Roman Triumvir
Mark Antony
MARK AN-tuh-nee · c. 83-30 BC · Also called Marcus Antonius
Julius Caesar's lieutenant and one of the three men who divided the Roman world after his murder — the Roman power who had Herod the Great made king of Judea, and who lost the East, and his life, to Octavian at Actium.
Life and work
Marcus Antonius was a Roman soldier and politician who rose under Julius Caesar in Gaul and in the civil war, and was serving as consul beside him in 44 BC when the dictator was assassinated. He turned the funeral into political theatre that drove the conspirators out of Rome, and the following year formed the Second Triumvirate with the dictator's heir Octavian and Marcus Lepidus — a formal three-way division of power that outlawed and killed thousands of their opponents.
After defeating the conspirators at Philippi in 42 BC, Antony took the eastern half of the Roman world as his sphere. He summoned Cleopatra VII of Egypt to meet him at Tarsus in 41 BC — the beginning of the political and personal alliance that defined the rest of his life — and spent the following decade reorganising Rome's eastern client kingdoms.
That reorganisation is where he touches the biblical story. In 40 BC, with the Parthians overrunning Judea and a rival installed in Jerusalem, Herod was presented to the Roman Senate; Antony spoke for him, arguing that a King Herod would strengthen Rome against Parthia, and the Senate voted him king of the Jews. Roman arms then had to put him on the throne, which took three more years. Every Gospel reference to Herod the Great as king rests on a settlement Antony argued for.
His eastern campaigns went badly. An invasion of Parthia in 36 BC failed with heavy losses, and his public grants of territory to Cleopatra and her children in 34 BC gave Octavian the material for a propaganda war in Rome. Their alliance collapsed into open conflict, and Octavian's fleet destroyed Antony's at Actium in 31 BC. Antony and Cleopatra took their own lives in Alexandria the following year, leaving Octavian sole ruler of the Roman world — the Caesar Augustus of Luke 2:1.
- Occupation
- Roman general, consul (44 BC), and triumvir (43-33 BC)
- Places
- Rome; Athens; Tarsus; Antioch; Alexandria, where he died
- Dates
- c. 83-30 BC
Historical evidence
Plutarch, Life of Antony Parallel Lives, Antony, throughout
The fullest ancient narrative of his career, from his service in Gaul through Philippi, the eastern command, Cleopatra, Actium and his death.
Weight: Written roughly 150 years after the events, by a moralising biographer working from earlier sources now lost. The standard ancient account and the source of most of the familiar detail, but a biography with a thesis rather than a neutral record — Plutarch is writing Antony as a cautionary life.
Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 14.14.4 (384-385)
Josephus records that when Herod was presented to the Roman Senate, it was Antony who rose and argued that a King Herod would be an advantage to Rome in its war with the Parthians; the Senate voted accordingly. This is the appointment on which Herod's whole reign rests.
Weight: A Jewish historian writing about a century later with access to Herodian court records and to Nicolaus of Damascus, Herod's own historian. Close to the Judean side of the story and generally reliable for the political sequence, though Nicolaus is a partisan source for anything to Herod's credit.
Further reading
- Plutarch, Life of Antony — via Wikisource — primary source; the Dryden translation as revised by A. H. Clough, 1859
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