Mark Antony

• 1. Introduction

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  Mark Antony was born in Rome on the 14th of January 83 BC, into a family already marked by violent ends and broken ambitions. His grandfather, the noted orator Marcus Antonius, had been murdered during the purges of Gaius Marius in the winter of 87-86 BC. His stepfather, Publius Cornelius Lentulus Sura, was executed on the orders of the consul Cicero in 63 BC for his role in the Catilinarian conspiracy. Antony grew up surrounded by political catastrophe, and he would spend his life chasing power in a world where the penalty for losing was death.

  By his twentieth year, he had already amassed enormous debts and fled to Athens to escape his creditors. Within two decades of that flight, he would be commanding Roman legions from the deserts of Mesopotamia to the coast of Alexandria, the lover of Egypt's queen, and the last serious rival to the man who would become Rome's first emperor. The questions that hang over Antony's life are not only military or political. They reach deeper: why did a man of such undeniable talent keep making choices that undermined his own power? And how did a soldier who dominated the eastern Mediterranean end up dying by his own hand on the banks of the Nile?

• 2. A Troubled Inheritance

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  Julia, Antony's mother, was a third cousin of Julius Caesar. That connection would eventually shape her son's entire career, but in the years of his youth it offered no protection from the disorder of Roman public life. His father, Marcus Antonius Creticus, had been handed command over the pirates of the Mediterranean in 74 BC, a task he failed to complete before dying in Crete in 71 BC. The orator Cicero, who would become Antony's most relentless critic, charged that the elder Antony had been incompetent and corrupt, given authority precisely because he lacked the capacity to use or abuse it.

  After his father's death, Antony and his brothers Lucius and Gaius were raised by their mother and her new husband Lentulus Sura, a man of old patrician blood whose extravagance kept him permanently in debt despite his political ambitions. Lentulus' execution in 63 BC, ordered by Cicero, was one more upheaval in a childhood defined by instability. The historian Plutarch records that Antony spent his teenage years drifting through Rome with friends, gambling, drinking, and getting tangled in scandalous love affairs. Cicero would later charge that Antony had a homosexual relationship with Gaius Scribonius Curio, though such accusations were a standard form of political slander in the late Republic, designed to demean rather than to inform.

  Antony was also associated with Publius Clodius Pulcher and his street gang, a connection that would later prove professionally useful. When his debts became overwhelming, Antony fled to Athens in 58 BC to study philosophy and rhetoric. That period of study did not last long. The following year, he joined the military staff of Aulus Gabinius in Syria, beginning a career that would carry him to the edges of the known world.

• 3. The Soldier Emerges

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  Antony's first military distinctions came in Judea, where he secured victories at Alexandrium and Machaerus while serving under the proconsul Gabinius. The campaign restored the Hasmonean high priest Hyrcanus II to his position and demonstrated that the young Antony had a genuine gift for command. His next assignment took him into Egypt. Pharaoh Ptolemy XII Auletes had been deposed by a rebellion led by his daughter Berenice IV in 58 BC, and Gabinius, with the backing of Pompey and a bribe of ten thousand talents, moved to restore him. Plutarch records that it was Antony who convinced Gabinius to act. The campaign succeeded, with Gabinius garrisoning two thousand Roman soldiers in Alexandria to secure Ptolemy's authority.

  Antony later claimed he first met Cleopatra, then fourteen years old and the daughter of Ptolemy XII, during this Egyptian campaign in 55 BC. That meeting would eventually reshape the entire Mediterranean world, though neither of them could have known it at the time.

  His political career launched in 52 BC, when Caesar dispatched him to Rome to stand for election as quaestor. Antony then returned to Gaul, commanding Caesar's cavalry in the victory at the Battle of Alesia against the Gallic chieftain Vercingetorix. Caesar elevated him to legate, assigning him command of two legions, roughly 7,500 soldiers. Back in Rome, Caesar secured Antony's appointment to the College of Augurs, a priestly body that could veto public actions by declaring the omens unfavorable. It was a position that carried far more political weight than it might appear, and Antony would use it exactly that way when the time came.

