We know about Fadia, a freedman's daughter, only from Cicero. More than once in his Philippics the orator depicts her as Antony's wife and insists she bore him children, a connection which, by aristocratic standards, was so disgraceful it could only be deprecated – true even if her father were a rich man, and nothing in Cicero's vituperation suggests that he was.Footnote ¹ The imputation of gross mésalliance was a reproach the orator had used before. In savaging the character of Gellius Publicola, a noble equestrian and an ally of Clodius Pulcher, Cicero defamed the knight for marrying a freedwoman, ‘not in order to satisfy his lust but to exhibit his solidarity with the common man’.Footnote ² This brand of calumny – an attack on the breeding of a man's loved ones – was anything but unusual in rhetorical invective. Indeed, one learned it in school.Footnote ³ And perhaps this suffices to explain why Plutarch, although he relied heavily on the Philippics in composing his Antony, ignored his subject's marriage to Fadia.Footnote ⁴ An orator and rhetorician himself, and a skilled reader, Plutarch, we might reasonably conclude, saw Fadia for what she was: a far-fetched fiction.

But how far-fetched? We may, like Plutarch, dispense with any possibility that Antony actually married a freedman's daughter, even if some have been willing to take Cicero's word for it.Footnote ⁵ It is more difficult, however, to dismiss the reality of Antony's sexual relationship with Fadia or the reality of her children. In his Second Philippic, which furnishes Cicero's first reference to Fadius and his daughter, we find what is for us a cryptic passage:

Here marriage to a freedwoman again signals a disgraceful desire to ingratiate oneself with riffraff. The nature of the legal case Cicero adduces here, unfortunately, can only remain baffling. For anyone who knew Antony's speech, all must have been clear enough. But we are at a disadvantage.

Some elucidation comes by way of Cicero's discussion of this very passage in a letter to Atticus:

Here we learn how, in his Philippics, Cicero expressed himself delicately in order to spare any embarrassment to his friend Sicca. The reason is obvious: the case Cicero cites did not reflect well on this man. Antony brought it up in his speech because he was certain his audience would agree that he, unlike Cicero, had acted on behalf of the better cause. The orator, it is clear, cares about Sicca's reputation, but it is equally clear how determined he was to find a way of working in Antony's relationship with Fadia, the reality of whom is not in question in this letter.

It has long been recognised how Plutarch, when composing his Cicero, turned to the orator's correspondence, not least his letters to Atticus.Footnote ⁶ Admittedly this material is less conspicuous in his Antony, but it is hardly a stretch to believe that Plutarch was aware of this letter and consequently its implications for the bad Fadian things Cicero said about Antony. Let us agree we cannot know this. But even if Plutarch was ignorant of Att. 16.11, or had forgotten or overlooked its implications for understanding the Philippics, that will not account for his omission of Antony's alleged marriage to Fadia. Calumnies, we are told, are best answered with silence. Still, that was by no means Plutarch's invariable response when he read hostile accounts which he disbelieved. In chapter three of his Alcibiades, to take a pertinent example, Plutarch discredits the disreputable reports about his subject conveyed by Antiphon on the sensible grounds that defamation is often dishonest. But he rehearses these reports anyway, doubtless because, although very likely false, they in some way suited Plutarch's depiction of his subject.Footnote ⁷ The tactic is similar when Plutarch rejects as nonsense the Second Philippic's simile likening Antony to Helen as the stimulus for the civil war between Caesar and Pompey: in order to criticise Cicero's over the top imputation to Antony of effeminate and destructive immorality, Plutarch must first parade it before his readers.Footnote ⁸ Cicero's slur about Fadia, by contrast, was clearly, in Plutarch's view, invective that demanded a different reaction. It may prove instructive for understanding Plutarch's biographical techniques to try to understand his various motives for suppressing Cicero's claims about Fabia.

