The story of Antony and Cleopatra is a familiar one, due mainly to the efforts of a certain Mr. Shakespeare. Whatever the accuracy of his history, there is no denying that it is great theater, and Burton and Taylor made the film version into a great classic. The idea of two powerful rulers giving up everything for love has a universal appeal. How well it fits the facts is another matter.

     A glance at the participants would seem to indicate that the result of the scheming and maneuvering which left Octavian on top was more than a little unlikely. Antony was, after all, the experienced commander, backed by all of the resources of the then-mighty kingdom of the Ptolemies, whose navy was far from feeble. It would have looked like Octavian, ruling in the west, which was - and long after remained - the far weaker part of the Roman world, was destined to failure.

     A certain Mr. Bonaparte, himself no neophyte in military matters, once made a statement to the effect that in warfare the morale factors were roughly three times as important as the material. Basically, this means that such factors as the quality of the troops, their confidence in their commanders, their opinion of the enemy, and similar concepts are of greater importance than the nominal strength of an army. Without taking these factors into consideration it is difficult to account for the Antonian collapse.

     Central to any discussion of Actium is the personality of Cleopatra herself. What she looked like is easy enough to tell; her coins, particularly her bronzes of Alexandria, show a fairly typical, if somewhat hard-featured, Macedonian profile. The Greek ruling classes had as little to do with the locals as possible, and the idea that Cleopatra was anything other than Greek (as in recently popular "political correctness") is absurd. Given that the Ptolemies followed the old Egyptian royal custom of marrying their sisters, any non-Greek ancestry of Cleopatra must have been very distant indeed.

     Æ of Cleopatra VII Thea of Alexandria. Head of Cleopatra / Eagle. Lot 155.

     The Ptolemies got their start in Egypt on the death of Alexander. One of his staff of generals, Ptolemy son of Lagos, managed to establish himself as king of the territory he had been administering during the chaotic period after 323 BC. When the dust settled Ptolemy I Soter (i. e., Savior ) had taken firm control, founding the city of Alexandria in 304 as his capitol. His successors made efforts to expand this territory, meeting with success for half a century or so, then losing much territory (including Judaea) to the Seleukids when the tide turned.

     By the 160s the Hellenistic monarchies were either friends of the new rising power, Rome, or they were under the Roman boot counting the hob-nails. The Ptolemies had needed Roman help, and placed themselves in the former category; when the dynasty nearly collapsed in domestic squabbles during the remainder of the century Rome backed first one party, then the other, all the while gaining control. By the time of Cleopatra's birth in 70 or 69 BC Rome was acting something like a puppeteer, pulling the strings which made Ptolemaic Egypt dance. Still, the memory of the "glory days" under Ptolemy II and III, when they temporarily occupied the whole of Syria itself, served the national consciousness of the Greek elite much as the Holy Roman Empire (the "First Reich") did in Germany in 1870 and 1939. For the native Egyptians, of course, the tradition went back much further, but it had the same results. For Cleopatra this expansion remained her main ambition, and if she had to conquer Rome itself to do this, so much the better.

     The later Ptolemies were never especially secure on their throne, and both Cleopatra and her father Ptolemy XII, known officially as Neos Dionysos, the New Dionysos, and unofficially as Auletes, the Piper, had to deal with the problems of being forced out by rebellions. Both were restored to the throne by Roman power; Auletes because he owed certain influential Romans a lot of money, and Cleopatra because Caesar preferred her company to that of her younger brother.

     Cleopatra had supported her father during his difficulties, so on his death she was rewarded by being named as his principal heir, and joint-ruler along with her younger brother Ptolemy XIII. In keeping with Ptolemaic, and Pharaonic, tradition, she started her reign designated Thea Philopator, the Goddess who is fond of her father, but being accorded divine status was no protection against the genuine article, since it would seem that at least one significant crop failure caused significant unrest early in her reign. Certainly something caused her brother's regency council to formally depose her in 49 or 48 BC. No doubt they preferred someone they could control, and Cleopatra refused to be handled so easily.

     Meanwhile Caesar and Pompey had been battling for control of the Roman world. As everybody knows, Caesar defeated Pompey decisively. In Alexandria, Pompey had been a benefactor, whereas Caesar was a nobody there until his victory at Pharsalus. Accordingly, the Ptolemies backed Pompey, at least in theory. Ptolemy XIII, or rather the regency, had no ideas about being an exception to the rule. This was their loss and Cleopatra's gain.

