CHAPTER 20
AS THE CAMPAIGN BEGAN ANTONY, with his powerful forces and the economic, military and political backing of Cleopatra and his allies in the east, as well as his still substantial support in Rome among exiled republicans, had as good a chance of emerging victorious as Octavian. In the autumn of 32, with Cleopatra at his side, Antony transferred his headquarters from Athens to make a winter base at the city of Patras. Strategically situated at the head of the Gulf of Corinth, this city was at the middle of the string of naval bases Antony had established from Corfu in the north to the coast, of North Africa in the south in order to protect his supply routes. Command of the sea would be key to the forthcoming struggle. It would allow the domination of the Ionian coast, where Octavian would need to land if he wished to come to grips with Antony and Cleopatra’s forces in Greece.
However, for reasons never satisfactorily explained, Antony did not keep his main fleet with him at Patras but ordered it to the Ambracian Gulf, just north of the island of Levkas. The Gulf is about ten miles long and about five miles across. It provides a safe harbor because two protruding promontories narrow the mouth to only half a mile wide. Actium is at the tip of the low, flat southern promontory. At that time, Actium was a small village used by pearl fishermen with a small five-hundred-year-old temple to Apollo nearby on the shore. Marshy, barren and dank, the area’s isolation rendered it both difficult to supply and inconducive to the maintenance of morale. Octavian, on the other hand, had the advantage of wintering his troops and navy in Italy at the port cities of Brundisium and Tarentum, where facilities and health were better and morale much easier to maintain.
During the winter, when uncertain weather ruled out a major sea campaign, both sides redoubled their efforts to build new ships and to repair old ones, replacing frayed rigging, caulking leaking seams, careening the hulls and reapplying coats of pitch and wax to make the ships sail more easily and quickly through the Mediterranean waters. The Romans had by tradition been soldiers, not sailors. The long wars with the Carthaginians had taught them how to fight at sea, and their first warship designs had evolved from a close study of captured Carthaginian vessels. Roman ships were still crewed to a great extent by foreigners, some pressed, some volunteers. Octavian’s navy had the great advantage of recent experience of naval warfare in the sea battles against Sex-tus Pompey around Sicily in which the young Agrippa had shown himself an astute admiral and naval tactician. On the other hand, Antony was able to draw on the long naval tradition of Egypt and of other of his allies and clients in the Mediterranean, such as the sailors of Rhodes.
The ships the two navies were gathering came in a variety of shapes and sizes. The large transports that, on the orders of Cleopatra, brought grain and other supplies from Egypt to Antony’s armies were sail-powered vessels of around thirteen hundred tons’ burden. They carried three masts, were approximately 180 feet long and 45 feet in both depth and width, had several decks divided into compartments and were well ballasted. Their pumps were based on the screw system invented by Archimedes at the Museon in Alexandria, in which a screw rotated within a pipe to pull water upward.* Supply ships would take about a week to reach Antony’s forces from the Egyptian capital.
The warships on both sides were galleys and thus relied mainly on the use of oars for their propulsion. Most had more than one bank of oars, but their designation as threes, fours or sixes came not from the number of banks of oars, one above the other, but from the number of rowers who manned the oars in a particular location. For example, a five might consist of one bank of two men above another bank of two, with a further man using a single oar on the level above; or, indeed, it could designate one bank of five men pulling on a single long oar.
Responding to the instructions of a hortator, who set the speed and rhythm, the rowers worked from benches, half standing to push back the oars and then falling back on their seats as they hauled the oars toward them. The bow of each ship was heavily reinforced with stout timbers and, at the waterline, a two- or three-pronged, brass-encased wooden ram protruded forward ready for use in disabling enemy vessels. According to surviving representations of them, the ships of Cleopatra’s Egyptian navy, which made up at least a quarter of the fleet assembled by Antony, seem to have been distinguished by a model of a crocodile fixed to the bow above the ram and below the prow as some kind of figurehead. Cleopatra’s contribution to the fleet was not limited to these ships. Many other of Antony’s vessels were rowed by Egyptians.
