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 Caesar. 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 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 Mylae, 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 Chapter XI.
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 Caesar; 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."[3]
[3] "Antony and Cleopatra," Act iii, scene 7.
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 triremes 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.
[Illustration: ROMAN WARSHIPS
_After the paintings found at Pompeii_]
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 triremes 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,
Caesar. 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.