Augustus (32 page)

On February 1, Sosius went on the attack. He strongly defended Antony and proposed a motion of censure of Octavian. His message will have been that, if there was a threat to peace, it did not come from Antony, who had shown no sign whatever of aggression toward his colleague.

Although a tribune friendly to Octavian entered a timely veto, Sosius’ intervention flushed Octavian out. In mid-February he gathered around him supporters and Caesarian veterans, and returned at their head to Rome. This was, in effect, his Rubicon, for he was staging something very like a coup d’état. On his own initiative, he convened a meeting of the Senate. He had absolutely no right to do this, but the consuls and the senators turned up at the session. He must have wondered whether he was riding events or they were riding him. Dio reports that he surrounded “himself with a bodyguard of soldiers and friends who carried concealed daggers. Sitting between the Consuls in his chair of state, he spoke at length and in moderate terms in his own defence, and brought many accusations against Sosius and Antony.”

For the consuls, this triumph of force could not be allowed to stand. “As they did not dare to reply to [Octavian] and could not bear to be silent,” in Dio’s sharp words, they secretly left Rome and set sail for the east. They were accompanied by between three and four hundred of Rome’s one thousand senators—republicans or supporters of Antony.

On the limited evidence available it is hard to be sure whether or not this move was a defeat for Octavian. Unlike the former triumvir, the consuls could claim legitimate political authority and, although the senators who joined them were a minority of the total membership, they were a substantial number of the ruling elite. What is more, it was uncertain how many of those who stayed behind were fully signed-up supporters of Octavian. Seasoned observers of the political scene will have seen a comparison with the flight from Rome in 49 of Pompey the Great and most of the Senate when Julius Caesar invaded Italy and launched the first of the civil wars. Ahenobarbus and Sosius could argue that they were taking “Rome” with them.

It looks as if Octavian was taken aback when he learned what had happened. He needed to neutralize the rebuff; pretending it was what he had always had in mind, he claimed that he had sent the senators away voluntarily. Anyone else who wanted to leave had his full permission to do so.

The upheavals at Rome were concentrating minds wonderfully. It was now certain that there was to be another round of civil war. Throughout the Roman world, men of importance in the state were considering their position: with whom were they to side?

XIV

SHOWDOWN

32–31
B.C.

In early 32
B.C.,
it became obvious to everyone that Antony and Cleopatra had made an important and highly controversial decision. She was to accompany Antony on the campaign, in which she meant to play a full part. In no small measure as a result of Octavian’s propaganda, the queen had become very unpopular among Romans, who disapproved of a foreign potentate interfering in their affairs. Her emergence as the co-general, in effect, of a Roman army further alienated opinion.

When Ahenobarbus and the others arrived from Rome, they were irritated by what they found. The consul cordially disliked Cleopatra, refusing to address her as queen and calling her simply by her name. He strongly advised Antony to send her back to Egypt to await the outcome of the war. Herod the Great of Judea, a bitter enemy after years of merciless bullying by the queen, gave Antony some confidential and cruel advice: Cleopatra’s continuing presence would damage his chances; the path to success was to put her to death and annex Egypt. At one point Antony did order her back home, but then relented, taking the line of least resistance, and let her stay. There were even reports that he was growing frightened of her.

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.

By the end of 32
B.C.,
the main body of Antony’s fleet was based in the safety of the Ambracian Gulf. At the narrowest part of the strait leading to the sea, two towers were constructed (probably where today’s Venetian towers stand), from which catapults could hurl missiles and fireballs at any passing galleys.

The ships had spent much of the summer and autumn ferrying the army to Greece and then establishing a defensive line down its Adriatic coast. A squadron guarded Leucas, the Actium roads, and the islands in the south. It protected the entry into the Corinthian Gulf and the port of Patrae (today’s Patras), where Antony and Cleopatra had established their headquarters. A garrison guarded the Methone promontory. Another force was placed on the headland at Taenarum. In addition, there were Antonian troops on Crete, and four legions held the province of Cyrenaica next to Egypt.

During the winter of 32–31
B.C.,
Antony’s army was distributed among these strongpoints on the western coast from Corcyra to Methone, with the largest part gathered at Actium.

At first sight Mark Antony’s strategy is hard to fathom. On the two most recent occasions when Greece had been the theater of operations, the opposing generals had focused their attention on the north of the country and the Via Egnatia, that strategically important route to Byzantium and the east. That was where Pompey the Great had based himself in 49 and 48
B.C.
; Brutus and Cassius had marched west along it to meet their doom at Philippi.