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(00:05):
The man known to history as MarkAntony was born as Marcus
Antonius Criticus on the 14th ofJanuary 83 BC in the city of
Rome. He was named after his father.
Marcus Antonius, Criticus senior, hailed from the gens
Antonia, a plebeian family, the plebeians with a lower rank of
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free Roman society below the aristocratic patrician class and
the equestrian class. However, the enormous expansion
of the Roman state in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC had created
a highly fluid social system, and many plebeian families had
acquired wealth and political prestige as a result.
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The Antonia were amongst these upwardly mobile families, and
Antony's grandfather had risen to important political offices
within the Roman Republic, becoming a member of the Roman
Senate, a governing official of the province of Silesia in what
is now southern Turkey in 102 BC, and then Consul of Rome
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three years later. Anthony's mother was a woman by
the name of Julia, who hailed from an old aristocratic
patrician family, the Gents Julia.
She was also a cousin of 1 GaiusJulius Caesar, a young man of 16
at the time that Mark Antony wasborn.
Caesar would be an integral figure in Anthony's life story.
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As will become abundantly clear,she and Anthony's father had
several other children, notably two sons called Gaius and
Lucius. Anthony was born into a nation
in turmoil. The Roman Republic had expanded
from being a city state that controlled a small stretch of
territory in central Italy at the beginning of the 4th century
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BC to 1st conquer most of the Italian peninsula, then
expanding to become the dominantpower of the Western
Mediterranean in the 3rd centuryBC, and finally to expand into
the Eastern Mediterranean in the2nd century BC.
Its conquests had made Rome a great power, However it had also
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made its generals so powerful that they, rather than the
members of the Senate, the aristocratic parliament which
controlled the Republic, had become the real power within the
state. This was even more the case
after Rome's most popular general, Gaius Marius,
implemented a slew of reforms in107 BC which expanded and
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professionalized the Roman military, further concentrating
power in the hands of the generals.
Marius soon had a rival in the shape of Cornelius Sulla, and a
quasi civil war was being foughtbetween the Marians and the
Sullens into the 90s and 80s BC,during a period when the Marians
were ascendant in the city. In 87 BC, Anthony's grandfather
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had been killed in a purge of Marius's enemies.
The old general had died himselfsoon after, but the fight had
continued. As his son and Sulla.
Entered into open war with one another in the spring of 83 BC,
just weeks after Anthony was born, when he was just an
infant. Sulla's forces met the Marians
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at the Battle of the Colline Gate outside Rome in N82 BC.
Sulla emerged victorious and established himself as dictator
of Rome thereafter. He would retire in 79 BC and
died the following year. But the Republic had been left
in tatters by decades of instability, and it was clear to
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had the ability and the ruthlessness to mimic Sulla's
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Check the link in the description of this video For
more information. While Mark Antony would never
rule the Roman state and so was not the subject, for instance,
of Swatonius biographical histories.
A. Figure who wrote about every
ruler of Rome from Julius Caesardown to the Emperor Domitian.
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A century and a half later, he is still very well served by the
primary sources we have available.
Swatonius Lives of the 12 Caesars has much to say on
Anthony in his biographies of Julius Caesar and of Caesar
Augustus. Antony features in Caesar's 2
surviving works on the Gallic Wars of the 50s BC and the Civil
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War of the 40s BC, and he appears frequently in Cassius
Dio's enormous History of Rome, written in the 3rd century AD.
However, the foremost source material for Antony's life is
found in the extensive Philippics of the great orator
and rhetorician Cicero, who composed a series of treatises
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condemning Anthony in the aftermath of Caesar's
assassination and argued that Anthony posed a severe enough
threat to the Roman state that he should have been killed too.
In addition to The Life of Anthony, written by the great
2nd century AD Greco, Roman historical biographer Plutarch,
it is an indication of Anthony'shistorical importance that he
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was written about so extensivelyin ancient times, despite never
actually ruling the Roman state.Anthony had a difficult early
life. As noted, his grandfather had
been killed in one of the Marianpurges a few years before he was
born. Counter intuitively, this
benefited Anthony's father, who,with the defeat of the Marians
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years later, suddenly seemed like a faithful.
Ally of Sulla's faction. He began a steady ascent as an
official thereafter, and in the 70s BC was given charge of a
military command in the eastern Mediterranean, tackling the
piracy which was rife throughoutthe region there.
This disrupted Anthony's early years, and then he was left
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fatherless when his father died on the island of Crete in 71 BC.
Anthony's mother remarried, though his stepfather, Publius
Cornelius Lentulus, was a dubious influence on him.
This chaotic family life, combined with the influence of a
number of feckless Roman aristocrats such as Gaius
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Scribonius Curio and Publius Claudius Pulcher, who were a few
years older than Anthony, led tohim beginning to lead a
dissolute lifestyle in Rome in the 60s BC as a young man,
spending much of his time drinking, gambling and generally
carousing. At the time when political
figures like the Roman Senator Cato the Younger were voicing
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concerns in the Senate about thebreakdown of traditional Roman
values and the growing self indulgent of wealthier Roman
families, of which Anthony was seemingly A symptom.
By the time he was entering his 20s in the late 60s BC, Anthony
had already accumulated a large amount of debts around Rome as a
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result of his immoderate behaviour.
It didn't help matters when his stepfather was implicated in an
attempted coup d'etat led by a Roman politician by the name of
Lucius Sergius Catalina in 63 BCand was executed as a result.
