“Why, thank you for the compliment! When will it happen?”
“Tomorrow, by all the signs. We’ll be ready.”
On the second day of September, Mark Antony came out of the Bay of Ambracia in six squadrons, leading the northernmost one himself. His right, which was his north, comprised three of the six squadrons, each numbering fifty-five massive fives; Poplicola was his second-in-command. Agrippa lay on his oars farther from the shore than Antony had expected, which meant he had to row for longer than he wanted. By mid-morning he achieved the distance and lay on his oars, resting the oarsmen. Only at midday, when the wind began to veer to the north, could the battle begin.
Cleopatra and her transports took advantage of the longer distance, moving into the mouth as though keeping herself in reserve, and trusting to Agrippa’s unexpected distance from the shore to conceal the troop-carrying nature of her ships.
The wind began to change; both sides put their backs to the oars and rowed desperately for the north, the galleys at the north end of both sides strung out in a line that saw longer intervals between Antony’s fives than between Agrippa’s Liburnians.
The race was a tie. Neither side managed to turn the other downwind. Instead, the two end squadrons became locked in combat. The Antonia and Agrippa’s flagship, the Divus Julius, were the first to engage, and within moments six nippy little Liburnians had grappled the Antonia and were hauling it in. When he had the time to look, Antony discovered that ten of his galleys were also in trouble, grappled by Liburnians. Some were on fire; scant matter that they couldn’t be rammed and sunk when fire would do it. Soldiers from the six limpetlike Liburnians began pouring on to Antonia’s deck; Antony decided to abandon ship. He could see that Cleopatra and her transports had broken out of the bay and were heading south under sail, helped by the brisk nor’westerly. A leap into the pinnace and he too was away, dodging between the Liburnians in a craft famous for its speed.
No one aboard the Divus Julius took any notice of the pinnace, half a mile away by the time the Antonia surrendered. Lucius Gellius Poplicola and the other two squadrons of Antony’s right promptly surrendered without engaging, while Marcus Lurius, in command of Antony’s center, turned his ships around and rowed back into the bay. At the south end of his line and commanded by Gaius Sosius, Antony’s left followed Lurius’s example.
It was a debacle, a laughingstock of a battle. Of the more than seven hundred ships on the sea, less than twenty had clashed.
So incredible was it, in fact, that Agrippa and Octavian were convinced that this oddest of all outcomes was a trick, that on the morrow some other tactic would be employed. Thus all that night Agrippa’s fleet lay on its oars out to sea, losing any chance they might have had to catch Cleopatra and forty thousand Roman troops.
When the next day produced no clever stratagem, Agrippa rowed home to Comarus and he and Octavian went to see their captives.
From Poplicola they learned the shocking truth: that Antony had deserted his command to follow the fleeing Cleopatra.
“It’s all That Woman’s fault!” Poplicola shrilled. “Antonius never meant to fight! As soon as the Antonia was finished, he got over its side into a pinnace and hared off to catch Cleopatra.”
“Impossible!” Octavian exclaimed.
“I tell you, I saw it myself! And when I did, I thought, why should I imperil my soldiers and crews? Surrender suddenly seemed more honorable. I hope you take due note of my good sense.”
“I’ll put it on your memorial,” Octavian said genially, and to his Germans: “I want him executed immediately. See to it.”
Only Sosius was spared this fate; Arruntius interceded for him, and Octavian listened.
As it turned out, Canidius had tried to persuade the land army to attack Octavian’s camp, but no one save him wanted a fight. Nor would the troops strike camp and march for the east. Canidius himself vanished while the legion representatives negotiated a peace with Octavian, who sent the foreign levies home and found land in Greece and Macedonia for the Romans.
“For I’ll not have a one of you polluting Italia with your stories,” Octavian told the legion representatives. “Clemency’s my policy, but you’ll never go home. Be like your master Antonius, and learn to love the East.”
Gaius Sosius was made to swear the Oath of Allegiance, and warned that he was never to contradict whatever Octavian’s “official” version of Actium turned out to be. “I have spared you on one condition—silence all the way to the pyre. And remember that I can light it at any time.”
