Augustus

At this delicate juncture, Plancus came to a new judgment. This was that in the imminent contest Antony was more likely to lose than not. It was time to pack bags. Plancus slipped out of Athens, where Antony and Cleopatra were spending some time before taking the field, and made his way as inconspicuously as possible to Italy.

What was the basis of this change of heart? Octavia’s dismissal was not enough in itself to power his defection, even if it supplied a pretext. Plancus noticed the corrosive effect Cleopatra’s presence in the campaign was having on Antony’s Roman supporters, and gauged that it would blunt the thrust of Antony’s military strategy: it would hardly be feasible for a foreign queen to help to lead an invasion of Italy.

Having arrived in Rome, Plancus presented himself to Octavian and announced that he knew most of Antony’s secrets. One of these was tempting to exploit: at some point in the past few years, Antony had lodged his will with the Vestal Virgins at the little round Temple of Vesta in the Forum.

Although Octavian was trying hard to present himself as a standard-bearer for traditional values, here was an opportunity too good to be missed. He sent a message to the Vestal Virgins asking them to hand over the document. They refused, saying that if he wanted it he would have to come himself and seize it, which he proceeded to do. Before making any public announcements, Octavian read through the document in private and marked the passages least to Antony’s credit; these he read out to the Senate. He drew special attention to Antony’s wish to be buried in Alexandria. Octavian’s former brother-in-law also left legacies to his children by Cleopatra and reasserted that Caesarion was Julius Caesar’s child.

These revelations had a dual effect. Many senators thought Octavian’s action in taking the will was “extraordinary and intolerable.” However, the document was cast-iron evidence that the great Roman general had somehow been transformed into an easterner. Such a bad impression was created that even Antony’s supporters in the Senate voted to deprive him of the consulship that had been planned for him in the following year. Octavian felt he was now in a position formally to declare war.

But the opponent had to be Cleopatra. This was partly because Octavian needed to avoid an accusation of restarting the civil war he claimed to have ended; also, he did not want to make official enemies of Antony’s Roman supporters, some of whom might wish to follow Plancus’ example.

The Romans had an antique ceremony for declaring war. Octavian went to the Temple of Bellona, goddess of war, in the Campus Martius. On a strip of land in front of the temple that was officially denominated as foreign territory stood the small columna bellica, or column of war. Bellona’s priests, called fetiales, threw spears, smeared with the blood of a sacrificed pig, into this ground.

Once the ritual was complete, Rome was officially at war with Egypt.

In its basic essentials the promontory of Actium on the coast of western Greece, and the inland Ambracian Gulf it guards, look today much as they did two thousand years ago. A low scrubby sandy tongue of land, lying only a few feet above sea level, Actium stretches northward toward a larger and hillier two-fingered peninsula. Between them, a half-mile-wide strait squeezes its way from the open sea into the gulf, twenty-five miles long and from four to ten miles wide.

It would be a dull, even slightly dreary place, but for the spectacular mountains that crowd the distant skylines; like the steep seating of an open-air Greek theater on a colossal scale they look down on the stage of Actium. Twenty miles to the west looms the towering rock of the island of Leucas, lying almost close enough to the mainland to touch it.

Today Actium bustles in the summer. Young tourists arrive at the small airport and crowd the sea with yachts. Actium boasts three marinas; one of these is the Cleopatra Marina, which occupies a position on the strait from which two thousand years ago an observer would have been able to watch the queen of Egypt in her splendid galley sail by into open waters and her destiny. There are boatyards, and numerous tavernas and bars line the waterfront. A tunnel is planned to join Actium to the northern promontory and the pleasant harbor town of Preveza.

In the first century B.C., things were quieter. Actium was a center for pearl fishing and a small village on the headland made a useful jumping-off point for travelers. Nearby, on the shore where the strait was narrowest, there stood an old temple and a grove of trees sacred to Apollo, founded five hundred years previously.