With the family name battered and his creditors insistence on
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repayment becoming louder, Anthony decided it would be best
to make himself scarce from Romefor a time.
Hence he spent much of the firsthalf of the 50s BC in the East
travelling to Athens where he allegedly studied philosophy and
rhetoric. He clearly wasn't attracted too
much to the philosophical life and soon joined a Roman military
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expedition that was travelling east to the Levant to
consolidate Rome's position in different regions at a time when
Roman provincial government herewas still embryonic after the
series of Roman conquests which had occurred here several years
earlier. Antony's opportunism was on
display when he inveigled his way into the inner circle of
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several senior Roman military commanders in the east and
pushed for a more aggressive policy towards Ptolemaic Egypt,
one of the successor kingdoms tothe Empire of Alexander the
Great and the last major power in the Eastern Mediterranean by
that time to remain outside of Rome's control.
It was during a foray into Egyptto support one of the royal
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factions here during a quasi civil war within the Ptolemaic
dynasty that Antony appears to have met a Princess of that same
royal household by the name of Cleopatra for the first time.
She was around 14 or 15 years ofage at that time, and four or
five years later would become Queen of Egypt in association
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with her brother Ptolemy the 13th.
As Anthony was growing up, and as he fled to the eastern
provinces and spent time there as a young man, the political
situation across the Republic was in a new period of flux.
Sulla's retirement back at the start of the 70s BC and the
defeat of the Marian faction several years earlier had
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created a vacuum within the state for new popular generals
to emerge as powerful figures. The first to do so successfully
was Pompeius Magnus Pompey the Great, a general who in the late
70s BC and into the early 60s BCwon a series of great wars in
the eastern Mediterranean against the Kingdom of Pontus
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and the Seleucid Empire, conquering much of Anatolia and
Syria in the process. Back home, he became a hugely
powerful and popular figure. He had rivals for power, though,
notably Marcus Crassus, reputedly the wealthiest man in
the Roman world, and Anthony's distant cousin Julius Caesar, a
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dangerous populist who had stirred up the Roman people to
support him through a series of provocative acts and election
campaigns in the late 60s BC. Together, these three formed a
political alliance to share power at Rome, one known as the
First Triumvirate. In the course of the 50s BC,
though, Caesar would begin to eclipse his rivals as he
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undertook a series of rapid conquests north of the Alps
against the Celtic tribes of Gaul, the ancient name for what
is now France and the Low Countries.
Crassus was killed in 53 BC on campaign in the east, and with
Pompey's glory days seemingly long behind him, Caesar was the
ascendant figure within the Roman Republic.
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Anthony would now gravitate towards his cousin.
By 54 BC, Anthony had made his way back from the east to Rome,
and from there travelled N over the Alps to find Caesar, who at
that time was in the north of the region, in between two
reconnaissance missions in whichhe crossed the English Channel
to Britain to evaluate whether the island could also be
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conquered, the Romans knowing little about it.
When he joined Caesar's army in Gaul, Anthony rose quickly
within it. Caesar warmed instantly to him,
and he would become one of his closest allies.
He appointed Antony as one of his senior commanders, and there
too, Antony quickly won the affection of his troops by
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appearing to live much as the common legionary did.
Over the next two years he wouldserve in Gaul.
From Caesar's book on the GallicWars, we learn that Anthony was
present at the Siege of Alicia in September 52 BC, the defining
conflict of the Gallic Wars, in which a grand coalition of the
Celtic tribes of Gaul. Led by a.
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Warlord named Versinggeterix were defeated by Caesar and his
legions. Victory at Alicia crushed the
resistance of the Gallic tribes,and thereafter Caesar spent the
next year or two largely reorganizing the vast territory
he had conquered into new Roman provinces.
It was most likely sometime after his return to the western
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provinces that Antony married Antonia Hybrida Minor, a woman
who came from a mix of patricianand plebeian background.
The historians of Rome have longdebated if this was Anthony's
first marriage or not. Years later, Cicero claimed that
Anthony had briefly been marriedto a woman named Fadia in his
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youth. However, it is unclear if this
was true or not, as Cicero may have been trying to smear
Anthony by suggesting he had married the daughter of a freed
slave. Whatever the truth of his
possible brief first marriage, we know that his marriage to
Antonia Hybrida would result in a daughter named Antonia.
Plutarch, who was always fond ofcapturing the personalities of
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his subjects, gives us a good insight into Anthony at this
time, describing him as quote having a noble dignity of form
and a shapely beard. A broad forehead and an aqualine
nose were thought to show the virile qualities peculiar to the
portraits and statues of Hercules.
Whenever he was going to be seenby many people, he always wore
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his tunic girt up to his thigh, a large sword hung at his side,
and a heavy cloak enveloped him.There were other elements to his
character, though, beyond this noble bearing.
Plutarch stated that many peoplefound his jesting and
boastfulness offensive. Yet there was no doubt that he
was able to win the affection ofthe soldiers he commanded,
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something which came from havingboth a common touch and also
through his liberal distributionof money to the legionaries.