     Pompey fled to Egypt following his defeat, no doubt hoping for assistance (or at least asylum). Instead of either, he was killed as he stepped ashore, on orders of the regents. They probably hoped to curry favor with Caesar; the attempt failed miserably. Caesar was on his way to Alexandria to settle the dynastic dispute, as well as destroy the remnants of Pompey's party, but to him there were acceptable ways of dealing with defeated enemies, and that sort of treachery wasn't among them.

     AR Denarius of Julius Caesar. Head of Caesar with star / Venus standing. Lot 216.

     Caesar settled into Alexandria preparing for whatever needed to be done. The problems he faced were compounded by the fact that Ptolemy's troops surrounded the city, and thus Cleopatra was excluded from the discussions. She wasn't the type to give up easily, however; and had herself smuggled into Caesar's apartments. The standard account is that she was carried in rolled up in a carpet; suffice it to say that however un-amused her brother was to see her enthroned later, there wasn't much he could do about it.

     Caesar quickly settled affairs to his satisfaction - Ptolemy and his army were soon defeated and destroyed - and Cleopatra, along with another small brother, this time as Ptolemy XIV, ascended the throne without further ado. Caesar, the man behind the throne and, soon, father of the child she was carrying, was at the peak of his power and planning on founding a dynasty of absolute rulers.

     Unfortunately for him the Ides of March came around a bit sooner than he expected. His death at the hands of Brutus, Cassius and the rest of the "Liberators" served merely to touch off succession disputes. The main candidates were Octavian - named in Caesar's will as main heir, but a youth with a "cold fish" personality and no military experience; and Antony, of no official status but, as a popular general and Caesar's right-hand man, putting in his claim in his impulsive manner, dismissing Octavian as a mere boy.

     AR Denarius of Mark Antony. Head of Antony / Head of Octavian. Lot 222.

     Certainly immediate events seemed to favor Antony. In the series of battles at Philippi, where the forces of the Triumvirs (Antony, Lepidus and Octavian) destroyed the cause of the Liberators, Octavian showed little skill, and indeed was taken so ill that he wasn't expected to live. The result was that Antony had no regard for him, and treated him with contempt.

     The Triumvirs met to divide the Roman world between them, with Antony taking the East, Octavian the West and Lepidus Africa and some of the Mediterranean islands. Antony found himself in the position of an Oriental despot, and he proceeded to make the most of it in accordance with his nature.

     Cleopatra, worried on the death of Caesar that the Romans would revive old claims - after all, Ptolemy XI had left his kingdom to Rome in his will, and they might come and claim it - and she at the moment had no friends in Rome. Antony, however, was someone she knew, if only slightly, as one of Caesar's staff. Accordingly she set about winning Antony over to her view of the political scene. She arrived at Tarsus for their meeting in a carefully managed performance described so well by Shakespeare, following Plutarch closely.

     Cleopatra made an entrance into Tarsus which was designed to impress the sort of person who would find it impressive. She knew Antony well enough to stage-manage accordingly. Rumor, no doubt also carefully managed, said that "Venus was sporting with Dionysus for the benefit of Asia". Deification, kingship and lavish luxury - these things the Iron Republic could not match, and Antony had no stomach to resist them.

     Back in Rome Octavian had not been idle. His motto, "Festina Lente" (more haste, less speed) summed up his operations. He was patient, and he was cunning. He already regarded Antony as a dubious character, and when Antony's wife Fulvia and brother Lucius attempted to stir up armed trouble in Italy this did not exactly help reconcile the Triumvirs. With the help of an old schoolmate, Marcus Agrippa, he soon reduced Italy to order. In Agrippa he found the perfect tactician to complement his own strategic genius, and together they were unstoppable, at least by anyone of Antony's caliber.

     Antony, meanwhile, continued his life of fun, from which he was awakened by two problems. First, the Parthians noted the lax government and invaded, overrunning all of Syria. They reached as far as Jerusalem, and they met little opposition. Second, the failure of Fulvia's schemes meant that the two men were more or less at war, and Antony was paying the price of treachery without gaining any of the benefits. With the Parthians on the prowl Antony needed peace elsewhere, and fortunately for him Fulvia died, supposedly from illness brought on by exhaustion. Octavian proposed that Antony marry his sister Octavia, to which Antony agreed, and the marriage was duly celebrated in Rome in Autumn of 40 BC.

     In the end this marriage, in the short turn so beneficial to Antony, made his position all but untenable. Octavia was probably the only person in this entire sordid tale who emerges with an admirable character. She was, according to the accounts, the ideal Roman wife: cultured, competent, entirely honest, virtuous without priggishness, willing to suffer all evils for the sake of her husband, who little deserved it. Not surprisingly Cleopatra regarded her as a serious threat.