The trireme or “three,” about 150 feet long and displacing some 230 tons, was the most common type of galley on both sides. However, Antony had, in general, the larger vessels. Their sides were reinforced with ironbound beams to withstand ramming. They were so massive that they looked like fortresses and “caused the sea to groan and the wind to labor as they were carried along.” Their size and weight, however, rendered them unwieldy. Agrippa, on the other hand, had introduced into Octavian’s fleet a lighter, smaller version known as a Liburnian, from its place of origin on the Adriatic coast, where it had been the craft of choice for pirates. Tough enough to withstand high winds and bad weather, it had two banks of oars, was fast and maneuverable and would give Agrippa a vital advantage in the campaign to come.
On whatever part of the Mediterranean coast—Egyptian, Greek or Roman—the shipwrights working during the winter of 32–31 used very similar construction techniques. First they laid down on the stocks the keel and the stem and stern posts. Then they began assembling the outer shell of planking, which was between one and a half and four inches in thickness and joined edge to edge to its neighbor or the keel and secured by frequent mortise and tenon joints so well made and so close together that very little caulking was required. Only after the shipwrights had completed this outer shell did they begin to insert structural framing timbers to strengthen the ship and to lay the planking for the decks. All ancient ships used side rudders to steer, one on each side of the ship. They were a kind of oversized oar on a pivot operated by a tiller.
Before they launched the ships the workers coated the hulls with tar and then painted the superstructure with hot wax. A Roman work on naval warfare describes how some ships, particularly the lighter craft used for scouting and shadowing, were painted with an early version of camouflage: “Their sails and ropes are dyed blue, the color of seawater; and even the wax with which the hull is painted is similarly colored, while the soldiers and sailors aboard them likewise dye their clothes.” The larger warships were painted in stronger-colored wax—purples, yellows and reds—to emphasize their size and destructive potential.
While the shipwrights labored busily that winter, neither side let up in the propaganda war. Antony had coins minted, one side of which bore his own image and titles and the other those of Cleopatra holding the ritual rattle, a symbol of Isis. Octavian challenged Antony to allow his forces to land in Greece and then to come to battle in five days or else to cross himself with his armies to Italy on the same basis. Antony responded with the very sensible question “Who is to judge between us if the agreement is broken in any way?” But he followed up with an equally empty invitation to single combat.
Octavian’s propagandists began to report a series of omens favorable to their leader. (So too, presumably, did Antony’s, but these are lost to us.) Octavian’s spin doctors claimed sweat oozed from a statue of Antony and, however hard people tried to wipe it away, they could not make it stop for a number of days. They also claimed that a figure of Dionysus, Antony’s divine counterpart, crashed to the ground, followed swiftly by one of his ancestor Heracles, and that a chasm swallowed up one of the colonies founded by Antony. According to Plutarch, Cleopatra’s flagship, theAntonias, was also the object of a terrifying portent: “Some swallows made their nest under the stern, but others attacked them, drove them away, and killed the baby birds.” Both Octavian and Antony, in his case bankrolled by Cleopatra, kept up a campaign of bribery of influential Romans and potential foreign allies.
With the arrival of the spring, the navies were readied for action. Marines, often land-loving legionaries, marched up the gangways to their stations on the decks built over the banks of rowers. Other Mediterranean navies had relied to a great extent in battle on the use of superior seamanship to vanquish their enemies. Their captains proceeded on a parallel course to an opponent before increasing speed to the maximum of which the rowers were capable—at most ten miles per hour—and swiftly changing course, either to ram the enemy or to disable them by sweeping away their oars before they could be pulled inboard. However, the Romans, being soldiers at heart, preferred to rely on the firing of arrows and other weapons from collapsible towers raised on the deck as well as the firing from deck-mounted heavy catapults of iron darts and grapnels. The latter were designed to become entangled in the opposing vessel and allow it to be winched into a position where it could be boarded. Literally to provide greater firepower, laborers carried onto the ships buckets of combustible pitch and oil. When battle was near, the crew attached these to long poles and pushed them out beyond the bow before setting them alight, so if an enemy came within range, the fire could be poured onto his decks.
Agrippa’s fleet struck the first blow, crossing the Ionian Sea not by the usual northern route opposite the heel of Italy but much further south, diagonally toward the Peloponnese. Here, on its west coast, Agrippa seized Antony’s naval station of Methone, killing Antony’s commander there, Bogud, the deposed king of Mauretania. From here, he proceeded to harass Antony’s supply route from Egypt and to make further amphibious hit-and-run raids on his bases along the coast, causing Antony to move some of his forces south. So successful were Agrippa’s diversionary tactics that Octavian was able to ship his main army across the northern route to Corfu undetected by Antony’s fleet, which, preoccupied with the southern threat, had failed to keep a northern shield of guard ships in place.
