At the end of Antony and Cleopatra, I suggested, Antony's invocation of the Aeneid works to affirm that his and Cleopatra's story can be understood as undermining the places of racial and cultural conflict in the founding legend of Romanitas. The two of them will have re-imagined the ending of meetings between east and west, conqueror and client state, male and female. Such an act of cultural will has necessarily required them to construct “new heaven, new earth” (1.1.17) as the ground for this transmutation, a new world which will recognize the erotic as the most powerful engine of human and national destiny.

But in this chapter, I turn to the myth Antony invokes at the moment of his suicide as a way of revaluing the meaning of his life and death. Versions of Rome's founding legends, and particularly of the places occupied in them by women and ideas of their racial and sexual duty, are not as malleable as Antony wishfully pronounces them at the end of his life. My readings of some of these texts of Roman origins suggests instead that looking back to Rome's beginnings reinforces the bonds of gender and of race that Antony and Cleopatra can be glimpsed in the act of attempting to “melt” (“Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch/Of the ranged empire fall,” 1.1.33–34).