The World

On 2 September 31 BC, the two fleets clashed. When the armies massed in Greece, Antony was outmanoeuvred by Octavian’s general Marcus Agrippa, who blockaded the Antonian army and fleet at Actium. Antony’s fleet featured multi-rower ships, quinqueremes, octeres and even giant deceres, but he was less good on the detail. At their war council, Cleopatra, commanding her fleet of 200, voted to break out of Actium, but in battle their coordination was disastrous. Cleopatra fled back to Alexandria with sixty ships, planning to use her Red Sea fleet to escape to her trading posts in Arabia if not India, only for the Arab king Malik to burn her ships. When Antony sailed after her, Octavian marched through Syria, negotiating secretly with Cleopatra, who offered to abdicate providing her children, especially Caesarion, kept their crowns. It is not clear if she really welcomed the defeated Antony.

She negotiated with Octavian, setting up headquarters in her mausoleum within the palace. Antony was possibly betrayed by Cleopatra, who misinformed him that she was dead, clearly a signal to commit suicide. After stabbing himself with his sword, he was borne to her tomb where he died in her arms aged fifty-two. Allowing her to reside in the palace, Octavian took her three Antonian children into custody. When they met, she learned there was no third act: Octavian would display her in his triumph. ‘I will not be triumphed over,’ she told him – she had seen her sister Arsinoe paraded through Rome – but concealed her plans. After feasting in style, her devoted attendants Eiras and Charmian arranged for a peasant to bring a basket of figs, containing a snake or at least a poison which all three of them somehow imbibed. She sent a sealed letter to Octavian asking to be buried with Antony, at which his guards rushed to stop her – too late. Cleopatra, at the age of thirty-nine, laid out in her glory wearing her diadem, was dead, along with her ladies-in-waiting. One was still just alive when Octavian’s troops burst in and saw Cleopatra in her final magnificence: ‘What a majestic scene!’

‘Extremely,’ the girl murmured, ‘as becomes the descendant of so many kings.’

Cleopatra had hoped that Caesarion would rule Egypt. ‘Too many Caesars,’ warned Octavian’s advisers, ‘is not good.’

Cleopatra had sent King Caesarion, seventeen years old, with his tutor down to the Red Sea port of Berenice to escape to India, but Octavian tricked the tutor into bringing him back, hinting that the boy could rule Egypt – and then had him strangled.^*

Octavian visited the tomb of Alexander, but when he touched the mummy, he knocked off its nose – a moment that marked the end of the Alexandrian age, the fall of the Roman Republic and the launch of an imperial monarchy.

AUGUSTUS, JULIA AND THE ONE -EYED QUEEN OF KUSH

Master of the empire, the young warlord Octavian behaved as he wished, seducing the wives of his henchmen whom he would take into another room at a dinner, returning them to their husbands with their ears red, hair tousled. While they were on their own, he cross-examined them on their husbands’ politics, finding out who was conspiring against him.

Octavian was a master of political dosage, understanding, after years of war and murder, that abrupt measures offend while respectful adaptation can mask dramatic change. While purportedly respecting the republic, he was now the most powerful Roman ever, adopting a new title, princeps – meaning ‘the first’ – and a new name; he was offered Romulus but finally settled on Augustus, meaning Awesome. Yet he remained modest, staying in his comfortable villa on the Palatine Hill.^* But the humility was contrived. His household was enormous, with freedmen doing the secretarial work while the graves of Livia’s staff show she was served by a thousand slaves, including entertainers and dwarves. Nor was his reign as easy-going as he liked to pretend. Vicious when necessary, merciful when possible, he used informers to report any dissidence; conspirators were eliminated fast; when his secretary took money to reveal the contents of one of his letters, Augustus personally broke his legs.^* Yet he was not a humourless megalomaniac either; his letters to intimates are bantering and affectionate. An enthusiastic gambler, he was highly social, regularly dined with friends and toyed with writing a tragedy while, through his wealthy advisor, Maecenas, promoted and befriended his court poets, Virgil and Horace. He praised Horace’s athletic love life, nicknaming him ‘Perfect Penis’, but did not threaten the poet when he failed to praise the princeps. He just teased him.