So she, not understanding, gloried in her ascendancy over Antony, deliberately provoking his marshals by demanding this or that from him as proof of his devotion to her, without seeing that her conduct was making Antony’s task much harder—and making her own presence more abominable to them with every passing day.
In Samos he had a brain wave and insisted on remaining there to revel; his legates went on to Athens and he had Cleopatra to himself. If she deemed him drunk, so much the better; most of the wine in his goblet was emptied surreptitiously into his solid gold chamber pot, a gift from her. Her own, she pointed out gleefully, had an eagle and the letters SPQR on its bottom so that she could piss and shit on Rome. That earned her a tirade and a broken chamber pot, but not before it traveled to Italia as a canard Octavian exploited to the limit.
One more handicap lay in her growing conviction that Antony was not a military genius after all, though she failed to see that her own conduct made it impossible for Antony to enter on this war with his old zest, his rightful position of authority. He had his way in the end, yes, but the constant brawling sapped his spirits.
“Go home,” he said to her wearily over and over again. “Go home and leave this war to me.”
But how could she do that when she saw through him? Were she to leave for Egypt, Antony would reach an accommodation with Octavian, and all her plans would fail.
In Athens he refused to travel farther west, dreading the day when Cleopatra rejoined his army. Canidius was an excellent second-in-command; he could manage things in western Greece. His own main duty, Antony thought, was to protect his legates from the Queen, an activity so demanding that he neglected his correspondence with Canidius, not as difficult as it would have been for a man less addicted to pleasure than Antony. On the subject of supplies he ignored every letter.
The news of Octavian’s seizing and reading of his will took Antony’s breath away.
“I, treasonous?” he asked Cleopatra incredulously. “Since when do a man’s posthumous dispositions brand him a traitor? Oh, cacat, this is more than enough! I have been stripped of my legal triumvirate and all my imperium! How dare the Senate side with that disgusting little irrumator? He’s the one who committed sacrilege! No one can open the will of a man still living, but he did! And they have forgiven him!”
Then came publication of the Oath of Allegiance. Pollio sent a copy of it to Athens, together with a letter that told of his own refusal to take the oath.
“Antonius, he is so crafty!” the letter said. “No reprisals have been visited upon those who refuse to swear—he intends future generations to be impressed by his clementia, shades of his divine father! He even sent notices to the magistrates of Bononia and Mutina—your cities, stuffed with your clients!—saying that no one was to be compelled to swear. I gather that the oath is to be extended to Octavianus’s provinces, which are not so lucky. Every provincial is to swear whether he wants to or not—no choice like Bononia, Mutina, and me.
“I can tell you, Antonius, that people are swearing in huge numbers, absolutely voluntarily. The men of Bononia and Mutina are swearing mightily—and not because they felt themselves intimidated. Because they are so fed up with the uncertainties of the last few years that they would swear on a clown’s centunculus if they thought that might bring stability. Octavianus has divorced you from the coming campaign—you are merely the drugged, drunken dupe of the Queen of Beasts. What fascinates me most is that Octavianus hasn’t stopped at citing Egypt’s queen. He names King Ptolemy XV Caesar alongside her as equal aggressor.”
Cleopatra’s face was ashen when she put Pollio’s missive down with shaking fingers. “Antonius, how can Octavianus do that to Caesar’s son? His blood son, his true heir—and a mere child!”
“Surely you can see for yourself,” Ahenobarbus said, reading in his turn. “Caesarion turned sixteen last June—he’s a man.”
“But he is Caesar’s son! His only son!”
“And the living image of his father,” said Ahenobarbus flatly. “Octavianus knows full well that if Rome and Italia set eyes on the lad, he’ll be overwhelmed with followers. The Senate will scramble to make him a Roman citizen and strip Octavianus of his so-called daddy’s wealth—and all his clients, which is far more important.” Ahenobarbus glared. “You would have done better, Cleopatra, to have stayed in Egypt and sent Caesarion on this campaign. There would have been less rancor in the councils.”
