The Augustan Empire 43 BC

Why did Antony and Cleopatra lose? Of course one can point to their political errors, and Octavian's greater shrewdness. There was Antony's insensitivity to the western crisis, which misled him into keeping his legions on the eastern frontier for too long; there was the indelicacy with which he flaunted his liaison with Cleopatra; there were the Donations of Alexandria — pure spectacle, but once again so damaging before an Italian audience. On the other side, there was Octavian's adept manipu­lation of Italian public opinion, exploiting propaganda with greater power and insight than had ever been done before. It is so easy to isolate these facts that we naturally assume they were decisive. They certainly made a difference: how big a difference, one may doubt. It remains true that, with Antony so confined to the East, Italy would have favoured Octavian overwhelmingly in any case; it remains true that, once all the politics had been played out, at the beginning of the } 1 campaign Antony still looked as if he would win. The East was as solid for him as the West for Octavian, and the military factors were on his side. Octavian certainly outwitted Antony in their political exchanges; but it was not this that finally brought the victory.

Perhaps it is easier to isolate the decisive moments. One is obvious, the autumn of 36, when Antony was failing in Parthia and Octavian was crushing Sextus: a suggestive contrast for the Italian public to ponder, and also a startling one — victory could not have been expected to dwell with the weak unmilitary Octavian rather than Antony, the greatest captain of the world. But there are at least two more turning-points. One, rather inconspicuously, was the death of Calenus in 40. It was that which robbed Antony of Gaul, and turned him so firmly eastwards; and, in the longer term, that gave Octavian not merely Gaul but also the whole West. And Calenus' death was just an accident, just Antony's bad luck. The second was the first stage of the Actium campaign itself, with Octavian's swift unimpeded crossing and, more important, Agrippa's series of debilitating thrusts on Antony's scattered forces. It was then that, within a few weeks, Antony started to look the loser rather than the winner; thereafter, the fighting simply ran its course. The true history of those few weeks remains hard to grasp. Why was Antony so dilatory in his resistance? Why was Octavian able to take over the decisive land station at Actium so easily? We shall never know; perhaps once again luck played a great part. But those few weeks decided the future of the Mediterranean world.

Octavian's greater political shrewdness should suggest a different reflection. Antony and Cleopatra might well have won the Actium campaign. If they had, the task of settling the world would in some ways have been easier for them. Their marriage — for marriage, unequivocally, it would then have been — would provide a most attractive register to describe and suggest a new harmony of West and East. That would be particularly true in any culture which thought of its royalty as gods: this would be a divine marriage, a most certain guarantee of the world's prosperity. But such cultures were the cultures of the East: Antony and Cleopatra would be both gods and monarchs, and the fate of Iulius Caesar made clear how sensitive such topics were in Rome. Antony had shown his statesmanship in other ways, especially in his penetrating judgment of the individuals he raised to power in the East, and in the style and range of his settlement. But his failure to appease Italian sentiment would surely have turned out to be a decisive flaw. The union of the Greco-Roman world was always a precarious thing, and it is hard to think that it could have survived the continuing dominion of Cleopatra and Antony. Looking a generation ahead, one could see what might happen: two worlds, not one, with Antyllus (perhaps) succeeding to some sort of control in the West, and Caesarion a more traditional monarch in the East. Or rather, that was the best that could be hoped for;

constitutional questions

a further debilitating series of revolts and civil wars, once again fought out in Italy and Greece, was just as likely. And no one could see what would emerge at the end.

Enthusiasm for Octavian comes less naturally to us now than fifty years ago. 'Because he stood for something more than mere ambition he could draw a nation to him in the coming struggle'³⁴¹ — one would not write that now. We admire the political shrewdness which forwarded ambition so well, but we admire it grudgingly: we have seen too many similar leaders since, and what they have meant for the world. Now the story is once again told, not as Octavian's triumph, but as the tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra. But, still, they could not have coped with success, and Octavian could: his mastery of Italian propaganda may not have won him the war, but it did much to win the ensuing peace. For Rome, the right man won.