“I need a walk,” Octavian said to Agrippa two nundinae after Actium, “and I want company, so don’t make excuses. Cleaning up is properly in train, you’re not needed.”
“You come before anyone and anything, Caesar. Where do you want to walk?”
“Anywhere but here. Faugh! The stink of shit, piss, and so many men is unbearable. I could bear it better if there were a bit of blood, but there isn’t. The bloodless battle of Actium!”
“Then let’s ride first, up into the north until we’re far enough away from Ambracia to breathe.”
“An excellent idea!”
They rode for two hours, which carried them farther than the dimple of the Bay of Comarus; when the forest closed in, Agrippa stopped by a brook sparkling in the dappled sunlight. It tumbled over its rocky bottom in breaks of foam, the mossy ground around it giving off a sweetly earthy smell.
“Here,” Agrippa said.
“We can’t walk here.”
“I know, but there are two lovely rocks over there. We can sit on them facing each other, and talk. Talk, not walk. Isn’t that what you really want to do?”
“Brave Agrippa!” Octavian laughed, sat down. “You’re right, as always. Here is peace, solitude, reflection. The only source of turbulence is the stream, and it’s a melody.”
“I brought a skin of watered wine, that Falernian you like.”
“Trusty Agrippa!” Octavian drank, then passed the skin to his friend. “Perfect!”
“Cough it up, Caesar.”
“At least these days that carries no implication of asthma.” He sighed, stretched out his legs. “The bloodless battle of Actium—ten enemy ships engaged out of four hundred, and only two of them fired until they sank. Perhaps a hundred dead, if that many. And for this I’ve taxed the people of Rome and Italia twenty-five percent, the second year’s contribution even now being collected? I will be cursed, perhaps even torn in pieces when all I can show for their money is a battle that was no battle. I can’t even produce Marcus Antonius or Cleopatra! They stole a march on me, sailed away. And, like a fool, I believed better of Antonius, lingered to defeat him instead of flying in pursuit.”
“Come, Caesar, that’s all done with. I know you, which means I know you’ll manage to turn Actium into a triumph.”
“I’ve been racking my mind for days, and I want to try out my ideas on you because you’ll answer me truthfully.” He picked up a series of pebbles and began to lay them out on his rock. “I can see no alternative other than to deliberately inflate Actium into something that Homer would yearn to hymn. The two fleets came together like titans, clashed all down the line from north to south—that’s why Poplicola, Lurius, and the rest perished. Only Sosius survived. Let Arruntius think his pleas spared Sosius—now you know better. Antonius fought heroically aboard Antonia and was winning his part of the engagement when, out of the corner of his eye, he noticed Cleopatra treacherously leaving both the battle—and him. So much drug was still in his body that he suddenly panicked, commandeered a pinnace, and set off after her like a lovesick dog after a bitch. Many of his admirals saw him go after Cleopatra, crying out to her”—Octavian raised his voice to a falsetto—” ‘Cleopatra, don’t leave me! I beg you, don’t leave me!’ Dead men were floating everywhere, the sea was red with blood, spars and shrouds tangled on the water, but the pinnace that held Marcus Antonius forged onward through the carnage in Cleopatra’s wake. After that, Antonius’s admirals lost
heart. And you, Agrippa, superlative in combat, crushed your adversaries.”
“It works so far,” said Agrippa, taking another swig from the wineskin. “What happens next?”
“Antonius reaches Cleopatra’s ship and climbs on board. Pray pardon the switch to the present tense—it always helps me when I’m embroidering something whose truth will never be known,” said the master of embroidery. “But suddenly he comes to his senses, sees in his mind’s eye the disaster he left so cravenly—I’ll teach that irrumator Antonius to accuse me of cowardice at Philippi! Now it’s his turn—sees the disaster he left so cravenly. He howls in anguish, pulls his paludamentum over his head, and sits on the deck for three days without moving. Cleopatra feeds him antidotes, pleading with him to go belowdeck to her cabin, but he won’t move, too devastated at his cowardice. Thousands of men dead, and he responsible!”
