A Masterfully Woven History of the Battle of Actium
Cornell University classicist Barry Strauss is an accomplished author of several scholarly books and articles on ancient Greek military, social, and economic problems. Starting about 20 years ago, Strauss increasingly turned his expertise and attention to writing riveting (and reliable) accounts for popular audiences about some of the most famous events of Greek and Roman antiquity, among them the battle of Salamis, the Trojan War, Spartacus’s slave revolt, various Roman emperors, and the assassination of Julius Caesar. He is currently the profession’s most gifted and accomplished classicist in making accessible to general readers the mesmerizing world of Greece and Rome. And that’s no easy task.
Ancient literary, historical, epigraphical, and archaeological sources for these seminal episodes are often fragmentary. Classical historians argue endlessly about their historicity. Yet it is difficult to find classicists who can translate such complexity into engaging narratives. And it becomes perhaps even harder to find effective stylists and popularizers who possess the philological skills and expertise to weigh and evaluate such conflicting ancient evidence.
Strauss, with over four decades of experience as an ancient historian, topographer, philologist, and student of archaeology, has excelled in both areas. And he now offers us the most challenging of his recent narratives. In “The War that Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium,” he chronicles the seven-year denouement of the decades-long Roman civil wars that ended with Octavian, the future Augustus, pitted at the Battle of Actium against his former partner Mark Antony and the Ptolemaic queen of Egypt, Cleopatra VII Philopator – the popular “Cleopatra” of Hollywood epic films, miniseries, and historical novels.
The roughly two-decade internecine wars of annihilation had formally broken out into open hostilities when Octavian was just 14 years old, after his great-uncle Julius Caesar had crossed the Rubicon into Italy in 49 B.C. The civil wars should have ended by 45 B.C., when the Caesarians finally vanquished the Republican forces under Pompey and subsequently put down the scattered remnants led by the deceased general’s two sons.
But as Strauss notes, Caesar’s assassination in 44 B.C. tore the scab off a poorly healing wound of civil discord. So, two more – and even more bitter – iterations of strife followed. The teenager Octavian brilliantly portrayed himself as the unchallenged, legitimate, and adopted heir of the increasingly lamented dead Caesar, the fallen first man of Rome. Yet at first, Octavian partnered in an uneasy alliance of convenience with the mostly incompetent Republican assassins of his great uncle, as both parties initially plotted to neutralize the loyal but megalomaniac Caesarian subordinate Mark Antony.
Soon, however, popular opinion shifted. Rome’s moneyed interests began funding Caesarians as much as Republicans. And the Roman street increasingly judged the late Julius not so much as a tyrant as an underappreciated champion of the lower classes who had spread his hard-won foreign spoils generously among the people of Rome.
So, Octavian at the opportune moment joined Antony in a new series of battles to defeat the Republican forces under the Caesarian assassins Brutus and Cassius. Their seminal victory at Philippi (42 B.C) over the twin architects of the Caesar’s murder again should have ended the civil war once and for all.
But the Republican survivors regrouped. They held off the now formal alliance of Octavian and Anthony for another seven years until the death of Sextus Pompey in 35 B.C. With Sextus’s end came the final destruction of the Republican cause and the inevitable falling out between the two Caesarians.
Without a common enemy, Octavian and Antony now formally inaugurated a new cycle of civil war – much of it ostensibly over the future ownership of the rich Ptolemaic kingdom of Egypt, the breadbasket and wealthiest domain on the shores of the Mediterranean, and thus the financial pathway to dictatorship over the entire emerging global empire of Rome.
Antony and his Egyptian queen consort Cleopatra were soundly defeated at the huge sea battle at Actium, in northwestern Greece, in 31 B.C. About a year later, each committed suicide. The triumphant Octavian became “Augustus” and oversaw the final transition of the old Italian agrarian republic into the Roman Principate. He would rule successfully and competently, as an unquestioned – but reasonable, for the times – imperator for the next 44 years. The rest is history.
If one includes the initial usurpation of the Roman Republic by the first triumvirs Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus in 60 B.C., then the three decades between 60 B.C. and 31 B.C. also marked the metamorphosis from a republican European nation – the Latin natio was a concept largely unknown or unwelcome to the squabbling polis Greeks – to a global Mediterranean commercial empire. Perhaps over 300,000 Romans were killed fighting during that tortuous passage, as alliances shifted, fell apart, and were reborn.
