Living descendants of Mark Antony

https://antigonejournal.com/2022/10/descendants-mark-antony/

by cacher • 4 years ago

66 117 4 years ago

antigonejournal.com

mastazi• 4 years ago

A descent from antiquity isn’t something most of us can relate to,

What? How so? Did we come out of thin air?

reactspa• 4 years ago

Well he is a "Prince". Of a non-existent Kingdom. So he cannot be wrong, can he?

thaumasiotes6• 4 years ago

Georgia is still around. He's just out of power.

ggm• 4 years ago

Virtually anyone with deep roots in england have landed gentry in their ancestry because statistically they survived long enough to have more progeny. So the base premise here is just wrong.

We're all descended from Adam, and Joseph of Aramathea.

mod50ack• 4 years ago

Virtually EVERY person, from every country, is descended from royalty/aristocracy of some kind somehow. And obviously, literally every person is descended from people who lived in antiquity.

The unusual thing is having a traced relation with royalty or stretching back this far.

Archelaos• 4 years ago

"Descent from antiquity" is a technical term that means that a specific linage to antiquity can be confirmed, typically via historical documents.

Bud• 4 years ago

It's "Mark Antony". Spell check!

e2021• 4 years ago

Isn't the actual name Marcus Antonius? I wonder why we use the anglicised version for him, but the latin names for most other Romans

pmontra4• 4 years ago

Maybe for the same reason the names of famous cities (especially if already famous in the past) are translated into foreign languages.

Examples.

Roma is Rome in English and Milano is Milan.

London is Londra in Italian but Manchester is Manchester and Liverpool is Liverpool.

Livorno (a small Italian town where English poets liked to spend their time) is Leghorn.

Aachen (a German city that used to be the residence of Charlemagne) is Acquisgrana in Italian.

Nobody has been translating city names anymore but Londra is going to stay. Aachen is not very famous but probably Acquisgrana is even less so. I should check current history books of schools.

thaumasiotes6• 4 years ago

I wonder why we use the anglicised version for him, but the latin names for most other Romans

We also use classical Latin names for pre-classical Romans who would have written their own names rather differently.

soco2• 4 years ago

I actually thought the article was about the singer Marc Anthony...

dghf• 4 years ago

I suspect Shakespeare can take at least some of the credit/blame.

dang2• 4 years ago

Fixed now!

kitd• 4 years ago

Is this a world record for proven genealogy? I read somewhere that the British monarchy held the record tracing back to mid-Saxon times. This blows that out of the water by about 600 years.

thaumasiotes6• 4 years ago

Is this a world record for proven genealogy? I read somewhere that the British monarchy held the record tracing back to mid-Saxon times.

China did not have a dark age and so descent from antiquity is relatively common there. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_tree_of_Confucius_in_th... , 80 generations of the family of Confucius have been recorded.

What would qualify this as "proven" to you?

warbler73• 4 years ago

It's not proven at all. He takes speculative jumps to close gaps:

My conclusion is that his younger sister, Queen Nana (AD 295–337), married King Mirian III of Caucasian Iberia (AD 290–362).

In a footnote he admits that the ancestry of the wife of Mirian III is unknown.

tinco• 4 years ago

Plot twist at the end there, as the author of the article is themselves a prince of the family of living descendants of Mark Anthony. Although he's pretty humble about it before breaking the news it did make me double take.

To me the amazing thing is that they managed to hold on to both power and money for so long. It took 1800 years for them to lose power, and 200 years later they're still sending their princes to Princeton.

edit: sorry Princeton highschool, I've got to hand it to them that this high school essay is more well written and polished than anything I ever handed in..

thaumasiotes6• 4 years ago

Plot twist at the end there, as the author of the article is themselves a prince of the family of living descendants of Mark Anthony.

That's not a plot twist. It's a strategy as old as civilization itself, probably older. It's mentioned right at the front of the piece:

In Ancient Greek and Roman cultures, having a distinguished family lineage determined your social standing. This practice has continued to exist within hierarchical societies to this day. Furthermore, many royal houses throughout history have claimed descent from ancient ruling dynasties and from famous figures both demonstrably historical (Alexander the Great, for example) and mythical (such as Hercules, Venus or Aeneas) to solidify their monarchical claim.