“It sounds like one of those trashy epic poems young girls buy,” said Agrippa.
“Yes, it does, doesn’t it? But would you care to bet that all of Rome and Italia won’t buy this one?”
“I’m not so silly. They’d buy it even on expensive paper. Once Maecenas adds some flowery phrases it will be faultless.”
“Certainly it ought to lighten the resentment against me for going to war. People like value for their money.”
“A touchy subject, Caesar. How on earth are you going to pay your debts? Now that Cleopatra’s defeated, you have no excuse for continuing to levy your tax. Yet while she’s alive, you’ll have no peace. She’ll be arming to have another try, whether Antonius is with her or not. It’s Divus Julius’s alleged son she wants to rule the world, not Antonius. So—money?”
“Proximately, I’m going to squeeze Antonius’s client-kings until they go Tyrian purple and their eyes bug out. Ultimately, I’ll invade Egypt.”
Agrippa glanced at the sun between the trees and rose to his feet. “Time to ride back, Caesar. We don’t want to be caught out here in the dark. According to Atticus—and he should know—the woods are full of bears and wolves.”
Some three hundred of Antony’s warships were undamaged, though all the troop transports had gone with Cleopatra. At first Octavian thought to burn all of them; he had fallen in love with the deadly little Liburnian, and become convinced that all future naval warfare would be Liburnian. Massive quinqueremes were obsolescent. Then he decided to retain sixty of Antony’s leviathans as a deterrent against piracy, growing at the western end of Our Sea. He sent them to Forum Julii, Caesar’s seaport colony of veterans on the coast where the Gallic Province met Liguria. The rest were beached and burned inside Ambracia, yielding such a vast number of ramming beaks that many of them had to be burned too. The most imposing were saved to adorn a column in front of the temple of Divus Julius in the Forum Romanum, but others were sent throughout Italia to remind the taxpayers that the threat had been very real.
Agrippa was to return to Italia and commence placating the veterans, who of late years always became truculent after service had involved a victory. The Senate was sent home too, and went thankfully; it had not been a comfortable sojourn overseas, even for those who had populated Antony’s anti-Senate. Clemency was the order of the day; once Antony’s admirals were executed, the inarguable ruler of Rome announced that only three men still at large would face decapitation: Canidius, Decimus Turullius, and Cassius Parmensis, the latter two because they were the last of Divus Julius’s assassins left alive.
Octavian himself planned to march his legions overland for Egypt, calling on the client-kings as he progressed. But it was not to be. Frantic word came from Rome that Lepidus’s son Marcus was plotting to usurp the victor of Actium. Having started his legions east under the command of Statilius Taurus, Octavian himself braved the winter gales of the Adriatic and returned to Italia. The crossing was the worst since that memorable one just after Divus Julius had been murdered, but now that the asthma had ceased to plague him, Octavian survived it reasonably well.
From Brundisium he traveled up the Via Appia for Rome at a gallop in a four-mule gig, swerving onto the Via Latina at Teanum Sidicinum to avoid the ague-riddled Pomptine Marshes. He was there within a nundinum, only to find it had been a wasted trip. Gaius Maecenas had dealt with the insurrection even before Agrippa had arrived. Marcus Lepidus and his wife, Servilia Vatia, suicided.
“How odd,” Octavian said to Maecenas and Agrippa. “Servilia Vatia was once betrothed to me.”
True to form, the veterans were restless and talking revolt. Octavian dealt with them by walking fearlessly through the vast camps around Capua wearing a toga and a laurel wreath upon his head. Smiling and waving, loudly proclaiming their valor and loyalty to anyone in hearing distance, he sought out the right men and sat down to some hard bargaining. Because a legion’s representatives were always the least satisfactory troops, as lazy as they were greedy, he talked money and land.
“In another seven or eight years, land won’t be a part of a veteran’s retirement package,” he said, “so be grateful that all of you here today will get good land. I am establishing a military aerarium, a treasury separate and distinct from the one under Saturn’s temple in Rome. The State will put money into it and that money will be invested at ten percent. The soldiers will also contribute. At this moment my actuaries are working out how much money it will need to contain in order to keep solvent even as it pays out pensions. They will be generous pensions, accompanied by a lump sum determined by a man’s service record. But land is not even an alternative.”
