Battle of Actium

File:Actium battleplan.jpeg

The Battle of Actium was a naval battle of the Roman Civil War between Mark Antony and Octavian. It was fought on September 2, 31 BC, near the Roman colony of Actium in Greece (near the modern-day city of Preveza), on the Ionian Sea. The fleet of Octavian was commanded by Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, and the fleet of Antony supported by the fleet of his wife, Cleopatra, queen of Egypt. The battle was won by the forces of Octavian, whose victory led him to become the Princeps Augustus, later considered to be the first Roman Emperor: for this reason the date of the battle is often used to mark the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Roman Empire.

Prelude

The second triumvirate broke due to the serious threat that Octavian felt of Caesarion, the son of Cleopatra and Antony. Octavian's base of power was his link with Caesar through adoption, which granted him much-needed popularity and loyalty of the legions. To see this convenient situation thretened after Antony declared that Caesarion was the legimate heir to Julius Caesar, a propaganda war between the allies began ending the second triumvirate on the last day of 33 BC. Finally the senate deprivied Antony from his power and declared a war against Cleopatra. Third of the senate and two consules joined Antony's side and in 31 BC, the war started when Octavian's talented general Agrippa captured the Greek city and naval port of Methone which was loyal to Antony. Mark Antony was an excellent soldier, but his inexperience in naval matters at sea was to become his fall.

The battle

The two fleets met outside the gulf of Actium, on the morning of September 2, 31 BC, with Mark Antony led 220 warships through the straits toward the open sea. There he met the fleet of Octavian, led by Admiral Agrippa, arranged to block his exit in an arc from the south. Mark Antony's warships were mostly massive quinqueremes, huge galleys with massive rams that could weight up to three tons. The bows of the galleys were armored with bronze plates and square-cut timbers making it difficult to successfully ram them with similar equipment. Unfortunately for Antony, many of his ships were undermanned because of a severe malaria that had struck his forces while he was waiting for Octavian's fleet to arrive. Many oarsmen had died even before the battle began thus making them unable to execute the tactics for which they were designed--powerful, head-on collisions. Also the morale of his troops had weakened due to the cutting of supply lines. Antony had burned those ships he could no longer man and clustered the rest tightly together.

Octavian's fleet was mostly smaller fully manned Liburnian vessels, armed with better trained and fresher crews. His ships were also lighter and could protect themselves by outmanuvering the quinqueremes in Roman naval battle, where one objective was to ram the enemy ship and at the same time kill the above deck crew with a shower of arrows and catapult-launched stones large enough to decapitate a man. Before the naval battle Mark Antony's general known as Delius defected to Octavian and brought with him Mark Antony’s battle plans. Antony had hoped to use his biggest ships to drive back Agrippa's wing on the north end of his line, but Octavian's entire fleet stayed carefully out of range. Shortly after mid-day, Antony was forced to extend his line out from the protection of the shore, and then finally engage the enemy.

Seeing that the battle was going against Antony, Cleopatra's fleet retreated to open sea without firing a shot. Mark Antony retreated to a smaller vessel with his flag and managed to escape the battle, his ships were not so fortunate and Octavian's fleet captured or sank almost all of them. Although he managed to escape, his naval fleet was lost.

Aftermath

Ballistae on a Roman ship.

The political consequences of this seemingly single sea battle were tremendous. The proper perspective is that Mark Antony's army was just as large as Octavian's, and the accomplished general Mark Antony could seriously challenge Octavian. As a result of losing the sea battle, Mark Antony's army deserted in large numbers without engaging Octavian's army in battle. Antony lost some 19 infantry legions and 12,000 cavalry, deserting under cover of darkness, debilitating Mark Antony's ability to challenge Octavian. Despite a brief victory at Alexandria, on July 31, 30 BC, Mark Antony's armies decided to desert, leaving him without a competent army to fight Octavian.

After losing his army to desertion, Mark Antony committed suicide, and, as a result, Cleopatra attempted to negotiate surrender terms with Octavian. Upon failure to have favorable surrender terms Cleopatra committed suicide on August 09, 30 BC, by allowing herself to be bitten by a poisonous asp that was reportedly hidden in a basket of dates. In summary, the Battle of Actium resulted in the loss of Mark Antony's army, and then his defeat, and the taking of Egypt by the Roman Empire. Also the battle ended the era of Roman Republic and began the time of the Roman Empire.

An account of the battle appears in Virgil's Aeneid.

References

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
• Military Heritage did a feature about the Battle of Actium involving Mark Antony, Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus (aka Octavian) (Julius Caesar's 18-year old adopted son and heir), and Cleopatra of Egypt (Joseph M. Horodyski, Military Heritage, August 2005, Volume 7, No. 1, pp 58 to 63, and p. 78), ISSN 1524-8666.
• J.F.C. Fuller. A Military History of the Western World: From he Earliest Times To The Battle of Lepanto. Da Capo Press, Inc. A Subsidiary of Plenum Publishing Corporation. 233 Sprint Street, New York, N.Y, 1987. 10013. ISBN 0-306-80304-6 (v. 1). pp. 222 to 229.

External links

• The Actium Project