The assassination of Caesar in 44 BC left Rome, after another decade of civil war, to two men: Octavian, Caesar’s 18-year-old heir grown into a cold political genius, holding the West; and Mark Antony, Caesar’s greatest general, holding the East — with Cleopatra VII of Egypt as his ally, financier, lover, and co-parent. Octavian’s propaganda war was masterly: not civil war against a Roman, but a crusade against a foreign queen who had bewitched him — sharpened when Octavian seized and published Antony’s will, with its provisions for Cleopatra’s children and his burial in Alexandria. Rome declared war on Cleopatra, and Antony, inseparable, was the target.
By 31 BC Antony’s grand army and fleet lay at Actium on the Ambracian Gulf in western Greece — where Octavian’s admiral Agrippa, the war’s actual naval genius, cut the supply lines one by one. Blockaded, hungry, fever-ridden, and bleeding deserters (including senators who carried Antony’s battle plans across the lines), Antony faced a choice of retreats; the fleet action of 2 September was, many historians judge, a breakout attempt dressed as a battle.
2 September 31 BC
Antony’s great galleys, undermanned, fought Agrippa’s nimbler squadrons through an afternoon of grinding, missile-swept fighting at the gulf’s mouth. Then the day’s defining movement: Cleopatra’s squadron of sixty ships — carrying the war chest — hoisted sail through a gap and ran south for Egypt. Antony transferred to a lighter vessel and followed her, leaving his flagship and his fleet fighting. The abandoned fleet surrendered by evening; the huge land army, after waiting a week for a commander who did not return, went over whole to Octavian. Whether the escape was pre-agreed strategy or catastrophe accepted mid-battle, its political meaning was fixed: the propaganda’s besotted deserter had performed the accusation before witnesses.
Alexandria
The end played out in Egypt the next summer. Octavian took Alexandria; Antony, on a false report of Cleopatra’s death, fell on his sword and died — by the tradition Plutarch preserved — in her arms in the mausoleum. Cleopatra, failing to negotiate her children’s future and refusing to walk in a Roman triumph, followed within days, by the asp of legend or the poison of likelihood. Egypt — three thousand years a kingdom — became Octavian’s personal province; Caesarion, her son by Caesar, was killed on the maxim that two Caesars were one too many.
Octavian returned to Rome holding everything, and in 27 BC exchanged the warlord’s power for the founder’s title: Augustus. Actium thus stands as the Republic’s actual tombstone — commemorated by the victor with a monument of captured bronze rams above the bay and games that ran for centuries, and remembered by everyone else through the lovers whose flight from it became, via Plutarch and Shakespeare, one of the world’s stories.