Nevertheless, Plutarch concludedhe was possessed of quote
countless faults. With victory at Alicia, Caesar
determined that Anthony should head to Rome and begin his own
political career. Caesar's long absence and Gaul
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had allowed Pompey and the aristocratic faction which
supported him within the Senate to begin trying to undermine him
in the capital. Caesar had responded by building
up his own faction at Rome. He now sent Anthony to join
them, in large part in response to the murder of Anthony's old
friend Publius Claudius in Italythat year, Claudius having acted
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as one of Caesar's principal supporters in the capital for
years while he was in Gaul. At Rome, Anthony quickly began
his ascent through the series ofpolitical offices which marked
the career progression of any Roman politician.
He was quickly elected as a Quaestor.
This was a low ranking politicaloffice with responsibilities for
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the municipal government of the city of Rome.
Crucially, quaestors were automatically given a seat in
the Senate. And so Anthony now entered the
main deliberative body of the Roman Republic.
Here he was able to position himself as a leading figure in
the Popularis faction amongst the hundreds of senators, the
Populares, with those who look towards popular support amongst
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the people of Rome for their power, and largely supported
Caesar against the Optimates, the faction of the more
traditional aristocratic senators who favored Pompey and
were broadly led by figures likeCato and Cicero.
These were not political partiesin the modern sense, but they
were important for the struggle which would very soon RIP apart
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the Roman Republic. Anthony remained in Rome
throughout the late 50s BC. This was a period of growing
tension across the city as Caesar used figures like Anthony
to stir up the Roman people intomobs which called for his
political power to be increased.This was in response to efforts
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by Pompey and his supporters in the Senate to undermine Caesar,
principally by plotting to recall him from Gaul and remove
the 8 legions which he controlled there, an army of
40,000 men which the optimatis were now worried Caesar could
refuse to relinquish control of when his governorship of Gaul
ended. In this environment, Anthony was
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elected to be one of the tribunes of the people for 49
BC, an important office junior only to the consulship, the
senior most magistracy in the Roman Republic.
Matters boiled over in the firstdays of January 49 BC during
debates in the Senate, where Cato and other Optimartis move
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to have Caesar recalled from Gaul with the clear intention of
prosecuting him for exceeding his authority as governor there.
Anthony responded in the Senate by stating that Caesar would
agree to return to Rome if he was promised the command of two
legions and the governorship of Illyrium around what is now
Croatia, along with immunity from prosecution.
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Although Pompey was inclined to agree to these requests, Cato
and other leaders of the Optimatters refused, and Anthony
fled northwards. He met Caesar just north of the
Rubicon, a river east of modern day Florence, which was the
boundary beyond which legions were prohibited from moving any
closer to the city of Rome. Here, after conferring with
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Antony on the political situation in Rome, Caesar
decided compromise was impossible and on the 10th of
January 49 BC he crossed the Rubicon, signaling the beginning
of civil. War.
The civil war which began in 49 BC, is often depicted as a clash
between Caesar and Pompey, and this is accurate to a certain
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extent. But it might more accurately be
said to have been a conflict in which an alliance of
traditionalists and aristocraticconservatives in the Senate, led
by Pompey and Cato, attempted toprevent Caesar, a populist
demagogue, from seizing control of the Roman state.
Abetted by enforcers and hench men like Antony, the war would
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last several years, with regional clashes between legions
and governors who had declared their support for Caesar and
pockets of Pompeian resistance. The main clash, though, took
place in Greece in 48 BC, after Pompey retreated there with his
senatorial supporters and began preparing an army for a
potential invasion of Italy. Caesar followed him to Greece,
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and at the battle of Farsalis onthe 9th of August he inflicted a
severe defeat on the Pompeians. Though the figures involved are
disputed, as many of the most detailed sources on these
events, including Caesar's own account, were clearly written to
exaggerate the extent of his military genius at Farsalis.
Pompey fled in the aftermath of it to Egypt, where the Ptolemaic
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government had him murdered in order to acquire the favour of
Caesar. Cato seized control of part of
North Africa and attempted to hold it for the Optomartis
cause, but in 46 BC he killed himself there rather than be
captured. The civil war would drag on for
years to come, with pockets of resistance around the
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Mediterranean, but after Farsalis, Caesar would
effectively become the ruler of the Roman state, ruling through
the office of Dicta Torres, a constitutional power which
granted a commander enormous powers to deal with military
emergencies within the Roman Republic, from which the concept
of a dictator in the modern sense derives.
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Antony played a major role in these affairs, commanding 2 of
Caesar's legions at the Battle of Farsalis.
Afterwards he returned to Italy with Caesar, who appointed
Antony as Magister Equitum, a term translating as Master of
the Horse. This was an adjunct position to
that of Dictator 1, which made Anthony Caesar's second in
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command as Master of the Horse. It was an enormously important
position, as the Constitution did require anyone with powers
of dicta torresi to still have the agreement of the magistaire
equitum to make major decisions.It was an indication of the
trust which Caesar reposed in Antony.
So too was Caesar's decision to appoint him as governor of Italy
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in 47 BC, effectively leaving him in control of the government
at Rome, while Caesar left for North Africa to militarily
campaign against some of the remaining groups of Optimatis
and Pompeians there. This period was one of shifts
and turns in Anthony's personal life in ways which overlapped
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with his position within the newpolitical dispensation.
Around the time he was appointedas governor of Italy, Antony
became suspicious that his wife Antonia was engaged in a
relationship with Publius Cornelius Dola Bella, an
important senator who had first sided with the Pompeians at the
start of the Civil war but laterchanged sides to support Caesar
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when he learned of the affair. Antony divorced Antonia and
quickly married Fulvia, a woman of the Roman aristocracy who had
probably been his mistress for several years by then and who
was the widow of Claudius, Antony's old friend and Caesar's
ally, who had been murdered backin 52 BC.
