ACTIUM

B.C. 31

Actium was one of the decisive battles of the world the event that fixed the destinies of the Roman Empire for centuries to come, made Octavian its dictator, and enabled him, while keeping the mere forms of Republican life, to inaugurate the imperial system of absolute rule, and reign as the first of the Roman Emperors, under the name and title of Augustus.

It brought to a close the series of civil wars which followed the murder of his grand-uncle, Julius Cæsar. The triumvirs, Mark Antony, Octavian, and Lepidus, had avenged the assassination by a wholesale proscription of their political opponents, all of whom indiscriminately they charged with the guilt of the deed; and had defeated Brutus and Cassius on the plains of Philippi. They had parcelled out the Empire among them, and then quarrelled over the spoil. Octavian, the dictator of the West, had expelled Lepidus from the African provinces that had been assigned to him as his territory. Antony was now his only remaining rival. Caesar’s veteran lieutenant held the Eastern provinces of the Empire. During the years he had spent in the East he had become half Orientalized, under the influence of the famous Queen of Egypt, Cleopatra, for whose sake he had dismissed his wife Octavia, the sister of Octavian, in order that the Egyptian might take her place. He had appeared beside her in Alexandria wearing the insignia of the Egyptian god Osiris, while Cleopatra wore those of Isis. Coins and medals were struck bearing their effigies as joint rulers of the East, and the loyalty of Rome and the West to Octavian was confirmed by the sense of indignation which every patriotic Roman felt at the news that Antony spoke openly of making Alexandria and not Rome the centre of the Empire, and of founding with the Egyptian Queen a new dynasty that would rule East and West from the Nile.

The question to be decided in the civil war was therefore not merely whether Octavian or Antony was to be the ruler of the Roman world, but whether Eastern or Western influences were to predominate in shaping its destinies. Antony was preparing to carry the war into Italy, and assembled on the western shores of Greece an army made up of the Roman legions of the eastern provinces and large contingents of Oriental allies. During the winter of B.C. 32-31, he had his head-quarters at Patrae (now Patras), on the Gulf of Corinth, and his army, scattered in detachments among the coast towns, was kept supplied with grain by ships from Alexandria. Antony’s war fleet, strengthened by squadrons of Phoenician and Egyptian galleys, lay safely in the land-locked Ambracian Gulf (now the Gulf of Arta), approached by a winding strait that could easily be defended.

But Octavian had determined to preserve Italy from the horrors of war, by transporting an army across the Adriatic in the coming summer and deciding the conflict on the shores of Greece. An army of many legions was already in cantonments on the eastern coast of Italy, or prepared to concentrate there in the spring. His fleet crowded the ports of Tarentum (Taranto) and Brundusium (Brindisi), and minor detachments were wintering in the smaller harbours of southern Italy. Most of his ships were smaller than those to which they were to be opposed. It was reported that Antony had a considerable number of huge quinqueremes, and even larger ships of war, anchored in the Ambracian Gulf. The ships of the Western Empire were mostly trirèmes; but there was the advantage that while Antony’s fleet was largely manned by hastily recruited landsmen, Octavian had crews made up of experienced sailors. Many of them were of the race of the Liburni, men of the island-fringed coast of Dalmatia, to this day among the best sailors of the Adriatic, and his admiral was the celebrated Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, who had to his credit more than one naval success in the civil wars, amongst them a victory won off the headland of Mylae, in the same waters that had been the scene of the triumph of Duilius.

Early in the spring, while the main body of Octavian’s fleet concentrated at Brundusium, and the army that was to cross the Adriatic gathered around the harbour, Agrippa with a strong squadron put to sea, seized the port of Methone in the Peloponnesus, and using this place as his base of operations captured numbers of the Egyptian transports that were conveying supplies to the enemy’s camps. Antony ought to have replied to this challenge by putting to sea with his combined fleet, forcing Agrippa to concentrate the Western armament to meet him, and deciding by a pitched battle who was to have the command of the sea in the Adriatic. But Caesar’s old lieutenant, once as energetic and enterprising a soldier as his master, had now become indolent and irresolute. He was used to idling away weeks and months with Cleopatra and his semi-Oriental Court. Instead of venturing on a vigorous offensive campaign he left the initiative to his opponent, and with a nominally more powerful fleet at his disposal he passively abandoned the command of the sea to Agrippa and Octavian.

The Egypto-Roman army was ordered to concentrate on the southern shores of the Ambracian Gulf. A division of the fleet was moored in the winding strait at its entrance, but directed to act only on the defensive. Inside the Gulf the rest of the fleet lay, the largest ships at anchor, the smaller hauled up on the shore.

