Battle of Actium
The Battle that Determined the Cultural Axis of Europe
Caesar the dictator was dead, murdered on the “Ides of March”, the 15th of that month, in 44 B.C., and with his death had come the hope of many of the people of Rome that their moribund Republic might be revived, ruled again by the Senate and the People of Rome. Indeed, it was partly for this, though partly, too, for jealousy, that the conspirators had plotted.
Death of Caesar
Mark Antony
But when Caesar’s will was opened, it was found that he had named a great nephew, Octavian, his adopted son and heir. This was not, definitely not, to the liking of Mark Antony, Caesar’s trusted, dissolute lieutenant, who had hoped he might step quietly into the dead dictator’s shoes. Already there was feeling against him among the legionaries, a resentment that he had done so little to punish Caesar’s murderers. Now, with a real blood-heir, a youth of eighteen swearing to avenge his uncle’s murder, there was an object towards whom the soldiers of Rome could rally.
At first, relations between Antony and Octavian were correct, almost friendly, but there was little doubt in either mind that a battle was coming, for the succession. They formed, with Sextus Lepidus, the second of Rome’s famous “triumvirates”, but they knew Lepidus counted for little, that the future lay with them, or with one of them. Brutus and Cassius, the two chief conspirators, “Republicans”, now, were in the East, preparing to fight either one or the other, or if necessary both, and now they assembled an army, marched it into Macedonia, the large northern state which in modern times has been divided between Greece and Yugoslavia, halted it on the Plain of Philippi.
To Philippi went, as well, Antony and Octavian, the “Caesarians”, anxious to do battle: the sooner the better. Their army, vowing vengeance for Caesar, was more reliable than that of the enemy, but the Republicans had managed to assemble a navy which threatened to cut its supplies from Italy. Antony decided to force the Republicans to battle, and in this he was successful though rather less so in the fighting: while he was overcoming Cassius, Brutus was destroying his left wing. Cassius, not knowing that his ally had scored a victory, committed suicide.
Marcus Junius Brutus
This first battle, though technically a draw, disposed of the Republicans’ better general. The second battle of Philippi, a few days later, with only Brutus to command the Republican forces, resulted in a definite victory for the Caesarians: Brutus, too, committed suicide.
These two land battles decided the form of government Rome would have: it could only be an autocracy, ruled by one man, or at most a few, not a democracy, ruled by its people. But of the two contenders, which would succeed? At first it seemed they might agree to work together, sharing the Empire, with Octavian taking the West, Antony the East, Lepidus the Province of Africa; but when Octavian returned, after Philippi, to Italy, and Antony went straightway to Egypt and became the lover of Cleopatra, as had Caesar before him, the seeds of the final conflict were sown. It would take ten years, but it would come.
At one stage, with war imminent, the two patched up their quarrel: Antony even agreed to marry Octavian’s sister. The respite was short. He repudiated the sister, married Cleopatra, named her “Queen of Kings”. Caesarion, her young son by Julius Caesar, he styled “King of Kings”. Not content with this, he named his own three children by Cleopatra rulers of half the Roman world.
It was this last, sweeping, foolish gesture which enraged the people of Rome. No longer was the impending battle to be one between two Romans: it would be between Rome and Egypt, and if that were the case, they knew where they stood. Octavian, sensing this mood, was able to seize Antony’s will, read it aloud to the Senate. To the Senate’s horror they learnt that, apart from all this ennoblement of Egyptians, Antony was bequeathing them “enormous presents”.
Cleopatra VII Queen of Egypt
This was too much. What if one of the “enormous presents” were the city of Rome? A campaign of hatred was launched on Cleopatra, a campaign such as the world had never seen. Every sort of accusation was hurled at her, many of them to stick, so that even to-day there are people who believe Cleopatra to have been a sorceress who bewitched Antony, a beast-worshipper, harlot, traitor, poisoner.
The propaganda worked: soon all Rome was up in arms. Skilfully, Octavian arranged that the Senate declare war on Cleopatra, not on Antony, and decree that any of Antony’s men, even Antony himself, caring to join Octavian would be given a full pardon. He knew well that he was declaring a fight with his rival, that there was no likelihood of Antony refusing to fight by Cleopatra’s side.
