On Mark Antony and Writing About History You Don’t Understand

 I am not feeling so hot as I type this; hopefully by the time you read this I’ll be feeling much better with some adequate bedrest, but at the moment I’m probably sitting in bed under the blankets with a hoodie and a beanie.

But in other news, I decided to start a Discworld read-through, and so I’ve started The Colour of Magic and I’ll probably get through it today.

I think I have talked about this before, but I don’t know that I’ve done so in a Saturday Note. If so, I apologize.

On Mark Antony and Writing About History You Don’t Understand

Have you heard of a movie called The Emperor’s Club? It’s a drama about an elite boarding school that centers around the old-fashioned Classics teacher and a kid who’s a twit son of a senator or something. Basically, the twit acts out, but it’s because his father ignores him, but he never actually gets any better, much to the teacher’s dismay. There, I summarized the movie.

Also Jesse Einsenberg is in it?

A specific scene gets on my nerves these days when I think about it. So the class is dedicated to teaching these kids about ancient Greece and Rome, and in one memorable and character-important scene, they’re reading Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in class (put a pin in that, we’ll get to it). In it, Twit Kid says he doesn’t identify with the story or characters, and doesn’t understand why Brutus didn’t also kill Mark Antony. The Teacher is absolutely horrified by this comment–Brutus was greatly conflicted about killing one person in the name of the Roman Republic, and now this Twit Kid is daring to suggest that he should have killed more people? Brutus, “the Most Noble of Romans”?!

It’s a well-made and acted scene, but there’s a massive problem with this: Twit Kid is absolutely right, they should have killed Mark Antony. He’s a twit about it, because he’s Twit Kid, but he’s absolutely right in his basic point.

[Disclaimer: you shouldn’t assassinate ANYONE. Murder is bad. Don’t do murder.]

[A clarification, because I myself am always mixed up about the spelling and pronunciation: this is Mark Antony, not Marc Anthony, who is a Puerto Rican singer, also known as El Chupacabra. Sounds out there? Perhaps, but as my Dad has pointed out, no one ever sees Marc Anthony and El Chupacabra in the same room at the same time.]

Alright, to catch up, in case you’re lacking in basic Roman history or Shakespeare: fearing that he was making himself a tyrant and would ruin the Republic, a group of politicians decided to stab Caesar, and then declare to everyone that they’d done it for the good of Rome. Caesar’s buddy Mark Antony quickly reverses this course by turning the crowd against the assassins, and they’re run out of the city, hunted down and eventually all eliminated. Rome is engulfed in civil war again and eventually Caesar’s heir Octavian makes himself Emperor Augustus Caesar, permanently ending the Roman Republic.

If they killed Mark Antony, this wouldn’t have happened. Despite what some stories might try to imply about eliminating tyranny (Assassin’s Creed: Origins makes this mistake, though the tie-in comic addresses), the assassination of Julius Caesar is one of the biggest botched jobs and monumental screw ups in the history of the ancient world. You’ll notice that later coup attempts, like the (sadly, successful) assassination of Lincoln, made attempts to not just destroy the leader, but also his supporters–though that mostly failed because John Wilkes Booth picked a bunch of losers. And frankly, you’ll notice the Capitol Riot, had it succeeded, would have eliminated/put out of action most government officials that would have stood in the way of its goals.

Had Caesar’s assassins really wanted to succeed, they should have not just wiped out Mark Antony. And this teacher should KNOW that, especially if he’s as into his Classics as we’re meant to believe. Cicero, one of, if not THE most prominent Latin writers of all time, agrees with Twit Kid. He was not a part of the conspiracy, but afterwards said that leaving Mark Antony alive was a massive mistake, and did his best to discredit Antony in public as much as possible, especially to Octavian. This massively backfired, because when Antony and Octavian teamed up, they made a hit list of people they wanted dead, and despite Octavian protesting, Antony INSISTED on taking out Cicero.

Instead of bringing up any of this, Teacher just acts shocked that Roman politicians would consider murdering more people. 

I think this points to a larger problem with the movie: it’s well-acted, well-done, and overall the themes stick… except it doesn’t really know much about history. The characters are making statements about history and what it means, but little idea of how it’s actually studied. For instance, a Classics or Roman history class would probably not be studying William Shakespeare, an English Renaissance playwright dramatizing Roman history–and if they WERE, it would not be as history of what happened but to compare to the historical texts.

There’s a running thing throughout the movie, that history will only remember people who contribute–otherwise, you’re nothing. The example used was a Mesopotamian king who is incredibly obscure. But that doesn’t work because that’s not how history works. Who is or isn’t remembered is sometimes pretty arbitrary, and plenty of people who contributed to the public good aren’t remembered.

In short, my point is this: this is a book in which history, particularly ancient history, is a large part of the narrative. But the people writing this movie don’t actually know about it. As TV Tropes puts it, Most Writers are Writers. Or more broadly, a lot of authors are English majors, which means that they know a lot about how to craft a dramatic yarn, or about epic works of literature, but outside of that field there are obvious gaps in knowledge or experience. Hence reading Shakespeare in a Roman history class, or high-minded ideals about how history works that actual historians wouldn’t hold. This is also why you’ll see Freud and Jung cited in a lot of fiction or analysis of fiction, when psychology has long moved past taking their work at face value. 

[I suspect it’s also why so much fiction runs on popular history rather than actual history. There’s a comment the title character makes in Iron Druid Chronicles about the Catholic Church violently eliminating all the druids, which is Not A Thing That Happened. But those books are full of horrible history and mythology.]

If you’re writing a story or script in which you bring up history, you should know what you’re talking about. This–the Mark Antony thing–is a particularly egregious example because this is actually a conversation real-life people had outside of the Shakespeare dramatization, and it bears discussion other than, “But that would be WRONG!!! 🙁”  It very much comes across as if the writers knew jack squat about Roman history.

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