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. Now he has been allotted half a book: but Goldsworthy is not the man to give him his due of appreciation. Author and subject are absurdly mismatched.

Goldsworthy begins by telling his readers that Cleopatra ‘was not really that important’, but he does allow her some intelligence and charm. Towards Antony he is more hostile. The ancient sources abundantly demonstrate that Antony was a popular commander and an adroit politician, but to Goldsworthy he was a ‘clumsy’ man who owed his successes to happy accident, and whose defeat and death, far from being tragic, form the fitting end to the career of a ‘vulgar’ drunkard who was ‘not an especially good general’.

Cleopatra and Antony alike were adepts in a form of public ceremony in which martial display and religious ritual merged. Their spectacles were gorgeous. Golden diadems and silver thrones, flute-players and handmaidens, clouds of incense, embroidered silks, rose-petals and blazing lights: all these were props in a form of propagandist theatre that made the world its stage and which employed the trappings of luxury and mythological imagery to cogent political purpose. Goldsworthy, who might have got on well with Cato the Censor (the paragon of Roman republican virtue who thought gardens a waste of good farmland), can’t abide it.

When Antony posed as Dionysus in Greece he was borrowing the god’s charisma to reinforce his own public image and flatter his Greek and Oriental dependents: Goldsworthy sees only stupid drunkenness and a health and safety problem (a chariot drawn by lions, he frets, would have been ‘absurdly impractical and dangerous’).