If Antony indeed fathered children by Fadia, what was Plutarch and what are we to imagine? Cicero does not allege seduction or violation. Nor does he ever adduce Fadia in order to reproach Antony for the sexual frolics for which young men like, say, M. Caelius Rufus could be – and indeed were – blamed. His censure here and whenever his relationship with Fadia recurs concentrates on the children and is centred round aristocratic good taste and a decent observance of Rome's class system: Antony, he complains, took a low-born wife, a specimen of depravity by way of social madness, and with her fathered children. But if we reject the idea of marriage – and we do – we are left with a sexual relationship between Antony and a lower-class woman, one apparently sanctioned by the woman's father, which produced children whom Antony, objectionably in Cicero's view, admitted were his own. We appear to have, then, as Susan Treggiari long ago suggested, an instance of concubinage.Footnote ⁹

Now, Roman men took concubines for more than one reason. Among the higher orders men, especially men of mature years, sometimes preferred concubines when seeking stable sexual companionship unencumbered by the obligations of marriage. The emperor Vespasian, for example, took Caenis as his concubine in order not to disrupt his relationship with his sons.Footnote ¹⁰ A younger man of prudent disposition might take a concubine before marrying in order to evade the seamy and expensive society of a meretrix or the hazards of adultery or fornication. The preponderance of concubines, it appears, were freedwomen, but it was perfectly legal and unexceptionable for a freeborn woman to become a concubine – if she came from the lower orders of society.Footnote ¹¹ Concubinage was an institution the arrangements of which vaguely resembled marriage and could in some instances be confounded with it by poorly informed, or, as in the case of Cicero, malicious observers.Footnote ¹² But a concubine was not a wife. Her sole purpose was to supply a man with reliable companionship and sexual gratification. She was owed no serious social or legal obligations – even should she become pregnant.

Naturally, matters could get complicated. Our information for aristocrats and their concubines is sparse. A detailed, personal account, however, survives in the Confessions of Augustine, who began a relationship with a concubine when he was a teenager. The woman became pregnant and at the age of seventeen Augustine was the father of a son, Adeodatus. Augustine has much to say about his concubine and about the son she gave him, although he never mentions her name, another silence. At first unwelcome – and Augustine was within his rights to ignore the child – Adeodatus became the object of his father's love. And when Augustine separated from his concubine, he kept his son, with whom he was close until the boy's early death. Augustine experienced strong feelings when he dismissed his son's mother, but, he makes it clear, she had to go – in order to clear his path toward legitimate marriage.Footnote ¹³

Now, Antony must never be confused with Augustine, but his connection with Fadia is certainly highly suggestive of concubinage. And in my view, we are probably right in concluding that it was as his concubine that Fadia bore him children. If this is so, Cicero may be telling the truth when he insists that Antony recognized her children as his own. Perhaps, like Augustine in the case of Adeodatus, he liked them. That did not make them Antonians – or his heirs. Indeed, the case of the imperial senator Cocceius Cassianus and the legal difficulties he faced in leaving a legacy for his daughter by a concubine, the free born Rufina, underlines the very real absence of any obligation between a Roman and offspring of this kind.Footnote ¹⁴

For any biographer, Fadia furnished a juicy story, or at the very least the raw material for elaborating any number of juicy, or perhaps edifying, stories. By taking a concubine, one could argue, Antony revealed himself as something other than an irredeemable roué: here was sexual moderation, prudence even. And his exertions on behalf of her father Fadius exhibited not vulgarity but decency – and reflected personal affections that transcended Rome's harsh social hierarchy. As for the kids, even if Antony's attachment fell short of saintliness, it was kindly enough to have saved them from exposure. This kind of thing writes itself. And it is not as if Plutarch was unacquainted with Roman concubinage: at a minimum, in his now lost biography of Vespasian he must have adduced the relationship with Caenis amid the traditional proofs of this emperor's worthiness to reign. And yet in the Antony, where Fadia is concerned, we find nothing – neither Fadia the concubine nor Fadia the wife. Why is that?