The crews had been brought up to full strength by enlisting mule-drivers, field-labourers, and other inexperienced landsmen, and would have been better for training at sea; but except for some drills on the landlocked waters they were left in idleness, and sickness soon broke out among them and thinned their numbers. The ships thus inefficiently manned presented a formidable array. There were some five hundred in all, including, however, a number of large merchantmen hastily fitted for war service. Just as modern men-of-war are provided with steel nets hanging on booms as a defence against torpedoes, so it would seem that some at least of Antony’s ships had been fitted with a clumsy device for defending them against attack by ramming. Below the level of the oars, balks of timber were propped out from their sides at the water-line, and it was hoped that these barricades would break the full force of an enemy’s “beak.” But the invention had the drawback of diminishing the speed of the ship, and making quick turning more difficult, and thus it increased the very danger it was intended to avert.

Another feature of the larger ships, some of them the biggest that had yet been built for the line of battle, the “Dreadnoughts” of their day, was that wooden castles or towers had been erected on their upper decks, and on these structures were mounted various specimens of a rude primitive substitute for artillery, ballistae, catapults, and the like, engines for discharging by mechanical means huge darts or heavy stones. These same towers were also to be the places from which the Eastern bowmen, the best archers of the ancient world, would shower their arrows on a hostile fleet.

But locked up in the bottle-necked Ambracian Gulf the great fleet, with its tower-crowned array of floating giants, had as little effect on the opening phase of the campaign as if its units had been so many castles on the shore. Agrippa soon felt that there was no serious risk of any attempt being made by Antony to interrupt the long and delicate operation of ferrying over an army of a hundred thousand men and some twelve thousand cavalry from Italy to the opposite shore of the Adriatic. He took the precaution of watching the outlet of the Ambracian Gulf with his swiftest ships. The narrow entrance, while making it difficult to force a way into the Gulf, had the disadvantage of all such positions, that a large fleet would take a considerable time to issue from it into the open sea, and it was therefore comparatively easy to blockade and observe it. If Antony showed any sign of coming out, there would be time to bring up the whole fleet of Octavian to meet him in the open.

It was thus that Octavian was able securely to embark his army in successive divisions, and land it without interruption at the port of Toryne on the eastern coast of the Adriatic. Having assembled there, it marched southwards along the coast till it reached the hills on the northern shore of the Ambracian Gulf, and the two armies and fleets were in presence of each other.

The legions of Octavian encamped on a rising ground a few miles north of the entrance of the Gulf, and above a narrow neck of land which divided one of its inlets from the open sea. The coast is here hollowed into a wide bay, in which the main body of Agrippa’s fleet was anchored, while a detached squadron observed the opening of the straits. The camp was surrounded by entrenchments, and connected with the station of the fleet by a road protected by lines of earthworks and palisades, for it was the custom of the Romans to make as much use of pick and spade as of sword and spear in their campaigns. On the site of the camp Octavian afterwards founded Nicopolis, “the City of Victory,” as the memorial of his triumph.

From the camp on the hill there was a wide view over the Ambracian Gulf, a sheet of water some thirty miles long and ten wide, surrounded by an amphitheatre of hills sloping to flat, and in many places marshy, shores. On the wide waters the fleet of Antony lay moored, line behind line, a forest of masts and yards. In the narrows of the entrance some of his largest ships were anchored. Many of the ships of Phoenicia and Egypt displayed an Eastern profusion of colour in their painted upper works, their gilded bows, and their bright flags and streamers. Near the southern shore lay the state galley of Cleopatra, a floating palace, with its silken sails, gilded bulwarks, and oars bound and plated with silver.

A line of earthworks and forts across the neck of the northern point, garrisoned by the best of Antony’s Roman veterans, defended one side of the narrows. The other side was a low-lying, triangular stretch of land, dry, sandy ground. The Greeks knew it as the Akte, just as the Italian sailors still call it the Punta, both words having the same meaning, “the Point.” At its northern extremity on a rocky platform there rose a temple of Apollo, known as the “Aktion,” the “sanctuary of the point,” a place of pilgrimage for the fisher and sailor folk of the neighbourhood. Its name, Latinized into Actium, became famous as that of the naval battle.

