Kyle West (University of Pennsylvania)
The Madness of Antony: Mental Deficiency as a Marker of Character in Plutarch’s Life of Antony and Cicero’s Second Philippic
It is the contention of this paper that both Cicero and Plutarch, in their treatments of Mark Antony, use mental impairment or deficiency as a marker of, and even a shorthand for, Antony’s deficient character. Awareness of this strategic invocation of mental illness as a common element in both authors’ characterizations of Antony can help illuminate the role of disability in ancient elite discourse more broadly.
Acknowledgement has grown in recent scholarship that Greek and Roman medicine and philosophy developed rich and varied accounts of mental illness. A common denominator of nearly all such accounts was the ability of physical states of the body to impact states of the soul; the two were seen as an integrated whole (Jouanna 2013; Singer 2018). One might expect this well-established, medicalized discourse to undergird the way “madness” was treated in literature. In fact in Antony’s case, for both authors, precise medical concepts notwithstanding, mental deficiency quickly becomes a broad quasi-metaphor for character deficiency. Virtually Cicero’s first move in the Second Philippic is to designate Antony “more mad (furiosior) than Clodius” (Philippics 2.1). He urges his colleagues to “consider the mental fog of this man, or rather, I would say, of this brute beast,” and implies that Antony’s mind is so addled by alcohol that he can muster at best a moment’s (punctum) attention to rational discourse (Ph. 2.30-31). Plutarch employs similar ideas in his portrait of Antony, but especially emphasizes Cleopatra’s influence as a fatal catalyst driving Antony out of his wits. The general, Plutarch says, had displayed an off-putting lack of self-control from early in his career, “wandering about with crazed and aching head” (Anthony 9.3). But the encounter with Cleopatra “roused and drove to frenzy many of the passions that were still hidden and quiescent in him, and dissipated and destroyed whatever good and saving qualities still offered resistance” (Ant. 25.1). The Life presents Antony as gradually stripped of mental fortitude and agency, until Octavian describes his state in explicitly pharmacological terms: “And Caesar put it about that Antony, under the influence of drugs, was not master of himself” (Ant. 60.1).
I argue that the continuities between these two portraits of Antony show that ancient ideas of mental impairment were robust but contextually elastic. In contrast to a school of thought in disability studies which contends that disability is only intelligible in a modern, capitalist socio-economic context (Oliver and Barnes, 2012), the easy recourse these authors have to images of mental impairment in creating their character sketches clearly demonstrates that mental impairment, furor, μανία etc., formed a cluster of concepts Imperial and Late Republican authors were prepared to “think with.” However, cultural and personal context, including the persuasive goals of the authors themselves, elastically shaped the import of such
notions. This accords well with a multi-factorial “laminate” or “biopsychosocial” model of disability (Watson, 2012; Shakespeare and Watson, 2001).