Mark Antony and Popular Culture

Masculinity and the Construction of an Icon

Rachael Kelly

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780857735898
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Culture populaire dans l'art

Shakespeare called him "Th' abstract of all faults / That all men follow". For Plutarch he was a bon vivant whose excessive appetites and poor judgement overwhelmed his potential for greatness. History remembers him as the man who threw away an empire for love: an imperfect romantic hero, dashing but decadent, whose tragic narrative is conveniently contained by his death by suicide in Cleopatra's arms. Stemming from hostile Roman propaganda in the years leading up to his death, Mark Antony is generally presented in popular culture as a deeply flawed character, subject to emotional and physical excesses that are understood in gendered terms as defective, feminised masculinity. His notoriety for drunkenness, debauchery, decadence and profligacy have survived and flourished in contemporary screen representations. But who was Mark Antony? Was he Richard Burton's Byronic dilettante, the brooding soldier who allows his love for Cleopatra to dictate his political policy? Was he James Purefoy's amoral, impulsive bully-boy, loyal to no-one but himself and dedicated to the relentless pursuit of bodily gratification? Both - or neither?
In this fascinating account of a classical figure and his reception in popular culture, Rachael Kelly traces the Mark Antony myth in Hollywood historical epic film and television and examines the complex discourses of hegemonic masculinity that have shaped it. Certain tropes occur time and again in constructing Mark Antony for the screen, nurtured by the strong influence of Roman gendered social mores on Western society. Kelly exposes and examines these tropes in order to look at how and why Mark Antony as pop culture icon differs so substantially and specifically from the actual historical figure Marcus Antonius - once the most powerful man in the Roman world, and the man who nearly led the Republic into empire.

1

Marcus Antonius: A Life in Invective

Figure 1 Engraving of Marcus Antonius (c.1880)

Introduction: Historiography and Ideology

Marcus Antonius was born in the 80s BCE, rose to prominence under Julius Caesar in the 50s, and died in Alexandria on 1 August 30 BCE apparently by his own hand. Thereafter begins the legend.

Throughout this analysis, I will be describing the discrepancies between the screen and historical narratives in order to illustrate the extent to which Antony’s deficiencies are manifested. Yet many of these screen narratives, either explicitly or implicitly, invoke historiographical authenticity as their imperative in constructing Antony as deficient. Moreover, although the dictates of commercial filmmaking sit uneasily alongside the practice of historiography, and the screen texts regularly employ a wide degree of artistic license in translating the narrative into a consumable cultural artefact, the ‘truth claims’ invoked by these texts are not necessarily without merit.

Plutarch’s Life of Antony is a study of a great man’s ruin by his own hand, while Cicero’s Philippics catalogues a litany of vices and deviance so appalling that the writer himself is obliged at one point to demur from further enumeration: ‘about Antony’s degradations and sex-crimes that is as far as I will go,’ says Cicero. ‘For there are some things which it would be indecent for me to describe’ (Phil. 2.19).

How, then, is it possible to reconcile the project of this study, which is predicated on the notion that the Antony-icon is a functional misreading of history, with an historical record that appears to support the very reading that I seek to challenge? The answer to that question will be the central theme of this chapter. To understand the function of the Antony-icon in western popular culture, it is necessary to understand its function in the Roman discursive practice that created it.

Inasmuch as it is ever possible to create an ideologically neutral historiography, a timeline of the basic facts of Antonius’ life can be found in the Appendix. This is intended to function as a guide to readers unfamiliar with the history of the period, in order to facilitate the discussion in this chapter, which assumes a degree of historical knowledge. However, in keeping with the chapter’s central premise, this project acknowledges the fact that there can be no such thing as a definitive characterization of Marcus Antonius the man, and that any attempt to reconstruct, the historical figure from the fragments of surviving information – ideologically positioned as all these accounts must be – can, at best, be considered simply another reception of Mark Antony. What follows below is a detailed account of the discursive interpretation of these facts – or, to put it another way, the use that was made of various (disputed) facts of Antonius’ life by his political enemies. I shall offer examples of Roman discursive practice that would appear to problematize a straightforward acceptance of these accounts, and use this discursive practice to offer a possible explanation as to why the figure of Mark Antony has been so well established as an avatar of problematic masculine performance in the pre-cinematic era’s socio-cultural receptions of his mythology. Simply put, this chapter will examine the sources from which the mythographization of Antonius has created the Antony-icon, and attempt to situate them within a larger sphere of Roman discursive custom.

