Becoming Mark Antony: A Metabiographical Study of Characterization and Reception

302 Pages·2015·1.58 MB·English

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Title
Becoming Mark Antony: A Metabiographical Study of Characterization and Reception
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https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7pq898zf
Author
Lessie, Alexander James
Publication Date
2015

Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation
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Becoming Mark Antony: A Metabiographical Study of Characterization and Reception

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the

requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy

in Classics

by

Alexander James Lessie

2015
© Copyright by

Alexander James Lessie

2015
ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

Becoming Mark Antony: A Metabiographical Study of Characterization and Reception

by

Alexander James Lessie

Doctor of Philosophy in Classics

University of California, Los Angeles, 2015

Professor Amy Richlin, Chair

The subject of this dissertation is the nexus of Greek and Latin texts that feature Mark
Antony. Cicero’s Philippics and Plutarch’s Life of Antony are the key components of this corpus,
but this dissertation also encompasses writings about Antony by authors ranging from Propertius
to Cassius Dio and covers the reception of this material in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Each
chapter uses a metabiographical approach to examine a particular stylized persona that these
authors project onto Antony. Chapter 1 investigates why authors invest Mark Antony with the
attributes of a stage actor with a frequency rivaled only by similar treatments of later emperors
like Caligula and Nero. Chapters 2 and 3 analyze the representation of Antony as a tyrant in
Latin-language authors and Greek-language authors, respectively. Chapter 4 delineates the
different ways that authors conceive of Antony’s love for Cleopatra as a type of madness.
Chapter 5 uses Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar as a test case for applying the metabiographical
methodology to a post-classical literary text and focuses on Shakespeare’s innovative
deployment of Antony as a paragon of eloquence.

ii
By analyzing the manifestations these personae in different authors, I uncover new ways
of understanding why competing portrayals of Antony take shape across time and across genre,
and I map out the evolution of the idea of Mark Antony as it is manufactured over time in
literature. I argue that the distortion of Antony that takes place in our sources is less an artifact of
his rivals’ propaganda than a product of the historio-biographical process itself. I show how
recurring biographical motifs exhibit subtle variations from author to author that signal
alignments with particular rhetorical traditions, highlight key themes, or encode commentary
upon the authors’ own cultural milieux.
The principal contribution my project makes to our understanding of Greco-Roman
literature is to demonstrate how Mark Antony is exploited as a malleable cultural touchstone.
Recent work in metabiography has illuminated how Julius Caesar and Cleopatra perform this
role as well, but our understanding of the processes that produced icons like these remains
incomplete without a comparable study of Mark Antony. This dissertation fills this gap.

iii
The dissertation of Alexander James Lessie is approved.

Robert Gurval

Ronald Mellor

Mario Telò

Amy Richlin, Committee Chair

University of California, Los Angeles

2015
iv
Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vi

Vita vii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1: The Staging of Mark Antony’s Body 13

Chapter 2: The Tyranny of Cicero’s Antony 70

Chapter 3: Roman Tyranny in a Greek World 121

Chapter 4: Mark Antony and the Madness of Love 183

Chapter 5: ‘I am no orator, as Brutus is’: The Unstable Identity 236
of Mark Antony in Julius Caesar

Afterword 279

Bibliography 282
v
Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my committee members Robert Gurval, Ronald Mellor, Amy
Richlin, and Mario Telò for their generous feedback, steadfast support, tireless patience, and
warm encouragement during the writing of this dissertation. In particular, I would like to express
my deep appreciation to my chair, Amy Richlin, for directing this project from its initial stages to
its completion. I would also like to thank Francesca Martelli for her insightful comments on
drafts of several chapters, and the rest of the UCLA Classics faculty, my graduate student
colleagues, and my family for support both tangible and intangible over the past six years. I also
received helpful feedback on material from Chapter 1 at the “Truth and Untruth” panel at the
2015 annual meeting of the Society for Classical Studies, for which I am grateful. I owe sincere
thanks to the UCLA Graduate Division for the award of a Dissertation Year Fellowship for the
2014-15 academic year that allowed this dissertation to be completed in a timely manner.
Finally, I wish to express my profound gratitude to my dear friend and colleague Christian
Lehmann for generously reading the entire dissertation and saving me from countless errors and
infelicities of expression. Those that remain I must claim as my own.
vi
VITA

2009 B.A. (summa cum laude), Classical Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

2009-10 Mellon Fellowship of Distinction
University of California, Los Angeles

2010-12 Teaching Assistant
Department of Classics
University of California, Los Angeles

2011 M.A., Classics
University of California, Los Angeles

2012-13 Mellon Fellowship of Distinction
University of California, Los Angeles

2013-14 Teaching Assistant
Department of Classics
University of California, Los Angeles

2014-15 Dissertation Year Fellowship
University of California, Los Angeles

PRESENTATIONS

Lessie, Alexander (March, 2012) The Comedy of Parenting in Statius’s Achilleid.
Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Classical Association of the
Middle West and South.

-------------------- (January, 2013) Protagoras 309a-310a: Socrates’ Angelic
Encounter. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Philological
Association.

-------------------- (March, 2014) Subversive Fidelity in Livy’s Account of
Masinissa and Sophoniba. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the
Classical Association of the Pacific Northwest.

--------------------- (January, 2015) A Body of Text: Incorporating Mark Antony
into the Second Philippic. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the
Society for Classical Studies.
vii
Introduction

ANTONY
Eros, thou yet behold’st me?

EROS
Ay, noble lord.

ANTONY
Sometimes we see a cloud that’s dragonish,
A vapour sometime like a bear or lion,
A towered citadel, a pendant rock,
A forked mountain, or blue promontory
With trees upon’t, that nod unto the world
And mock our eyes with air. Thou has seen these
Signs –
They are black vesper’s pageants.

EROS
Ay, my lord.

ANTONY
That which is now a horse, even with a thought
The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct,
As water is in water.

EROS
It does, my lord.

ANTONY
My good knave Eros, now thy captain is
Even such a body: here I am Antony:
Yet cannot hold this visible shape, my knave.1

– Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, 4.15.1-14

Of the many thousands of treatments of the tragic end of the Roman general and
statesman Mark Antony written over the past two millennia, there is perhaps no more poignant
evocation of his downfall than this acknowledgment of impending self-annihilation.
Shakespeare’s Antony, brooding with his servant Eros upon the deceptiveness inherent in the
stable appearance of identity, suggests that those elements of his identity that define him as Mark
Antony are slipping away from him. The loss of his soldiers, friends, family, and, above all,

1 The text here printed is taken from Michael Neill’s (1994) edition for the Oxford Shakespeare series.
1