On reaching Corfu, Octavian found it abandoned by Antony’s forces, and he crossed safely to the mainland. Octavian, perhaps on Agrippa’s advice, had not brought with him all the legions he had mobilized. With a smaller, less unwieldy force, his mobility was increased and his supply problems lessened. He had about eighty thousand men compared to Antony’s one hundred thousand. However, Octavian’s forces were nearly all Italian, well disciplined and committed to his cause, whereas Antony’s troops were drawn from all across the eastern Mediterranean and the loyalties of some, at least, were more questionable.
According to the historian Dio Cassius, Octavian brought with him to Greece “all the men who carried influence in public life, both senators and knights.” His astute intention was both to ensure that they could not make trouble at home in his absence and also “to demonstrate publicly that he had on his side the largest and strongest body of support among the Roman people.” He wanted to make clear that he, not Antony and the numerous renegade senators among his multinational army, represented Rome and legitimacy.
Octavian had seized the military initiative, which he would never again lose, and was quickly making his way down the mainland in a series of amphibious leaps. In response to the news of his landings, Antony mobilized his forces and, with Cleopatra at his side, moved them up toward the peninsula of Actium and the Ambracian Gulf, where his major fleet lay. Over the winter, his commanders had taken the precaution of fortifying both sides of the narrow entrance to the gulf with palisades, watchtowers and catapults.
By the time Antony reached Actium with Cleopatra, Octavian, moving with the speed and decisiveness of his adoptive father, Julius Caesar, was already on the shores of the gulf, where he had encamped some way from the mouth, on the northern side on a low hill that dominated the surrounding flats. He had also established a naval base on the open sea nearby in the Bay of Comaros. While Antony’s fleet could ride safely at anchor in the gulf, if his ships attempted to put to sea, Agrippa, on Octavian’s behalf, could severely maul them as they negotiated the narrow mouth and deployed. Similarly, Agrippa could harass incoming supply ships. Antony’s great fleet was partially blockaded and, as a consequence, the freedom of movement of his land armies severely restricted. If his main armies marched away from the shores of the gulf, Antony’s fleet would have little alternative but to surrender.
Octavian’s position did have some weaknesses. His water supplies were not secure, since they came from a river about a mile to the east of his camp or from springs at least a similar distance away. Octavian had built a temporary breakwater to protect his fleet from the sea but even so, in a westerly storm—fortunately for him, rare in summer—his ships would have to quit their anchorage or face being driven ashore. It was in Octavian’s interest to force a decisive battle as soon as possible while the weather was good and before Antony could marshal fully his diverse forces and summon more ships to break Agrippa’s naval blockade of the gulf. Antony knew this and refused to give battle, contenting himself with harassing attacks and cavalry raids on Octavian’s water supplies.
However, while Antony was assembling his troops, Agrippa struck again by sea to tilt the balance further in favor of Octavian, capturing the large craggy island of Levkas just southwest of the Actium promontory. Separated from the mainland by only a narrow channel of mudflats, the island dominates the southern approaches to the gulf. Surviving records do not recount Agrippa’s feat in detail nor whether Antony had neglected to garrison the strategic island properly. However, its capture meant that not only Antony’s fleet but also his army were now effectively blockaded. Agrippa’s ships had secured a better anchorage and could prevent the great transports dispatched on Cleopatra’s orders from Egypt with grain and other supplies from approaching the gulf or even landing supplies nearby. Only the bravest captains would attempt to run the blockade.
It was now to Octavian’s advantage to defer mass combat while Antony’s troops sweltered in the summer heat and caught malaria from the mosquitoes infecting the marshes and dysentery from the unsanitary conditions likely to affect any confined military camp where there was insufficient tide to wash away the feces and other waste.
