Word: actium
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...later images cast light on how Cleopatra's reputation was sullied in Rome after Octavian (later to become the emperor Augustus) defeated Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium in 31 B.C. A marble relief, part of a frieze replete with symbols of Egypt and the Mediterranean, depicts a couple engaging in sexual intercourse aboard a boat. And a terracotta oil lamp shows a female figure, amid a Nile-like landscape, squatting on a phallus atop a crocodile. To the poet Lucan, she was a "wanton daughter" of Macedonian kings...
...still the same. Those who call it a romance say it focuses on the passionate love affair between Antony (Noah Feinstein '98) and Cleopatra (Erin Billings '00); people who think it a tragedy dwell on Antony's fatal flaw; and historians remember it for the end battle of Actium, which marks the end of the Hellenistic Age and beginning of the Roman Empire. As Foley's interpretation sees it, however, Antony and Cleopatra follows Antony's infatuation with Cleopatra and a long line of her betrayals: first, when she aligns herself with Caesar; second, when she withdraws her ship...
ANTONY'S death seen is especially complex because he acts in the fire of heroic pride as well as the fire of self-dissolving love. He commits suicide as an act of love- self-love and love for Cleopatra. The fact that she is dissimulating shows that, as at Actium, she cannot comprehend manly honor until it demands the man's death. She will require the sad spectacle of Antony's expiration to realize her implication in his fate, his in hers, and their common destiny as honorable lovers. Antony, at death, finally associates honor with the divine nobility...
...years later, when Cleopatra flees the battle of Actium, Antony runs after her. He abandons his legions, abandons his empire at a woman's whim. Back in Egypt, he falls on his sword as Octavian (Roddy McDowall) approaches, and Cleopatra receives from an indifferent asp the famous kiss of death...
THOM Gunn's third and latest book of poems takes its title from a jaded but "treble-sinew'd" Antony's invitation to "one other gaudy night" before the reeking dishonor of Actium. Insofar as this volume has a central theme, it is a study in types of heroism, which are finally indistinguishable from what Mr. Gunn calls "modes of pleasure." On one side stand the byrnied and terrified warriors of the age of Ethelred and such perennial noblemen of the suicidal beau geste as Claus von Stauffenberg. Different only in degree are the tattooed and/or black-jacketed hoods...