During the renewed civil war, for example, Octavian (along with Mark Antony) had overseen a notorious wholesale cull of their enemies in the political élite. Some three hundred conservative senators and 2000 knights were named on a proscription list, hunted down and executed.4 That is just one grim statistic provided by the ancient sources; one can only imagine the severity of punishment meted out to their other enemies. By 42 BC Octavian and Mark Anthony finally defeated the assassins of Caesar at the battle of Philippi. Brutus’s severed head was sent to Rome and thrown at the foot of Caesar’s statue. With their opponents crushed, the two men had become masters of Rome and her empire. It was only a matter of time, however, before the victorious allies turned rivals again and fought each other for sole control of the Roman world.
Today Actium is located on the tree-lined coast of northwestern Greece, north of the island of Leukada. Over 2000 years ago, on 2 September 31 BC, those silent, green hills bore witness to one of the most pivotal moments in Roman history. This was the battle of Actium. It pitted the navy of Octavian against a combined fleet of Mark Antony and his ally Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt. She was now both Mark Antony’s lover and his wealthy benefactor. Since the time of her liaison with Caesar, she had realised that the future prosperity of her country depended on a favourable alliance with Rome. After Caesar’s death, she had tied her colours to Mark Antony’s mast. Now she was about to find out if her gamble would pay off. For the result of this one battle would not only bring the long civil war to a conclusive end. Actium would also decide the destiny of the Roman empire.
The scale of the encounter was indeed huge: 230 of Mark Antony’s ships were blockaded in an expansive bay by an even greater fleet under the command of Octavian’s admiral Agrippa. The ninety largest of Mark Anthony’s ships were equipped with a state-of-the-art weapon: a pure bronze ram weighing 1.5 tonnes and mounted on the prow. In ancient Rome naval conflicts were won or lost by driving these warheads into enemy ships and sinking them. In spite of this technological advantage, Mark Antony’s force was weakened by malaria and desertions: the political tide of support in Rome was turning away from him in favour of Octavian, and Mark Antony’s soldiers knew it. Octavian’s military steel had improved considerably since his first taste of battle. He was also the greater tactician. After patiently reeling the enemy fleet into action, he now took clinical advantage of its weaknesses.
Octavian and Agrippa first sent in volleys of catapult balls that had been set on fire. Then they surrounded the bronze-prowed ships of Antony and Cleopatra, trapped them with grappling hooks and used their superior numbers of soldiers to dash on board and overpower the enemy force. The battle itself was fast becoming a rather anticlimactic, one-sided engagement. Indeed, Mark Antony’s battle plan was perhaps nothing more ambitious than to break through Octavian’s blockade. He really wanted to escape to Egypt to create a stronger position from which to win the war. Once Cleopatra had successfully peeled away with a key portion of the fleet, however, the break-up of his allied fleet single-handedly took the teeth out of Mark Antony’s naval charge and brought about its complete collapse. There was no epic struggle, only a deflated, easy victory.
A Roman of the time would not have known this from the hype with which Octavian before and afterwards infused the ‘titanic’ encounter. In Virgil’s Aeneid, the epic poem of the Augustan age, Cleopatra’s escape was famously cast as a panic-stricken flight, typical of a weak foreigner. But that was just one element in the grandiloquent war of words. The battle of Actium was billed as nothing less than a fight between western and eastern values, between Octavian’s vigorous, pious Romanness and the immoral debauchery of Antony and Cleopatra’s union. It asked Romans to answer one simple question: did they want the vast empire to be saved by a traditional, steadfast Roman military hero, or to become the plaything of an emasculated, oriental king enslaved to a depraved exotic queen? It was presented, in short, as a worldwide clash of civilizations. By winning it, Octavian won something even more important than the military victory. He won the victor’s privilege of explaining the meaning of the war’s outcome.
THE SPOILS OF WAR
The rich seam of political capital that Octavian drew from his victory was mined immediately. He founded a new Roman city near the scene of battle and called it Nicopolis, the ‘City of Victory’. At his old campsite he also ordered the construction of a massive victory monument, from the remains of which archaeologists have recently produced new information. Beautifully carved scenes depict the battle and also the triumphal procession in Rome with which Octavian celebrated his victory in 29 BC. Part of the monument was a 6-metre (20-foot) high wall which contained visually stunning ‘souvenirs’. Thirty-six of Mark Antony’s bronze prows were set in concrete and fastened on to the limestone blocks that made up the wall. The ‘beaks’ of the enemy’s ships were thus set into the landscape on a hill overlooking the site of the victory. It must have been a spectacular display befitting a spectacular triumph – one never to be forgotten. For although the limp victory did not live up to Octavian’s propaganda, its consequences certainly did.
After Actium, the victorious Octavian was master of all Rome’s armies. Victory gave him the freedom to conquer Egypt, to provoke the suicides of Mark Antony and Cleopatra (later dramatized by Plutarch and Shakespeare), and to add to Rome’s provinces all the extraordinary wealth of that far more ancient civilization. Finally, it furnished Octavian with the greatest personal fortune in all Roman history. It was money he wasted no time in spending. His goal was to honour the promises he had made during the war, and above all to secure the loyalty of the Roman army and the Roman people. It was a goal he accomplished in lavish style.
On his return to Rome he celebrated the closure of the civil war with three spectacular triumphs, he paid off his soldiers with generous cash rewards, and he gave a smaller sum to every Roman citizen. As if that were not enough to win unanimous popular support, the bountiful fields of Egypt’s Nile valley were now Rome’s granary and a secure, reliable source of the city’s grain dole. Octavian thus became the most powerful man in the Roman world. ‘At this point,’ wrote the historian Cassius Dio, ‘Octavian alone held all the power of the state for the first time.’5 There was a problem, though. The one thing that Octavian lacked within the Roman state was legitimacy.
Winning this would not be the fruit of a single battle, but the great project of his entire life. The result, and the personal reward for Octavian, would be a Roman empire ruled by a single emperor. In achieving legitimacy, however, one question would baffle the ancient world as much as it has done ours. Was Octavian an evil tyrant deviously and quietly dismantling Roman liberty? Or was he indeed a benevolent statesman who, first among equals, shared power with Roman senators and had the consent of the Roman people? Was he, in short, a wicked autocrat in all but name, or a model emperor who restored if not exactly the republic, at least constitutional government? Who really held the reins of power?
In ancient Rome, as in the government of modern states, the question is perhaps impossible to answer. In the case of Octavian the answer lies deep within poor or highly partial historical sources. The evidence that does remain (namely, Octavian’s own account of his achievements, plus inscriptions and the wealth of monuments and buildings he authorized in Rome) presents us with only a sustained, ingenious political performance – a performance from which his mask would rarely slip. Whichever view we take of Octavian, what is certain is that he cleverly robed his power in the clothes of the old republican offices. This critical strategy lies behind a meeting of the Senate on the Ides of January 27 BC.