These trying conditions understandably began to sap the strength and unity of Antony’s multinational army and navy. Antony now had to bring in what supplies he could on the backs of local men press-ganged for the purpose. Lashed on with long whips by Antony’s overseers, they struggled over the rugged mountain tracks from the nearest supply point. Among the locals was an ancestor of Plutarch—a fact that cannot have raised Antony in the historian’s esteem. To try to break the deadlock, Antony ordered part of his army to march round the shores of the gulf to the northern side and, once encamped there, to launch probing attacks, partly to try to cut off Octavian’s water supplies and partly to provoke Octavian to battle. Antony may even have had the idea of attempting to cut off Octavian’s camp from the north and, in turn, to put him under siege if all went well. It did not.
Antony’s cavalry were defeated in a major skirmish in which Octavian’s troops were led by Titius, a man who had only recently deserted from Antony and been rewarded with a consulship. As a consequence of this new setback, two of Antony’s client kings defected to Octavian with their men. When one attempted to curry favor with Octavian by abusing Antony, Octavian told him curtly, “I like treason but I don’t like traitors.”
The desertions were more damaging to the morale of Antony’s army than they were in strategic terms; more seriously, Agrippa’s fleet was already capturing further ports in Antony’s rear, thus lengthening his overland supply routes. Agrippa’s greatest success was in capturing Patras and encouraging Eurycles, ruler of Sparta, one of Antony’s client states, to go over to Octavian—a decision he found easy since Antony had executed his father for piracy.
Reports of these amphibious actions in their rear, together with the worsening disease within the camp and the trickle of desertions, further eroded the morale of Antony’s men. However, worse were the continuing differences within the leadership of Antony’s forces between the remnants of the Roman republican faction led by Enobarbus and those who supported, or at least hoped to benefit from, the nebulous idea of an eastern Mediterranean empire being developed by Cleopatra and Antony. Even Antony’s client kings were not entirely happy. They had been affronted by the diminution of their status at the Donations of Alexandria, which had subjected them to the children of Cleopatra and Antony.
Soon, a sickly Enobarbus, “angered” by some new action of Cleopatra’s, decided that he stood no chance of weaning Antony from her to the republican virtues and had himself rowed in a small boat across the gulf to Octavian’s camp. Even though this “upset Antony a great deal,” he sent along after him all his equipment and retinue, despite Cleopatra’s protests, joking that Enobarbus clearly wanted to be in the arms of his mistress in Rome. He never reached them, dying almost immediately—probably not, as Plutarch claimed, “from the shame of his disloyalty and treachery” but more prosaically from dysentery or malaria, the fever from which he was suffering before he left Antony’s camp.
Even though Antony, “undermined in confidence and suspicious of everything,” made an example by executing two other would-be deserters, having one, a senator, torn apart by horses and subjecting the other, an Arab ruler, to torture, presumably to find out who else was wavering, Enobarbus’ was not the last defection. Antony needed quick, decisive and successful military action to prevent his forces—and with them his chances of victory—from dissipating through desertion and disease.
After an abortive attempt by the fleet to break out of the gulf, Canidius Crassus, Antony’s land commander, urged him to withdraw his army northeastward over the Pindos Mountains to Macedonia and Thrace, where he could recruit further troops and face Octavian with a good chance of success. Although previously a vocal advocate of Cleopatra’s presence in the camp, he now recommended to Antony that he send her home to Egypt.
The surviving accounts of the campaign (by Dio Cassius and Plutarch) record almost nothing of Cleopatra until this time. Two of the most significant glimpses of her are in the form of jokes. In the first, when Octavian’s forces, in their initial advance from the Greek coast, captured a place called Toryne, whose name can mean “ladle” or “stirring spoon,” she punned, “What is so terrible in Octavian sitting on a ladle?”—a joke that in translation at least says more for her courage than for her fabled wit. (In Cleopatra’s defense, some scholars suggest that toryne was also a slang word for “penis,” investing the joke with a cruder but more effective humor.) In the second incident, she was the target of a joke, or rather jibe, by Dellius, who upbraided her after they had been besieged that the wine they were now obliged to drink was sour, whereas even Sarmentus, a page at Octavian’s court, whom gossip alleged was also Octavian’s catamite, quaffed the best Italian vintages.
It is hard to comprehend the strength of character Cleopatra must have needed during her time at Actium, both as a woman and as the ruler of Egypt. As far as is known, none of the other leaders had their wives or mistresses with them as Antony had. There would have been no noblewomen other than those in her own retinue with whom she could discuss events. She had to be constantly alert to Antony’s moods, which were probably exacerbated by drink and the paranoia and depression it induced, not to mention the inactivity he so hated and a real consciousness of his declining fortunes.
