I've noticed that, in all my reading, Marc Antony is almost universally painted as one of the bad guys of the late Roman Republic. From the books I've read right down to HBO's Rome, he is never painted in a positive light. Instead, he is depicted as an arrogant drunkard who fell under the charms of an Eastern queen, forsook his "Romanness," and made a bad mistake letting himself be trapped at Actium. But there must have been more to the man than simply trying to become Dionysus incarnate.
Are there any good books, or other media, that tell Antony's side of the story? I don't know if it's based on fact or on propaganda, but I've bought into the anti-Antony story hook, line, and sinker, and am hoping a fuller picture will give me a different perspective on the time period.
Adrian Goldsworthy's Antony and Cleopatra focuses not only on the relationship between the two famous characters but it also covers the world in which they lived, family history and the events surrounding their lives. It is not only a narrative, but it also allows you to understand them and their motives.
Goldsworhy does not present all his narrative as fact, but as different theories, since a lot about their lives is not known. Like all of Goldsworthy's books the narrative is excellent. In the book he says that he wanted to write the book because even though Antony was a famous character in history, no one has really written a good book about him. If you end up reading this one I do definitly recommend some of his other books.
Antony's not presented as some sort of a devil incarnate (except maybe by Cicero)--his reputation was pretty seriously rehabilitated later in Augustus' career, possibly because of ties it the Antonians. It was Cleopatra who took the hit--in Augustan poetry and literature it's usually Cleopatra who's presented as the bad guy (for example, I can think of a single instance in verse when she's called by name, she's always just "that woman"). Plutarch in particular paints Antony as a tragic character, misled and crippled by some fatal character flaws, in his life of the character. Particularly in the later part of the Principate, Antony was a rather complex figure in literature