Battle of Actium

• 1. Introduction

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  The Battle of Actium, fought on the 2nd of September 31 BC, decided who would rule the known world. On one side sat Octavian, heir to Julius Caesar's name and fortune. On the other stood Mark Antony, Caesar's greatest general, sailing alongside the queen of Egypt, Cleopatra. What happened on those waters off the coast of Greece that morning would not merely end a war. It would end a republic.

  For more than a decade, Octavian and Antony had circled each other inside the same alliance, the Second Triumvirate. They shared power, shared enemies, and for a time shared a bond sealed by Antony's marriage to Octavian's own sister. Then Antony left her for Cleopatra, and the pretense of cooperation collapsed. By the time both fleets anchored near the promontory of Actium, the question of who governed Rome had narrowed to a single day on the water.

  Antony arrived with 500 ships and 70,000 infantry. Octavian countered with 400 ships and 80,000 infantry. On paper, the numbers were close. What would determine the outcome was something far harder to quantify: whose crews were rested and well-fed, whose ships could manoeuvre in heavy surf, and whose general had already spent months quietly strangling his enemy's supply lines. The man who held the answer to all three questions was Marcus Agrippa, commanding Octavian's fleet from its left wing.

• 2. The Decade Before

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  At Tarentum in 37 BC, the Second Triumvirate was renewed for another five years. Antony, Octavian, and Lepidus had cooperated long enough to defeat their common enemies in the civil war that followed Julius Caesar's assassination. But the peace was uneasy, built on marriages, debts, and mutual suspicion rather than genuine trust.

  Antony's position was complicated by Cleopatra's son, Caesarion, who was claimed as Caesar's own child. That claim threatened Octavian's entire identity. Octavian's power rested on Caesar's will of 44 BC, which named him sole heir and adopted son. If Caesarion were accepted as Caesar's legitimate offspring, the inheritance that anchored Octavian's legitimacy could be challenged.

  In 34 BC, Antony and Cleopatra formally elevated Caesarion, then 13 years old, granting him the title "King of the Kings" in an act that became known as the Donations of Alexandria. It was said that Antony had once offered the boy a diadem. Octavian responded with a sustained propaganda campaign, telling Rome that Antony intended to hand the empire to Caesarion and move the imperial capital to Alexandria.

  When the triumvirate formally expired on the last day of 33 BC, Antony wrote to the Senate that he did not want reappointment. He expected Octavian to do the same, hoping the senators would then see Octavian's refusal as proof of ambition. Instead, Octavian obtained possession of Antony's will, placed there by a defector named Lucius Munatius Plancus, and circulated its contents widely. The will confirmed, in Roman eyes, everything Octavian had been saying. By 32 BC the Senate had stripped Antony of his consulship for 31 BC and declared war, not on Antony directly, but on Cleopatra.

• 3. Agrippa's Opening Moves

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  Agrippa began tightening the noose before the main battle was ever joined. In 32 BC, he captured Methone, a Greek town allied to Antony. That seizure was part of a careful strategic design. Octavian landed on the Greek mainland opposite the island of Corcyra, modern Corfu, and moved south by land. Agrippa's navy ferried troops across the Adriatic, and together they seized Patrae and Corinth, severing Antony's communications with Egypt through the Peloponnese.

  Antony had planned to strike first, even contemplating a descent on Italy toward the end of 32 BC. He reached as far as Corcyra before finding the sea guarded by Octavian's ships. He pulled back to winter at Patrae, with most of his fleet sitting in the Ambracian Gulf and his land forces camped at Actium's promontory.

  Through the early months of 31 BC, while Antony waited for his forces to assemble from their various winter quarters, Agrippa kept raiding Greek coastal towns. Octavian's cavalry won skirmishes on land. Gradually, Antony's soldiers were pushed from the northern side of the strait between the Ambracian Gulf and the Ionian Sea, confined entirely to the southern camp. Desertion began to eat into his numbers. Plutarch and Dio both describe how disease, specifically a severe malaria outbreak, compounded the problem, leaving many of his rowing crews dead or unfit to serve.

  Before a single major engagement had been fought, one of Antony's generals, Quintus Dellius, defected to Octavian and brought Antony's battle plans with him.

• 4. Ships and Soldiers

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  Antony's ships were the heavier class. His flagships and those of his admirals were "tens," the largest war galleys of their era. An "eight" in his fleet carried around 200 heavy marines, archers, and at least six ballista artillery pieces. The galleys' bows were armoured with bronze plates and square-cut timbers. Their towers stood high enough that troops could rain missiles down onto the decks of smaller vessels. A ship of that size was extremely difficult to board head-on.

  Octavian's fleet answered with what were called Liburnian vessels: smaller, lighter, and far more nimble. They could still manage in heavy surf. They could close fast, strike the above-deck crew with arrows and ballista-launched stones, and withdraw before Antony's heavy galleys could pin them. A medium ballista had an effective range of roughly 200 yards and could penetrate the sides of most warships at close range; most were aimed at the fighting decks.