Also, Cleopatra cannot but have been aware that she was a divisive force in the testosterone-charged camp, disliked and distrusted not only by the republicans but also by her fellow eastern rulers for her privileged status. At least as important as protecting her personal position, she had to protect the interests of her Egyptian kingdom, whose treasury was funding much of the war and much of whose treasure, in the form of gold and silver, was with her in the camp. Her fate and that of her family and her kingdom were inextricably linked to Antony’s. She could never succeed without him. Yet without her, Antony’s position, though weakened financially, would be enhanced politically.
There was, she knew, a valid alternative to Canidius’ strategy of abandoning the fleet and marching over the mountains to Macedonia. This was to load the ships with the best of the legionaries and all the treasure and head south toward Egypt, Syria and Libya, where there were at least seven legions to be added to the hardened core that got away with the fleet. Egypt was, as previous centuries had shown, easy to defend, and there they could recoup their strength. Those of Antony’s legions left ashore at Actium could march back overland as best they could, since if the fleet successfully broke out, Octavian and Agrippa’s best forces would be bound to follow it. Such a strategy had considerable advantages over the whole army marching to Macedonia. The latter would be risky in itself, and any victory, unless a complete rout, would be difficult to follow up because if Antony abandoned his ships in the gulf, Octavian would have absolute dominance of the sea.
Historical accounts don’t reveal whether Cleopatra made these arguments privately to Antony. However, they do record that she attended an army council where, presumably the only woman and surrounded by hostile, uniformed Romans, she put these arguments and succeeded in convincing Antony, who in turn carried most of his supporters with him. But Dellius, so adept at switching horses at the right time that one ancient writer called him “the circus rider of the civil wars,” went over to Octavian and disclosed Antony’s plans.
At around this time, Octavian ordered a commando squad to infiltrate Antony’s camp and attempt to capture or kill him as he walked down beside the palisades to the harbor accompanied by only a single member of his staff. However, they leapt from concealment too soon and, mistaking the staff officer for Antony, carried him off while Antony made his escape with less than dignified haste.
Before Antony and his commanders could attempt a breakout, they had to review the number of ships and rowers available to them. According to Plutarch, Antony had been reduced to “press-ganging from long-suffering Greece, travellers, mule drivers, reapers and boys not yet of military age” to man his vessels. Yet even so, disease, deprivation and desertion meant that there were more ships than rowers to man them. The ships had been lying at anchor for months and some were likely to have become unseaworthy through worm infestation or slow through the accumulation of barnacles and other marine life. Antony no doubt had as many of the best ships careened and rewaxed as he could in the time available and burned the worst. Then began the process of selecting which legions were to embark. Plutarch described how those chosen were reluctant: “an infantry centurion, covered with scars from very many battles for Antony, burst into tears as Antony was passing and said, ‘Imperator, why do you despise these wounds and this sword of mine and pin your hopes on wretched planks of wood. Let Egyptians and Phoenicians fight at sea but give us land, that is where we’re accustomed to stand.’ ”
It was equally important not to alarm the soldiers, including Antony’s elite legion, the Larks, into thinking that they would be left to fight their way alone over the mountains against superior forces. When galleys were prepared for battle, sails were usually left ashore to lighten the vessels and thus to make them more maneuverable as well as to free space for fighting men. However, on this occasion sails were needed, since it was a breakout that was intended and sails would allow a galley to make six knots in open waters while the rowers rested. When the legionaries spotted sails, spars and rigging being loaded aboard, Antony calmed their concerns by asserting that the added speed they would give would be necessary in a victorious pursuit so that not a single one of his enemies should escape. However, no one seems to have noticed Cleopatra’s preparations. Her treasure would have been stowed on her ships discreetly and her retinue taken aboard perhaps under cover of darkness.