It's entirely possible they are living descendants of Mark Antony, but if they are, so is every other person in the vicinity of the Mediterranean.

fmajid• 4 years ago

That's not a plot twist. It's a strategy as old as civilization itself, probably older.

Yep, the good ol' not-so-humble-brag.

probablynottrue• 4 years ago

As of yet, no one has managed to prove descent from antiquity. People claim it for various reasons, but none of the claims are provable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_from_antiquity

avgcorrection• 4 years ago

Humble to write an essay where you could do such a reveal?

googlryas• 4 years ago

Is he though? I would imagine in all those intervening years, at some point the male heir got cuckolded by his wife.

Sunspark2• 4 years ago

There are other things that can happen as well, rape is a known thing, and of course, adoption as well. Romans definitely did adopt others and give them their family name. On a tree, none of this shows.

jl6• 4 years ago

If the average age of giving birth is 25, Mark Antony would be about 80 generations ago. With each generation back doubling the number of ancestors (2 parents, 4 grandparents, …), this person has a theoretical 2^80 ancestors - somewhat more than the number of people that have ever lived. So clearly that logic is flawed, and the family tree must in fact be a family web - but potentially a very, very wide one.

I wouldn’t be surprised if a large portion of the population of Italy were also descendants of Mark Antony, albeit without the famous lineage to prove it.

LarsDu88• 4 years ago

This is the correct answer. The entire population of Europe is about as descended from Mark Antony as that Georgian noble house. Only the Y-chromosome is lineally passed across such long time spans

rongopo• 4 years ago

Does it follow that same would apply for all humans of Mark Antony's time?

ginko• 4 years ago

Only the Y-chromosome is lineally passed across such long time spans

There's also the mitochondrial DNA passed along female descandants.

TylerE• 4 years ago

The real give away is in the bio: Prince Theodore D. Kopaliani is a member of the Bagrationi Royal House.

simonh2• 4 years ago

Furthermore for an ancestor that far back, many of their descendants may not even have inherited any of their actual genes.

User233• 4 years ago

Given that we share somewhere well north of 99% of our genes with every other human being that sounds unlikely.

User233• 4 years ago

This is called pedigree collapse.

photochemsyn• 4 years ago

There also wasn't much mixing of isolated populations of humans, leading to a relatively large amount of inbreeding. Sort of like a graph with clusters of heavily linked nodes and only a few links between the clusters.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22029453-500-inbreedi...

"“In the distant past, human populations were probably only in the thousands or at best tens of thousands, and lived locally, exchanging mates only with their nearest neighbours.”"

International shipping, and now, air travel, has changed this - the 20th century and the population boom have led to more genetic mixing than at any point in human history.

ch4s32• 4 years ago

We have pretty good evidence since 2013 of bands of neolithic humans moving over really tremendous distances. There's good evidence in the Americas of people moving from the Great Lakes down to the Gulf and beyond. Once horses were domesticated in Eurasia, all bets are off and we see mass migration from the steppe through to all of Europe, India, Iran, the Horn of Africa, and other places. This didn't happen in a single life time, but people on horseback with carts really got around.

williamcotton• 4 years ago

My mother’s parents were from a small island community in Norway. They were second cousins.

One time I got drunk and made out with my second cousin who still lives on that same island. My friends and family who witnessed the course of events were merely amused and not at all disgusted.

Inbreeding ain’t going nowhere in coastal Norway!

My (not at all previously related) wife thinks I’m insane that I love telling this story.

b06timmer• 4 years ago

While in the US Navy (1977 ~ 1981) I can distinctly remember the unique facial structures of the people in Southeast Asia and being able to tell what country they were from because of this. A couple of decades later with the mixing of populations by various means, and their diet changing in that-time frame, I couldn't reliably tell anymore.

irrational4• 4 years ago

All it took was a single person who was a wanderer from each isolated community. I’ve read a number of articles that estimate, based on genetics, that every person living has a common ancestor who lived 2000-4000 years ago. It could have been a peasant in rural Tibet or a South Pacific Islander or someone(s) else entirely.

https://sci-hub.st/10.1038/nature02842

xhevahir• 4 years ago

There also wasn't much mixing of isolated populations of humans, leading to a relatively large amount of inbreeding.

