero’s immediate successors from Galba (68–69 CE) to Domitian (81–96 CE) rose and fell through persistent conflict and internal divisions within the Roman legions. In one famous year, 69 CE, there were no fewer than four of them. A relatively brief respite under the Antonines, from Nerva in 96 CE to Marcus Aurelius in 180 CE (the “Five Good Emperors,” as they have come to be known), was followed by a long succession of crises until finally in 476 CE the German chieftain Odoacer deposed the last of the western emperors, Romulus Augustus (named ironically after Rome’s founder and spoken of contemptuously as Augustulus—“Little Augustus”). The Roman Empire in the east, now generally referred to as the Byzantine Empire, would survive for almost a millennium. But the unity of the Roman world, and what we identify as Roman culture, had effectively expired long before poor Augustulus limped into exile.

HAD ROME preserved its republican constitution, the worst of this might have been prevented. A reinvigorated republic might have built an economic and civil infrastructure to support its ever-expanding military power; it might have been better equipped to defeat, or absorb, the Germanic tribes which finally engulfed it in the fourth and fifth centuries. It might also have been better placed to resist the temptations of an obscure cult founded by a carpenter’s son from Judaea claiming to be God and embraced in the fourth century by the emperor Constantine in the mistaken hope that a universalizing religion might be able to keep his universal empire from unraveling altogether. Its catastrophic dismemberment, which was Constantine’s and Christianity’s final legacy, might never have taken place. The dreams of a united Europe, which haunted nineteenth-century nationalists and the ideological architects of the European Union alike, might have been a continuing reality. If Cleopatra’s nose had been a little shorter, might we not all be Romans still?

Adrian Goldsworthy does not mention Pascal. He is not much interested in counterfactuals, the “what-ifs” of history. But it is obvious from his highly readable biography of the two players in this most contentious of all historical dramas that the answer he would give to all the above questions is no. Because even before Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BCE—aiming to challenge his rival Pompey to control Rome (which he clearly successfully accomplished)—the institutions of the republic were in an advanced state of decay, undermined by a series of economic crises which had transferred immense power and wealth into the hands of those like Caesar and Pompey who had the resources to corrupt and control the Senate. Caesar’s brisk description of it as “nothing, merely a name without body or shape” was about right.

And though Antony was in many respects a creation of Julius Caesar, he was not a great leader. Yes, it was Antony who staged the famous charade in which Caesar was offered the crown of the ancient (and still-hated) kings of Rome only to refuse it three times to the uproarious approval of the mob. And yes, it was of course Antony who, after Caesar’s assassination, masterminded the leader’s public funeral. And yes, although he undoubtedly lacked the oratorical skills which Shakespeare attributes to him, by mixture of showmanship (a wax effigy of Caesar was lifted up on a crane so that the spectators could see the place of every knife wound) and cunning (he read, with tears in his eyes, Caesar’s will listing the generous benefactions he had made to the people) he succeeded in turning the Roman mob against the conspirators (Brutus included), so that by the next day they had fled the city. But Antony was unlikely to have ruled Rome with the necessary intelligence and guile to prevent its now-seen-as-inevitable collapse. He was not, sadly, a better leader than Octavian—and in many ways besides ambition, he was Octavian’s lesser.

Antony is frequently represented as a bluff, uncompromising soldier with a barrack-room sense of humor and a barrack-room sense of pleasure. He liked to drink, he liked to eat, he liked to gamble, he liked to brawl; and as one courtier said of him, he was “inimitable at sex.” In most respects (except possibly sex) he was quite unlike his mentor. Caesar, as well as being a dandy (he even designed his own toga), was a brilliant orator, great Latin stylist and—although very little of what he wrote has survived—a not-inconsiderable political thinker. By contrast, Antony’s contribution to classical literature was a single text (now lost) entitled “On his own Drunkenness.” True, almost all we know about Antony is heavily tainted by Octavian’s highly efficient propaganda machine. It is also true that a number of old republicans in the Senate preferred him to Octavian, although this may only have been because he was the devil they knew. But in the end, and on what evidence we do have, Goldsworthy is surely right in saying that “Antony did not fight and lose against Octavian for any vision of the Republic, but for personal supremacy.”

Had he won at Actium, he would, in all likelihood, have acted very much as Octavian did, only the consequences would have been very different. From Goldsworthy’s careful reconstruction of Antony’s career, both before and after he met Cleopatra, it is obvious that he was much lacking in comparison to his rival, who in many respects merited the title “Revered One.” Augustus succeeded in finally bringing peace to the empire. He established a centralized system of government. He reigned in the power of local aristocrats and reformed and hugely extended the rule of law. He also radically overhauled the tax system, on which his crucial ability to pay his troops depended, and held a census, the first of its kind, of the entire empire. It is very doubtful that Antony would have been able or would have wished to do any of these things. It is also hard to imagine the author of “On his own Drunkenness” presiding, as Augustus did, over the “Golden Age” of Latin literature—the age of Virgil and Ovid, of Horace, Tibullus and Propertius, and of Livy, perhaps the greatest of the Roman historians. Octavian’s mistake in the end was to make possible the ultimate triumph of the military over the civil sphere—the initial catalyst to Rome’s decline.