K. sets out to examine the popular reception in film and television of the character and mythology of Mark Antony. The central thesis is that Mark Antony, ‘the triple pillar of the world transform'd | Into a strumpet's fool’ is translated in modern film and television as a flawed, subversive, or excessive (depending on the text in question) performer of masculine values and behaviour. Given the centrality of male characters, and male bodies, in so many cinematic (and televisual) representations of Roman history, and especially in the so-called Hollywood epics, this approach makes a great deal of sense. Antony's case is especially intriguing, as K. shows, because he never properly occupies the position of the hero, but is no villain either, despite the fact that he shares his flawed masculinity with a whole range of cinematic villains such as Olivier's Crassus in Spartacus, or Commodus as played by both Christopher Plummer and Joacquim Phoenix. These decadent, effete Romans are almost always contrasted in films with characters such as Spartacus, or Livius and Maximus, who perform a more stable form of manhood, associated with fatherhood and military discipline, and also with a Roman masculine austerity often linked to Stoicism. K.'s project is to tease out the various ways in which Antony's mythic persona, whose key characteristic is a lack of self-control in the pursuit of pleasure, is transformed and adapted according to the changing norms and conventions of masculinities during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The survival and continuity of some of Antony's characteristics (drunkenness, lechery, excess) but not others (especially his ambiguous performance of gender identification) is well drawn out and forms the basis for an interesting and worthwhile project.

I am not convinced, however, that K.'s approach best serves the subtlety, range and complexity of its subject. She identifies Plutarch's Life of Antony and Cicero's Philippics as the sources of the gender-based invective that forms the myth of Antony, and this is no doubt correct as far as it goes. But the over-arching theme of Antony and Cleopatra, as K. acknowledges herself, is love and its power over Antony, and on this subject Propertius (and perhaps elegy in general, as well as Aeneid 4) would have helped to form a more complete view of Antonian masculinity and its reception. Like Plutarch himself, K. does not exploit the great Latin poets to illuminate the subtleties of the Augustan and later discourses she analyses (See C.B.R. Pelling [ed.], Plutarch, Life of Anthony [1988], p. 6). The complete absence of elegy in general and Propertius specifically from this book is somewhat baffling, given K.'s professed interest in Roman discourses of gender. When K. argues, rightly, that Antony as represented in the TV series Rome, entertains and delights audiences because of his ‘performance of unacceptable masculinity’, it is clear that the missing link in all this discussion of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ and its defects is Propertius’ Antony. Reading Propertius 2.16 and considering the role of infamis amor in Antony's downfall would have certainly enriched K.'s frame of reference when it came to discussing the significance of gender and its performance in the political conflict between Antony and Octavian (see M. Fox, Roman Historical Myths [1996], pp. 165–9; J. Griffin, ‘Propertius and Antony’, JRS 67 [1977], 17–26). Similarly, the discussion of Antony's feminisation, and the brief mention of the story of Hercules and Omphale, would have been well illuminated in terms of Roman views of gender by Propertius’ comparison of Cleopatra with Omphale in 3.11, and the ‘Antonian overtones’ lent to Hercules in Propertius 4.9 (T.S. Welch, ‘Masculinity and Monuments in Propertius 4.9’, AJPh 125.1 [2004], 61–90: 77).

The book is based on a doctoral thesis in film and gender studies, and it does an excellent job of situating what K. aptly calls the ‘Antony-icon’ within the theoretical framework of recent studies in masculinity, or better, masculinities. One problem with this, however, is that ancient texts and ideas are mostly filtered through quotation from secondary literature; a good example is the Fulvia epigram attributed to Octavian by Martial (11.20), which is quoted with a reference only to its citation in a popular history book by D. Preston, Cleopatra and Antony (2008), its potential significance discussed only cursorily. The discussion of mollitia and incontinentia, which are rightly identified as key features for understanding Antony, relies almost exclusively on extensive quotation from C. Edwards's 1993 book The Politics of Immorality at Rome. When introducing ‘Dionysian Antony’, K. makes no mention of key passages in Plutarch pertaining to this aspect of Antony's self-mythologising, preferring instead to refer to a secondary source again (in this case L. Hughes-Hallett's 1990 book, Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions). Elsewhere, K. argues that the tendency to excessive violence displayed by the most recent portrayals of Antony (especially in Rome) has no precedent in ancient sources, ignoring the numerous references to his violence in the Philippics (e.g. 3.31; 4.11; 5.19–20; 6.6). All this means that the twentieth/twenty-first century filmic icon of Antony is well illuminated in the context of film and gender studies. But the interactions between this icon and the classical texts which have shaped it, and with which it continues to interact in intriguing and productive ways, are not as rigorously examined as they might have been.