War between Sextus Pompey and the Second Triumvirate

• 1. Introduction

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  Sextus Pompey was the last surviving son of Pompey the Great, and by 42 BC he had turned the island of Sicily into a fortress. From that base, he choked off the grain supply to Rome itself, sending the Roman people into riots while the most powerful men in the world scrambled to respond. He commanded a fleet of warships manned by Sicilian marines, commanded by capable admirals, and swelled by an extraordinary flood of runaway slaves from the estates of the Italian wealthy. The desertion of those slaves was so alarming that the Vestal Virgins prayed for it to stop.

  The war that followed, fought between 42 BC and 36 BC, was unlike most Roman conflicts. It was decided less on open plains than on the waters of the Mediterranean, in a string of naval battles that would reshape the Roman world. At its end, the question of whether the Roman Republic could ever be restored would be answered, definitively, in the negative. And the very coalition that defeated Sextus would begin to splinter almost immediately after his death.

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• 2. The Making of a Rebel

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  Sextus came to his rebellion through family loyalty and personal survival. His father Pompey had been fighting Julius Caesar since 49 BC, and was executed by the Egyptians in 48 BC. Sextus and his brother Gnaeus kept the resistance alive until 45 BC, when Caesar’s victory became undeniable. After the Battle of Munda, Gnaeus was hunted down and died fighting. Sextus escaped.

  For a time, Sextus kept a low profile in Sicily. Then on the 15th of March 44 BC, Julius Caesar was assassinated, and the political landscape of Rome collapsed overnight. The three men who filled the vacuum, Lepidus, Mark Antony, and Octavian, formed the Second Triumvirate. They drew up proscription lists of enemies to be killed and stripped of property, partly to refill the treasury and partly to fund their war against Caesar’s assassins Brutus and Cassius. Sextus found his name on that list.

  His response was immediate. He seized several Sicilian cities, including Tyndaris, Mylae, and the provincial capital Messina. Syracuse and other cities joined his revolt without a fight. Fragments of the old Optimate faction, the conservative senatorial order his father had championed, rallied behind him alongside the slaves and the remnants of his father’s allies.

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• 3. The Blockade and the Pact

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  Sextus understood that Rome’s greatest vulnerability was grain. Sicily and the islands of Sardinia and Corsica sat across the sea lanes that fed the city, and with his large fleet he stopped almost all shipments flowing toward Italy. Trade with other nations by sea dried up. The Roman army felt the pinch, and the population of the Italian Peninsula suffered alongside it.

  Rioting broke out in Rome. The Triumvirate, stretched thin by the campaign against Brutus and Cassius, had no immediate answer. Rather than fight, they negotiated. The resulting agreement, named the Pact of Misenum after the location where it was struck, recognized Sextus as ruler of Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica. In exchange, Sextus agreed to lift the blockade, resume grain shipments, and stop taking in fugitive slaves.

  The peace was short-lived and, as the source describes, rocky. But the pact itself was a remarkable moment: the Triumvirate had officially acknowledged the son of their enemy as a legitimate ruler of Roman territories, buying time rather than admitting any deeper weakness.

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• 4. Agrippa Builds a Navy

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  After the Battle of Philippi in 42 BC ended the threat from Brutus and Cassius, Octavian and his right-hand man Marcus Agrippa could finally concentrate on Sextus. Octavian’s first attempt to invade Sicily in 38 BC ended without a fight: storms forced his fleet to turn back.

  Agrippa responded with engineering. He cut part of the Via Ercolana and dug a channel connecting the Lucrine Lake to the sea, turning the lake into a sheltered harbour known as Portus Julius. In that protected water, a new fleet was trained. Twenty thousand oarsmen were recruited by freeing slaves. The ships themselves were built larger than previous models, specifically to carry heavier contingents of naval infantry. Mark Antony contributed to the effort as well, exchanging 120 ships, under the command of Titus Statilius Taurus, for 20,000 infantry that Antony needed for his Parthian campaign.

  In July of 36 BC, the two fleets sailed from Italy. A third fleet, under the third triumvir Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, departed from Africa. The coordinated attack aimed to strike Sicily from multiple directions at once.

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• 5. Battle at Naulochus

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  August of 36 BC brought two different outcomes on the same Sicilian coastline. Agrippa defeated Sextus near Mylae, the modern city of Milazzo, in a naval engagement that month. That same August, Octavian suffered a serious defeat near Taormina and was personally wounded.

  The decisive moment came at Naulochus. Both sides committed 300 ships, all equipped with artillery. The difference was in the weapons and the weight of the ships. Agrippa’s fleet carried the harpax and corvus, grappling devices that let heavier vessels lock onto and board enemy ships. Sextus’ fleet was more manoeuvrable, but Agrippa managed to block and pin those faster ships before they could use their speed effectively. After a long and bloody engagement, Agrippa prevailed. He lost three ships; 28 of Sextus’ ships were sunk, 17 fled, and the remaining vessels were burnt or captured.

  On land, Lepidus had landed the bulk of his army and ravaged the Sicilian countryside. By the time the fighting subsided, the losses across the whole conflict were staggering: around 200,000 men killed and 1,000 warships destroyed. Tyndaris and Messina, the cities Sextus had seized at the outset, were particularly hard hit.

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• 6. Fractures After Victory

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  Sextus fled Sicily in 36 BC and made his way to Miletus. In 35 BC, he was captured there and executed without trial by Marcus Titius, an agent of Marcus Antonius. The absence of a trial was a violation of Roman law: Sextus was a Roman citizen and legally entitled to one. Octavian stored that grievance carefully, and when his relationship with Antonius later grew hostile, the illegal execution became a useful piece of ammunition.

  The fall of Sextus exposed the tensions within the Triumvirate almost immediately. When Octavian visited Lepidus’ camp and soldiers saluted him as Caesar’s son, Lepidus ordered him expelled from the camp. The move backfired. Much of Lepidus’ army defected to Octavian’s side, and Octavian used the moment to accuse Lepidus of usurping power in Sicily and of attempted rebellion. Lepidus submitted, was stripped of all his offices except the religious title of pontifex maximus, and was exiled to Circeii. Octavian seized his provinces.

  With Lepidus gone, only Octavian and Mark Antony remained as rulers of the Roman world. The war against Sextus, which had been fought to preserve the Triumvirate’s grip on power, had inadvertently reduced that Triumvirate to two men headed toward a final confrontation at Actium.

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• 7. Sicily After the War

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  The Sicilian countryside bore the heaviest civilian toll. Much of the island’s farmland had been ruined or abandoned during the fighting. Octavian addressed the problem by distributing that land to veterans of the legions that had fought in Sicily, filling the island with soldiers who had personal reasons to support him and to make the land productive again.

  Thirty thousand slaves captured during the conflict were returned to their former masters. A further 6,000, who could not be matched to owners, were impaled on wooden stakes as a public warning. The brutality of that final measure underscored how deeply the mass desertions had alarmed the Roman propertied class throughout the war. The war between Sextus Pompey and the Second Triumvirate had closed every avenue through which the old Roman Republic might have been restored, leaving the path clear for the sole rule that would arrive with Octavian’s victory over Antony at the Battle of Actium.

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