—Act III, scene vi, lines 57-60
It would appear that Octavia, who left Mark Antony two scenes before, now arrives in Rome. All the events that took place over three years-the defeat and death of Sextus Pompeius, the demotion of Lepidus, the campaigns of Mark Antony in Parthia and Armenia (to which Octavius makes reference in passing)-are all hastened over in the one intervening scene.
This serves a purpose. In many places in the play, Mark Antony is whitewashed to make him a more sympathetic hero. Here he is made to seem worse than he is so that the love story with Cleopatra can be made more dramatic.
In actual fact, he returned to Cleopatra only after three years, when his marriage to Octavia proved to be politically worthless-or worse. Here in the play, it appears that even while Octavia is on her way to intercede for Antony with her brother, the faithless Antony deserts her.
Octavius asks her where Antony is and when she innocently says that he is in Athens, her brother says:
—Act III, scene vi, lines 65-66
Cleopatra's power over Antony thus seems enormous. The truth of Antony's return would have considerably diminished the glamour of the love affair.
Indeed, Octavius goes on to say, Antony is preparing for war:
—Act III, scene vi, lines 66-76
This list of kings sounds impressive; the sonorous syllables roll off the tongue. They are at best, however, a set of puppet kinglets, with very little power except for what prestige their names can lend Antony. Cappadocia, Paphlagonia, Pont (Pontus), Comagene, and Lycaonia are all regions in Asia Minor. Herod and Mauchas represent small kingdoms in southern Syria, and so on. Indeed, one of the kings listed, Bocchus of Libya, actually fought on Octavius Caesar's side.
Nevertheless, this sort of thing was undoubtedly used by Octavius to rouse the Roman populace with the fear that Antony was turning the whole mysterious East loose upon them.
Between this scene and the next, further crucial events take place.
Toward the end of 32 b.c. Octavius finally had the situation exactly where he wanted it. The Senate and the people had grown so exasperated that the former declared war against Cleopatra and the latter supported it avidly.
This was utterly clever. The war was not against Mark Antony, who could be pictured as a Roman general deceived and besotted by a wicked foreign queen; it was against the wicked foreign queen herself. It was not a civil war; it was a patriotic war against the dangerous kingdom of Egypt. (The fact that Egypt was helpless and harmless and that Cleopatra, minus Mark Antony, had no military power at all, could be ignored. The public knew nothing of that.)
Naturally, Mark Antony had to fight. But he had to fight now against Rome and on the side of the foreigner. Desperately he shifted his armies to Greece and prepared to invade Italy.
Cleopatra, in a decision as foolish as that of Octavius Caesar had been wise, decided to accompany Antony, and together they are now at Actium, a promontory in northwestern Greece.
The next scene, then, opens in Actium, where Cleopatra is raging against Enobarbus, who objects to her presence there. She points out that the war, after all, was declared against her:
—Act III, scene vii, lines 5-6
But Cleopatra was unintentionally fighting on Octavius Caesar's side in this respect. As a foreign queen, she was no more popular with Antony's soldiers than with the enemy.
Indeed, it is the spirit of Antony's forces that is their weakest point, and Octavius Caesar knows it. Anti-Cleopatra propaganda reaches them and the desertions are numerous. The men won't fight for an Egyptian against Rome. Antony's movements are slowed and made uncertain by the increasingly doubtful loyalty of his men.
Octavius Caesar's general, Agrippa, moves quickly, however. Where it had been Antony's hope to invade Italy, it was Agrippa instead who swept across from that peninsula and landed in Greece. Antony comes in with his general, Canidius, brooding about it:
—Act III, scene vii, lines 20-23
Tarentum and Brundusium are ports in the "heel" of Italy. The Ionian Sea is the stretch of water between southern Italy and western Greece. Toryne is a small harbor in northwestern Greece, thirty-five miles up the coast from Actium.
Octavius Caesar's rapid movement (or, rather, Agrippa's, in his name) has cut Antony's line of communication and put him in the peril of running short of supplies. It is to Antony's interest to force a land battle; he has eighty thousand troops to Octavius Caesar's seventy thousand and it is Antony who is the better tactician on land.
On the other hand, it is to Octavius Caesar's best interests to fight a sea battle. He has only four hundred ships to Antony's five hundred, but he still would have the advantage there. Enobarbus points this out to Antony, saying:
—Act III, scene vii, lines 34-38
The growing desertions from Antony's standards have left his ships shorthanded, and their crews have had to be fleshed out by the drafting of non-sailors from the surrounding population. And, of course, though you can force a man onto a ship, you cannot force him to be a sailor.
The logical course of action would have been to retreat inland and force Octavius to follow and then fight a land battle. Even an ordinary soldier begs him to take that strategy, saying: