OCTAVIA                    Thanks to my lord.

The Jove of power make me most weak, most weak,

Your reconciler! Wars ’twixt you twain would be

As if the world should cleave, and that slain men

Should solder up the rift.

ANTONY         When it appears to you where this begins,

Turn your displeasure that way, for our faults

Can never be so equal that your love

Can equally move with them. Provide your going,

Choose your own company, and command what cost

Your heart has mind to.

Exeunt                         (3.4.26-36)

Thanks to my lord. It’s not quite thanks for nothing; it could be, but Octavia’s too canny for that. This is deadly serious, and she’s got to stay on side with both her husband and her brother; her husband could cast her off and go after Caesar right away, and she’d be lost. But she also wants peace, for herself, for Antony and Caesar, and for Rome. So there’s an invocation, a prayer—the Jove of power make me most weak, most weak, your reconciler! Here goes, and may the Almighty bless my endeavours and enable me to undertake them, so that even though I am most weak—with the body of a weak and feeble woman, there’s a bit of performative powerlessness here, because Octavia is far from weak, and there may well be an Elizabethan echo—I can still bring this off, make peace between you and reconcile you to each other once again. The violent vividness of her conceit makes clear just how high the stakes are, just how seriously she takes this, and how much she fears open warfare between them. Wars ’twixt you twain would be as if the world should cleave, split asunder, fall apart, a rupture in the very fabric of things, with the bodies of the slain a kind of horrific solder, lumpy, liquifying, trying and failing to mend the rift. Oh, Octavia knows all too well what’s at stake, and part of what she’s doing, implicitly, is shaming the men into making peace, by making it personal–conflict between them will destroy her–but also reminding them of the horrors of civil war, and suggesting that it’s ridiculous that she should be the one trying to sort this out.

Antony’s not entirely won over, however, and he’s not going to be mollified, even by his wife’s genuine distress. When it appears to you where this begins—that is, when you admit that it was him, Caesar who started this, not me—turn your displeasure that way. Give him the telling off he deserves! There may—he implicitly concedes—be blame on both sides, but our faults can never be so equal that your love can equally move with them. OK, I’ve niggled a bit, but he’s done it over and over again, gone too far, and there’s no way that we’re equally to blame; you can’t forgive us both equally and set us back on an even footing because it’s almost entirely his fault. Yes, you can love us both, but you’ve still got to blame him more. You need to choose. So, provide your going, make whatever preparations you need, choose your own company—is he saying, I won’t lift a finger to help you? or rather, I’m not going to impose my own choices of attendants upon you, I trust you?—and command what cost your heart has mind to. Antony is, it seems, putting money and perhaps even troops at Octavia’s disposal, giving her carte blanche. It’s not quite a happy parting (and there are no words of farewell), but it’s a parting of equals, who understand Caesar, Roman politics, and each other.