Antony and Cytheris
There is a side to Marcus Antonius that history, in its endless rush to judge him, so easily forgets: he was a man who loved openly, shamelessly, and with the unbridled devotion of someone who never learned how to hold anything back.
Cameo depiction of Mark Antony dressed as Hercules riding a chariot with Cytheris dressed as Iole. Pierre d'Hancarville, Monumens de la vie privée des douze Césars, 1782
In 49 BC, fresh from the cold, blood-soaked camps of Gaul, when he found out that his wife Antonia was having an affair with friend Dollabela his took up with Volumnia Cytheris—a Greek actress, a woman of the stage, and the mistress who completely untamed the fiercest soldier of the Republic.
Antony did not keep her in the shadows. He did not treat her as a secret to be whispered about in quiet tricliniums like every other roman noble. He was visibly proud to be hers.
When he traveled through Italy on official business, Cytheris rode right beside him. He introduced her to local dignitaries, flaunting her before conservative Roman nobility who bristled at the scandal of a low-born actress receiving the court of a magistrate. But Antony didn't care. He gallantly called her Volumnia, gracing her with the sacred, heroic name of the legendary matron who once saved Rome from Coriolanus. In his eyes, she was no less.
Where other men played at political restraint, Antony possessed the wild, beating heart of a youth who had been deprived of life’s pleasures for too long while fighting in the trenches. He not only loved Cytheris; he celebrated her.
Even his mother, Julia, traveled in their caravan. While bitter moralists like Cicero sneered later in his Philippics by calling Antony "Cytherius" to mock his total devotion to her, the truth was far sweeter. Antony brought his mother along because his heart was vast and fiercely loyal, and Julia, a woman who knew the grand, complex rhythms of Roman life, seems to have looked upon her son’s passionate affair not with disdain, but with fond, indulgent affection. One can easily picture the three of them navigating the Italian countryside: a graceful Roman matriarch, a triumphant general and the brilliant actress, riding together.
They called him a "colossal child," incapable of resisting pleasure. But perhaps Antony simply understood something his critics never could: that when you find a muse who brings light to a world of dust and politics, you build a procession, you take her hand, and you let the whole world watch you worship her.