     After some time of fence-mending and diplomatic skirmishing Antony headed back east. The Parthians had been beaten back, not by Antony himself but by one of his generals; and Antony was eager to show what he could do against this newly chastened enemy. The Triumvirs renewed their alliance at Tarentum in 37 BC, and Octavian left for naval operations against Sextus Pompey, while Antony left for the Parthian campaign.

     Antony's Parthian campaign was an unmitigated disaster. This affair showed him at his worst: the hopeless logistician and witless strategist, the sort of commander who allows the enemy to beat him in detail. Antony assembled an enormous army, and in 36 he was ready to strike. He entered Media via Armenia, on his way to besiege the city of Phraaspa. Because of the lack of suitable building-timber he had to bring his siege-equipment with him. Impatient as always, he brought his legions as quickly as possible while the slower siege-train followed, guarded by a seemingly adequate force. The Parthians attacked this siege-train, destroyed the guards and burnt the siege-equipment; then when Antony realized the uselessness of further effort, the Parthians harassed his army all the way back to Armenia.

     Octavian, meanwhile, had finally (with a little help from some ships loaned him by Antony) destroyed the menace of the "Sea King", Sextus Pompey, in a great battle at Mylae. Thus Octavian, the "mere boy", had decisively won his victory, whereas all the face-saving devices in the world couldn't turn Antony's defeat into a victory.

     Relations between the Triumvirs had gone from cordial dislike to more-or-less open hostility as well. Just after Mylae, Lepidus, the third Triumvir, feeling greedy, made his bid for power and was outmaneuvered and forced into retirement by Octavian. Meanwhile, as Antony wanted troops for his Parthian campaigns - he was determined to improve his success the next year, so he loaned his ships to Octavian in return for legions - Octavian sent him an installment, along with supplies, but dispatched Octavia to Athens to deliver them. Antony kept the supplies and troops but rejected Octavia and sent back to her brother. With this action further agreement between the two men became unattainable, and Antony seems to have been unable to understand the problem.

     A clue to the mindset of Antony can be gathered from a letter copied in Suetonius which, if genuine - Suetonius was an incorrigible gossip-monger - shows the problem. The Senate sent him a letter telling him to leave Cleopatra and return to Octavia, as any Roman citizen ought. His reply to Octavian said that she was his wife ("uxor meus est"). Under Roman law bigamy, especially to a foreigner, was criminal in a Roman citizen, and to so openly insult a colleague by cheating publicly on his sister was hardly diplomatic, but the tone of the letter indicated that Antony neither understood nor cared.

     Matters were swiftly coming to a climax. Octavian's maneuvering in Rome had put Antony on the spot. He was regarded as completely under the spell of Cleopatra, and his claims to be "New Dionysus" and therefore deity, comprehensible in Asian terms, was irreverent at best in Rome. His fondness for Hellenistic luxury appalled most Romans, who pointed to their string of victories over such people to show how degenerate all this was (in fact the West was almost always the victor in Roman civil wars against the East up to the time of Constantine). Antony's only significant victory - and that was a walkover - was against Armenia in 35 BC; Octavian's troops were doing the usual duty of troops in the west, namely repelling barbarian invasions, year after year; by Actium they were well used to combat.

     By 34 BC matters had clearly reached the point of no return. Antony in his "Donations" had given large territories to Cleopatra, some of which were Senatorial provinces; this provided Octavian with yet another piece of evidence against Cleopatra's "usurpations", with Antony as no more than her minion. She was a Queen; described, in fact, on Antony's denarius issue as "Queen of Kings", and in Africa; just like Dido of Carthage. "King" (and "Queen") had been regarded as "rude words" in Rome since Tarquinus Superbus, the last king of Rome had been expelled centuries earlier.

     Although Antony had many supporters in Rome, they had no love for the "foreign queen", and more than one told him to have less to do with her. Cleopatra would of course have none of that, and this alienated many. Finally, the case of Antony's will - in which he left the entire Roman world, not necessarily his to leave, to the son of Caesar and Cleopatra. Antony, honest, forthright, brave and open-handed, was in political terms his own worst enemy. Cleopatra was such an easy target for Roman enmity that Octavian's attacks could not possibly fail.

     Octavian opened the Actium campaign by declaring war against the "Foreign Queen" and by getting her "minion" Antony voted out of office. Both sides prepared for war, assembling their forces and sending them to Greece. The two fleets spent the winter of 32/31 BC preparing, waiting for Spring weather.