Maria Wyke has noted the specific caution that should be adopted by scholars attempting to piece together an ideologically informed reading of Augustan consensus-building efforts in the early years of the principate. She discusses Augustan uses of Cleopatra, interrogating it alongside modern feminist attempts to unpack the invective and arrive at a ‘neutral’ appraisal of Cleopatra, and argues that:

…this redefined critical practice also draws attention to its own potential as propaganda, its capacity to control our perceptions of literature. Disinterested scholarship is declared a myth and our aesthetic judgements are placed firmly within their own historical context. Thus we may read into Augustan texts and their poetic Cleopatras a stance for or against Augustus according to our twentieth century views on autocracy, imperialism, female power and the process of first-person narrative… (Wyke, 2004: 100).

We must adopt a similar caveat when approaching the historiography of Marcus Antonius, acknowledging the impossibility of inscribing an ‘authoritative’ history of the man himself, even as we attempt to discern the probable from the invective.

It is therefore exigent to address the historical record not as a history of Antonius, but as a history of Antonian historiography. This chapter will consider the forces shaping the manner in which Antony-as-avatar was created by Roman socio-political discourse in the late Republican period and beyond, discussing the form and intent of Roman gender invective, Augustan imperative, and evaluating the availability to the Augustan propaganda machine of certain key events in Antonius’ life. By formatting the study in this way, I aim to avoid positioning an idealized Antonius as the baseline for the study as a whole, and instead ground the tropology of Antony-as-avatar in verifiable Roman discursive practice.

Key to understanding the construction of the Antony-icon is the fact that it relies so heavily either upon sources directly hostile to Marcus Antonius (Ciceronian invective is a particularly rich basis for Antony’s iconography) or strongly influenced by a socio-political backdrop that can be broadly categorized as anti-Antonian. Since it is impossible to divorce the semantics of anti-Antonian invective from their socio-political moment, I will start by situating these texts within the discursive framework of late Republican and early imperial Rome, before moving on to a specific consideration of the operation of ideology and invective within the ancient sources themselves.

Roman Masculinity as a Representational Strategy

Arguably the most significant theoretical contribution of gender studies to our understanding of the semantics of hegemony is the positioning of gender as a discursive construct. Situated outside of biological sexual difference, ‘gender’ becomes an ontological device for defining and managing the body and its function within a wider societal whole. If we imagine gender as a tool for policing difference – for defining the ‘me’ as well as the ‘not me’ – many otherwise naturalized practices, including an almost invisible language of domination (hegemony), are brought sharply into focus.

Hegemony and its function in the regulation of masculinity will be explored in detail in Chapter 6. For now, I want to note that masculinity – its construction, performance and rhetorical significance – was a discursive preoccupation in ancient Rome. It could not be otherwise, perhaps, in an imperialist culture in which language and the semantics of identity were mobilized in support of territorial expansionism and a policy of domination and subordination to a Roman ideal. While there is clearly no ineluctable link between the biological fact of maleness and the philosophy of domination (and it is manifestly outside the scope of this project to explore the pervasive and axiomatic connection between male and superior), it is nevertheless the case that post-colonialist studies of the mechanics of colonial justification repeatedly find the necessity of colonial governance articulated in gendered terms.¹ Domination/subordination is reified in terms of masculine/feminine: the imperialist culture is gendered masculine, the colonized culture feminine, and the superiority of the former over the latter is rationalized, to a significant extent, on these grounds. Indeed, as Catharine Edwards has observed, this is precisely the strategy adopted to defuse the anxiety inherent in the Roman subjugation of Greece: Roman intellectual identity acknowledged its debt to ancient Greek philosophy, but required a rhetorical justification for the seizure of Greek territory. Edwards situates the tension embodied in the semantics of philhellenism as the expression of this anxiety:

For many educated Romans, familiarity with Greek literature, Greek art and Greek customs (as well as the purchase and consumption of Greek goods) was a crucial source of prestige, of cultural capital… For that reason, ‘Greece’ posed a threat to the stability of Roman elite society. Gendering Greek culture as ‘feminine’ and philhellenes as ‘effeminate’ can be seen both in general terms as a strategy to defuse the threat to Rome’s cultural identity and, in terms of conflicts between individuals, as a strategy to limit the value of Greek sophistication to those Romans who possessed it to an unusual degree (1993: 95).