The battle that was at hand would decide the fate of the Mediterranean world and would be the last major naval engagement there for many hundreds of years, not surpassed until Lepanto in 1571. Antony had himself rowed around the fleet, encouraging his men to stand firm and fight exactly as if they were ashore. Octa-vian, all too aware of Antony’s intentions and conscious of the power omens held for his superstitious troops, put it about, according to Plutarch, that as the preparations for battle were being made, “while it was still dark and he was walking towards the ships he met a man driving a donkey. He asked the man’s name and the man said, ‘My name is Lucky and my donkey’s name is Victor.’ This is why when Octavian later erected a display of captured ships’ prows near by he also set up a bronze statue of a donkey and a man.”
At last all was ready, and on September 2, 31, the rowers bent their backs to the oars as Antony’s galleys began to move slowly through the water. The twenty thousand legionaries and two thousand auxiliaries aboard tugged nervously at their equipment, conscious that even if they could swim, if they fell into the water they would be impeded by their mail coats, which they could not discard without great risk of being wounded. After some initial maneuverings to get into formation, the ships headed slowly for the mouth of the gulf, past the encampments and fortifications of the fifty thousand or so troops who had been left to fight their way out as best they could under Canidius Crassus. As they emerged into the open sea, Antony’s ships deployed into four squadrons, three of which, containing a total of perhaps 230 ships, formed a double line stretching from one shore to the other in order to protect the fourth squadron, the sixty or so Egyptian ships which were positioned to their rear.
Octavian’s four hundred ships, with perhaps as many as forty thousand legionaries on board, had been early to sea and formed up in an opposing line. He stationed his vessels some way to the seaward of Antony, anxious to lure him further forward and thus to lessen his chances of retreating back into the gulf if necessary.
At first, very little happened as the seminaked rowers rested on their oars, sweating as the heat rose in the airless confines of the rowing decks. While the conditions that day were not recorded, by noon at that time of year the temperature can easily exceed 90° Fahrenheit (33° Celsius) and the difference in the temperature of the air over the sea and land produces an onshore breeze that starts to rise at about this time and strengthens as the afternoon wears on. Even though his sails were stowed, Antony was at some risk of being blown back on shore, so he could wait no longer and headed for the enemy. Plutarch described how the rowers in Antony’s large ships could not get up sufficient speed, and hence momentum, to ram and that Octavian’s admirals also preferred close-quarters action to ramming the reinforced sides of Antony’s ships and thus risking damaging their own, more slender vessels. Hence, “the fight resembled a land battle or more precisely an assault on a walled town. Three or four of Octavian’s ships would cluster round one of Antony’s while the marines wielded catapults, spears, javelins and flaming missiles; the troops on Antony’s ships even shot at the enemy with catapults mounted on wooden towers.”
All of a sudden, Cleopatra’s ships took advantage of the turn of the breeze to the northwest and a break in the lines of fighting ships to hoist their stowed sails and to make off fast southwest for the Peloponnese. Since this change of wind was a daily occurrence and would have been well known to those encamped in the area for months, this was no doubt what had been intended ever since the council of war, even if later propagandists presented her flight as outright cowardice and treachery. When he saw the Egyptian fleet was away, Antony turned his own ships to follow. Few, however, could disengage from the fierce combat. Even Antony himself pragmatically had to switch from his own massive flagship to a swifter galley before he could do so. Thus he laid himself open to the charge of deserting his men for the sake of his mistress, a charge that rang down the centuries until Shakespeare dubbed him a “doting mallard.” But there was logic as well as love in his actions. If, as he planned, he could rebuild his forces, all could still be saved.
Some of Antony’s ships had already been captured. Some raised their oars aloft as a token of surrender. Others took refuge back in the gulf. Yet others fought on well into the night, which Octavian spent aboard one of the swift Liburnian vessels, supervising the closing stages of the battle. Dio Cassius probably exaggerated when he recounted how Octavian’s ships turned to fire as their main weapon. But the battle continued with Octavian’s sailors tossing jars of flaming pitch onto Antony’s larger galleys from their more maneuverable vessels, as well as throwing torches lashed to javelins into their flammable and pitch-coated sides. When the ships were well aflame, some, presumably the rowers belowdecks, were, according to Dio, “roasted in the midst of the holocaust as if they were in ovens,” while the legionaries were incinerated in their armor as it grew red-hot.
By morning, Octavian’s victory was long since complete and all was quiet save for the sound of the waves lapping on the beach strewn with pieces of wreckage and the occasional sodden corpse.
*Such devices are still in common use on the Nile today for irrigation.