In April 31 B.C., the multitudinous military machine set off on its slow journey to Greece.
Octavian’s strategy was to sit and wait. It was obvious that Antony was heading for Greece, but, although it would have been in Octavian’s tactical military interest to get there first, it was not in his political interest to do so. This was because he did not wish to be seen as what in truth he was: the aggressor, and the invader of his onetime partner’s agreed territory. That would neither harmonize with his new emphasis on legality nor win a war-exhausted public to his side. Antony must be left free to move westward, so that he might receive the opprobrium for opening hostilities.
In the meantime, Octavian had to maintain and enlarge his army and fleet. There was no alternative but to raise additional taxes. An unprecedentedly severe income tax was levied (25 percent of an individual’s annual earnings) and riots immediately broke out. Octavian became as unpopular as he had been ten years earlier, when the Triumvirate had been forced to raise money for the war against Brutus and Cassius.
In this climate of fear and rage, he took a bold step. At some point during 32 B.C., he held a kind of personal plebiscite, in which people were required to swear their loyalty to him. Later, he wrote proudly: “The whole of Italy [and the western provinces] voluntarily took an oath of allegiance to me and demanded me as its leader in the [forthcoming] war.” He claimed that half a million citizens bound themselves to him. We do not need to accept this suspiciously round number when conceding that the exercise was a surprising success.
It was still less than fifty years since the War of the Allies, when the peoples of Italy rose up against Rome to claim their rights and were granted full Roman citizenship. Octavian was a provincial, as were many of those who managed his regime. Italians were now getting their own back after centuries of Roman dominance. They liked the new status quo and did not want Antony and his eastern queen to threaten it. Anger over the new taxes was cooling off; something more than simple self-interest guided a growing Italian self-consciousness, a new patriotism.
Then came an extraordinary stroke of luck.
Lucius Munatius Plancus had been one of Antony’s closest advisers ever since defecting to him after Mutina in 43 B.C. He threw himself into the spirit of things at Alexandria. He flattered the queen shamelessly and, if an unfriendly commentator is telling the truth, was willing to humiliate himself to please. Sometime in the early summer of 32 B.C., however, Plancus began to get very worried about the situation in which he found himself.
In May or June of that year, Antony finally divorced Octavia and told her to quit his house in Rome. Octavia seems to have been an affectionate and maternal woman, for when she left the family home she took with her all of Antony’s children, except for his eldest son by Fulvia, the teenaged Antyllus. He left Rome to join his father in Greece, where he delivered the embarrassing news that Octavia had looked after him with great kindness.
The impact of the divorce on Roman opinion was serious for Antony. It was not simply that he had behaved cruelly to a loving wife, but that he had done so in favor of a foreign queen. The decision to send her away drew awkward attention to Cleopatra.
At this delicate juncture, Plancus came to a new judgment. This was that in the imminent contest Antony was more likely to lose than not. It was time to pack bags. Plancus slipped out of Athens, where Antony and Cleopatra were spending some time before taking the field, and made his way as inconspicuously as possible to Italy.
What was the basis of this change of heart? Octavia’s dismissal was not enough in itself to power his defection, even if it supplied a pretext. Plancus noticed the corrosive effect Cleopatra’s presence in the campaign was having on Antony’s Roman supporters, and gauged that it would blunt the thrust of Antony’s military strategy: it would hardly be feasible for a foreign queen to help to lead an invasion of Italy.
Having arrived in Rome, Plancus presented himself to Octavian and announced that he knew most of Antony’s secrets. One of these was tempting to exploit: at some point in the past few years, Antony had lodged his will with the Vestal Virgins at the little round Temple of Vesta in the Forum.
Although Octavian was trying hard to present himself as a standard-bearer for traditional values, here was an opportunity too good to be missed. He sent a message to the Vestal Virgins asking them to hand over the document. They refused, saying that if he wanted it he would have to come himself and seize it, which he proceeded to do. Before making any public announcements, Octavian read through the document in private and marked the passages least to Antony’s credit; these he read out to the Senate. He drew special attention to Antony’s wish to be buried in Alexandria. Octavian’s former brother-in-law also left legacies to his children by Cleopatra and reasserted that Caesarion was Julius Caesar’s child.
These revelations had a dual effect. Many senators thought Octavian’s action in taking the will was “extraordinary and intolerable.” However, the document was cast-iron evidence that the great Roman general had somehow been transformed into an easterner. Such a bad impression was created that even Antony’s supporters in the Senate voted to deprive him of the consulship that had been planned for him in the following year. Octavian felt he was now in a position formally to declare war.
But the opponent had to be Cleopatra. This was partly because Octavian needed to avoid an accusation of restarting the civil war he claimed to have ended; also, he did not want to make official enemies of Antony’s Roman supporters, some of whom might wish to follow Plancus’ example.
The Romans had an antique ceremony for declaring war. Octavian went to the Temple of Bellona, goddess of war, in the Campus Martius. On a strip of land in front of the temple that was officially denominated as foreign territory stood the small columna bellica, or column of war. Bellona’s priests, called fetiales, threw spears, smeared with the blood of a sacrificed pig, into this ground.
Once the ritual was complete, Rome was officially at war with Egypt.
In its basic essentials the promontory of Actium on the coast of western Greece, and the inland Ambracian Gulf it guards, look today much as they did two thousand years ago. A low scrubby sandy tongue of land, lying only a few feet above sea level, Actium stretches northward toward a larger and hillier two-fingered peninsula. Between them, a half-mile-wide strait squeezes its way from the open sea into the gulf, twenty-five miles long and from four to ten miles wide.
It would be a dull, even slightly dreary place, but for the spectacular mountains that crowd the distant skylines; like the steep seating of an open-air Greek theater on a colossal scale they look down on the stage of Actium. Twenty miles to the west looms the towering rock of the island of Leucas, lying almost close enough to the mainland to touch it.
Today Actium bustles in the summer. Young tourists arrive at the small airport and crowd the sea with yachts. Actium boasts three marinas; one of these is the Cleopatra Marina, which occupies a position on the strait from which two thousand years ago an observer would have been able to watch the queen of Egypt in her splendid galley sail by into open waters and her destiny. There are boatyards, and numerous tavernas and bars line the waterfront. A tunnel is planned to join Actium to the northern promontory and the pleasant harbor town of Preveza.
In the first century B.C., things were quieter. Actium was a center for pearl fishing and a small village on the headland made a useful jumping-off point for travelers. Nearby, on the shore where the strait was narrowest, there stood an old temple and a grove of trees sacred to Apollo, founded five hundred years previously.