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Title Becoming Mark Antony: A Metabiographical Study of Characterization and Reception
Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7pq898zf
Author Lessie, Alexander James
Publication Date 2015
Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
Los Angeles
Becoming Mark Antony: A Metabiographical Study of Characterization and Reception
A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the
requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy
in Classics
by
Alexander James Lessie
2015
© Copyright by
Alexander James Lessie
2015 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION
Becoming Mark Antony: A Metabiographical Study of Characterization and Reception
by
Alexander James Lessie
Doctor of Philosophy in Classics
University of California, Los Angeles, 2015
Professor Amy Richlin, Chair
The subject of this dissertation is the nexus of Greek and Latin texts that feature Mark
Antony. Cicero’s Philippics and Plutarch’s Life of Antony are the key components of this corpus , but this dissertation also encompasses writings about Antony by authors ranging from Propertius to Cassius Dio and covers the reception of this material in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar . Each chapter uses a metabiographical approach to examine a particular stylized persona that these authors project onto Antony. Chapter 1 investigates why authors invest Mark Antony with the attributes of a stage actor with a frequency rivaled only by similar treatments of later emperors like Caligula and Nero. Chapters 2 and 3 analyze the representation of Antony as a tyrant in
Latin-language authors and Greek-language authors, respectively. Chapter 4 delineates the different ways that authors conceive of Antony’s love for Cleopatra as a type of madness.
Chapter 5 uses Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar as a test case for applying the metabiographical methodology to a post-classical literary text and focuses on Shakespeare’s innovative deployment of Antony as a paragon of eloquence.
ii By analyzing the manifestations these personae in different authors, I uncover new ways of understanding why competing portrayals of Antony take shape across time and across genre, and I map out the evolution of the idea of Mark Antony as it is manufactured over time in literature. I argue that the distortion of Antony that takes place in our sources is less an artifact of his rivals’ propaganda than a product of the historio-biographical process itself. I show how recurring biographical motifs exhibit subtle variations from author to author that signal alignments with particular rhetorical traditions, highlight key themes, or encode commentary upon the authors’ own cultural milieux.
The principal contribution my project makes to our understanding of Greco-Roman literature is to demonstrate how Mark Antony is exploited as a malleable cultural touchstone.
Recent work in metabiography has illuminated how Julius Caesar and Cleopatra perform this role as well, but our understanding of the processes that produced icons like these remains incomplete without a comparable study of Mark Antony. This dissertation fills this gap.
iii The dissertation of Alexander James Lessie is approved.
Robert Gurval
Ronald Mellor
Mario Telò
Amy Richlin, Committee Chair
University of California, Los Angeles
2015
iv
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vi
Vita vii
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: The Staging of Mark Antony’s Body 13
Chapter 2: The Tyranny of Cicero’s Antony 70
Chapter 3: Roman Tyranny in a Greek World 121
Chapter 4: Mark Antony and the Madness of Love 183
Chapter 5: ‘I am no orator, as Brutus is’: The Unstable Identity 236 of Mark Antony in Julius Caesar
Afterword 279
Bibliography 282
v Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my committee members Robert Gurval, Ronald Mellor, Amy
Richlin, and Mario Telò for their generous feedback, steadfast support, tireless patience, and warm encouragement during the writing of this dissertation. In particular, I would like to express my deep appreciation to my chair, Amy Richlin, for directing this project from its initial stages to its completion. I would also like to thank Francesca Martelli for her insightful comments on drafts of several chapters, and the rest of the UCLA Classics faculty, my graduate student colleagues, and my family for support both tangible and intangible over the past six years. I also received helpful feedback on material from Chapter 1 at the “Truth and Untruth” panel at the
2015 annual meeting of the Society for Classical Studies, for which I am grateful. I owe sincere thanks to the UCLA Graduate Division for the award of a Dissertation Year Fellowship for the
2014-15 academic year that allowed this dissertation to be completed in a timely manner.