The decades of continually internecine war were certainly brutal. They were characterized by both secret and open pacts of conveniences, betrayals, treasons, assassinations, intrigue, barbarity, and mounting internecine violence. The unending violence makes the fictional “Game of Thrones,” a gruesome saga of dynastic rivalries, seem pedestrian in comparison. It would be no exaggeration to say most of the luminaries of the Roman aristocracy were wiped out over these three decades in battles, by proscriptions, and through assassinations.
Generally, any major player during the wars who became an assassin usually was himself eventually assassinated. If we sometimes are bothered that the contemporary poet geniuses Horace and Virgil became early Augustan sycophants, we underestimate the general Roman sense of relief credited to Augustus, and appreciation of him for delivering the people from years of mass death and relentless upheaval.
Strauss charts the steady ascendence of Octavian as part of his fated rendezvous at Actium. He was a mere four-year-old at the outset of the First Triumvirate, a temporary fix (60 B.C. – 53 B.C.) consisting of Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus, and he ended the strife as a 32-year-old at Actium. How did the novice survive? Strauss notes the logic of the improbable triumph of the kid Octavian:
Besides, on the principle of “It takes a thief,” Octavian was a good judge of turncoats. In a dozen years on the public stage, he had first supported Julius Caesar and then the Senate that approved of Caesar’s assassination. He had made war on Antony and then joined forces with him against the Senate. He had allied with Cicero and then allowed him to be executed. He had made peace with Sextus Pompey and then fought a war to the death. So, Octavian could tolerate a few twists and turns on the parts of others.
The first half of the book chronicles the lives of the principles in the lead-up to the finale at Actium; the second half is a gripping description of the great sea battle and an analysis of the political significance of Octavian’s historic victory. Strauss’s overarching themes include the ironies of these bloody decades.
The robust Julius Caesar was militarily brilliant, but politically naïve. His sickly, young, and more successful heir Octavian proved the opposite, as tentative on the battlefield as he was diabolically and ruthlessly brilliant as a politician and propagandist.
The generational opponents of the First Triumvirate, and later the dictator Caesar – such as the seasoned insider and moralist Cato the Younger, the later “noble” assassins led by Brutus and Cassius, the subsequent republican supporters such as the erudite Cicero, and the thuggish Mark Antony – were all supposedly masters of Roman politics in a way inconceivable to the upstart teen Octavian. In the end, all died violently. Augustus passed quietly in bed at 77.
Strauss notes still-greater paradoxes. In the name of conservative Romanity, Julius Caesar, Pompey, Mark Antony, and Octavian all inevitably made their way to the sumptuous eastern court at Alexandria, ostensibly on various quests for vengeance, alliance, or sanctuary. But all in differing ways inevitably found themselves fixated on Egyptian riches – both to indulge and to damn them. All the major players sought to simulate the rural values of the dead Republic, often in showy contrasts to decadence and luxury, as increasingly typified by Cleopatra and the last generation of a 300-year Ptolemaic Empire in Egypt.
In fact, Egyptian customs and lifestyles, Strauss notes, had more influence on Romans than Roman values had on Egyptians – at least in the sense of increasing, unapologetic Roman manifestations of luxury, ostentatious shows of taste, and the pursuit of leisure. The plush beds at Alexandria were a long way from Caesar’s hard campgrounds of Gaul, where Julius and occasionally Antony had slept in their decade-long mission to carve out northwestern Europe for Rome from tough tribal peoples.
With Octavian’s final conquest and annexation of Egypt came the jewel-in-the-crown imperial province. Alexandria’s revenues from then on would go directly into the private coffers of the emperors themselves. The consequences of such endless fuel for Roman luxus would be the stuff of Latin literature in the condemnations of Petronius, Suetonius, and Tacitus.
Strauss emphasizes other disconnects. In a male-dominated society such as Rome, gifted and privileged women arose mostly as useful tools through male-arranged marriages, divorces, and remarriages. Their fathers’ class, names, and money were their central attractions.
By contrast, the foreigner Cleopatra was unapologetically equal to any would-be claimant to the Egyptian throne. She seduced and outsmarted both Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony. And the queen nearly pulled off a Hellenization of the Roman Empire that would have predated its formal division into a Latinized West and Greek-speaking East by some 300 years before the emperor Diocletian.
Strauss’s emphases on ironic drama are most manifest in the character of Octavian’s sister Octavia. For seven years, she was the loyal (fourth) wife of Mark Antony, dutiful mother of their own two daughters and the three children from her prior first marriage, and a patient and protective stepmother to Anthony’s earlier brood (including his three offspring with Cleopatra). Strauss notes that she was always the key intermediary between her brother and Antony. Predictably, the more Octavian listened to Octavia, and the more Antony did not, the better the fortunes of the former and the worse of the latter.