• 4. The Rubicon and Its Aftermath

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  Antony served as one of the ten plebeian tribunes for 49 BC, a position whose holder was constitutionally protected from harm and whose veto could block senate actions. Caesar had engineered this appointment deliberately. When the senate, under Cato and with Pompey's support, passed a decree stripping Caesar of his command on the 7th of January 49 BC, Antony fled Rome claiming to fear for his life. He returned to Caesar's camp in Cisalpine Gaul. Three days later, on the 10th of January, Caesar crossed the Rubicon, citing the violation of Antony's person as justification for the march.

  With Caesar in pursuit of Pompey across the Mediterranean, Antony held Italy as its governor. His soldiers liked him, but most Roman citizens despised him for his indifference to the hardships the civil war imposed. By early 48 BC, Antony faced a blockade at Brundisium under Pompey's admiral Lucius Scribonius Libo, whose fleet of fifty galleys trapped him with five legions Caesar needed in Greece. Antony outmaneuvered Libo by deploying decoy ships, luring his squadron into a trap. Several Pompeian ships were captured, and Libo's blockade collapsed. Antony joined Caesar in Greece by March 48 BC.

  At the Battle of Pharsalus on the 9th of August 48 BC, Antony commanded Caesar's left wing against Pompey's forces, which outnumbered Caesar's own two to one. The battle was a decisive victory for Caesar. Plutarch calls Antony Caesar's top general during this entire Greek campaign, second only to Caesar himself. Pompey fled to Egypt and was assassinated on arrival by Pharaoh Ptolemy XIII, who feared Caesar's anger.

• 5. The Ides of March

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  On the 15th of February 44 BC, during the Lupercalia festival held in honor of Lupa, the she-wolf of Roman legend, Antony publicly offered Julius Caesar a diadem. Caesar threw it off. Antony placed it in Caesar's lap. Caesar ordered it sent to the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. The crowd applauded when Caesar refused the crown and fell largely silent when Antony offered it. The meaning was unmistakable: a diadem was the symbol of a king, and Caesar was demonstrating he would not become one. Whether this theater was Caesar's own idea, Antony's improvisation, a setup by Caesar's enemies, or a genuine test of public sentiment remains unresolved to this day.

  The performance did not reassure the conspirators gathering around Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus. On the 1st of January 44 BC, Caesar had been named dictator perpetuo, with no fixed end date to his authority. The conspirators originally planned to kill not only Caesar but also his key supporters, including Antony. Brutus rejected that plan, limiting the assassination to Caesar alone. On the Ides of March, the 15th of March 44 BC, Antony was waylaid at the door of the Theatre of Pompey by the conspirator Gaius Trebonius and kept from Caesar's side. The historian Eutropius records that around sixty or more men took part; Caesar was stabbed twenty-three times and died from blood loss. Antony fled Rome dressed as a slave.

  When it became clear the conspirators intended no general massacre, Antony returned and moved decisively. He seized the state treasury. Caesar's widow Calpurnia handed him Caesar's personal papers and custody of his extensive property. At Caesar's public funeral on the 20th of March, Antony read the will aloud and displayed the bloodstained toga. The assembly erupted in riot. Several buildings in the Forum and houses belonging to conspirators were burned to the ground.

• 6. The Second Triumvirate

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  Caesar's will revealed that his principal heir was not Antony but his nineteen-year-old great-nephew Gaius Octavius, then stationed with Caesar's army in Macedonia. This young man, known to history as Octavian, arrived in Rome in May 44 BC. The two men's rivalry intensified through the summer. When Antony moved north in December 44 BC to seize Cisalpine Gaul from Caesar's assassin Decimus Junius Brutus Albinus, the senate dispatched Octavian, alongside the consuls Hirtius and Pansa, to defeat him. Antony's forces were beaten at the Battle of Mutina in April 43 BC. Both consuls died in the fighting, leaving Octavian in sole command of eight legions.

