The General in Slave’s Clothing:
Plutarch’s Depiction of a Deviant and Liminal Marc Antony

Angela E. Holzmeister (University of Toronto)

In his Life of Antony, Plutarch explores the flaws and failures of Marc Antony, providing us with a character study and moralizing tale of the Roman general. He describes Antony’s life, from his potential as a great military leader to his eventual submission to Cleopatra and subsequent downfall. What we are given, however, is not a simple story of a man’s ruin due to a woman, but instead the depiction of abnormal and morally deficient acts by a man who carries the burden through history of being defeated by his own hubris, extravagance, and, most importantly, deviant nature. This paper explores how Plutarch attributes Antony’s failure to his nature (phusis), and shows how this abnormality is made apparent by Antony’s predisposition to cross-dressing, thus transgressing boundaries not only of gender but initially of class.

Plutarch takes advantage of Antony’s claim of Herculean ancestry to employ the mythic trope of Hercules and Omphale when depicting the relationship between Antony and Cleopatra. This myth, commonly used by the Roman elegists, narrates Hercules’ submission to Omphale, as she forces him to do women’s work and wear women’s clothing (Propertius 4.9; Ovid, Heroides 9). Brigette Ford Russell notes the emasculating effect of Plutarch’s comparison of Antony’s relationship to that of Hercules (1998), but this still leaves unexplored the overriding difference between the hero and the Roman general. My paper shows that, unlike the forcible role experienced by Hercules, from which he emerges a stronger hero, Antony willingly cross-dresses (to the point of fetishism), thereby entering a liminal state between conqueror and conquered from which he cannot escape. Plutarch uses the myth of Hercules and Omphale to create a parallel between Antony and Hercules with an ironic twist. Antony does not emerge heroic, but is forever confined to the abnormal state of the cross-dressed character.