The genetics of Rome's population at the beginning of the Common Era were almost identical to that of Anatolia's, but just after Antony this began to change significantly due to the migrations that followed the Roman Empire's expansion: https://news.stanford.edu/2019/11/07/genetic-history-rome/

Bjorkbat• 4 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised if every person in Europe and every person in the Americas with European ancestry was descended from Mark Antony.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/commentisfree/2015/may/2...

PaulDavisThe1st2• 4 years ago

Given that the lineage has not died out, the average number of ancestors per generation is not zero. If you assume it is 1.2, that would mean about 2M descendants, which seems much more reasonable.

pjlegato• 4 years ago

All real family trees are not tree-shaped but diamond-shaped due to inbreeding (often very distant), a phenomenon geneaologists call "pedigree collapse":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedigree_collapse

P5fRxh5kUvp2th3• 4 years ago

If it's "very distant" is it really inbreeding?

krmboya• 4 years ago

Nice breakdown. Maybe it works the other way too.. that a large percentage of the population alive today can count rulership/prominence in their ancestry.

I speculate that when times were hard for humans in the course of history, those who were better off were more likely to successfully raise kids to adulthood, who in turn had better chances of establishing their own families

irrational4• 4 years ago

Yes, every single person alive that has any ancestry from Western Europe is a direct descendant of William the conqueror and Charlemagne and others. But they are also all direct descendants of the servant who cleaned out their potty every morning (presuming that servant had descendants). Claiming royal descent is not a big deal since we are all descended from everyone that lived back then and has descendants to this day.

https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/01/your-family-past-present-and-...

https://nautil.us/youre-descended-from-royalty-and-so-is-eve...

irrational4• 4 years ago

You should read up on family trees. This is an extremely well known thing and you can find a lot of articles that answer this question.

bin_bash• 4 years ago

This comment is begging for a link—or at least a description of this "extremely well known thing"

WalterBright3• 4 years ago

Such paper lineages assume that none of the fathers were cuckolded. DNA is the only way to be sure.

Bayart4• 4 years ago

« Non-paternity events » occur at a rate of a few percents a given generation at best, but it's enough that at this scale even a rock-solid documents trail isn't proof of descent.

TheCoelacanth• 4 years ago

Assuming it's 3%, then after 80 generations there would only an 8% chance of the genealogy being accurate.

WalterBright3• 4 years ago

« Non-paternity events » occur at a rate of a few percents a given generation at best

I thought that widespread genetic testing has shown it to be much higher than that.

goethes_kind2• 4 years ago

That was much harder to do, in the past, and people back then weren't as foolish and trusting as today. They literally went to great lengths to make sure it didn't happen. And especially royal lineages.

At the same time, testing was also not possible back then.

WalterBright3• 4 years ago

That was much harder to do, in the past

Is there any evidence for that? In one of David Attenborough's documentaries, he talks about that. Research showed that people are quick to point out that a baby looks like the father, even when the father isn't the biological father. The inference is that cuckolding is a common occurrence.

You're right that people would go to great lengths to ensure fidelity of the women, even executing them for infidelity. They wouldn't have bothered if cuckolding wasn't common. The recent movie "The Last Duel" was historically accurate in that it was a duel to the death over whether a knight's friend had sex with his wife or not.

Bayart4• 4 years ago

An unbroken lineage to people of ancient times, known as a descent from antiquity, still remains to be historically proven.

Such records exist in Chinese culture, in particular in Taiwan and the diaspora, as they have not been interrupted before the Cultural Revolution.

rgrieselhuber• 4 years ago

Where can one learn more about this?

adastra222• 4 years ago

Even then it depends on what you’d call antiquity. Chinese records only go back as far as 220 BCE, and with a lot of gaps in between.

