Two gentes were called Antonius, a word that is not easy to trace.  Some explain it as inestimable, but the Triumvir himself chose to deduce it from Antius, a son of Hercules.  One of these clans was patrician, with the congnomen Merenda; the other plebeian, without any third name, and it was to the latter that the avenger of Caesar and lover of Cleopatra belonged—Mark Anthony, Marc Antoine, or Marcantonio, as modern tongues have clipped Marcus Antonius.  The clipping had, however, been already performed before the resuscitation of his evil fame in the fifteenth century, for both his names had become separately saintly, and therefore mutilated; Mark in the person of the Evangelist, Antonius in that of the great hermit of the fourth century—the first to practice the asceticism which resulted in the monastic system.  Of Egyptian birth, his devotions, his privations, and his conflicts with Satan, were equally admired in the Eastern and Western Churches, and Antonios has been as common among the Greeks as Antonius among the Latin Christians. (History of Christian Names, Yonge, 1884).