Word: octavian
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...Then bolder more ferocious, death slipping through your fingers, how could you go aboard Octavian's galleys...
While hardly ranking with the parley between Marc Antony, Lepidus and Octavian in a tent near Bologna at which they created the Second Roman Triumvirate, the meeting of the three little men under a tent on Laos' Plain of Jars certainly rivaled it in security precautions.* Amid fluttering truce flags, the only outsiders allowed within 100 meters of the tent were one unarmed bodyguard for each principal, and two servants. Between 100 and 300 meters away were stationed ten unarmed guards for each side, and in an outer circle stood 330 more soldiers...
...second, which tells the story of Antony and Cleopatra, begins with the battle of Philippi, which once more breaks the power of the republic and this time makes a triumvirate (Antony, Octavian, Lepidus) master of the Roman world. Antony (Richard Burton) is allotted the East, and Cleopatra's reveries of empire revive. She amorously regales him on her gilded barge, and the charms that captivated a cerebral Caesar enslave the sensual Antony the old war dog degenerates into...
...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...
With endless patience and dry irony, she probed the motivations of the characters. On Octavian: "He had thought that his love for the Marschallin was eternal-he is very young." When the Marschallin suggests that she will one day end the affair, and easily, "this is really the last straw for him. [He thinks.] 'Hasn't she ever loved me?' ...He doesn't understand this woman at all." On the Marschallin: "She has not a drop of sentimentality in her whole makeup, not at all. Always she has this humorous superiority which carries her through everything...