Finally, I wish to express my profound gratitude to my dear friend and colleague Christian
Lehmann for generously reading the entire dissertation and saving me from countless errors and infelicities of expression. Those that remain I must claim as my own.
vi VITA
2009 B.A. ( summa cum laude ), Classical Studies University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
2009-10 Mellon Fellowship of Distinction University of California, Los Angeles
2010-12 Teaching Assistant Department of Classics University of California, Los Angeles
2011 M.A., Classics University of California, Los Angeles
2012-13 Mellon Fellowship of Distinction University of California, Los Angeles
2013-14 Teaching Assistant Department of Classics University of California, Los Angeles
2014-15 Dissertation Year Fellowship University of California, Los Angeles
PRESENTATIONS
Lessie, Alexander (March, 2012) The Comedy of Parenting in Statius’s Achilleid . Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South.
------(January, 2013) Protagoras 309a-310a: Socrates’ Angelic Encounter. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Philological Association.
------(March, 2014) Subversive Fidelity in Livy’s Account of Masinissa and Sophoniba. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Classical Association of the Pacific Northwest.
------(January, 2015) A Body of Text: Incorporating Mark Antony into the Second Philippic . Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Classical Studies.
vii
Introduction
ANTONY Eros, thou yet behold’st me?
EROS Ay, noble lord.
ANTONY Sometimes we see a cloud that’s dragonish, A vapour sometime like a bear or lion, A towered citadel, a pendant rock, A forked mountain, or blue promontory With trees upon’t, that nod unto the world And mock our eyes with air. Thou has seen these Signs – They are black vesper’s pageants.
EROS Ay, my lord.
ANTONY That which is now a horse, even with a thought The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct, As water is in water.
EROS It does, my lord.
ANTONY My good knave Eros, now thy captain is Even such a body: here I am Antony: Yet cannot hold this visible shape, my knave. 1
– Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra , 4.15.1-14
Of the many thousands of treatments of the tragic end of the Roman general and statesman Mark Antony written over the past two millennia, there is perhaps no more poignant evocation of his downfall than this acknowledgment of impending self-annihilation.
Shakespeare’s Antony, brooding with his servant Eros upon the deceptiveness inherent in the stable appearance of identity, suggests that those elements of his identity that define him as Mark
Antony are slipping away from him. The loss of his soldiers, friends, family, and, above all,
1 The text here printed is taken from Michael Neill’s (1994) edition for the Oxford Shakespeare series. 1
Cleopatra has left Antony as insubstantial as a cloud, and as the shapes of clouds are subject to individual fancy, so too does this fictive Antony anticipate how he, like the imaginary horse he puts forward as an example, will become blurred and indistinct. Henceforth, he will exist only in the subjective impressions of a crowd of observers who will possess full discretion to see him as distinctly, or as distortedly, as they choose.
Any historical or biographical treatment of Mark Antony must inevitably fail to capture the substance of its subject. The historian or biographer can only hope to access the echoes and reflections of his life preserved in a fragmentary source tradition. For figures like Julius Caesar or Augustus our sources at least preserve kernels of self-fashioned ideology and propaganda that allow scholars to reconstruct, at least partially, how these individuals wished their identities to be understood by their contemporaries, if not posterity. However tendentiously self-serving these manufactured selves may be, there is still something substantial for historians and biographers to grapple with when they confront products of their subjects’ own making. Mark Antony, in contrast, has left behind no enduring testimonia of his own self-fashioned identity beyond his coinage, a few letters and epistolary fragments preserved in the works of Cicero and Suetonius, and a smattering of inscriptions and statuary that Augustus’s program of erasure failed to eradicate. 2 The extended treatments of Antony in ancient Greek and Latin literature consist of
texts that are invariably written by authors who were hostile to Antony themselves or who relied
heavily upon the work of these hostile authors as sources. The writings of Cicero, the Augustan
poets, Nicolaus of Damascus, Seneca the Elder, Velleius Paterculus, Josephus, Plutarch, Appian,
and Cassius Dio are all colored by a veneer of anti-Antonian bias that makes the recovery of
2 Cf. Plutarch, Cic. 49.4 for Augustus’s Senate sponsored program of removing the statues and revoking the honors of Antony after his death. The definitive treatment of Antony’s coinage is by Theodore Buttrey (1953). On Antony’s literary remnants and inscriptions, see Huzar (1982). 2
reliable information about Antony and his self-representation from these sources a difficult endeavor.