She shrank, in no condition to contend with Ahenobarbus. “No, if what you say is true, I was right to keep Caesarion in Egypt. I must conquer for him, and only then display him.”
“You’re a fool, woman! As long as Caesarion remains at the arse end of Our Sea, he’s invisible. Octavianus can issue leaflets describing him as totally unlike Caesar, and get no arguments. And if Octavianus should get as far as Egypt, your son by Caesar will die unseen.”
“Octavianus will never reach Egypt!” she cried.
“Of course he won’t,” said Canidius, stepping in. “We’ll beat him now in western Greece. I have it on good authority that Octavianus has settled on sixteen full-strength legions and seventeen thousand German and Gallic horse. They represent his only land forces. His navy consists of two hundred big fives that did well at Naulochus, plus two hundred miserable little Liburnians. We outnumber him in all aspects.”
“Well said, Canidius. We cannot possibly lose.” Then she shivered. “Some issues can be settled only by a war, but the outcome is always uncertain, isn’t it? Look at Caesar. He was always outnumbered. They say this Agrippa is almost as good.”
Immediately after Pollio’s letter they moved to Patrae, on the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth in western Greece; by now the entire army and navy had arrived, sailing around the westernmost peninsula of the Peloponnese, into the Adriatic.
Though several hundred galleys were left to garrison Methone as well as Corcyra and other strategic islands, the main fleet still numbered some four hundred and eighty of the most massive quinqueremes ever built. These leviathans had eight men to the three oars of one bank, were completely decked, and had ramming beaks of solid bronze surrounded by oak beams; their hulls were reinforced with belts of squared timber plated and belted with iron to serve as buffers should they be rammed. They were two hundred feet long and fifty feet wide in the beam, stood ten feet above the water amidships and twenty-five feet above it at stern and prow. Each had four hundred and eighty oarsmen and a hundred and fifty marines, and bristled with tall towers carrying artillery pieces. All this rendered them impregnable, an asset in defense; but they crept along at the pace of a snail, no asset in attack. Antony’s flagship, the Antonia, was even bigger. Sixty of Cleopatra’s ships were of this size and design, but the second sixty were roomy triremes with four men to an oar bank, and could move at a fast clip, especially when under sail as well as oar power. Her flagship, the Caesarion, though daintily daubed and gilded, was swift and designed more for flight than fight.
When everything was in train, Antony sat back complacently, finding nothing wrong in issuing orders so broad that much of the detail was left up to the ability of invidual legates, some good, some mediocre, and some hopeless.
He had put himself on a line running between the island of Corcyra and Methone, a Peloponnesian port just to the north of Cape Acritas. Bogud of Mauretania, a refugee from his brother, Bocchus, was given command of Methone, while the other big naval base, on the island of Leucas, was given to Gaius Sosius. Even Cyrenaica in Africa had been garrisoned. Lucius Pinarius Scarpus, a great-nephew of Divus Julius, held it with a fleet and four legions. This was necessary to safeguard grain and food shipments from Egypt. Huge caches of foodstuffs were put on Samos, at Ephesus, and at many ports on the eastern coast of Greece.
Antony had decided to ignore western Macedonia and northern Epirus; to try to hold them would stretch his front and thin out the density of his troops and ships, therefore let Octavian have them and the Via Egnatia, the great eastern road. Dread of a too-long, too-thin fr
ont obsessed him so much that he even vacated Corcyra. His main base was the Bay of Ambracia; this vast, rambling, almost landlocked body of water had a mouth into the Adriatic less than one mile wide. The southern promontory at the mouth was called Cape Actium, and here Antony put his command camp, with his legions and auxiliaries fanned around it for many miles of swampy, unhealthy, mosquito-ridden ground. Though it hadn’t been in camp very long, the land army was approaching dire straits. Pneumonia and the ague were pandemic, even the hardiest men had bad colds, and food was beginning to run short.