     The two forces which met in Greece were on paper similar, but in fact very different. Antony's fleet was ill-manned; the lack of provisions had led to disease, and the ranks were filled by levies of peasants. This did not improve an army whose last victory had been in Armenia four years earlier. Octavian's army had been fighting, and beating, barbarians in Illyria constantly during the same years. Antony's fleet, largely Egyptian, was also undermanned, and consisted largely of "battleships", huge galleys whose strength lay in their rams. Under-manned, they were unable to get up sufficient speed to ram anything, however. Octavian's fleet consisted mainly of floating siege-camps, designed to maneuver, grapple and board; this technique cleared out Pompey's fleet at Mylae very effectively.

     Octavian opened the game by seizing some fortified places in Greece, notably Methone and, later, Toryne. Antony, sitting at Actium, waited for Octavian to open the decisive battle; the latter was far busier cutting Antony's supply routes and communications. Finally, having done this effectively, he moved in to blockade Antony and Cleopatra at Actium. Octavian set up his camp near the site of Nikopolis and waited for Antony to do something foolish.

     Antony finally awoke to the danger and attempted to deal with it. He tried his best to provoke Octavian's army to come out and fight. The result was that Agrippa took the island of Leukas, which commanded the southern approach to the Gulf of Ambracia, where Antony's fleet sat idle. The blockade tightened, and the effect on Antony's army's morale caused many of the Asian contingents to desert to Octavian. By late August the trickle of desertions had become a torrent, so Antony decided to risk it all on a breakout by sea, since his ground troops had completely failed to accomplish anything.

     Antony began by transferring crews to provide as many fully-manned ships as possible, burning the rest. This left him with roughly three hundred large warships to Octavian's four hundred smaller ones. The idea was to break out of the trap; the destruction of the enemy fleet would be welcome, but it was not the primary intention. Hence the ships were provided with their sailing gear; to the troops, however, it looked like they were to be sacrificed while the top people escaped.

     Antony's ships emerged from the mouth of the gulf on 2 September 31 BC in four squadrons, three in front with Cleopatra's Egyptians behind them. While the exact battle-plan is uncertain from the surviving sources, Antony appears to have sent his left wing in first, to force Octavian's fleet away from Leukas in the south, and open the escape route. The battle itself consisted of a series of small fights, with Agrippa, commanding Octavian's fleet, relying on bombardment and boarding-parties. Agrippa extended the line of his fleet around Antony's right wing, in order to flank him: this made Cleopatra's escape rather easier. Meanwhile, all along the line of battle, Agrippa's small ships with their legionaries were dealing with Antony's lumbering hulks like army ants destroying scorpions, and whatever hopes Antony had of victory soon ebbed away. Accordingly Cleopatra's Egyptians raised their sails and sped away toward Egypt, and later Antony followed while his remaining ships fought on. Antony's fleet fought on well into the afternoon, by which time Antony had escaped to fight again; but his position was no longer really tenable.

     By the next day the war was all over except for the mopping-up. Antony's breakout had been successful; the cost was nearly his entire navy, with 300 ships captured or destroyed, and the flower of his army, as the loss of 5000 legionaries on his ships had reduced the remaining land force to below Octavian's strength, and it was still blockaded. This army attempted to escape to Macedonia, but deserted by its commander it soon came to terms with Octavian. Antony had failed, continuing his string of defeats, or at least non-victories, and his troops were not anxious to die for a loser who had abandoned them.

     The immediate result of Actium was that all of the client-kings loyal to Antony suddenly had changes of heart and went over to Octavian. While Antony was planning suicide, Cleopatra planned to escape to the East. Actium itself wasn't a disaster; it was a successful breakout, like the escape from Dunkirk in 1940; but retreats alone don't win wars, and Antony wasn't Churchill.

     Antony did in fact kill himself, after several unsuccessful attempts to stop Octavian's progress into Alexandria; Cleopatra tried to negotiate, without success, as Octavian wasn't so easily entrapped; then she tried to escape and send her children east, once again without success. She shut herself up in her mausoleum, in which she deposited her treasure, hoping to use it as a bargaining-counter to salvage what she could from the ruin. She was, however, captured despite her efforts. Eventually she committed suicide, reputedly bitten by an asp smuggled to her in a basket of fruit, rather than be featured in Octavian's triumph.

     Antony and Cleopatra were perhaps not quite the model lovers portrayed by Burton and Taylor, but that does not detract either from the history or from Shakespeare. They were two ambitious people who played for the highest stakes according to their skills and lost. Both underestimated their opponent, Octavian, as well as the Roman institutions which he used so skillfully; and both made the error of assuming that superior wealth and culture and titles automatically meant victory against the "barbarian" Romans. Their exploits, and especially Shakespeare's rewriting, makes them memorable and sympathetic characters.