SOURCE: Lloyd, Michael. “Antony and the Game of Chance.” JEGP: Journal of English and Germanic Philology 61, no. 3 (July 1962): 548-54.

In the following essay, Lloyd examines the destabilizing role of fortune in Antony and Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, observing Antony's affinity with the unpredictable powers of chance.

Plutarch's Roman Fortune¹ is a planning goddess beneficent to Rome, because through Rome she will establish universal peace. Rome has been chosen to serve as “a maine pillar to sustaine the decaying state of the world, ready to reele and sinke downward; and finally, as a sure anchor-hold against turbulent tempests, and wandering waves of the surging seas.” Octavius is Fortune's favoured instrument in this voyage to fixity out of dangerous flux: “for I reckon Cleopatra among the favours that Fortune did to Augustus, against whom, as against some rock, Antonius … should run himself, be split, and sink. …” Here, as elsewhere in...