to do credit to his belongings.  His riotous life became conspicuous even in a city where extravagance and vice were only too common, and his debts, though not so enormous as Caesar’s, were greater, says Plutarch, than became his youth, for they amounted to about fifty thousand pounds.  He was taken away from these dissipations by military service in the East, and he rapidly acquired considerable reputation as a soldier.  Here is the picture that Plutarch draws of him:  There was something noble and dignified in his appearance.  His handsome beard, his broad forehead, his aquiline nose, gave him a manly look that resembled the familiar statues and pictures of Hercules.  There was indeed a legend that the Antonii were descended from a son of Hercules; and this he was anxious to support by his appearance and dress.  Whenever he appeared in public he had his tunic gired up to the hip, carried a great sword at his side, and wore a rough cloak of Cilician hair.  The habits too that seemed vulgar to others—­his boastfulness, his coarse humor, his drinking bouts, the way he had of eating in public, taking his meals as he stood from the soldiers’ tables—­had an astonishing effect in making him popular with the soldiers.  His bounty too, the help which he gave with a liberal hand to comrades and friends, made his way to power easy.  On one occasion he directed that a present of three thousand pounds should be given to a friend.  His steward, aghast at the magnitude of the sum, thought to bring it home to his master’s mind by putting the actual coin on a table.  “What is this?” said Antony, as he happened to pass by.  “The money you bade me pay over,” was the man’s reply.  “Why, I had thought it would be ten times as much as this.  This is but a trifle.  Add to it as much more.”

When the civil war broke out, Antony joined the party of Caesar, who, knowing his popularity with the troops, made him his second in command.  He did good service at Pharsalia, and while his chief went on to Egypt, returned to Rome as his representative.  There were afterwards differences between the two; Caesar was offended at the open scandal of Antony’s manners and found him a troublesome adherent; Antony conceived himself to be insufficiently rewarded for his services, especially when he was called upon to pay for Pompey’s confiscated property, which he had bought.  Their close alliance, however, had been renewed before Caesar’s death.  That event made him the first man in Rome.  The chief instrument of his power was a strange one; the Senate, seeing that the people of Rome gloved and admired the dead man, passed a resolution that all the wishes which Caesar had left in writing should have the force of law—­and Antony had the custody of his papers.  People laughed, and called the documents “Letters from the Styx.”  There was the gravest suspicion that many of them were forged.  But for a time they were a very powerful machinery for effecting his purpose.