  From defeat, Antony rebuilt. Joining forces with Marcus Aemilius Lepidus in Transalpine Gaul gave him control of seventeen legions, the largest army in the West. By mid-May, Octavian was already seeking an alliance. In November 43 BC, the three men met near Bononia. After two days of negotiations, they agreed to rule jointly for five years under what historians call the Second Triumvirate, formalized on the 27th of November by the lex Titia. Antony received Gaul, Lepidus took Spain, and Octavian took Africa. The proscriptions that followed were brutal: two thousand equites were executed and one third of the senate. Cicero was killed on the 7th of December, a personal enemy of Antony whom Antony demanded in exchange for Octavian's acceptance of the list.

  At the two Battles of Philippi in October 42 BC, Antony defeated Cassius at the first engagement on the 3rd of October while Brutus overran Octavian's position. Cassius, believing the battle lost due to poor communications, committed suicide. At the second battle on the 23rd of October, Antony's leadership routed Brutus, who also killed himself the following day. Over fifty thousand Romans died across both engagements.

• 7. Cleopatra and the East

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  After Philippi, the triumvirs divided Rome's world again, with Antony emerging as the clear senior partner. He took the Eastern provinces plus Gaul in the West, while Lepidus was reduced to Africa alone. In October 41 BC, Antony summoned Cleopatra to meet him at Tarsus in Cilicia. She arrived aboard a magnificent ship and invited him to a grand banquet. As the most powerful of Rome's eastern vassals, Egypt was essential to any Parthian campaign. Antony had the execution of Cleopatra's half-sister Arsinoe carried out at Tarsus; Arsinoe had been granted sanctuary at the temple of Artemis in Ephesus after being marched in Caesar's triumphal parade in 46 BC.

  Antony and Cleopatra spent the winter of 41 BC in Alexandria. She bore him twins, Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene II, in 40 BC, and a third child, Ptolemy Philadelphus, in 36 BC. Antony formalized Egypt's control over Cyprus in 40 BC as a gift to Cleopatra for her loyalty to Rome. His time in the East also included genuine administrative work: he received envoys from client kingdoms, redistributed thrones, extracted financial gifts, and reorganized Rome's eastern holdings. He was worshiped as Dionysus upon arriving in Ephesus. He attended the Eleusinian Mysteries in Athens during the winter of 42 BC. These gestures won him genuine loyalty among the Greek-speaking peoples of the East, but they provided Octavian with political ammunition to paint him as a man who had abandoned Roman values for eastern decadence.

  The Parthian threat kept pressing. Publius Ventidius Bassus, dispatched by Antony, won three successive victories against the Parthians, killing the Parthian prince Pacorus at the Battle of Cyrrhestica in 38 BC. Pacorus' death threw the Parthian court into chaos: Shah Orodes II, devastated by grief, named his younger son Phraates IV as successor, who then assassinated his father in late 38 BC. Ventidius was sent back to Rome to celebrate a triumph, the first Roman ever to triumph over the Parthians, while Antony kept the larger eastern campaign for himself.

• 8. The Final Break

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  The Treaty of Brundisium in September 40 BC had papered over the hostility between Antony and Octavian by having Antony marry Octavia, Octavian's sister, in October 40 BC. The marriage was a political instrument, and it held for years while Antony conducted his affairs with Cleopatra. By 36 BC, Lepidus had been expelled from the triumvirate. The Treaty of Tarentum had briefly renewed Antony and Octavian's cooperation, with Antony supplying naval forces while Octavian promised new legions for the Parthian campaign. The two also unilaterally extended the triumvirate's term by five years without seeking senate approval, treating the formal structures of the Republic as irrelevant.

  By 33 BC, disagreements fractured the alliance completely. In 31 BC, Octavian induced the republic to declare war on Cleopatra and proclaimed Antony a traitor. At the naval Battle of Actium later that year, Antony was defeated by Octavian's forces. Antony and Cleopatra fled to Egypt. After the subsequent Battle of Alexandria brought another defeat, both died by suicide. Antony died on the 1st of August 30 BC.

  With Antony dead, Octavian held the entire Roman world without a rival. In 27 BC, the senate granted him the honorific title of Augustus, formalizing what the Republic had been sliding toward for decades: rule by one man. The three children Antony had with Cleopatra, Alexander Helios, Cleopatra Selene II, and Ptolemy Philadelphus, survived. Antony's son Marcus Antonius Antyllus, born in 47 BC, was not so fortunate. Octavian had him killed.