On the level ground by the temple was the camp of the army of Antony and Cleopatra, a city of tents and reed-built huts, within its midst the gay pavilions of the Court. It was a mixed gathering of many nations Roman legions commanded by veterans of the wars of Cæsar; Egyptian battalions in the quaint war dress we see on the painted walls of tombs by the Nile, and the semi-barbarous levies of the tributary kings of Eastern Asia. There were widespread dissension and mutual suspicion among the allies. Not a few of the Romans were chafing at their leader’s subservience to a “Barbarian” queen. Many of the Eastern kinglets were considering whether they could not make a better bargain with Octavian. The cavalry of both armies skirmished among the hills on the land side of the Gulf, and prisoners made by Octavian’s troops readily took service with them. Then one of the Asiatic kings, instead of fighting, joined the hostile cavalry with his barbaric horsemen, and night after night Roman deserters stole into the camp of Octavian on the northern height.

An attempt led by Antony in person against the Roman entrenchments was beaten off. A detachment of the fleet tried to elude the vigilance of Agrippa and slip out to sea, but had to retire before superior numbers. Then both parties watched each other, while at the head-quarters of Antony councils of war were held to debate upon a plan of campaign. The situation was becoming difficult. For Octavian contented himself with holding his fortified camp with his infantry, drawing his supplies freely from over-sea, while his cavalry prevented anything reaching Antony’s lines from the land side, and Agrippa’s fleet blockading the Gulf and sweeping the sea, made it impossible to bring corn from Egypt. Provisions were running short, and sickness was rife. A move of some kind must be made.

The veteran Canidius, who commanded the army under Antony, had like most of the Romans little faith in the efficiency of the fleet. He proposed to Antony that it should be abandoned, and that the army should march eastward into Macedonia, and, with an unexhausted country to supply it, await the pursuit of ten legions of Octavian in a favourable position. But Antony, influenced by Cleopatra, refused to desert the fleet, which was the one possible hope of reaching Egypt again, and rejecting an attack on the Roman entrenchments as a hopeless enterprise, he decided at last that all the treasure of Court and army should be embarked on the ships, and an effort made to break through the blockading squadrons.

While the preparations were being made, the Romans renewed their entreaties that their leader would rather stake his fortunes on a battle on land. One day a veteran centurion of his guard, who bore the honourable scars of many campaigns, addressing him with tears in his eyes, said to Antony: “Imperator, why distrust these wounds, this sword? Why put your hopes on wretched logs of wood? Let Phoenicians and Egyptians fight on the sea, but let us have land on which we know how to conquer or die.” It is the appeal that Shakespeare puts into the mouth of one of Antony’s soldiers:

“O noble emperor, do not fight by sea;
Trust not to rotten planks. Do you misdoubt
This sword and these my wounds? Let the Egyptians
And the Phoenicians go a-ducking; we
Have used to conquer standing on the earth,
And fighting foot to foot."

The sight of the Egypto-Roman fleet crowding down to the narrows with their sails bent on their yards showed that they meant to risk putting to sea, and Octavian embarked on Agrippa’s fleet, with picked reinforcements from the legions. For four days the wind blew strongly from the south-west and the blockaded fleet waited for better weather. On the fifth day the wind had fallen, the sea was smooth and the sun shone brightly. The floating castles of Antony’s van division worked out of the straits, and after them in long procession came the rest of the Roman, Phoenician, and Egyptian galleys.

From the hills to the northward of the straits, from the low-lying headland of Actium to the south, two armies, each of a hundred thousand men, watched the spectacle, and waited anxiously for the sight of the coming battle.

The Western fleet had steered to a position off the entrance formed in two divisions, the one led by Agrippa, the other by Octavian. Agrippa, whose experience and record of naval victory gave him the executive command, had no intention of risking his small ships in the narrows, where they would have been opposed by an equal number of heavier ships, more numerously manned, and would lose whatever advantage their superior handiness and seaworthiness gave them, through having no room to manoeuvre. He kept his fleet of four hundred trirèmes sufficiently far from the shore to avoid the shelving shallows that fringe it near the entrance to the straits, and to have ample sea-room.

For some time the fleets remained in presence of each other, both hesitating to begin the attack. Antony knew that his slower and heavier ships would have the best chance acting inshore and on the defensive, and Agrippa was, on the other hand, anxious not to engage until he could lure them out seaward, where his light craft would have all the gain of rapid manoeuvring.

It was not till near noon that at last the Western fleet closed with the Allies. The ships that first encountered were nearly all Roman vessels, for the Egyptian and Asiatic squadrons were not in the front line of Antony’s fleet, and the brunt of the attack fell upon the sluggish giants that had been so elaborately fortified with booms in the water and towers and breastworks on their decks. As the attacking ships came into range, arrows, javelins, and stones flew hurtling through the air from the line of floating castles, missiles that did not, however, inflict much loss, for the men on the decks of the attacking fleet crouched behind bulwarks or covered themselves with their oblong shields, and their bowmen made some show of reply to the heavier discharge of engines of war on Antony’s ships and to the more rapid shooting of the Asiatic archers. The days were still far off when sea fights would be decided by “fire,” in the sense of the discharge of projectiles.