The incident also caused Anthonyto oppose legislation which Dola
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Bella brought before the Senate concerning the alleviation of
debts incurred during the Civil War, and in recent years.
Anthony blocked this. Whether he did so out of spite
or to benefit himself in some way is unclear.
What is clear is that this was just one example of Anthony's
mishandling of the government in47 BC and 46 BC while Caesar was
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absent from Rome. When the dictator returned to
the Eternal City, he found the political atmosphere tense and
there was a cooling of relationsbetween Caesar and Anthony for a
time on account of Caesar's perception that Anthony had
acted poorly as his understudy while he was in North Africa.
In time, the relationship between Anthony and Caesar
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healed, though at the same time it was clear that Caesar was
also grooming his great nephew, a boy named Octavian, who was
entering his late teens and showing considerable promise as
a political heir. This did not mean that Anthony
stopped accumulating power of his own.
He was, for instance, appointed by Caesar to serve as one of the
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two consoles for the year 44 BC.We will never know exactly what
political dynamic might have prevailed with Octavian growing
up with his great uncle as dictator of Rome, however, for
in the spring of 44 BC, Caesar was assassinated at a meeting of
the Senate by a cohort of senators opposed to Caesar's
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decision just weeks earlier to extend his power of Dicta Torres
for the duration of his life. That day, the 15th of March, the
Ides of March in the Roman calendar, Caesar was stabbed
upwards of three dozen times anddied on the spot of his attack.
Caesar's death created more problems than it solved on the
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surface of things. The man who had usurped the
Republic and who, unlike Salah over 3 decades earlier, had
refused to relinquish his power once the civil war was over, was
gone. However, Rome had also been
robbed of its effective politicians, men like Cato who
might have been able to restore the Republic once Caesar was
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dead. Instead, there were many
individuals seeking to simply take Caesar's place, Antony, an
Octavian chief amongst them. Antony initially fled from Rome,
wary of a potential purge of Caesar's former allies.
He eventually returned to the city where he and another of
Caesar's former allies, Marcus Lepidus, managed to negotiate an
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amnesty for anyone associated with the former regime.
Anthony went further in the weeks that followed, stirring up
mobs of people across Rome as hetried to present himself as
Caesar's populist successor. He then employed his new found
power to attempt to coerce the government into granting him the
governorship of much of Gaul. The Senate was understandably
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wary of placing Antony in the same position of military power
which Caesar had held in the 50sBC.
And so a military stand off ensued between Antony, who
established a power base in the Alpine region in the autumn of
44 BC, and the Senate. Some historians have termed the
clashes which followed a speciesof limited civil war between
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Antony and the government, one called the War of Moutina after
a battle fought as part of it in43 BC.
As Anthony was manoeuvring to become Caesar's political
successor, one of Rome's great literary figures and statesman,
the rhetorician, writer and orator Cicero, was warning the
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Roman political classes of the danger which Caesar's closest
ally posed to the Republic. Modelling his approach on the
Athenian orator Demosthenes, whoin the middle of the 4th century
BC had rallied against the rule of Philip the 2nd and Alexander
the Great over Athens, Cicero composed 14 documents attacking
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Anthony, known as the Philippics, A literary name for
an invective or attack on a political enemy.
He delivered these as public speeches in the Senate and at
gatherings around Rome between September 44 BC and April 43 BC.
In them, he repeatedly condemnedAnthony, warned of the threat he
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posed and the manner in which hewas trespassing over the codes
of conduct expected of a Roman official or commander, before
finally calling on the Senate and the people of Rome to wage
war on Anthony before he claimedabsolute power.
Cicero was successful in his appeals for several months,
although ultimately Anthony was able to have him prescribed in a
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purge of his enemies at the end of 43 BC, and Cicero was
executed while trying to flee from Italy.
His head and hands, the latter of which had written against
Anthony, was symbolically severed and set up on public
display in central Rome. Cicero might have been convinced
that Anthony posed the gravest threat to the possibility of
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restoring the Republic after Caesar's fall.
Yet he was not alone in trying to acquire Caesar's mantle.
By 43 BC, there were multiple individuals with their own
factions who were emerging as Anthony's rivals.
In the autumn of that year, Anthony came together with two
others, Octavian and Marcus Lepidus, to form a new
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triumvirate, one which imitated the one formed nearly 20 years
earlier by Caesar, Pompe and Crassus.
By employing a number of biddable officials in Rome to
propose the legislation, they managed to have a law named the
Lextitia Past, which establishedthis second triumvirate,
ostensibly with Antony, Octavianand Lepidus charged with
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restoring the Republic. Whereas in reality, this
political alliance was designed exclusively for the three to
consolidate their power and bring some stability to the
state as a mere prelude to fighting it out between
themselves to see which would succeed Caesar as Master of
Rome. The first major concern for the
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Triumbars was to end a war whichhad been initiated by some of
those who were central to the assassination of Caesar back in
44 BC. These liberators, as they have
been termed in the historiography of the late Roman
Republic, had fled from Rome after killing Caesar and
gathered their forces overseas to prepare for conflict with
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figures like Anthony that would now step into the void left by
the death of the dictator. The Liberators civil war
culminated in October 42 BC in the 1st and 2nd battles of
Philippi. These were fought near the city
of Philippi in Macedonia, with Antony and Octavian leading by
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some estimates over 100,000 soldiers against a similarly
sized force led by Marcus Brutusand Gaius Cassius Longinus.