His supply chain had not been well organized, and anything that Cleopatra suggested to rectify its deficiencies was either ignored or deliberately sabotaged. Not that either she or Antony spared supply much thought, sure that their policy of keeping the foodstuffs on the eastern side of the landmass was good strategy; Octavian would have to round the Peloponnese to get at the caches. But what they failed to take into account was the high, rugged, rather impassable range of mountains that ran like a fat spine from Macedonia down to the Gulf of Corinth and separated eastern Greece from the west. The roads were mere tracks where they existed at all.
Alone among the legates, Publius Canidius saw the imperative necessity of bringing most of these food and grain caches around the Peloponnese by ship, but Antony, in a stubborn mood, took many days to approve the order, which then had to make the voyage east before it could be executed. And that took time.
Time, it turned out, that Antony and Cleopatra didn’t have. It was so well known that late winter and early spring saw the advantages lie with those on the east side of the Adriatic that no one in Antony’s command tent believed Octavian and his forces would—or could—cross the Adriatic until summer. But this year all the watery gods from Father Neptune to the Lares Permarini were on Octavian’s side. Very brisk westerlies blew, as unusual as unseasonal. They meant a following wind and a following sea for Octavian, but a head wind and a head sea for Antony. Who was powerless to prevent Octavian’s sailing—or landing wherever he pleased.
While the troop transports poured across the Adriatic from Brundisium, Marcus Agrippa detached half his four hundred galleys and struck at Antony’s base of Methone. He was completely victorious, especially because, having killed Bogud, destroyed half his ships, and pressed the other half into his own service, Agrippa went on to do the same thing to Sosius at Leucas. Sosius himself escaped, a very small joy. For Antony and Cleopatra were now completely cut off from any grain and foodstuffs coming by sea, no matter where their point of origin. Suddenly the only way to feed the land and sea forces was overland, but Antony was adamant that his Roman soldiers were not going to be made beasts of burden—or even lead beasts of burden! Let Cleopatra’s indolent Egyptians do something for a change! Let them organize the overland trek!
Every donkey and mule in the east of the country was commandeered and loaded to maximum tolerance. But Egyptian overseers, it turned out, had scant respect for animals, neglected to water them, and indifferently watched them die as the cavalcades came over the mountains of Dolopia. So Greek men by the thousands were forced at swordpoint to shoulder bags and jars of supplies and walk the eighty hideous miles between the end of the Gulf of Malis and the Bay of Ambracia. Among these wretched porters was a Greek named Plutarch, who survived his ordeal and entertained his grandchildren ever after with lurid tales of dragging wheat over eighty awful miles.
By the end of April, Agrippa controlled the Adriatic and all Octavian’s troops had been safely landed around Epirote Toryne, in the lee of Corcyra. After deciding to make Corcyra his main naval base, Octavian pressed on south with his land forces in an attempt to surprise Antony at Actium.
Until this moment all Antony’s wrong decisions had stemmed from the adverse effect Cleopatra had on his legates. But now he committed a cardinal mistake: he penned up every ship he had within the Bay of Ambracia, a total of four hundred and forty vessels even after his losses at Agrippa’s hands. Given the size and slowness of his ships, it was impossible except under the most ideal conditions to get the bottled-up fleets out of the bay through a gullet less than a mile wide. And while Antony and Cleopatra sat impotent, the rest of their bases fell to Agrippa: Patrae, the entire Gulf of Corinth, and the western Peloponnese.
Octavian’s effort to move fast enough to surprise Antony’s land army failed; it was wet, the ground was boggy, and his men were sickening with colds. Acting on reports from his scouts, Antony and the assassin Decimus Turullius set out with several legions and Galatian cavalry and defeated the leading legions; Octavian was compelled to halt.
Desperately needing a victory, Antony made sure his soldiers hailed him imperator on the field (for the fourth time in his career) and grossly inflated his success. Between illness and increasingly poor rations, morale in his camps was extremely low. His command chain was severely disaffected, for which he had Cleopatra to thank. She made no attempt to keep in the background, toured the area regularly to carp and criticize, and comported herself with icy hauteur. According to her lights, she did nothing wrong; though her association with Romans now dated back a full sixteen years, she still hadn’t managed to grasp the concept of egalitarianism, which incorporated no automatic reverence for any man or woman, even one born to wear the ribbon of the diadem. Blaming her for the mess they were in, ordinary legionaries jeered, booed, and hissed at her, yammered like a thousand little dogs. Nor could she command that they be punished. Their centurions and legates simply ignored her.
