Antony and Cleopatra at War
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Everyone wants to read about Antony and Cleopatra, especially about Cleopatra, who was not only history’s most famous female ruler but its most glamorous. The Egyptian queen’s love affair with the married Mark Antony, who because of his defeat of the assassins of his patron, and Cleopatra’s onetime lover, Julius Caesar in 44 B.C. had become sole ruler of the Roman East, precipitated not only Antony’s downfall but her own. The brother of Antony’s spurned wife, Octavia, happened to be Caesar’s great-nephew Octavian, later the Emperor Augustus and already in command of the western half of what was already a vast Rome-ruled territory, including the city of Rome itself. It was one or the other, and on Sept. 2, 31 B.C., Octavian handed Antony a humiliating sea defeat at Actium, a harbor town on the western Greek coast whence Antony had considered launching an invasion of Italy. When the battle went south early on, Cleopatra fled to Egypt with her ships, and Antony followed her. The victorious Octavian next turned his military sights on Egypt, and what followed was the most famous pair of lovers’ suicides in history. Antony fell on his sword and died in Cleopatra’s arms. Cleopatra did herself in with an asp, the story goes. It was also the end of 3,100 years of Pharaonic rule in Egypt, which became a Roman province until its conquest by Muslims in the seventh century A.D.
The Battle of Actium, which involved more than 600 warships and at least 200,000 participants, was a flashpoint of Roman history, memorialized by Plutarch in his Life of Antony and by the third century Roman historian Cassius Dio. It was also the stuff of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, numerous historical novels, and everyone’s favorite bad Hollywood movie, Cleopatra (1963), whose stars, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, reenacted the doomed lovers’ adulterous passion both on and off the set.
But the details of the engagement itself, along with Antony’s plan of attack, remain hazy. The first century historian Livy wrote a detailed account that has unfortunately been lost, and the poets Horace, Virgil, and Sextus Propertius contributed highly unreliable impressionistic verses that flattered Octavian. In The War That Made the Roman Empire, Barry Strauss, a classics professor at Cornell University, tries to reconstruct exactly what happened on that fateful day in September, supplementing the written texts with whatever he could glean from an enormous array of alternative sources of evidence: archaeological finds, commemorative sculptures, coins, geography — even tides, temperatures, wind patterns, and sunrise/sunset times.
The coins featuring the heads of the various players in this drama are especially revealing. We often think of ancient coin portraits as generic: rulers’ heads in profile without much individuality. In fact, as photos in Strauss’s book indicate, we can get a fair idea of what their human models looked like. Antony was thick-necked and fleshy-faced, built like a brute. Octavian, 21 years younger than Antony (age 31 to Antony’s 52 in the year of Actium) was a wiry ectomorph in his early years. Cleopatra was
one of the Macedonian Ptolemies whose dynasty had ruled Egypt since the days of Alexander the Great. Her native language was Greek, and she almost never wore, at least when sitting for portraits, the King Tut-era clothing and elaborate Egyptian headdresses that were Taylor’s signature garb in the movie. On Cleopatra’s coins and in a marble bust believed to be her likeness, she wears her hair pulled back into a chignon like other highborn Greek and Roman women, her head encircled by a diadem, the ribbon-band reserved for royalty in classical times. Shakespeare to the contrary, Strauss notes, the literary sources “disagree” about whether Cleopatra was “incomparably beautiful or merely good-looking” — she looks rather homely on one coin. She certainly had sex appeal, and she combined it with formidable brainpower and political shrewdness to manipulate men, Octavian being the obvious exception. She was also, as Strauss points out, “robust and healthy enough to give birth to four children,” one almost assuredly by Caesar, the other three by Antony.
Strauss has made a successful career out of writing books, mostly on military history, that, while meticulously researched — the endnotes and other apparatus for this book are precise and exhaustive — and reflecting the highest standards of up-to-date academic scholarship, are also clearly and concisely enough written to appeal to a general audience, with key personalities brought vividly to life. His classical topics have included the Trojan War, the Spartacus war, and the Battle of Salamis, a fifth century B.C. Greek naval victory over Persia that, like the Battle of Actium, turned an ancient city, in this case Athens, into an imperial power. Like his Salamis book, Strauss’s current book focuses in particular on the oar- and sailpowered warships that were the strategic backbone of ancient naval fleets. Most of the ships in the huge fleet Antony assembled for his invasion were quinqueremes — “fives,” as Strauss calls them after the number of rowers on a cross-section of seats. They were big enough galleys to carry 300 oarsmen apiece, plus 120 marines and crew members, but reinforced sufficiently to ram other ships and to carry such weapons as grappling hooks
and catapults that made them supremely useful for maritime battle. There were larger ships available, “sixes,” “sevens,” and even “tens,” that were useful for breaking through harbor barriers, but their sizes made them slow-moving targets for enemies, and Antony, apparently planning his Italian invasion, kept them to a minimum in contrast to the more nimble “five.”
