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Mark Antony

Latin nameMarcus Antonius

Caesar’s lieutenant, Cleopatra’s ally and lover

Soul of the Legions · Commanders

Second TriumvirateBattle of ActiumThe funeral oration

Who they are

Antony was the boldest of Caesar’s lieutenants and held Italy for him during the civil war. After Caesar’s assassination he turned the whole situation with a funeral oration: he displayed the bloody robe and read out the will that gave Caesar’s gardens to the citizens, the Roman mob raged, and the assassins fled in panic. He formed the Second Triumvirate with Octavian and Lepidus, and after the proscription purge (Cicero died on his list) split the world with Octavian, taking the rich East for himself. In the East he met Cleopatra, and from then on his life was entangled between Roman power and the Egyptian queen: he gave lands to her and their children, and asked in his will to be buried in Alexandria — and when Octavian obtained the will and made it public, Roman opinion was outraged. At the Battle of Actium in 31 BC he withdrew with Cleopatra’s fleet mid-battle and collapsed without a fight; the next year Octavian reached Alexandria, and Antony, mistakenly hearing the queen was dead, fell on his sword and was carried to the tomb where Cleopatra was hiding, dying in her arms.

Key stories

The funeral oration

The assassins agreed to a public funeral for Caesar — a fatal concession. Antony first read the will calmly: three hundred sesterces to every Roman citizen, and the gardens by the Tiber given as a public park. Then he raised the bloody robe pierced with twenty-three holes and named the blows one by one: "This gash was Casca’s… this one Brutus’s, whom he trusted so." The crowd rioted on the spot, tore up the timber of the forum to burn the body, and rushed with torches toward the assassins’ houses. Shakespeare made it the summit of rhetoric: "I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him."

The turn at Actium

At the headland of Actium, Antony’s heavy warships and Octavian’s light, fast fleet were locked in stalemate. At the height of the battle Cleopatra’s sixty Egyptian ships suddenly set sail out of the fight — and Antony abandoned his whole army, boarded a fast ship, and followed her. The leaderless fleet and the nineteen legions on land soon surrendered in formation. Why did he go? Love, a secret pact, or cutting his losses in a lost battle? Historians have argued for two thousand years. All that is certain is the cost: the one match remaining in the Roman world became Octavian’s solo performance.