  Agrippa developed a device called the harpax, designed to grapple and board enemy ships from a distance. Against vessels as large as Antony's tens, the harpax offered a way to neutralise the advantage of height. Antony's ships' single most exploitable weakness was immobility. Once isolated from the rest of the fleet, with its oars smashed or its crew thinned by disease and desertion, a heavy galley could be overwhelmed with boarding attacks from multiple directions.

  Estimates put Antony's effective force at around 140 ships by the time of the battle, against Octavian's 260. He had arrived at Actium with roughly 500 ships but could not crew them all. The shortfall in oarsmen, caused by the malaria outbreak, made the powerful ramming tactic for which his largest ships were designed very difficult to execute.

• 5. The Day of Battle

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  On the 1st of September, Octavian addressed his fleet, setting out what was to come. The next morning was wet and the sea was rough. When the trumpet signal sounded, Antony's ships began issuing from the straits and drew into line, holding still. Octavian hesitated briefly, then ordered his vessels to steer right and pass along the enemy's flank. Fearing encirclement, Antony gave the order to attack.

  The battle order on Antony's side placed Lucius Gellius Poplicola on the right wing alongside Antony himself. Marcus Octavius and Marcus Insteius commanded the centre. Gaius Sosius, who had made a speech in the Senate in favor of Antony the year before, commanded the left. Behind them sat Cleopatra's squadron. On Octavian's side, Agrippa commanded from the left wing, Lucius Arruntius the centre, and Marcus Lurius the right. Titus Statilius Taurus oversaw Octavian's land army from the shore north of the straits. Sosius opened the battle from Antony's left wing.

  Antony had hoped to use his heaviest ships to drive back Agrippa's wing in the north. Octavian's entire fleet, aware of this plan through Dellius's defection, stayed out of range. The two forces fought through the afternoon without either side achieving a decisive result. Then, with a breeze rising, Cleopatra's squadron in the rear unfurled its sails and headed for the open sea. The ships were soon out of sight.

• 6. Flight to Egypt

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  Under cover of darkness after the battle, 19 of Antony's legions and 12,000 cavalry fled before he could arrange any land engagement. Without his fleet and without his army, Antony was a fugitive. Octavian visited Greece and Asia and settled at Samos for the winter, pausing only to travel briefly to Brundisium to suppress a mutiny among his own troops.

  From Egypt, Cleopatra sent Octavian a gold crown and a throne, offering to abdicate in favor of her children. Octavian let her believe she would be treated well; he wanted her alive for his triumph in Rome. Antony sent his eldest son Antyllus to Octavian with money and a proposal to retire to Athens as a private citizen. The offer was ignored.

  By the spring, Antony was attacked from two directions. Cornelius Gallus advanced from Paraetonium while Octavian landed at Pelusium, reportedly with Cleopatra's connivance. Despite a minor victory at Alexandria on the 31st of July 30 BC, more of Antony's men deserted. A final engagement ended in defeat. When false reports reached Antony, spread in Cleopatra's name, claiming she had killed herself, he stabbed himself in the stomach. He did not die immediately. Learning that Cleopatra was still alive, he asked to be carried to the mausoleum where she was hiding and died in her arms.

  Cleopatra killed herself on the 12th of August 30 BC. Octavian had Caesarion killed later that month, permanently eliminating the one figure whose existence could challenge his status as Caesar's sole heir. Cleopatra's children by Antony, with the exception of Antony's older son, were spared. Octavian held a public military funeral for both Antony and Cleopatra in Rome, with a day of mourning and a portion of Antony's legions marching alongside the tomb.

• 7. What Actium Built

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  Octavian returned to Rome and celebrated a triple triumph spread across three days: one for his victory over Illyria, one for Actium, and one for the conquest of Egypt. He adopted the title Princeps, meaning first citizen. In 27 BC the Senate awarded him the additional title of Augustus, meaning revered, and that name displaced all others in the historical record.

  Egypt's surrender, following Cleopatra's death, ended the Ptolemaic Kingdom and brought a close to what historians call the Hellenistic Period. The country became a Roman province. Octavian now held sole, uncontested control of what Romans called Mare Nostrum, "Our Sea," the entire Mediterranean.

  To mark the victory, Octavian founded a new city in 29 BC near the battlefield. He called it Nicopolis, Greek for "City of Victory," placing it on the southernmost promontory of Epirus at the mouth of the Ambracian Gulf. On a hill north of the city, at the site of his wartime camp, he built the Campsite Memorial, a tropaion dedicated to Neptune, Mars, and Apollo. Its central display featured the bronze rostra, the rams stripped from the ships he had captured. At the cape of Actium itself, he built the Actian dekanaia, a tropaion made from a full set of ten captured warships.

  The Temple of Apollo Aktios, standing above the cape, was renovated and enlarged. Apollo Aktios was a deity Octavian invoked repeatedly in his post-battle commemorations, tying his victory to divine sanction. The god's temple, expanded and gleaming, would stand in Nicopolis as a reminder that the battle had not merely reshuffled the men in power. It had replaced one kind of government with another.