Fadia presented Plutarch with at least two apparently intractable problems: she was the wrong kind of woman for his Antony, and her timing was awful. Antonian women, in this Life, must be formidable women, as critics have observed. The biography opens with Antony's strong-willed mother, Julia. She henpecks Antony's generous but undistinguished father, and in doing so sets a pattern for Fulvia, Octavia, and even Cleopatra.Footnote ¹⁵ After that, Julia more or less vanishes, and until Antony marries Fulvia in chapter ten the story of Antony is the tale of a bright lad seeking in vain for a good masculine role model. His unremarkable dad is removed early on. His stepfather too, in disgraceful circumstances. Curio, Clodius, and Gabinius all furnish the wrong sort of influence. And so it goes until Antony joins Caesar, who reprises, in a more nuanced performance, the part of Antigonus in the Demetrius.Footnote ¹⁶ At last Antony receives the fatherly guidance he so desperately needs, and it is only then that Antony marries Fulvia, a woman who, like his mother, is sufficiently strong to set him straight.Footnote ¹⁷ Fadia, it is obvious, comes too early to satisfy the narrative architectonics Plutarch has put in place here. Nor, owing to the condition of her birth, is she tough enough to elbow her way into this biography's team of tough women.Footnote ¹⁸ But nor is Antonia any kind of formidable woman – not, in any case, in this Life. We shall come back to her.

Marriage, then, getting it right and getting it wrong, is a central theme of the Antony as it was of the Demetrius. But this theme plays out differently in the two biographies. The Macedonian, in Plutarch's telling, is never elevated, disgraced, or even distracted by his multiple marriages. For him the institution is utilitarian, devoid of erotic attachment, and easily manageable. Demetrius is a lubricious man, but his baseness along those lines lies outside marriage. Antony, too, leads an active sex life outside his home life. But for his story marriage is more important. In Antony's case, marriage does sometimes elevate him, sometimes distract him – and it is never simply utilitarian, not even in the case of his tactical political reconciliation with Octavian by way of marriage to his sister. There is variety here, but one of the constants in Antony's life is that each of its subject's marriages is ultimately an unfortunate one. Fulvia and Octavia each in her own way fails to rehabilitate her husband, and by the time we reach the synkrisis Cleopatra has also become Antony's wife – and this marriage is the disgrace which destroys him.Footnote ¹⁹

Still, Plutarch was good at making his material serve his literary ends, and a disgraceful misalliance with Fadia, one might have thought, could perhaps be fitted into this biography's catalogue of marital mistakes and by way of prolepsis prepared the reader for Antony's failures to come. Plutarch likes prolepsis, as we have seen in the instance of Julia. In this respect Fadia should have been no less useful than Antonia, about whom Plutarch apparently knew next to nothing apart from what he read in the Second Philippic and whom he inserts into his account of Antony's falling out with Dolabella: Antony believed Dolabella had seduced his wife, and so he divorced her, neatly eliminating her from this Life by way of circumstances Plutarch has largely sucked from his own thumb, a technique more elevated criticism has described as ‘the fabrication of a context’.Footnote ²⁰ Even this account, though, for all its sexiness, is an uncomfortable fit. Here Antonia's job is to elaborate Dolabella's, not Antony's, unsavouriness. Here it is Antony who is wronged, or, put differently, it is Antony who gets it right. This is doubtless why the marriage is ring-fenced by way of digressive, circumstantial detail, and why, when later in this Life Plutarch comes to Antony's marriage to Fulvia, he introduces it in such a way that a hapless reader might easily conclude that she was actually Antony's first wife.Footnote ²¹ Notwithstanding all this literary manoeuvring, however, Antonia at least gets a cameo role. Unlike Fadia.

