“The almighty Mark Antony came, proudly displaying his gladiator-shaped chest, and he smashed, with a very powerful punch, Cicero’s face”
Or, the funniest thing I’ve ever read in a Renaissance work (Leon Battista Alberti, Intercenales)
But…I wanna know what the fuck this is.
Cicero was Rome’s major traditional statesman, a staunch defender of the idea of the Republic and importance of the senate. That said he was still a piece of shit, he if I recall was once thrilled that a tenement he owned collapsed killing everyone inside because then he could just build a new one without complaints. Still, he’s generally looked to as a ‘good not tyrannical Roman’…the bar is very low.
Mark Antony for a spell after Julius Caesar had been assassinated was acting largely as…leader? of Julius’ party, and executor of his estate. He’d already been a hated governor of Italy years before, when his relation to Cicero went bad. Now it was worse, and Antony, seeing Cicero as a personal enemy, despite the deceased Caesar’s general admiration for Cicero, put him on the proscription list, meaning he could be freely executed by anyone who found him and his estate would be divided up.
At no point did Antony and Cicero cross paths violently, especially given their mutual ranks in the senate…like…before everyone was killing everyone else and there was total mayhem there was a lot of deference about the sacredness of a senate seat and your position in the government. Hence part of Caesar’s assassination is him wheeling on an attacker and declaring in a shocked voice “This is violence!”
So is this like…Italian fanfic, where an Antony fan boy has Cicero, a nerd, writing the Phillipics, and then getting just slammed into a locker for being such an absolute cuck by super macho and sexually powerful Mark Antony?
Oh, and if you didn’t know, Antony may have never punched Cicero so hard the Senate collapsed, but he definitely did have him executed by a centurion and tribune who found him and quickly put him to death on a road outside his villa.