The two battles, fought 3 weeks apart, were chaotic.
Morale was low amongst the legions on all sides.
After years of civil war, rank and file legionaries on all
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sides must have wondered what itwas they were actually fighting
for other than money, at a time when the Republic was simply
lurching from crisis to crisis. In the end, the clashes
themselves weren't decisive. Instead it was Marcus Brutus
ending his own life after an indecisive engagement and the
general collapse of leadership amongst the Liberators that led
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to the end of this civil war. Other conflicts in different
provinces and involving different rebel leaders
smouldered across the Mediterranean in its aftermath.
Following the Liberators civil war, Antony, Octavian and
Lepidus began considering how they would work with each other
going forward. The resolution which they
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arrived at involved dividing up a large number of the provinces
of Rome's empire between them. Initially, Antony took control
of Gaul and the Alpine region, which was significant in that it
included the plain of Lombardy and meant that he had legions
under his control. Just north of the Rubicon,
Aleppidus was largely in controlof Hispania, although Rome
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remained at war with some stubborn native groups in
Cantabria in the north. There Octavian's power base was
in North Africa, where, as well as having direct control over
the provinces of Africa and Numidia, the Kingdom of
Mauritania, in what is now Morocco and western Algeria, was
a client state. This arrangement gradually
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changed from 42 BC onwards as the eastern territories which
the Liberators had controlled when the Second Triumvirate was
first established. Were retaken and Anthony began
shifting his power base from Gaul to the Eastern
Mediterranean. As these arrangements between
the trio were evolving, Anthony's personal life was
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again overlapping with his political one.
His marriage to Fulvia, which was either his second or third
marriage and which had resulted in Anthony having two more
children, had become problematicin 41 BC when tensions escalated
between her and Octavian in Italy while Anthony was absent
in the East. The immediate cause of the
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conflict was Octavian's decisionto renounce his wife Claudia,
who was Fulvia's daughter, from her earlier marriage to
Claudius. The resulting clash between
Fulvia and Octavian supporters has become known as the Perusine
War, after the town of Perusia in the Umbrian countryside where
Fulvia had strong support for her case.
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The irony of this is that even as she was trying to buoy up her
husband's chance of becoming preeminent at Rome, Antony was in
the East negotiating a new diplomatic arrangement with the
Ptolemaic royal family of Egypt,in the course of which he began
an affair with Queen Cleopatra, whom he had met many years
earlier. Cleopatra was a born survivor.
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Faced with the prospect of Egyptbeing brought under Roman rule,
she had started an affair with Julius Caesar during the civil
war and had a son by him named Caesarean.
Now she wooed Antony when they met again in 41 BC.
It was a relationship which would dominate the rest of his
life. Back in the West, Octavian
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suppressed Fulvia's partisans inthe first months of 40 BC and
then banished her to the city ofCicillon in Greece.
Her presence there could have posed an ongoing problem for
relations between Antony and Octavian in the years ahead, had
it not been for Fulvia's unexpected death shortly after
arriving in Greece. Anthony might have married
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Cleopatra at this juncture, but instead a political marriage was
quickly worked out whereby he married Octavia, Octavian's
sister, in October 40 BC. This union was intended to bring
Octavian and Anthony closer together and to allow Caesar's
great nephew and the man he had made master of the horse to
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divide power between them. It would have the opposite
effect, as Anthony acted as though the marriage barely
existed, instead settling in Alexandria in Egypt and
continuing his relationship withCleopatra as though it were her
he had married. Indeed, Cleopatra gave birth to
twins by Anthony, a son named Alexander Helios, and a daughter
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named Cleopatra Cellini around the time of their father's
marriage to Octavia. A third child of Anthony in
Cleopatra's, another boy named Ptolemy, was born in 36 BC.
Perhaps one of the reasons why Anthony was so sexually
promiscuous and had spent 20 years getting into trouble
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because of his relationships, his gambling and his
indebtedness was owing to his drinking habits.
People drank a lot in ancient times, encouraged by the fact
that alcohol was often safer to drink in settings where the
water supply could often be a Petri dish of disease and
bacteria. As such, weak wine, Mead, and,
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in some parts of Rome's empire, beer were imbibed throughout the
day. It is meaningful.
Then the people made note of howmuch Anthony drank.
In his biography of him, Plutarch points out that Anthony
was known for being frequently intoxicated.
From the 1st century AD encyclopedist Pliny the Elder,
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we learned that Anthony even allegedly wrote a book boasting
about his pauchon for drinking. He entitled it Desua Ebriatate,
meaning of his drunkenness. His tendencies would only get
worse over time and there are many examples of Anthony's
excessive drinking in the eastern provinces throughout the
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30s BC. It is worth remembering when
considering Antony's career and actions that he might well have
been what we call now a high functioning alcoholic.
The period following Fulvia's death and Antony's marriage to
Octavia, in tandem with his growing relationship with
Cleopatra, was also a critical phase for the Second
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Triumvirate. Much of this focused on the war
with Sextus Pompeus, the son andheir of Pompeii the Great.
