UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Becoming

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,

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