Mark Antony

Biography

Mark Antony was the best general Caesar had, the most charismatic orator of his age, and the man who — more than anyone else — set the Roman world on fire after Caesar's death. His funeral oration for Caesar, turning an ambivalent crowd into a mob that chased the conspirators from Rome with fire and iron, was perhaps the most consequential single speech in Roman history. For the next fourteen years he spent his extraordinary gifts destroying himself. His military credentials were genuine: Philippi was as much Antony's victory as Octavian's, and his campaigns in the East showed a commander of the first order. But his political intelligence was inferior to both Caesar's and Octavian's. He underestimated Octavian consistently — the 19-year-old who had marched on Rome and extorted a consulship could not, in Antony's mind, be a serious rival. He misread his relationship with Cleopatra: what was for her a matter of political survival became for him a romantic obsession that his enemies (and Octavian's propaganda machine) brilliantly exploited. The Actium campaign was the product of an accumulation of miscalculations. Antony had 100,000 infantry and 500 ships; Octavian had roughly the same. But Agrippa systematically strangled his supply routes for months while desertion and disease gutted his forces. By September 31 BC the battle he fought was not a battle of choice but an attempt to break free of a trap. He escaped; his fleet and army did not. He killed himself in Alexandria when Octavian arrived, dying in Cleopatra's arms — a monument to the gap between personal charisma and political intelligence.

Key Battles