Could the tall ships have rammed the smaller and lower galleys of Octavian and Agrippa they would certainly have sent them to the bottom a sunken ship for each blow of the brazen beak. But attempts at ramming were soon found by Antony’s captains to be both useless and dangerous. It was not merely that their lighter and nimbler opponents easily avoided the onset. The well-trained crews evaded every attempt to run them down or grapple them, chose their own distance as they hovered round their huge adversaries, and presently as they gained confidence from impunity, began successfully to practise the manoeuvre of eluding the ram, and using their own bows, not for a blow against the hull of the heavier ship, but to sweep away and shatter her long oars, that were too heavy to be saved by drawing them in or unshipping them. Successful attack on the oars was equivalent to disabling an adversary’s engines in a modern sea-fight. And when a ship was thus crippled, her opponents could choose their own time to concentrate several of their ships for a joint attempt to take her by boarding.

The unwieldy ships of Antony’s first line, with their half-trained and untrained crews, must have formed a straggling irregular line with large intervals as they stood out to sea, and it was this that gave Octavian’s fleet the opportunity for the worrying tactics they adopted. Had the Egyptian and Phoenician ships come to the support of the leading line, their more sailor-like crews might have helped to turn the scale against Octavian. But while the fight was yet undecided and before the Egyptian squadron had taken any part in it, a breeze sprang up from the land, blowing from the north-east. Then, to the dismay of Antony’s veterans who watched the battle from the headland of Actium, it was seen that the Egyptians were unfurling their sails from the long yards. The signal had been given from Cleopatra’s stately vessel, which as the battle began had rowed out to a position in the midst of the Egyptian squadron, and now shook out her purple sails to the breeze, silken fabrics of fiery red, that seemed at first glance like a battle-signal. But in battle sails were never used and ships trusted entirely to the oar, so to set the sails meant plainly that the fight was to be abandoned.

Driven by her silver-tipped oars, helped now with the land breeze that swelled her sails, Cleopatra’s galley passed astern of the fighting-line on its extreme left, and sixty of the warships of Alexandria followed their queen. Those who watched from the land must have hoped against hope that this was a novel manoeuvre, to use the breeze to aid the squadron of their allies to shoot out from behind the main body, gain the flank of the enemy, and then suddenly let the sails flap idly, furl or drop them, and sweep down with full speed of oars on the rear of the attack, with Cleopatra leading like Artemisia at Salamis. But the “serpent of old Nile” had no such ideas. She was in full flight for Alexandria, with her warships escorting her and conveying the wealth that had been embarked when it was decided to put to sea. Was her flight an act of treachery, or the result of panic-stricken alarm at the sight of the battle? But even her enemies never accused her of any lack of personal courage, and there are many indications that it had been arranged before the fleet came out, that, as soon as an opportunity offered, Cleopatra with a sufficient escort should make for Egypt, where several legions were in garrison, and where even if the army now camped beside the Ambracian Gulf could not be extricated from its difficulties, another army might be formed to prolong the war.

But the withdrawal of the sixty ships threw the odds of battle heavily against the rest of Antony’s fleet. And matters were made worse by its leader suddenly allowing his infatuation for the Queen of Egypt to sweep away all sense of his duty to his comrades and followers and his honour as a commander. As he saw Cleopatra’s sails curving round his line and making for the open sea, he hastily left his flagship, boarded a small and swift galley, and sped after the Egyptians.

Agrippa was too good a leader to weaken his attack on the main body of the enemy by any attempt to interrupt the flight of the Egyptian squadron. When he saw the galley of Antony following it, he guessed who was on board, and detached a few of his trirèmes in pursuit. Antony was saved from capture only by the rearward ships of the fugitive squadron turning back to engage and delay the pursuers. In this rearguard fight two of the Egyptian warships were captured by Agrippa’s cruisers. But meanwhile Antony’s galley had run alongside of the royal flagship of the Egyptian fleet, and he had been welcomed on board by Cleopatra.

By this time, however, he had begun to realize the consequences of his flight. Half an hour ago he had stood on the deck of a fighting ship, where comrades who had made his cause their own were doing brave battle against his enemies. Now, while the fight still raged far away astern, he found himself on the deck of a pleasure yacht, glittering with gold and silver, silk and ivory, and with women and slaves forming a circle round the Queen, who greeted him as he trod the carpeted deck. He made only a brief acknowledgment of her welcome, and then turned away and strode forward to the bow, where he sat alone, huddled together, brooding on thoughts of failure and disgrace, while the royal galley and its escort of warships sped southward with oar and sail, and the din of battle died away in the distance, and all sight of it was lost beyond the horizon.