Whether Roman imperial expansionism was fed by a doctrine of masculine superiority manifested in the sharply gendered division of Roman society, or the gendered division was reinforced by the language of colonialism, is not my concern here. Instead, I want to explore the ways in which this gendered language is used to express notions of dominance and power, and to examine the implications of this discursive framework in terms of the genesis of the Antony-icon.

To be clear: I am specifically focusing on masculinity as it is deployed within the Roman political elite – as a mechanism for discursively permitting or denying entry to the public sphere, which, in keeping with the domination/subordination paradigm expounded above, is gendered male. In Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies of Masculinity In Classical Antiquity, Craig A Williams explicitly links the public/political to the masculine: ‘The Roman conceptualization of masculinity as being embodied in restraint and control, over others and oneself, informs two concepts basic to Roman masculinity: virtus and imperium,’ he says. ‘The first of these two words displays a significantly gendered quality. Derived from vir and thus etymologically meaning “manliness”, virtus came to be used of a variety of moral traits considered admirable in men – concepts that might be translated as “valor” or “virtue”. Effeminate men, of course, failed to live up to this standard’ (1999: 132). He continues:

Virtus could also be related to the concept of imperium, the rule or dominion that magistrates exercised over the Roman people, generals over their armies, the Roman people as a whole over their subjects, and Roman men over women and slaves. If a Roman writer wished to wax philosophical, he could even use the imagery of imperium to describe the dominion that reason ought to exercise over emotions (Williams, 1999: 133–134).

The subordination of emotions as signifier of masculinity is a concept that will be revisited in detail in Chapter 4, as it is repeatedly and conspicuously employed in the construction of the Antony-icon. For now, however, I want to investigate the specific devices by which this hermeneutic construct of public/masculine is mobilized into the form of a challenge to political authority.

Roman Political Invective

While it is possible to discern the broad details of Antonius’ life from contemporary or near-contemporary historiographical accounts, it remains the case that much of this information is derived from sources either explicitly hostile towards him or else written after he had passed from living memory, and, therefore, based on pro-Augustan sources. When Shakespeare’s Caesar calls ‘Th’ abstract of all faults, that all men follow’ (Antony and Cleopatra, 1.4.9–10), for example, he is drawing from Plutarch’s Life of Marcus Antonius, written in second-century Roman Greece some 150 years after Antonius’ death settled the propaganda war in Augustus’ favour. Moreover, as Edwards argues, the catalogue of vices by which modern audiences know Antony are very much in keeping with Roman oratorical convention, suggesting that they might more properly be read as political artefacts. ‘Such claims functioned as vivid and highly entertaining assertions about the general character of their victims,’ she says. ‘They also served to display the orator’s mastery of the traditional vocabulary of invective. Rhetorical tradition emphasises the importance of inventio, “elaboration”, in all branches of the orator’s art’ (Edwards, 1993: 10).

Edwards goes on to point out that the very flaws that Cicero levels against his political opponents (not only, we should note, Antonius) were, in fact, elsewhere laid against Cicero himself. ‘In Cicero’s case we are happy to dismiss these lurid allegations of adultery, gluttony, luxury and avarice as false or exaggerated,’ says Edwards (1993: 10). Perhaps if Antonius had triumphed at Actium, Shakespeare might have had Antony, restored to the paradigm, musing on the nature of Cicero’s flawed masculinity. Historical legacy might not quite be a craps shoot, but it very much depends on who finishes in first place.

Chapters 5 and 6 will examine in detail where Augustus leaves off and modern additions to the Antony-myth begin, but for now I want to examine how the parent narrative uses Roman invective to construct the Antony that has been handed down to us. Edwards talks at length about the oratorical devices of incontinentia, which loosely translates as a lack of self-control, and mollitia, which connotes an effeminacy of person or behaviour, and I want to begin by exploring these ideas.