“Waffle for the future!” said Tornatius, the chief of the group, with studied rudeness. “We’re here for land and big cash bonuses—now, Caesar.”
“I know you are,” Octavian said cordially, “but I’m not in a position to oblige you until I get to Egypt and defeat the Queen of Beasts. That’s where the plunder is that can give you what you ask.” He lifted one hand. “No, Tornatius, no! There’s no point in arguing and less point in aggressive behavior. At the moment Rome and I don’t have a sestertius to give you. While you remain in camp you will be fed and made comfortable, but should any of you go on a rampage, you’ll be treated as traitors. Wait! Be patient! Your rewards will come, but not yet.”
“It’s not good enough,” said Tornatius.
“It has to be good enough. I’ve issued edicts to every town and city in Campania that if any soldiers try to sack and pillage them, every measure of reprisal is condoned by the Senate and People of Rome. They will not suffer rebellious soldiers, Tornatius, and I doubt you have sufficient influence with all my legionaries to mount a full-scale uprising.”
“You’re bluffing,” Tornatius muttered.
“No, I am not. I’m in the process of issuing edicts to every camp around Capua even as we speak. They will inform the men of my predicament and ask them to be patient. On the whole, most men are reasonable. They will see my point.”
Tornatius and his colleagues subsided, and remained quiet after they realized that the bulk of the soldiers were prepared to wait the two years Octavian asked for.
“Did you take their names?” he asked Agrippa.
“Of course, Caesar. They’ll quietly disappear.”
“I had hoped you’d be able to stay home,” Livia Drusilla said to her husband.
“No, dearest one, that was never a possibility. I cannot let Cleopatra start arming. Even now that the Senate is back, I’m safe against insurrection. Once the Capuan troops realize that their representatives somehow never return to the ranks, they’ll behave. And with Agrippa in Capua regularly, no ambitious senator will be able to raise an army.”
“People are getting used to having you at the head of Rome,” she said, smiling. “I even hear some of them say that you’re good luck, that you’ve managed against all the odds to keep them safe—Sextus Pompeius, now Cleopatra. Antonius is hardly mentioned.”
“I have no idea where he is, because he isn’t in Alexandria with That Woman.”
A mystery that was solved not many days later w
hen a letter came from Gaius Cornelius Gallus in Cyrenaica.
“The moment I arrived in Cyrene, Pinarius surrendered his fleet and four legions to me,” Gallus wrote. “He had received orders from Antonius to march east across Libya to Paraetonium, but it seems he didn’t fancy emulating Cato Uticensis by trudging hundreds of miles along a desert coast. So he stayed put. When he showed me his orders from Antonius, I could see why he didn’t march. Antonius wants a last battle, he’s not finished yet. I have sent for transports, Caesar, and once they arrive I’ll load the legions aboard for a voyage to Alexandria, escorted by Pinarius’s fleet. Though not before the spring, and not before I get word from you when to start. Oh, I forgot to tell you that Antonius himself intended to meet Pinarius and his forces in Paraetonium.”
“Typical poet,” said Agrippa, grunting. “No logic.”
“How is Attica?” Octavian asked, changing the subject.
“Very poorly, has been ever since her tata fell on his sword. Funny, that. She behaves more like his widow than his daughter. Won’t eat, drinks far too much, neglects little Vipsania as if she didn’t like the child. I’m having her watched because I don’t want her slashing her wrists in the bath. Her money will come to me. I tried to persuade her to leave it to Vipsania—you’d have no trouble procuring an exemption from the lex Voconia de mulierum hereditatibus—but she refused. However, if anything does happen to her, I’ll dower Vipsania with her fortune.”
So it was that Octavia inherited yet another child; Attica took poison and died in agony three days after Agrippa talked of her to Octavian, leaving his sister to take Vipsania in. A man of his word, Agrippa transferred Attica’s funds to the child, which made her an extremely eligible marital prize.