He was right: the lovers took up his challenge and moved, in 33 B.C., to Ephesus, on what is now the Turkish coast opposite the island of Samos, assembling there an army and a fleet. From Ephesus they moved across to Athens, where Antony received a message from his supporters in Italy, of whom there were many, urging him to get rid of Cleopatra; the war was not his, it was hers, he should refuse to take part. But this was impossible; he had tied his fortunes to those of the Egyptian Queen, it was too late now.
Antony’s army moved over to the west coast of Greece, his main force occupying the promontory of Actium, the south side of the entrance to the Gulf of Ambracia, and immediately opposite what is now the Greek town of Preveze. Here he built a fortified camp, sat down to wait.
To military historians this has seemed a strange manoeuvre. With its long line of communication from Egypt (all corn came from Egypt: there was none to spare in Greece), a line which had to be guarded by a string of forts along the coast, it was stupidly placed for an invasion of Italy, the nearest point of which was over a hundred miles away. To invade Italy, which would have been the best way of defeating Octavian, Antony should have taken up position farther to the north, much nearer the Italian coast, in what is now Albania.
But in fact Antony could not invade Italy: if he took Cleopatra with him, every man’s hand would be against him; without her, he had insufficient men, money, equipment. He had taken up Octavian’s declaration of war, but Octavian would have to come.
Octavian did. He mobilized his army and fleet on the heel of Italy: 80,000 foot soldiers, 12,000 cavalry, 400 ships. The larger of these were armed with catapults for firing the “harpax”, a harpoon attached to a windlass which, when it struck an enemy vessel or tangled in its rigging, held fast, could be used to drag the vessel close, so it could be boarded by soldiers. Octavian would command the army, and his trusted lieutenant Agrippa the fleet.
On Antony’s side there were rather over 60,000 foot soldiers, 12,000 horses, 480 ships. He felt reasonably confident that when Octavian came he would defeat him, fling his troops back into the Ionian Sea; but he reasoned that it would be months before he came.
He was startled when Octavian attacked him, early in 31 B.C. The Admiral, Agrippa, crossed the Ionian Sea, captured a large number of Antony’s grain and munition ships making their way up the west coast of Greece, while Octavian and his transports landed north of Actium, marched rapidly and set up their fortified camp just five miles from it, which they linked with a sea base at Comarus by a road protected by high walls. Antony and Cleopatra, still in winter quarters, not yet ready to fight, hastily fortified a camp two miles south of Actium, and like Octavian, joined it to a coastal supply base by a walled road. No sooner had they done this than Agrippa struck again, captured many more of the supply vessels and at the same time several of the coastal fortifications designed to protect them. Antony was now cut off from Egypt and all his supplies.
To stay still would be suicide: within weeks they would starve. He took the only decision open to him, crossed the straits of Actium and quickly built a new camp only two miles from Octavian’s. If he could attack his enemy and at the same time cut off his water supply from the Luro River, just behind him, he stood a chance of victory.
He failed. The troops he disembarked at the mouth of the Luro deserted to the enemy, their ships likewise. Now, with his fleet badly mauled, badly shaken, by Agrippa, Antony considered jettisoning it, withdrawing overland to Macedonia where he could fight with his army in the open, if Octavian would follow. Cleopatra rejected this scheme and won her point: the war would be decided by a naval battle. (Yet it would seem that while she was making this stipulation, she was preparing to flee, was planning, so Plutarch tells us, to dispose her forces, “not where they would be helpful in winning the victory, but where they could most easily get away if the cause was lost.”) Deserters, of which there were many, explained this to Octavian and now he and Agrippa decided to draw up their fleet in line of battle facing the strait and wait for Antony’s fleet to come out, whether it intended to fight or to run.