Mollitia is, to some extent, an easier concept to absorb, although its rhetorical application does not always translate well from Roman mores into contemporary behaviours. Edwards quotes Plutarch’s account of Julius Caesar, in which Cicero comforts his own concerns about Caesar’s early ambition with the fact he observed Caesar ‘scratching his head with one finger’ (Life of Julius Caesar, 4.4, in Edwards, 1993: 63). The significance, argues Edwards, is that the gesture, in Roman discourse, is indicative of mollitia, in much the same way that a modern speaker might talk pejoratively about a ‘limp wrist’. There is no literal connection between the action and the interpretation, but cultural context fills in the blanks. ‘Mollitia in a man was sometimes taken to imply an inclination to submit oneself sexually to other men, sometimes an inability to act in a forceful “manly” way,’ explains Edwards (1993: 63–64). ‘Power and sexual passivity seemed, for Cicero and many other Romans, incompatible.’

Incontinentia is an extension of this idea of effeminacy, but more precisely defined. Incontinentia is coded feminizing because the subjection of bodily desires to rational will was considered by the Romans to be a singularly male quality. ‘In the eyes of Roman moralists, the effeminate were like women in playing a “passive” sexual role but at the same time they were like women in having an excessive interest in sex,’ says Edwards (1993: 81). ‘The appetites of the effeminate were uncontrollable. They were adulterers as well as catamites.’ This ‘excessive interest’ need not only apply to sex: alcoholic or sumptuary excess, or a penchant for excessive luxury, would also qualify a man for castigation in these terms. Edwards even cites the invective used against Pompey, who was accused of incontinentia on the grounds that he was immoderately in love with his fourth wife, Julia Caesaris (1993: 85). A man who could not govern his own desires, according to Roman rhetorical mores, could not be trusted to govern others.

Both mollitia and incontinentia, by invoking the gendered division of public: masculine and private: feminine in Ancient Rome, were used to imply that the subject was unfit to hold political office. If the public sphere was an exclusively male space, a challenge to one’s masculinity was, by definition, a challenge to one’s ability to govern. It is therefore of great significance that much of the language of Antony’s iconography is essentially gendered, and follows these specific, feminizing codes of attack. As I will show, much of Antony’s parent narrative adheres to this device.

The Sources

There are, of course, a plethora of sources from which historians have sought to piece together a picture of Antonius/Antony. Many, if not all, are explicitly hostile towards Antonius, perhaps because they are ideologically opposed to him, because they are writing in a period in which it is inadvisable to be other than ideologically opposed to him, or because they are writing in a period in which the benefits of the Augustan regime have been amply demonstrated.

I will, however, focus attention disproportionately on two sources in particular: Cicero and Plutarch. In doing so, I am not attempting to deny or elide the contribution of the multiplicity of other contemporaneous sources to the cultural construction of the Antony-icon. Cassius Dio, Flavius Josephus, Suetonius et al – all these accounts are critical in building an historiographical portrait of Marcus Antonius. An historiographical portrait, however, is not the intention of this chapter or this project. I am not attempting to evaluate all the available ancient sources for their contribution to the historiography of Marcus Antonius; rather, I am specifically concerned with situating the evolution of the Antony-myth in terms of the cultural currency afforded to it by certain privileged sources, and attempting to offer a metonymical alternative reading for these sources in line with Roman discursive practice. Therefore, while I concur that the works of Josephus and Cassius Dio et al are certainly of incalculable value to a modern-day biographer of Marcus Antonius, and that their opinions and ideological agenda have certainly shaped the formation of the Antony-icon, certain socio-cultural conditions – largely beyond the aegis of this project – have afforded greater value to the Antony of writers such as Cicero and Plutarch, lending their characterizations a familiarity that has effectively ‘ghosted’ the Antony-icon on screen.

This is not to say that the Antonius of Caesar’s Civil War makes no appearance on screen (indeed, I would argue that we have Caesar to thank for Antony’s – incongruously – rare appearances as a soldier, where he is often able to acquit himself well), and it woul...