So, let's try a different tack. Ignoring the routine indulgences of aristocratic Roman youth – excessive drinking and womanizing, and the accumulation of debt – Plutarch's Antony is a promising young man, and his relationship with the concubine Fadia could have been adduced as an early instance, however evanescent, of his capacity for reasonableness. In the Alexander, by way of a possible parallel, that hero's concubine Barsine, although she is never denominated a pallake, registers his capacity for moderation and sophrosyne. Unlike Fadia, however, this woman is high born, and, unlike Antony, Alexander consistently confines his youthful sexual exertions to a single woman.Footnote ²² And even if Plutarch had introduced Antony's concubine as an example of the role the women in his life could play in helping him to attain to a degree of order and reasonableness, she must remain incongruous with Fulvia or Octavia. Each of these women imposes on her husband the profile of a better man. In contracting a relationship with a concubine, by contrast, Antony must become the agent of his own propriety. So, this deployment of Fadia also failed to satisfy Plutarch's design.

In depicting Antony's character, Plutarch might have made something of Fadia's humble condition. At Ant. 4.5 we learn how Antony's love affairs, with all their various complications, some of them embarrassing, endeared him to the ranks and thus signal for the reader an attractive facet of his vulgarity:

Here, amid so much plebeian philandering, a digression about Fadia could have been inserted. Fadia, however, unquestionably strikes a wrong note in the key to which Plutarch has set this passage. Here we have to do with Antony the elegiac lover, a living embodiment of militia amoris. It is love as a battlefield, with all its delightful or frustrating stratagems, that defines the joking and ribbing of Antony and his men.Footnote ²³ Neither marriage nor concubinage properly belongs to this register.

So far, then, reasons why Plutarch perhaps felt he couldn't introduce Fadia. He may also have felt he shouldn't. Perhaps Plutarch left her out, and left her children out, owing to his characteristic sympathy – not for Fadia but for Antony.Footnote ²⁴ Antony, in Plutarch's version of his life, can sink to many depths – indeed, he must do – but he apparently cannot be allowed to father children by the daughter of a freedman. His moralism here is close to, but not quite the same as, the snobbery underlying Cicero's invective. For Plutarch, Antony's value as a moral paradigm, even a negative paradigm, cannot be disconnected from the man's great nature, from his congenital nobility. Plutarch makes this point explicitly when he unpacks the moral message of this pairing in its opening passages,

Critics have not failed to observe how the Antony, for all its disapproval of its subject's lapses and failures, nonetheless brings to the fore the tragedy of this man's failure, a tragedy that impresses the reader because Antony's essential nature, admitted fragile, even vulnerable, is a truly noble one, body and soul.Footnote ²⁵

Antony's was a nature the splendour of which he passed on through his abundant children and their descendants, the elaboration of which issue constitutes the closing of his Life. Closure by way of pointing at a hero's progeny is a recurring and familiar Plutarchan technique, and it is variously deployed, rarely without complications. The complexities that arise when reading Plutarch's account of Antony's family tree have been pointed out before.Footnote ²⁶ Still, in the struggle for imperial power, inasmuch as Octavian's successors derive principally from Antony's and not Octavian's gene-pool, it is clear that – in a sense – Antony was the winner. And Antony's family are some of them truly illustrious: his son-in-law the learned Juba, for instance, and the gifted Germanicus. Plutarch does not overlook Gaius’ insanity, but Claudius is mentioned without praise or blame. And this registry closes with Nero, the human debacle who very nearly destroyed the empire, a chip off the old block. By ending with Nero Plutarch at the very least makes the point that, in the political contest between Antony and Octavian, the better man won, even if Nero was also a direct descendant of the first princeps. This was of course the inevitable conclusion for any imperial writer. A mixed bag, then, but however one decides to take it in its totality, this passage exhibits clear proof of Antony's nobility. Antony's race is a race of kings and emperors.

It is here, in the closing chapter of this Life, that we find the most conspicuous instance of Plutarch's silence on the topic of Fadia: this section opens with the words, ‘Antony left seven children by his three wives’.Footnote ²⁷ For readers ignorant of the Philippics, this sentence unmistakeably constructs an Antony very different from the Ciceronian version. For readers in the know, however, Plutarch here furnishes a tacit correction of Cicero, at least insofar as Antony's marriage to Fadia is concerned. As for the children, that issue is side stepped.

