General Notes

[Herron5.FTW]

Roman general and statesman, 3rd generation with that name.
After his wife Flavia died, he married Octavia (Octavian's sister). Divorced her about 38 B.C. and married Cleopatra. Anthony committed suicide when he heard a false report that Cleopatra was dead.

Antony, Mark (Latin Marcus Antonius) (83?-30 BC), Roman statesman and general, who defeated the assassins of Julius Caesar and, with Gaius Octavius and Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, formed the Second Triumvirate, which ultimately secured the end of the Roman Republic.
Antony was born in Rome and educated for a short time in Greece. From 58 to 56 BC he served as a leader of cavalry in Roman campaigns in Palestine and Egypt, and from 54 to 50 BC he served in Gaul under Julius Caesar. Subsequently, with Caesar's aid, he attained the offices of quaestor, augur, and tribune of the people. At the outbreak of the civil war between Caesar and the Roman soldier and statesman Pompey the Great, Antony was appointed Caesar's commander in chief in Italy. He commanded the left wing of Caesar's army at the Battle of Pharsalus in 48 BC, and in 44 BC he shared the consulship with Caesar.
After the assassination of Caesar in 44 BC, Antony's skillful oratory, immortalized by Shakespeare in the play Julius Caesar, turned the Roman people against the conspirators, leaving Antony for a time with almost absolute power in Rome. A rival soon appeared, however, in the person of Gaius Octavius, later the Roman emperor Augustus, who was grandnephew of Caesar and Caesar's designated heir. A struggle for power broke out when Antony, Octavius, and a third contender for the throne, the Roman general Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, formed the Second Triumvirate and agreed to divide the Roman Empire among themselves.
In 42 BC, at Philippi, the triumvirate crushed the forces led by two assassins of Caesar, the Roman statesmen Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus, who sought to restore the Roman Republic. Later in the same year, Antony summoned the Egyptian queen Cleopatra to attend him in the city of Tarsus, in Cilicia (now in Turkey), and explain her refusal to aid the triumvirate in the civil war. Instead of punishing Cleopatra, however, Antony fell in love with her and returned with her to Egypt in 41 BC. In 40 BC he attended meetings of the triumvirate in Italy, at which a new division of the Roman world was arranged, with Antony receiving the eastern portion, from the Adriatic Sea to the Euphrates River; in the same year he attempted to cement his relations with Octavius by marrying the latter's sister Octavia. Nevertheless, Antony soon returned to Egypt and resumed his life with Cleopatra. Octavius made use of this fact to excite the indignation of the Roman people against Antony. When, in 36 BC, Antony was defeated in a military expedition against the Parthians, popular disapproval of his conduct deepened in Rome, and a new civil war became inevitable. In 31 BC the forces of Antony and Cleopatra were decisively defeated by those of Octavius in a naval engagement near Actium. The couple returned to Egypt, deserted by the Egyptian fleet and by most of Antony's own army. In the following year, besieged by the troops of Octavius in Alexandria and deceived by a false report of Cleopatra's suicide, Antony killed himself by falling on his sword.



"Antony, Mark," Microsoft(R) Encarta(R) 96 Encyclopedia. (c) 1993-1995 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. (c) Funk & Wagnalls Corporation. All rights reserved.