Contemporary biographical treatments of Antony’s life and career have all sought to strip away this veneer of distortions, exaggerations, and outright lies in order to produce a portrait of
Antony that approximates – to the extent the sources make possible – the “historical” or “real”
Antony. The full-scale modern biographies of Mark Antony – by Arthur Weigall (1931), Jack
Lindsay (1936), Hermann Bengston (1977), Eleanor Huzar (1978), François Chamoux (1986),
Alan Roberts (1988), Helmut Halfmann (2011), Patricia Southern (2012), and Paolo De
Ruggiero (2013) – all apply the conventional methodology of disentangling underlying facts from the ancient sources’ web of misrepresentation.3 Even focused studies of the propaganda
deployed against Mark Antony tend to approach the material with positivist goals in mind. The
source material has generally either been synthesized by scholars to delineate the contours of a
monolithic propaganda campaign, 4 or it has been examined in order to determine the mixture of
historical truth and malicious slander in ancient accounts of Antony’s last will and testament, 5
his marriage to Cleopatra, 6 and his drunkenness. 7
3 Ronald Syme’s (1939) treatment of Antony’s career is also a decisive influence on modern biographical approaches to Antony. Syme’s description of Octavian’s propaganda and Cicero’s Philippics can stand as a representative illustration of the posture that modern critical inquiry generally observes towards the ancient sources for Antony’s life: “The memory of Antonius has suffered damage multiple and irreparable. The policy which he adopted in the East and his association with the Queen of Egypt were vulnerable to the moral and patriotic propaganda of his rival. Most of that will be coolly discounted. From the influence of Cicero it is less easy to escape. The Philippics , the series of speeches in which he assailed an absent enemy, are an eternal monument of eloquence, of rancour, of misrepresentation. Many of the charges leveled against the character of Antonius – such as unnatural vice or flagrant cowardice – are trivial, ridiculous, or conventional” (104).
4 Scott (1929 and 1933) and Freyburger-Galland (2009).
5 The scholarly debate over Antony’s will is a particularly good illustration of the intensity of focus that has been brought to bear on separating fact from fiction in our sources. See Syme (1939: 282), Crook (1956 and 1989), Johnson (1978), Sirianni (1984), and Champlin (1991: 9-20).
6 Huzar (1986) and Ager (2013).
7 Marasco (1992). 3
Let us unpack Antony’s drunkenness as an example. Since all our sources are virtually
unanimous in claiming that Antony had a habit of drinking to excess, we can reasonably
conclude that the historical Antony was, at the very least, not a teetotaler. But the “fact” of
Antony’s fondness for wine and revelry conceals a range of heuristically significant variations in
how Antony’s drunkenness is portrayed in our sources. Two representations of Antony’s
drunkenness in ancient literature can serve as a preliminary test case; first, a short description
from one of Seneca the Younger’s Epistulae Morales (83.25) of the drunken Antony during the
Proscriptions:
M. Antonium, magnum virum et ingeni nobilis, quae alia res perdidit et in externos mores ac vitia non Romana traiecit quam ebrietas nec minor vino Cleopatrae amor? haec illum res hostem rei publicae, haec hostibus suis inparem reddidit; haec crudelem fecit, cum capita principum civitatis cenanti referrentur, cum inter apparatissimas epulas luxusque regales ora ac manus proscriptorum recognosceret, cum vino gravis sitiret tamen sanguinem.
What else besides drunkenness and – no less than wine – the love of Cleopatra impelled Mark Antony, a great man and a man of noble talent, into foreign ways and non-Roman vices and destroyed all that he had? Drunkenness rendered him an enemy of the Republic and no match for his enemies. Drunkenness made him cruel, when the heads of the leading men of the state were brought to him as he was dining, when among the very well-laden tables and royal extravagance he recognized the faces and hands of the proscribed, when, though heavy with wine, he nevertheless thirsted after blood. 8
In Seneca’s anecdote, Antony’s drunkenness fuels his bloodlust and whets his thirst for
the blood of his enemies. Next, let us consider a passage from Cassius Dio’s Historia Romana on
the same topic and set slightly later in time, around 41 BC (48.27.1-2):