Raining on their parade

Julius Caesar’s deputy, Cleopatra’s second lover, Marcus Antonius is the perennial supporting act.

Julius Caesar’s deputy, Cleopatra’s second lover, Marcus Antonius is the perennial supporting act. In books about Caesar (like Adrian Goldsworthy’s recent biography) or about Cleopatra (mine among them), he appears as a partner, in the ballet-dancing sense of a burly chap whose prime task is to lift a more glittering other into the spotlight.