In the aftermath of the civil war and the chaos that followed
Caesar's assassination, Sextus, who as the leader of the
Pompeians still commanded a gooddeal of support across the
Republic, had managed to take control of the island of Sicily
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with a powerful fleet. Here he controlled the island
and sometimes expanded outwards to Sardinia and southern Italy,
becoming a powerful figure in his own right by controlling the
waterways between the western and eastern Mediterranean.
In the early 30s BC he managed to continue to win victories
over all three of the Triambias as they variously sent forces
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against him. However, in 36 BC, Octavian
finally launched a successful invasion of Sicily.
Sextus fled eastwards hoping to obtain an alliance with Antony,
but he was haunted down and killed the following year.
The wider significance of this was that in the West, Octavian
took control of Sextus territoryand marginalized Lepidus too.
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By 35 BC, the latter had become a broadly insignificant figure,
and the power struggle was now developing almost entirely into
a clash between Octavian and Antony.
Even by the time the Second Triumvirate broadly became a
nonentity from around 35 BC onwards, the battle lines were
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being drawn in the broader struggle between Antony and
Octavian. An agreement made at the city of
Brundisium back in 40 BC had already ensured that Octavian's
main base was in Italy, Hispaniaand Gaul.
Now, with control of the Italianislands and growing influence
over North Africa, where Lepidushad previously held sway, he was
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all but in charge of the westernhalf of the Republic's
provinces. On the other hand, Antony's
sphere of influence had been determined as lying in Greece,
Anatolia and the Levant at Brundisium, while Egypt, which
was theoretically still a quasi independent client state of
Rome's, was assured to him owingto his relationship with
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Cleopatra. He based himself here out of the
city of Alexandria, the second largest city of the Empire and
its intellectual capital. So it was that in the course of
the 30s BC, Octavian came to largely control the western
provinces and Antony the easternprovinces.
Antony benefited from the fact that the eastern provinces were
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considerably wealthier and more economically productive, but in
Rome Octavian could manipulate the Senate and gain the support
of the people of Rome. Everything pointed towards a new
civil war, but perhaps if Anthony reformed his behaviour
and made the marriage alliance which had been entered into
through his union with Octavia, work, conflict could be averted.
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Anthony, though, was not the sort of figure to prioritize
conflict resolution. With the Second Triumvirate now
evaporating into a rivalry between Octavian and Anthony,
Anthony concluded that he would try and gain mastery over the
Republic the old fashioned way. Just as Marius in the hundreds
BC, Salah in the 80s BC, Pompey in the 60s BC and then Caesar in
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Gaul in the 50s BC had each in their turn attained a pre
eminent position within the Republic by conquering new
territories for the Senate and the people of Rome.
Antony would now seek to eclipseOctavian by expanding the empire
himself, and there was an obvious target.
There was just one state other than Rome anywhere in the known
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world that had a strong centralized government,
controlled extensive territory, and had a large army.
This was the Parthian Empire, based out of Persia and
Mesopotamia around modern day Iran and Iraq.
What was more, the Romans had suffered an egregious stain on
their honour when Marcus Crassus, the third member of the
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First Triumvirate, had been heavily defeated and killed in
the desert along the Syrian and Turkish border at the Battle of
Karai back in 53 BC. At the time of his assassination
in 44 BC, Caesar was planning tocampaign eastwards against the
Parthians and avenge the loss ofseveral Roman legions at Karai A
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decade earlier. His death had put pay to any
such effort, and instead the Parthians had taken advantage of
the chaos following Caesar's assassination to invade the
Roman east and occupy some of the border regions.
Now, with the war with Sextus coming to an end in the West,
Anthony gathered together upwards of 16 legions in the
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east and began preparing to invade Parthea.
A great victory here might have represented the triumph that
would have allowed him to outflank Octavian back in Rome.
The war which followed against the Parthians is sometimes known
as the Atroportane campaign, after the region of northern
Persia near the Caspian Sea, where most of it played out.
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Anthony marched eastwards in 36 BC.
As with many other campaigns against Parthia, the Kingdom of
Armenia, an independent buffer state in the southern Caucasus,
played a role, with Anthony winning over King Artavastes,
the second there as an ally against King Frates the 4th of
Parthia. He then marched into Armenia
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before swinging southwards towards northern Persia, a
strategy many Roman generals followed to avoid campaigning
through the Syrian desert. Our sources vary in their
figures, but Anthony clearly hadone of the largest Roman armies
to ever campaign eastwards. With 100,000 men under his
command, despite these extensivemilitary resources, the campaign
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became an unmitigated disaster. After arriving in the
Atropotania region, he began a siege of the city of Freyta,
near modern day Ganzak in northwestern Iran.
Disease broke out in the camp, then his Armenian allies
abandoned him and he subsequently faced attacks by
the Parthians. Dismayed, Anthony ordered a
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retreat back West through Armenia and finally to Syria.
Having lost as many as 30,000 men without achieving anything,
he planned another campaign to both exact revenge on the
betrayal of the Armenians and tostrike again at the Parthians,
though it never fully materialized as his attentions
were drawn to the West and the increasingly inevitable showdown
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with Octavian. One success which Antony did
have during these years was in Judea.
Back in the middle of the 2nd century BC.
The Jewish people here had managed to establish themselves
as an independent nation once again after years of foreign
domination by the Babylonians, Persians, Macedonians and the
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Seleucid Empire. This was through the Maccabean
Revolt, following which a new Jewish monarchy was set up.
