What were Marcus Antony's plans on ruling if he had won the civil war with Augustus?

by Henry_Burris
XenophonTheAthenian

You'd have to ask Antony, no source of ours mentions his intentions very much. The most that we can divine is through Augustan rhetoric, which emphasized the threat of foreign invasion by Cleopatra, who tended to get most of the blame (Antony was a Roman after all, so blaming him was bad form). Obviously that's not a very balanced view, and it's a rhetorical campaign that began on the eve of Actium to rally the Italians behind Octavian--coupled with the oath of personal loyalty to Octavian that all the Italians swore it was a powerful weapon. We know that Antony during the Donations of Alexandria and in his will granted massive amounts of land to Cleopatra and her children, as well as more than a few titles--his will in particular made a lot of people very upset. But I would highly question that Antony had any "plans on ruling" at all. Shackleton Bailey pointed out in his biography of Cicero what just about every classicist agrees on--with the possible exception of Caesar during the last year or so of his life (and I personally would say that no, Caesar is not an exception at all) there wasn't really anyone in the state who seriously contemplated a serious overhaul of the way the state functioned before Augustus. Even then Actium was certainly something of a surprise to Octavian, particularly the completeness of his victory--it took some time to get things resettled from the decades of civil war. If we're talking about Antony in particular I see no reason to believe on the basis of his actions that he had anything resembling a plan on what do do with the Roman state--in the last years of his life he seems (or at least Octavian wanted him to seem) largely uninterested with anything besides his own provinces