Alluring as Cleopatra’s presence was, the Battle of Actium was not, in Strauss’s view, about star-crossed lovers or the enticements of Eastern luxury and decadence exemplified by Cleopatra versus sturdy Roman values. That was Octavian’s propaganda. The Battle of Actium was about political power: Whose giant ego, Antony’s or Octavian’s, was going to control the Roman world, already stretching from the English Channel to the borders of Mesopotamia? Antony and Octavian were already frenemies and Antony was already carrying on with Cleopatra when the marriage to Octavia took place in 40 B.C. It was “an affair of state, not a matter of the heart,” Strauss writes. And Octavia, whom Strauss paints as no mean politician herself, seemed to function as her brother’s consigliere. In 42 B.C., Octavian and Antony had combined forces to defeat Caesar’s assassins, Brutus and Cassius, at Philippi in northern Greece. Antony stayed in the East, the nascent empire’s richer half, where Cleopatra’s Alexandria was a glittering, trade-swollen enticement in itself. Octavian returned home to force out Lepidus, the third member of the triumvirate that technically ruled Rome after Caesar’s death, and steal legions from Antony in an effort to weaken him. Cleopatra’s claims for her son Caesarion threatened Octavian’s ambition to succeed his great-uncle, who was also his adoptive father. In 32 B.C., Antony, who had assembled an army of his own, informed Octavia that he was divorcing her. Under Octavian’s strong-arming, the Roman Senate stripped Antony of his Eastern imperium and declared war on Cleopatra.
As Strauss and the maps in his book make clear, the harbor-rich west coast of Greece, including Actium, was an ideal launch pad for an attack on Italy from the south, or at the very least for stirring up fear of an attack. Antony lined up his troops in bases along the shore down to the Peloponnesus. But the invasion never occurred, and while Antony was dithering, Octavian sent his crack naval officer, Marcus Agrippa, to seize Antony’s base in the Peloponnesian port of Methone in March of 31 B.C. It was a death blow. Methone was key to Antony’s long and fragile maritime supply chain stretching to Egypt and Syria, and Agrippa had a superior fleet. Octavian was now on the offensive. Spring and summer passed with Antony and Cleopatra stalled at Actium and Octavian having set up camp with 40,000 fighting men, about twice the size of Antony’s forces, about 20 miles to the north, along with a fleet of 400 ships that was almost twice the size of Antony’s. Antony’s men were hungry, dying of dysentery and malaria, and deserting in droves.
The battle itself on Sept. 2 was nearly an anticlimax, albeit a ghastly one. The two fleets had to wait until noon, when the sea breezes began to blow, to engage, and it soon became clear that Antony’s men were losing. At around 2 p.m., when the winds were at their peak, Cleopatra and her squadron of 60 ships made their breakout. Antony soon followed, essentially deserting his own troops in the heat of battle. Strauss argues that all of this was likely a prearranged plan. Most of Antony’s men kept fighting nonetheless, and Agrippa’s men began setting fire to their ships. At about 4 in the afternoon, amid flames and wreckage, they began surrendering.
The next summer, Octavian marched on Alexandria, where the lovers were holed up at Cleopatra’s court. It was a summer marked by further desertions among Antony’s troops and Cleopatra’s likely efforts to save her skin and those of her children by betraying him. Antony made his last stand, again by land and sea, on Aug. 1, 30 B.C. His ships, however, saluted their enemy instead of charging, perhaps by Cleopatra’s treacherous arrangement. She herself had gone into hiding and let word out that she was dead. After a swift rout, Antony stabbed himself in the stomach in honorable Roman suicide, but he did not die immediately. Instead, his servants carried him to the mausoleum where a very alive Cleopatra turned out to be hiding. Plutarch put a noble deathbed speech into his mouth, while Cleopatra wailed and smeared herself with his blood. Octavian took Cleopatra
prisoner and spent more than a week resisting her attempts to seduce him and preventing her from killing herself because he wanted to take her to Rome as a prisoner to march in his triumphal parade. On Aug. 10, she managed to thwart him, according to legend, with the asp smuggled into her chamber in a basket of figs. The boy Caesarion, technically Egypt’s last pharaoh, was executed a few days later. Octavian brought Cleopatra’s children by Antony back to Rome, where a generous Octavia raised them with her own offspring and those of a former wife of Antony’s.
In 27 B.C., Octavian had the Senate give him the name Augustus, under which he reigned until his death in 14 A.D. He was an emperor now, and he embarked on turning Rome into an imperial capital, adorning it with impressive marble temples, baths, theaters, and porticoes, as well as numerous obelisks and other artworks scavenged from Egypt. “The Augustan makeover produced a new Rome,” Strauss writes. “Now, for the first time, it began to be known as the Eternal City.” He was, in effect, creating another Alexandria, moving wealth and power into a new center of gravity that was decidedly in the West. Strauss concludes that in this sense, “in spite of the bite of the asp, Cleopatra had come to Rome after all.”