‘The War That Made the Roman Empire’ Review: Turning the Tide of History
By Arthur Herman, April 1, 2022, WSJ
Though still cleaning up the mess in Italy, Octavian held a strong
hand: Italy was the home of Rome’s legions and its manpower reserves.
All he needed was a cause with which to unite Romans and Italians
under his leadership. He found it in Antony’s relationship with
Cleopatra: It was not exactly a formal marriage but obviously had
a sexual as well as a political dimension.
It is worth noting that there were no libel laws in ancient Rome.
Anyone could accuse a public figure of anything—cowardice, alcoholism, murder, incest, bestiality. A Roman politician like Antony was supposed
to take even the most lurid charges with good grace. But Octavian tapped
a vein of misogyny in Roman culture—and affronted a Roman-noble ideal—by portraying Cleopatra as a temptress and whore and Antony as her sexual
slave. Octavian claimed that, under her influence, Antony intended to
move the empire’s capital from Rome to the east.
The strategy worked. In 32 B.C., the senate in Rome declared war on
Cleopatra and stripped Antony of his consulship and military command.
But there was even more at stake. Mr. Strauss notes that, for Octavian,
the most worrisome threat came from the boy Caesarion. “If Caesarion
was a flesh-and-blood Caesar,” he writes, “then Octavian was back to
being merely Gaius Octavius, a minor member of a prosperous but provincial Italian family.” Octavian would have to not only crush Antony and Cleopatra but annihilate her son.
Preparing for Octavian’s assault, Antony faced two choices. He could
adopt an aggressive approach and use his superior navy to launch an
invasion of Italy. Or he could wait on the other side of the Adriatic,
in the Gulf of Corinth, to lure Octavian and his second-in-command,
Marcus Agrippa, into attack. He chose the second plan—a blunder. His opponents, Mr. Strauss tells us, especially Agrippa, understood naval
warfare far better than he. Octavian’s ships swept in and trapped
Antony’s fleet in the narrow entrance to the Gulf of Ambracia at
Actium. After months of stalemate, Antony decided to risk everything
with a battle at sea.
The Battle of Actium—involving over 600 ships and 40,000 men—forms
the centerpiece of Mr. Strauss’s story. His account captures the
hideous confusion of ancient warfare at sea: “a cacophony of shouts, trumpets, and battle cries set to the pounding rhythm of oars; the
whoosh of catapults and the crash of ships; and, everywhere, the
screams of the dying.” After hours of fighting with no result, “the attackers approached Antony’s ships from many directions at once.
They shot blazing missiles, hurled spears with torches attached to
them, and used catapults to shoot pots filled with charcoal.” The all-
wood triremes lit up like kindling as their crews were immolated or
drowned. Still, Antony’s ships fought long enough to allow both Antony
and Cleopatra to sail to Egypt to fight another day.
It took a year before Octavian felt strong enough to launch an
invasion of Egypt. Facing death at Octavian’s hand, and believing
rumors that Cleopatra had taken her own life, Antony committed
suicide. The rumors were false. Cleopatra managed to meet the
triumphant Octavian long enough to beg for her children’s lives
before choosing death herself. We still don’t know exactly how she
died. If it was from a poisonous snake bite, Mr. Strauss says, it
was more likely that of a cobra than the asp of legend.
Octavian spared Cleopatra’s children—except for Caesarion, He had
to die to secure Octavian’s position as “the August Caesar,” or
Caesar Augustus, as the senate eventually dubbed him. For all his
ambition, Augustus understood that Rome had for too long ruled itself
and its possessions by a sleight-of-hand, pretending that it was still
a republic of farmers perched on the banks of the Tiber and led by a
cluster of noble families. Decades of civil war were the result—all
because Romans wouldn’t face the reality that they weren’t a city-state anymore but an empire.
Julius Caesar was the first to see this reality clearly. He had
grasped that Rome needed a broader base of leadership and support,
even as its noble families fiercely opposed him in the name of
liberty. His namesake and heir did better. A new governing elite
drawn from across Italy came into being, graced with impressive
titles and powers, though Augustus kept the key powers for himself.
After annexing Egypt, he made sure that its governorship was a
reward for loyal service, not a new power base. The victory at
Actium, Mr. Strauss argues in this splendid book, allowed Augustus
to build an empire that lasted for nearly 500 years. The price was
the destruction of the man who dared to oppose him, along with the
woman for whom he had risked everything.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-war-that-made-the-roman-empire-book-review-actium-mark-antony-cleopatra-turning-the-tide-of-history-11648826419
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