Octavian finally camped on good dry ground near the north headland of the bay, connecting his vast compound to a supply base on the Adriatic shore by “long walls” fortifications. An impasse ensued, with Agrippa blockading the bay from the sea and Octavian depriving Antony of the chance to relocate where his own ground was less swampy. Hunger reared its ugly head higher, and desperation followed it.
On a day when the westerlies blew less constantly, Antony sent out a part of his fleet under the command of Tarcondimotus. Agrippa came bustling to meet it with his trusty Liburnians and trounced it. Tarcondimotus himself was killed; only a sudden change in wind direction enabled most of the Antonian fleet to struggle back inside its prison. Agrippa was puzzled by the fact that the sally had been led by a client-king and that no vessel held any Roman troops, but interpreted the move as doubt in Antony’s mind that he could win.
In actual fact, it stemmed out of dissent in the councils a despondent Mark Antony still held regularly. Antony and the Romans wanted a land battle, but Cleopatra and the client-kings wanted a sea battle. Both factions could see that they were trapped in a no-win situation, and both factions were beginning to see that they had to abandon the invasion of Italia in favor of returning to Egypt to regroup and think out a better strategy. If they were to do this, however, they had first to defeat Octavian badly enough to enable a mass retreat.
Sufficient food kept trickling in over the mountains to keep starvation at bay, but short rations had to be enforced. In this respect Cleopatra suffered a defeat that was rapidly alienating the non-Roman contingents, fully seventy thousand strong. Antony was furtively feeding bigger portions to his sixty-five thousand Roman soldiers—but not furtively enough. The secret leaked to the client-kings, who objected strenuously and loathed him for it. And deemed Cleopatra weak, since she was unable to persuade or hector Antony into ceasing this unfair practice.
Ague and enteric fever ran through the camps as summer came in. No one, Roman or non-Roman, had the forethought—or the enthusiasm—to drill the land forces or exercise the sea forces. Almost a hundred and forty thousand Antonian men sat around, idle, hungry, ill, and discontented. Waiting for someone at the top to think of a way out. They didn’t even clamor for a battle, a sure sign that they had given up.
Then Antony thought of a way out. Rousing himself from gloom, he summoned his staff and explained.
“We’re quite lucky here, we’re close to the river Acheron,” he said, pointing to a map. “And here is Octavianus—not nearly
as lucky. He has to bring fresh water from the river Oropus, a long way from his camps. It’s ducted through halves of hollowed tree trunks which he’s replacing with terra-cotta pipes Agrippa brings from Italia. But at this moment, his water situation is precarious. So we’re going to cut off his supply and oblige him to withdraw from his present position to one nearer the Oropus. Unfortunately, the distance we have to travel to achieve surprise negates a full-scale infantry attack, at least in the beginning.”
He continued, using his right index finger to illustrate the relevant areas, and he sounded very confident; the mood in the command tent lightened, especially when Cleopatra kept silent.
“Therefore, Deiotarus Philadelphus, you’ll take your cavalry and the Thracian cavalry—Rhoemetalces will be second-in-command—and spearhead the action. I know you’ll have a very long detour around the east of the bay, but Octavianus won’t be watching anything happening there, it’s too distant. Marcus Lurius will take ten of the Roman legions and follow as hard on your heels as he can. In the meantime I’ll take rafts of infantry across the bay and set them up in a camp just under Octavianus’s walls. He won’t be particularly dismayed, and when I offer battle, he’ll ignore me. He’s too firmly entrenched to be alarmed. When your infantry, Lurius, meet Deiotarus Philadelphus’s cavalry, you’ll rip miles of Octavianus’s ducting out and then plunder his northern food caches. Once he hears what’s happening, he’ll pull out to relocate along the Oropus. And while he’s in the middle of that—and while Agrippa is helping him—we’ll evacuate for Egypt.”