ThinkingGuy• 4 years ago

And yet there are people who can trace their lineage back to Confucious (c.551 – c.479 BCE)

https://www.nationalgeographic.org/projects/out-of-eden-walk...!

tokai• 4 years ago

Unrelated to the genealogy; but at what point does it become ridiculous to claim yourself a prince? With over a century of no power for the family and no obvious way back to it as the kingdom is well dissolved, it feels like dress-up to style yourself a prince.

shever73• 4 years ago

I don’t want to cast doubt on his claims either, but I was unable to find anyone with the surname Kopaliani in any of the main or cadet branches of the house of Bagrationi.

goethes_kind2• 4 years ago

He is still part of the special club that we are not invited to. Among people with current or former titles, titles still matter.

shaftoe• 4 years ago

Is this like people who wear $500 jeans? Only they can tell the difference.

sct202• 4 years ago

Very quickly, considering the monarchs of Denmark and Sweden removed titles from grand children of the reigning monarchs, and the British are reportedly considering the same.

dangerbird2• 4 years ago

Maybe ridiculous, but not totally unprecedented. Aga Khan IV is generally considered to be royalty despite the fact that his family hasn't held secular power (outside of the occasional governorship) since [1095](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nizar_ibn_al-Mustansir). Of course, they held religious leadership as Imams of the Nizari branch of Islam.

renox• 4 years ago

Mark Antony was a close relative of Julius Caesar (100–44 BC) and a brave general

Brave? I'm sure that the grunts in his army where much, much more likely to die than him (they were in a riskier position, he had better armour, weapons, training etc)

Donckele• 4 years ago

“But what is the significance of all this?”

For this particular story none at all. Nothing.

oli5679• 4 years ago

If the traced genealogy line is average birth age 25 and 50% female, then there are 40 females.

This would mean that a 2% infidelity rate would have a more than 50% chance of breaking this chain, although there would likely be other undocumented ones.

vjk800• 4 years ago

As a very low self-esteem person, I envy the self-confidence of the author. In high school he seems more of a man than I will ever be.

Bakary• 4 years ago

Perhaps you would also have been more confident if you had grown up in privilege and had the resources to pursue various things. An organism with few resources will seek safety and the conservation of energy, whereas one with abundance will seek expansion

al_be_back• 4 years ago

0) Politics is a messy, confusing affair, even by-nature (if you will). I would take such lineage claims with a generous pinch of salt ;)

1) the Ancient world was gravely brutal. Sex, Pregnancy and Fighting were more often used synonyms than most may realize today. Hard to tell how many children Mark Anthony knew he himself 'fathered', let alone us today. Slavery and serfdom was rife in/around Europe up to 1400s, and in parts up to as late as mid-1800s!

2) Bolsheviks were ruthless in removing the Tsar+family + opposition. it's highly unlikely they would've been so lean on such famous linage from little ancient Rome; they were full of paranoia.

Article's a great read though.

user3939382• 4 years ago

I bet they're all traitorous covert Egyptians as well! - Romans, probably

riffic• 4 years ago

genealogy hobbyist here: descent from European antiquity can not be reliably determined:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_from_antiquity

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 4 years ago

Marc Anthony has 6 children:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Anthony

jdlyga• 4 years ago

Is Marc Anthony a descendent of Mark Antony?

dang2• 4 years ago

There was an h in the title. We've de-h'd it now.

naniwaduni• 4 years ago

It's one of those classical names that are traditionally "translated" to the language of discourse. If you can accept that Mark Antony indicates the same name as MARCVSANTONIVS, it's not exactly a great stretch to identify that with Marc Anthony as well.

iambateman• 4 years ago

Tangentially, one time I read the question “at what point are you functionally not related to your ancestors anymore?”

I knew my great grandparents until their death when I was 18. My great great great grandparents would potentially view me as “their” descendants but I wonder how much further. Going back 8 or 10 generations means there are so many descendants (thousands?) that the relationship is meaningless.

bookofjoe• 4 years ago

One thing we can say with certainty is that every person alive today and every person who will ever be born is a descendant of successful hunters.

Living descendants of Mark Antony

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