Early on the morning of 2 September, 31 B.C., Antony’s fleet came out, rested on its oars, waited for the wind. It got up at noon and now both Antony and Agrippa raced to outflank each other, leaving their central squadrons to fight head on. In this encounter, Antony almost immediately lost a dozen ships, had his own flagship grappled, held fast, by a harpax. As Agrippa’s ships were lighter, more mobile, than his, they were able to dodge between them, avoiding his long-range missiles and the huge boulders he could drop or hurl from his artillery turrets. Just before coming to grips, Agrippa’s small ships would backwater with astonishing agility and then either ram the enemy ship again, crippling it, or row speedily away and attack another. In this way they sank many, while Antony for his part was trying to hit them with showers of stones and arrows, flung from the high towers which his larger ships carried. As Dio has put it: “Each gained advantage over the other; the one party would run in upon the lines of oars projecting from the ships and shatter the blades, and the other party, fighting from the higher level, would sink them with stones and engines.’
Order of battle
All along Antony had been frightened of his own badly shaken fleet, he had wanted to fight on land, and now the worst he had feared took place. Three squadrons of his centre and left (each squadron of sixty vessels) suddenly backwatered and raced for harbour, while two more from his own, right, wing did the same but found themselves unable to enter the Actium strait because Cleopatra’s squadrons, at the rear, were blocking the way. They raised their oars in surrender.
This was the end. Antony signalled Cleopatra that the battle was lost, but, so it seemed, almost before she got the signal she had hoisted the purple sails of her own Antonia, was racing for the open sea.
Chaos came. Some ships were still at grips with the enemy, many of them tied to him by the dreaded tentacles of the harpax, but those that were not made panicky preparation for flight, pushing their heavy turrets over the side, hoisting their sails. It was these ships, caught in a state of undress, that Agrippa now set upon and destroyed, leaving those that had got sails up, and started, to get away. His own ships were without sail (which made them more manoeuvrable) and now, before the enemy could hoist their own, Agrippa fell upon them, crushing oars, tearing off rudders, boarding the crippled ships and engaging in hand-to-hand combat with Antony’s men, who fought back, desperately, with boathooks, axes, stones.
Then Agrippa’s sailors shot flaming arrows into the enemy, setting fire to his ships, fires they stoked with pots of charcoal and pitch which they catapulted on to the decks, while Antony’s men, trapped in each floating inferno, screamed as they fought their way through boiling pitch, only to be slaughtered as they reached the gunwale.
Antony, his flagship held fast by an enemy harpax, leapt on board another and fled with the pitiful remnants of his fleet, fled as fast as the wind would take him, in pursuit of Cleopatra. When he caught up with her and boarded the Antonia, he sat down, Plutarch tells us, “in silence, holding his head in both hands”, and refused to speak to her for three days. When the ship put in at Cape Matapan, Antony was sufficiently recovered to send messengers to his army, ordering it to withdraw through Macedonia into Asia.
He was destroyed as a man by this catastrophe, his fleet wiped out, his army fleeing into Asia, but Cleopatra sailed into Alexandria Harbour with her ships garlanded for victory. This was a trifling setback: very soon she would attack Spain, seize the tin mines. The world was hers, for the taking.
But less than a year later, Octavian was in Egypt. Antony made a desperate attack on his advance guard, won a fleeting victory, but on the next day lost half his troops and ships to the enemy. Now, utterly dejected, hearing a rumour that Cleopatra was dead, he stabbed himself. But when he was carried into the room where she had locked herself, it was only to find her alive and to die in her arms.
A few days later, when Cleopatra learnt Octavian would take her in triumph to Rome, she planned to thwart him. She was now his prisoner, so in order to do so she had to arrange for a basket of figs to be smuggled into her, containing among them two or three small snakes, the Egyptian asp. Holding one against her breast she died from its bite. Her last request was to be buried beside Antony, and this Octavian granted.
Although in many ways it was Philippi which established Octavian’s power, his defeat of Antony at Actium is of far greater historical importance. Had Antony and Cleopatra won, they would have transferred the capital of the Roman Empire from Rome to Alexandria, which was a better site, both commercially and strategically. Had there never been an Actium this might still have happened. Had it happened, a cosmopolitan world empire, of the sort dreamed of by Alexander, would have grown up, the cultural axis of Europe would have changed. It is unlikely that Western Europe would have been Latinized, that the Christian religion would have been able to take root. In later years the Roman Empire was to split into an Eastern and a Western half, but by the time this took place both these things would have happened.
Actium, in short, is one of history‘s most decisive battles, perhaps the most decisive of them all.