However, a century later, when Pompey was undertaking his
conquest of Syria, the Hasmaniandynasty had agreed to become
client kings of Rome, a form of vassalage whereby Judea only
remained semi independent. The Hasmanians had attempted to
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exploit the chaotic period following Caesar's assassination
to reassert their independence. Antony was now committed to
reversing this situation and ordered the governor of Silesia
and Syria, Gaia Sosius, to campaign into Judea.
Military clashes followed in theLevant between 40 BC and 37 BC,
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at the end of which Herod, a commander from western Judea of
Idumean origin, was placed on the throne of Judea as Rome's
new favored client King. Herod would rule for the next 4
decades. Though he is more widely known
as Herod the Great in the historiography owing to the
success of his reign, he is a reviled figure in both Christian
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and Jewish traditions for allying with the Romans, who
desecrated Judea for decades to come and paved the way for the
destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in 70 AD.
It is often forgotten that Antony was responsible for
putting the Herodian dynasty in place in Judea as the clients
and allies of Rome. As the years went by, and as
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Anthony spent more and more timein the eastern provinces, he
appears to have adopted many of the trappings of eastern
monarchy. Nation States and peoples often
define themselves as much by what they aren't as what they
are. The Greeks in centuries gone by
had for instance, defined themselves as being a free
people and the antithesis of thetyrannical absolutist rule of
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the kings of Persia. Rome, with its republican
government, adopted this mentality when it expanded into
the Eastern Mediterranean and viewed itself as the opposite of
Pathia. But now Antony seemed to be
drifting more towards this form of autocratic government, one in
which he aspired more towards monarchy and lived as such with
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Cleopatra in Egypt, a country which had the oldest tradition
in the world of revering its rulers as the representatives of
the gods on earth. If Octavian's propaganda back in
the West is to be believed, Antony's court in Alexandria
became a place of people bowing and scraping before the rulers
and forms of iconography and wealth which was deemed to be
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unroman. His enemies made the most of
this impression of Antony as an emerging despot in the eastern
provinces, though the extent to which this reflected reality or
was the product of a propaganda campaign is hard to say for
sure. Anthony did little to allay
worries about his eastern tendencies.
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Alexandria seemed to have becomethe capital of what was becoming
an independent fiefdom of his own in the east, a fact
accentuated by his decision to hold a Roman triumph, the
military celebration usually held in Rome itself in
Alexandria in 34 BC. This was after he had conducted
a raid into Armenia and capturedKing Artavastes, who had
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betrayed him two years earlier during the Parthian campaign.
Artavastes was led as a prisonerthrough the streets of
Alexandria during the triumph. Then that evening, Anthony and
Cleopatra, purportedly dressed up in imitation of the Egyptian
deities Osiris and Isis, issued a series of decrees known as the
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Donations of Alexandria. Through this, Anthony and
Cleopatra's children, along withCleopatra's child with Caesar
Caesarean, were bestowed with royal titles.
Caesarean was proclaimed as Kingof Egypt and as heir to Julius
Caesar, the latter action being a direct attack on Octavian's
position as Caesar's political heir.
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Alexander Helios, Antony and Cleopatra's oldest son, was
named as King of Armenia and Parthia, while his twin sister
Cleopatra Cellini was proclaimedas Queen of Cyrenica in what is
now Libya. Ptolemy Philadelphus was made
king of Syria. If anyone in the West was
looking for evidence of Anthony's alleged shift towards
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becoming a despot, they couldn'thave found clearer evidence of
it than that supplied by the donations of Alexandria.
These actions in the East provided Octavian with the
ammunition he needed to begin pressing the case for Total War
between the Roman government in the West and Antony's forces in
Egypt and elsewhere. Indeed, we have to be cautious
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about how willingly we accept subsequent depictions of
Antony's despotic behavior during this period, as many of
our records may be colored by the concerted propaganda
campaign which Octavian and his supporters were now engaged in
from Rome against his rival. It was ultimately a successful
campaign. In 32 BC, Octavian exaggerated
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reports that Anthony was planning on establishing A rival
Senate in Alexandria, essentially splitting Rome's
empire in two in the process. This, combined with Anthony's
I'll Judge decision to marry Cleopatra in Alexandria that
year without first organizing anofficial divorce from Octavia,
tipped the Senate at Rome into backing Octavian's calls for
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war. This latest civil war, known as
the War of Actium, would involvethe largest military buildup of
all the civil wars of the late Roman Republic, with upwards of
200,000 legionaries and allies fighting on each side.
Despite the huge numbers involved, the civil war would be
fought and lost in just one major battle.
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This occurred at Actium in the waters of the northeastern
shores of Greece at the mouth ofthe Gulf of Corinth.
Hence the reference to the civilwar as the War of Actium.
Antony had chosen to build up his forces in Greece, where many
supporters and members of the Roman Senate had fled from Italy
to join his cause. Here Antony found himself
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blockaded in the Gulf of Corinthand on the 2nd of September 31
BC, decided to break the impasseby sailing out against
Octavian's fleet. Hundreds of galleys, the
standard Roman warship, clashed across the gulf in what was one
of the largest and most consequential naval battles in
human history. Antony and Cleopatra had the
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larger, more powerful ships, butthe more agile, smaller boats of
Octavian, and the naval tactics deployed by his foremost general
Marcus Agrippa won the day with many of Antony's ships sinking,
while communication also broke down across his fleet after
Cleopatra's Egyptian contingent became separated from the main
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body of Anthony's galleys. Eventually, Anthony broke free
of the fighting with one of his ships and abandoned the naval
battle when it became clear thatall was lost.
