Within the bond of marriage, tell me, Brutus, Is it excepted I should know no secrets But, as it were, in sort or limitation; To keep with you at meals, comfort your bed, And talk to you sometimes? Dwell I but in the suburbs Of your good pleasure? If it be no more, Portia is Brutus's harlot, not his wife. BRUTUS. You are my true and honorable wife! As dear to me as are the ruddy drops That visit my sick heart! PORTIA. Then should I know this secret. I grant I am a woman; but, withal, A woman that Lord Brutus took to wife: I grant I am a woman; but, withal, A woman well reputed--Cato's daughter. Think you I am no stronger than my sex, Being so fathered, and so husbanded? Tell me your counsels; I will not disclose them. I have given strong proof of my constancy, Giving myself a voluntary wound. ---------------- Can I bear that with patience, And not my husband's secrets? BRUTUS. Oh, ye gods, Render me worthy of this noble wife! In the same play, Shakspeare would have us believe that Calpurnia, wife of Cæsar, had quite persuaded her husband not to go to the senate house on the fatal ides of March, though then and there he was to be crowned and clothed with regal power. The apprehensions she had raised in his mind were, however, dispelled by Oceius Brutus. Antony's second wife, Octavia, was quite the reverse of Fulvia in character and disposition. She was of a gentle and peaceable spirit, doing her strict duty to her husband long after he had ceased to deserve her confidence or respect. The marriage, on the whole, was an unhappy one, being suggested by policy and public expediency, and effected for the purpose of uniting two powerful factions. Octavia was, for a considerable period, instrumental in preventing a rupture between her brother and husband, though that event finally occurred, with the most disastrous consequences to Antony. Though Antony was an able general, a man of capacity and great personal courage, yet he had so involved himself in the dissipations and luxuries of the Egyptian court, whose crowning star was Cleopatra, that he was no match for the graver and more calculating Augustus. The charms of Cleopatra had completely unmanned him, and smothered, in a measure, his ambition. Time did not serve to rally him from the lethargy, hopeless and fatal, into which her spell had thrown him. The chains which bound him grew stronger and stronger, and his desire to break them weaker and weaker. This he attributed to her unrivalled beauty and the extent and variety of her accomplishment, to depict which requires a poet's pen and limner's art. "Age cannot wither, nor custom stale Her infinite variety. Other women clog The appetites they feed; but she makes hungry Where most she satisfies."