The names of history’s most famous battles still ring in our ears today, their influence immediately understood by all. Marathon lent its name to the world’s most famous race, but it also preserved Western civilization during the First Persian War. Saratoga, won by one of the colonists’ most renowned war heroes before he became his nation’s most vile traitor. Hastings ensured the Normans’ success in England and changed the course of British history. Waterloo, which marked the reshaping of the European continent and Napoleon’s doom, has now become part of the English lexicon. In Charles River Editors’ Greatest Battles in History series, readers can get caught up to speed on history’s greatest battles in the time it takes to finish a commute, while learning interesting facts long forgotten or never known.
Every era has watershed moments that shape the arc of history, and for Ancient Rome, few were as decisive or monumental as the Battle of Actium in 31 B.C. The battle’s importance is understandable given the stakes and people involved; Actium pitted the joint navies of Cleopatra and Mark Antony against the battle fleet of Octavian. In many ways, this climactic battle was the culmination of a years-long power struggle between the heirs of the assassinated Julius Caesar, with Octavian being his legally appointed heir and Antony being his longtime lieutenant and trusted advisor. Antony had even taken Caesar’s Egyptian mistress as his own.
Actium is also remarkable because Roman conflicts were almost always decided on land. The generals of the Roman Republic were far more comfortable fighting on land than at sea, and while Pompey Magnus had made a reputation fighting on the Mediterranean, it was his victories during Sulla’s war that earned him his distinguished nickname. Likewise, Caesar had largely shunned naval combat throughout his distinguished career, and he had even been captured by pirates while sailing in the Aegean. Philippi, Mutina, Utica and Pharsalus had all been land battles, and with good reason. Unlike the British Empire of the 19th century or Athens and her “Wooden Wall”, the Roman military machine was almost entirely geared towards land combat, which received the greater part of funding from the state and was considered by far the more honorable profession. While the annals of Roman history are replete with great generals, they are considerably lighter on the side of the admirals, and there were many examples of generals finding the transition to sea difficult. Roman antipathy for sea fighting may explain why the piracy problem was such an endemic one for the Mediterranean during their rule. Indeed, the Romans were so historically unaccustomed to fighting on the sea that when attempting to find a short-term answer to bridging the technical gap between themselves and the more experienced Carthaginian fleets during the Punic Wars, their solution was the corvus, a spike-ended mobile walkway which allowed Roman galleys to latch onto enemy ships and flood them with marines, literally turning a sea battle into a series of miniature land ones where their expertly drilled and equipped troops could prevail.
As one of Rome’s most famous battles, the Battle of Actium has taken on a life of its own in popular memory. One of the longest-held myths about the battle is that Cleopatra, sensing defeat, began to sail away from the fight in the middle of the day, and the love struck Antony followed her with his own ship, abandoning his men in the middle of the fight. While that popular myth would be in keeping with explaining Cleopatra’s irresistible charm and magnetism, contemporary accounts of the battle do not suggest it was actually the case. As night approached, Antony and Cleopatra spotted a gap in the now thoroughly jumbled enemy line, and ordered their ships to speed through it without delay, making for Alexandria with all speed and abandoning their entire navy to its fate.