Most of his fleet, and with it his chances of winning the war,
was destroyed. In the weeks that followed,
Anthony did his best to gather together the remnants of his
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forces from around the eastern Mediterranean in Egypt.
Many of his former allies abandoned him, and both
Cleopatra and he sent word to Octavian that they would step
down from their positions and retire to become private
citizens if Octavian pardoned them.
Caesar's Air was in no mood for clemency, though he did take his
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time before initiating the finalcampaign dealing with matters in
Greece and Italy in the winter of 31 BC, before sending his
troops to Egypt in the spring and early summer of 30 BC.
There a battle was fought aroundAlexandria throughout July.
When it was lost at the end of the month, Anthony knew that
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nothing but death and the possible humiliation of being
dragged to Rome to be used in a spectacle at Octavian's triumph
awaited him. He killed himself on the 1st of
August, 30 BC, stabbing himself in the stomach.
Plutarch's Life of Anthony suggests he mistakenly believed
at that time that Cleopatra had just died and only learned that
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he was mistaken after stabbing himself.
He was then carried to her and allegedly died in her arms,
calling for a glass of wine before doing so.
The Egyptian queen killed herself a week and a half later
after being captured by the Romans.
Legend has it that it was from the poisonous bite of an ASP,
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though most ancient accounts state that she drank poison.
She and Antony were buried together somewhere around
Alexandria, though the tomb has never been located.
With Antony's defeat and death, Octavian was left without any
major rival within the Roman Republic and had firmly
succeeded his great uncle as thepre eminent figure within the
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state. He would not make the same
mistakes as Caesar. Despite his relative youth,
Octavian proved himself to be animmensely shrewd politician.
In reaching a new political settlement three years after
Antony's death in 27 BC, he established what is known as the
Principate. He would not take the power of
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Dicta Torres, which had given Caesar such immense authority
but which had also proved his undoing.
Nor would he seek to rule as a sort of eastern despot in the
manner which Antony had over theeastern provinces.
Instead, he granted himself a number of well established
powers through long standing Roman political offices, such as
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the Office of. Tribune of the people.
He would also hold the consulship frequently for years
to come, and became the PontifexMaximus, the chief priest of
Rome. Finally, he adopted the names
Caesar and Augustus. As Caesar Augustus Octavian was
declaring to all that he was nowthe first citizen of Rome,
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though not its ruler. The facade of maintaining the
Republic worked extremely well and the new dispensation was
accepted by all. We should not be fooled in
retrospect though. What Octavian did in 27 BC was
begin to establish a new position at Rome, that of
Emperor of Rome, of which he wasthe first.
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While he stood in the shadow of two men in his time, first
Caesar and then Octavian, Antonywas still a huge figure in the
history of the demise of the Roman Republic and his
relationship with Cleopatra and the manner in which he hived off
the eastern provinces as his ownterritory for the better part of
a decade has ensured that Antonyhas been a figure who has
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interested people ever since hisown time.
Plutarch deemed him to be one ofthe individuals who had shaped
the history of Rome and includedhim in the biographies of the
most eminent Romans alongside Caesar and Augustus at the
height of the English Renaissance, over a Millennium
and 1/2. After his own time, Anthony and
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his relationship with Cleopatra became the subject of one of
William Shakespeare's plays. John Dryden took up the same
theme in his play All for Love acentury later.
Closer to our own time, in the 20th century, versions of
Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra were adapted for the
screen, and Anthony was played by both Charlton Heston and
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Marlon Brando in the 1950s. Yet it is surely the 1963 film
Cleopatra, in which Anthony was played by Richard Burton and
Elizabeth Taylor starred as Cleopatra, that is the most
infamous modern take on Anthony,a production which became the
most expensive movie ever made-up to that time, and which
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contributed to the decline of the golden age of the Hollywood
studio system. Mark Antony was one of the most
striking figures of Roman political history, rising as a
military and political figure inthe 50s BC.
He gravitated into the orbit of Julius Caesar and eventually
became his closest ally and mosttrusted military accomplice.
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When the Civil War broke out with Pompey, Antony played an
absolutely vital role in defeating the Pompeians and was
rewarded commensurately by beingmade master of the horse.
Unsurprisingly, when Caesar was assassinated, he was able to
step into the breach as one of his potential successors.
But Anthony wasn't just an important political figure, he
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was also one of the more colorful characters of ancient
Roman history, A man who ended up in the Greek E as a young man
because of his debts, a serial philanderer who married four or
five times, and a noted heavy drinker in an age when you
really needed to drink a lot forpeople to make an especial note
of it. Ultimately, his disregard for
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convention was his undoing. By setting himself up in the
East, saundering his relationship with Octavian
through his affair with Cleopatra while married to
Octavia, and then ruling the eastern provinces as a despot,
he ensured that a new civil war would have to be fought.
His gamble didn't pay off. Antony's defeat and Octavian's
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triumph changed the course of history as the Roman Empire
emerged under his nemesis and the man who defeated.
Him What do you think of Mark Antony?
Could he have become Rome's first emperor if he hadn't made
the mistake of spending so many years away from Rome itself with
Cleopatra in Egypt? Or was he no match for the
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political guile of Octavian? Please let us know in the
comment section. And in the mean time, thank you
very much for watching.