Chapter 3 homes in on the intersection of femininity and race: to put pressure on Antony’s curious whitening of the Black Egyptian Queen’s hand in the play’s climactic act. Extending the second chapter’s emphasis on gender, “On the Other Hand: the White(ned) Woman in Antony and Cleopatra” positions Cleopatra as collateral damage, caught in the play’s intraracial crossfire. I depict the significant dangers of the whiteness that gets magically mapped onto Cleopatra’s Black body so she can momentarily become a form of what Arthur L. Little, Jr., has described in Shakespeare Quarterly as “Shakespearean white property.” Through Cleopatra’s whitened body and her interracial relationship with Antony (and by extension, the ensuing intraracial tensions caused by Antony’s movement between Egypt and Rome), I further complicate the white other concept to reflect on integral matters such as white property, white dominance and white women as props: patriarchal, theatrical, cultural, economic, domestic props.

Scholarship on De Officiis tends to place the emphasis on those aspects of the treatise that outline the building blocks of a functioning commonwealth. What tends to receive rather less attention is Cicero’s theorizing of what to do in situations of communal breakdown. But in De Officiis he is as interested in injustice as he is in justice, in the ability of humans to inflict massive damage on each other, in the insufficiency of legislation to ensure harmonious co-existence, in fraud and abuse of power. To address the problem of harm and injustice Cicero calls for vigilance and intervention on the part of all members of the community and endorses ‘protective violence’ up to and including the license, indeed the duty, to kill tyrannical figures that threaten the fabric of communal life. This chapter argues that Cicero’s ethical extremism animates the entire treatise. To render this claim plausible it explores the historical circumstances that gave rise to it and traces its ubiquitous presence within De Officiis, with a particular focus on the conceptual strategies used to justify murder.

This chapter focuses on the relationship between Augustus/Octavian and Apollo’s incarnation as citharoedus (lyre-player). The main contention of the chapter is that the Augustan period fostered a revival of music which resonated with, and to some degree embodied, a restorative political message. Not only did Augustus integrate images of Apollo Citharoedus into his own imagery (both in Rome and in the commemorative monuments around the gulf of Actium), but he also exploited harmonia as a metaphor for his newly established regime, imbuing musical rituals like the Ludi Saeculares of 17 BCE with powerful symbolic resonances. The chapter also makes a case for seeing Mark Antony’s use of music as a key part of a project to present himself through the symbolic language of Hellenistic kingship, against which Octavian in turn defined his own musical ‘programme’.

The chapter is divided into three sections. In the first section I discuss Plutarch’s life and work in the general context of the first century CE. Following this, I provide a short analysis of six of Plutarch’s Lives, Lycurgus, Numa, Alexander, Caesar, Antony and Phocion, to demonstrate the key themes highlighted by scholars of his thought, and to introduce readers to accounts which figure among the most prominent as references in Western intellectual traditions. In the concluding section I offer a comparison and contrast between Cicero’s On Duties and the themes of Plutarch’s Lives and his moral essays devoted to questions of public life. This comparison highlights what distinguishes Plutarch’s contribution and signals his unique contribution to traditions of political reflection on public life and public service.

In Chapter 4, I continue my study of the reception of Plutarch’s work in the French Renaissance. First, I discuss how Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) was introduced to Plutarch’s work at the press of Aldus Manutius in Venice and his subsequent work translating several of Plutarch’s texts into Latin. I demonstrate how the subsequent vernacular translations of Erasmus’s Latin work, including his Education of a Christian Prince, and his translation of Plutarch’s Apophthegmata or Sayings of Kings and Commanders had a different presence in the French and English contexts. I also explore the interesting case of Claude de Seyssel (1450–1520) who drew on the Latin translations of Plutarch by Jean Lascaris of the Lives of Antony and Demetrius to complete his vernacular translations of Appian and Diodorus Siculus. I demonstrate connections between Seyssel’s work on these translations and his later political reflections in his treatise The Monarchy of France while deepening my analysis of the contours of public humanism.

The story of the final months of Caesar’s life has been dominated by the question whether he wanted to be "king." That is to focus the question in a way that privileges the perspective of his assassins. Caesar himself was preoccupied at this time with massive preparations for a war of vengeance against the Parthians on a truly extraordinary scale. The knock-on effects of the mobilization effort were themselves extremely disruptive, causing an explosive intensification of the political game at a time when the Dictator was about to absent himself from the capital for several years. He had gravely alienated the urban plebs, encouraging the conspirators’ expectations (falsified in the event) that they would have popular support. The Caesarian coalition was coming apart, as shown by the remarkable clash between Mark Antony and Dolabella on the eve of Caesar’s scheduled departure. Caesar made little to no effort to create a new political system out of the ruins of civil war during the short period that he spent in Rome before his intended departure on an expedition that would keep him abroad for several years, much less to oversee a transition to a whole new kind of politics.

Cicero claims to represent all right-thinking citizens, the boni, associated with an ideology of traditionalism, as opposed to the populares, whom he describes as a few seditious and degenerate outliers. This reflects a partisan rhetoric associated with the so-called optimates, even though it rests on the paradoxical claim that there are not two similar parties at all. In De Domo Sua and Pro Sestio, Cicero’s partisan rhetoric construes the optimates as having a monopoly on legitimacy, particularly on the legitimate use of violence as a political tool. In a letter to his brother in 56 BCE, Cicero gives a revealing report of an episode in which Clodius and Pompey were addressing simultaneous, partisan contiones. In the Philippics Cicero reflects on the role of factions in the 50s and attempts to resurrect his polarizing rhetoric in order to brand Antony a popularis and therefore an undesirable leader.

Cicero shows deference to the senate’s will and holds up the senate’s authority as a defining characteristic of the functioning republic. The more the senate’s authority seems to erode in this period of crisis and dysfunction, the more Cicero insists on its solidarity and power. Especially in orations delivered to the senate, Cicero casts himself as a champion of the senate’s collective authority and promotes concord among its members based on a sense of shared virtue, shared values, and mutual respect.In De Haruspicum Responsis and In Pisonem, he describes his recall from exile and the restoration of his house on the Palatine as symbols of the senate’s support for him and his politics, while his opponents Piso, Gabinius, Clodius, and later Antony and Calenus (Philippics 2, 5, 7) are characterized in his orations as detested by the senate. Historically, one of the most obvious symptoms of the aspiring tyrant in Rome was contempt or abuse of the senate. He claims that Caesar shares his fidelity to the senate in De Provinciis Consularibus and Pro Marcello, and therefore is not a tyrant.

Cicero puts on an exciting show of outrage, anger, and contempt in his attacks on certain opponents, but balances attacks with statements of restraint and self-control in order to maintain his own dignity and decorum, so that he is not seen as contemptible himself. This balance can be observed in the opening sections of his speeches In Vatinium and De Haruspicum Responsis, where he particularly criticizes the failures of his targets as orators. His persona as an attacker may distract from political weakness in his speech In Pisonem. In the Second Philippic, never delivered in public, he shows less restraint. The Philippics generally show less of the balance he maintained earlier in his career, probably due to political circumstances. While this persona will be familiar to most readers of Cicero, it is a good initial example of how Cicero portrays contemporary people and events through a distorting lens. It is also a good example of how Cicero uses (or weaponizes) norms to police others, often by claiming to embody those norms himself.