Now, Tim Duff has suggested that, in the Antony, Plutarch is interested in its subject's sex life only when it has political or geopolitical implications.Footnote ²⁸ This may well be right, but the difficulty of distinguishing the personal from the political in Plutarchan biography persists. In the world of the Demetrius–Antony, as we have seen, the history of Antony's marriages or the topic of his progeny cannot easily be tabulated under the simple heading of sex, Antonian. In my view, the absence of Fadia and especially her children is important in the shaping of this Life, and I suggest that their omission is owing to Plutarch's disapprobation of men who seek children from women of the wrong stock. Although this is a view from which we naturally recoil, the notion that the mother of one's children must possess a suitable heritage was normative in Greco-Roman commentary on marriage – and in much legislation about marriage in Greece and Rome alike.Footnote ²⁹

In the Pseudo-Plutarchan treatise De Liberis Educandis, almost certainly a contemporary text and very likely a product of Plutarch's intellectual circle,Footnote ³⁰ it is stated as a matter of policy that no man hopeful of notable children should run the risk of fathering offspring through intercourse with a concubine:

Children like this – the author's point is unmissable – are made from the wrong stuff.

Plutarch, too, makes absolutely clear his distaste for marriage when it is contracted between seriously misaligned parties. In his Elder Cato he includes a lengthy account of Cato's second marriage to the daughter of one of his clients, underlining its indignity and the strong and in Plutarch's opinion entirely legitimate objections of Cato's adult son:

When Cato justifies his decision to his son by stressing his desire, as he puts it, ‘to leave behind me more sons like you of my blood’, Plutarch, by observing how Cato here reprises a remark previously made by the tyrant Peisistratus (cf. Ath. Pol. 17.3–4), registers his disapproval.

The biographer saves his fiercest criticism of Cato's marriage for his synkrisis:

Plutrarch concludes this synkrisis by censuring Cato for this unequal marriage, a union he attributes to base motives: ‘for if he had wished to father other sons as virtuous as his first’, Plutarch the synkrisist asserts, ‘then from the start he would have endeavoured to marry a noble woman’.Footnote ³¹ And yet the Life itself closes by adducing, as Cato's legacy to his city, Cato Uticensis, or ‘Cato the Philosopher’ as Plutarch denominates him, ‘one of the most remarkable men of his time’.Footnote ³² Here we find a typically unsimple conclusion, one purpose of which, obviously enough, is to balance the Elder's Cato's antipathy to Greek culture with the splendid Hellenism of his descendant. More pertinent to our discussion here, however: Plutarch explicitly traces the younger Cato back to the Elder Cato's disgraceful second marriage. And yet not even this remarkable man can shake the biographer's disapproval of taking a wife who is the wrong sort socially.

This was something Antony, at least Plutarch's Antony, never did. Nor, in Plutarch's universe, did Antony sully his lineage by siring children from a concubine. When Antony took a wife – even a foreign wife – she was always exquisitely endowed and possessed of the proper status for a man of Antony's fundamental nature and elevation and therefore entirely suitable to the tragedy of his career. Hence the splendour of his aristocratic progeny, even the ones who, like their ancestor, turned out bad. On this basic score, at least, Plutarch will not humiliate his Antony by mentioning the base-born children so often deployed in Ciceronian vituperation.

If, as I have suggested, Plutarch knew all along that Fadia and her children were very real parts of Antony's past, then the biographer's silence – or perhaps we could say restraint – goes deeper than simply rejecting fake news. The biographer's snobbery in the matter of Fadia and her children may and almost certainly will disturb us, but Plutarch was a man of his times and not of ours. His occlusion of Fadia was, by his lights, among other things an act of kindness – not toward the woman or her offspring but toward Antony. In which case, Plutarch has elected to preserve for his noble ruin at least one species of integrity – and he has done so not by way of justification or extended rehabilitation, but by way of omission. The strategy was at once neat and appropriate. ‘For words divide and rend’, as Swinburne once put it, ‘But silence is noble till the end’.