Strauss meticulously chronicles and games the battle of Actium itself. It was one of the largest Roman naval engagements in republican history in terms of total ships (over 600) although not in manpower, as Antony’s depleted forces suffered from weeks of insidious desertions. Strauss brings his own practical knowledge of naval craft and seamanship to the discussion, especially concerning winds and navigation. Ostensibly, the battle should have been evenly matched given the originally similarly sized fleets and more durable construction of the mostly Egyptian galleys of Antony and Cleopatra. And Octavian had to sail his enormous fleet of some 400 ships across the often-rough Ionian Sea from Italy to Actium in northwestern Greece to meet the waiting Antony.
Yet Strauss points out how such matchups on paper did not reflect realities, either on the seas off Actium or at the chaotic Greek base camps of Antony. In truth, Roman sailors were far more motivated to fight for Octavian than Cleopatra’s largely Egyptian navy was for her would-be co-regent Antony. Marcus Agrippa, Octavian’s admiral in charge, was a certifiable logistical, organizational, and naval genius; he had no such counterpart on the other side. Desertions and illnesses had reduced the navy of Cleopatra and Anthony to less than 250 undermanned ships. The vessels of the Roman armada were not only more numerous, but perhaps also quicker, and more maneuverable than the more stoutly constructed Egyptian galleys.
Actium was not so much a naval battle as a seaward escape attempt by a hapless Antony and Cleopatra to elude a pursuing fleet that had adroitly boxed them in at Actium. Their provisions were limited, their futures at the mercy of fickle winds, and their forces attenuated by constant pressures from Octavian’s amphibious raids. That the two escaped with a third of their fleet from Augustus’s net owed partly to luck but also to Cleopatra’s risky but inspired late entrance into the battle to force a breakout and subsequent passage down the coast of Greece and across to Alexandria.
Strauss discusses the later, anti-Antony narrative of Actium – namely, that a once-robust and fearsome force on the battlefield had become supposedly a worn-out general, if not an over-the-hill debauchee in his early fifties:
To turn from military to psychological arguments, there is the explanation of the hostile sources: Antony had been unmanned by Cleopatra. The queen supposedly kept him under her thumb and repeatedly vetoed all plans that didn’t keep them on the coast of western Greece, where they could best prevent a thrust southeastward toward Egypt and where her navy could win a share of glory that would be denied in a land battle. Worse still are the claims that Antony had sunk into drunkenness and self-delusion.
A reader doesn’t have to swallow this tabloid version of history to conclude that Cleopatra’s presence had a deleterious effect on good order and discipline in Antony’s army and especially in his high command.
Before Actium, the fate of Rome was still uncertain. Afterwards, it became only a matter of time before all opposition to Octavian would cease. He found in the giddiness of Actium’s postbellum landscape more sycophants, turncoats, new friends, and sudden allies than even he could accommodate.
Strauss believes that Actium ensured an ordered and stable Augustan Rome, which, in turn, guaranteed that Rome would expand and secure her empire. What would have followed, however, had Antony and Cleopatra instead won? It is hard to imagine the duo ruling a vast Mediterranean empire from Rome, or corrupting, with their eastern luxuries and habits, an Italian urban upper class that itself had already been softened by vast imperial revenues from overseas exploitation.
In any case, Antony and Cleopatra had far earlier lost the hearts and minds of Romans due to the most adroit propaganda campaign in early Western history, one that turned self-absorbed renegades into Oriental, most un-Roman despots, corrupted by gold, drink, and sex. Octavian did his best to brainwash Roman citizens into fearing that the seductress Cleopatra intended for them what she had already done to Antony, as his erstwhile brother-in-law devolved from an audacious Roman he-man into a dissolute has-been.
Much later ancient chroniclers followed this party line and wrote about the gambit of Cleopatra and Antony through the hindsight of the subsequently disastrous Julio–Claudian Caesars. The later lurid careers of Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero were supposedly illustrative of more Egyptian than Roman values – in antithesis to their austere founder, the divine Augustus.
In truth, Octavian had tactically defeated the corrupting foreigners and turncoats at Actium, but through his acquisition of unlimited riches and power – propagandized as uniquely foreign vices – he strategically lost the battle to save rural Italian values.
Somehow, Barry Strauss has masterfully woven together all these outsized personalities, their often-twisted and conflicting agendas, and their epilogue at Actium into a coherent narrative that is as factually rigorous as it is fascinating to read.
Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of many books, including "A War Like No Other" and "The Other Greeks."