The withdrawal of the Egyptians was a palpable discouragement to all the fleet, but not all were aware that their leader, Antony, had shared Cleopatra’s flight. Some of those who realized what had happened gave up all further effort for victory, and leaving the line drove ashore on the sandy beach of Actium, and abandoning their ships joined the spectators from the camp. Others made their way by the strait into the great land-locked haven of the Gulf. But most of the fleet still kept up the fight. The great ships that drifted helplessly, with broken oars, among the agile galleys of Agrippa’s Liburnian sailors, or that grounded in the shallows nearer the shore, were, even in their helplessness as ships, formidable floating forts that it was difficult to sink and dangerous to storm. More than one attempt to board was repulsed with loss, the high bulwarks and towers giving an advantage to the large fighting contingents that Antony had embarked. Some of them had drifted together, and were lashed side to side, so that their crews could mutually aid each other, and their archers bring a cross fire on the assailants of their wooden towers. Some ships had been sunk on both sides, and a few of the towered warships of the Eastern fleet had been captured by Agrippa, but at the cost of much loss of life.

To complete the destruction of the Antonian fleet, and secure his victory, Agrippa now adopted means that could not have been suddenly improvised, and must therefore have been prepared in advance, perhaps at the earlier period, when he was considering the chances of forcing a way into the Gulf. Fire was the new weapon, arrows wreathed with oiled and blazing tow were shot at the towers and bulwarks of the enemy. Rafts laden with combustibles were set on fire, and towed or pushed down upon the drifting sea-castles. Ship after ship burst into flame. As the fire spread some tried vainly to master it; others, at an early stage, abandoned their ships, or surrendered. As the resistance of the defeated armada gradually slackened, and about four o’clock came to an end, it was found that a number of ships had taken refuge in the narrows and the Gulf; others were aground on the point; a few had been sunk, some more had surrendered, but numbers were drifting on the sea, wrapped in smoke and flame. Some of these sank as the fire reached the water’s edge, and the waves lapped into the hollow hull, or the weight of half-consumed upper works capsized them. Others drifted ashore in the shallows, and reddened sea and land with the glare of their destruction far into the night.

For the men who had fought, the victory, complete as it was, had an element of disappointment. They had hoped to secure as a prize the treasures of Cleopatra, but these had been spirited away on the Egyptian fleet. But for the commanders, Octavian and his able lieutenant, there was nothing to regret. The battle had once more decided the issue between East and West, and had given Octavian such advantages that it would be his own fault if he were not soon master of the Roman World.

Within a few days the remnant of the defeated fleet had been surrendered or burned at its anchors. The army of Canidius, after a half-hearted attempt at an inland march, and after being further weakened by desertions, declared for Octavian, and joined his standards.

Cleopatra had entered the port of Alexandria with a pretence of returning in triumph from a naval victory. Laurel wreaths hung on spars and bulwarks, flags flew, trumpets sounded, and she received the enthusiastic greetings of Greeks and Egyptians as she landed. But the truth could not be long concealed, and under the blight of defeat, linked with stories of leaders deserting comrades and allies, Antony and Cleopatra failed to rally any determined support to their side when the conqueror of Actium came to threaten Egypt itself. Both ended their lives with their own hands, Cleopatra only resorting to this act of desperation when, after breaking with Antony, she failed to enslave Octavian with her charms, and foresaw that she would appear among the prisoners at his coming triumph in Rome.

2 September, B.C. 31 the day of Actium is the date which most historians select to mark the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Empire. The victor Octavian had already taken the name of his grand-uncle, Cæsar. He now adopted the title of Augustus, and accepted from army and senate the permanent rank of Imperator, inaugurating a system of absolutism that kept some of the forms of the old Republic as a thin disguise for the change to Imperialism.

On the height where he had camped before the battle, Nicopolis, the City of Victory, was erected. The ground where his tent had stood was the marble-paved forum, adorned with the brazen beaks of conquered warships. The temple of Apollo, on the point of Actium, was rebuilt on more ambitious lines, and on the level expanse of sandy ground behind it, every September, for some two hundred years, the “Actian games” were held to celebrate the decisive victory.

Augustus did not forget that to the fleet he had owed his success in the civil war, and naval stations were organized and squadrons of warships kept in commission even in the long days of peace that followed his victory. They served to keep the Mediterranean free from the plague of piracy, and to secure the growing oversea commerce of the Empire which had made the Mediterranean a vast Roman lake.