In this most noble play, Shakespeare applies to a great subject his constant idea, that tragedy springs from the treachery caused by some obsession. "Strange it is That nature must compel us to lament Our most persisted deeds." It cannot be said that the play is greater than the other plays of this period. It can be said that it is on a greater scale than any other play. The scene is the Roman world. The men engaged are struggling for the control of all the power of the world. The private action is played out before a grand public setting. The wisdom and the beauty of the poetry answer the greatness of the subject. Shakespeare's later tragedies, _King Lear_, _Coriolanus_, _Othello_, and this play differ from some of the early tragedies in that the subject is not the man of intellect, hounded down by the man of affairs, as in _Richard II_, _Richard III_, and _Henry IV_, but the man of large and generous nature hounded down by the man of intellect. In all four plays the destruction of the principal character is brought about partly by a blindness in a noble nature, but very largely by a cool, resolute, astute soul who can and does take advantage of the blindness. Edmund, the tribunes, Iago, and (in this play) Octavius Caesar are such souls. All of them profit by the soul they help to destroy. They leave upon the mind the impression that they have a tact for the gaining of profit from human frailty. All of them show the basest ingratitude under a colourable cloak of human excuse. The obsession of lust is illustrated in half-a-dozen of Shakespeare's plays; but in none of them so fully as here. The results of that obsession in treachery and tragedy brim the great play. Antony is drunken to destruction with a woman like a raging thirst. A fine stroke in the creation of the play sweeps him clear of her and offers him a way of life. He uses the moment to get so far from her that his return to her is a deed of triple treachery to his wife, to Caesar, and to his country. His intoxication with the woman degrades him to the condition of blindness in which the woman-drunken staggers. It is a part of all drunkenness that the drunkard thinks himself a king, though he looks and is a sot. Shakespeare's marvellous illustration of this blindness (in the third act) is seldom praised as it should be. Antony, crushingly defeated, owing to the treachery of all debauched natures, calls upon Octavius to meet him in single combat. "men's judgments are A parcel of their fortunes, and things outward Do draw the inward quality after them, To suffer all alike." "when we in our viciousness grow hard, O misery on't--the wise gods seel our eyes; In our own filth drop our clear judgments; make us Adore our errors; laugh at's while we strut To our confusion."