CHAPTER II

## 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. Cæsar'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 Patræ (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 triremes; 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,[2] 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 Mylæ, in the same waters that had been the scene of the triumph of Duilius.

[2] Men of the same race of sailors and fishermen largely manned the victorious fleet of Tegethoff at Lissa, nineteen centuries later. See