‘The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium’
By Barry Strauss
Simon & Schuster, 368 pages 

Imagine a joint Roman-Egyptian Empire with its capital at Alexandria, with Caesars dressed like Pharaohs and the world ruled not from the Tiber but from the Nile. 

Western Europe is a backwater, and the history of the world is written from Asia and Africa. Christianity remains a minor sect, dwarfed by Judaism, cults to Isis and Osiris, and other sects whose recondite rites we can but imagine. 

These roads not taken converge at the Battle of Actium, a conflict that changed the course of history and that is the subject of Barry Strauss’s engaging new book just out from Simon & Schuster, “The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium.” 

Mr. Strauss, a professor and military historian who has written a veritable bookshelf of accessible histories of the ancient world, here turns his attention to perhaps the most famous battle of them all. It pitted the Roman general Mark Antony and Egyptian queen Cleopatra against Octavian, the future Augustus. It is a spoiler 2,000 years in the making to disclose that Octavian won — and that in that victory was born the Roman Empire, and the world we know.

What Mr. Strauss calls a “battle for the soul of the Roman Empire” became a reality over the years following the murder of Julius Ceasar in the Senate, and the time of civil war and bloodshed that followed. Both Antony, one of Caesar’s generals, and Octavian, his great-nephew and adopted heir, claimed the mantle and legacy of the slain conqueror and dictator. 

This was one of those times when, in the words of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, “things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” The elites of Rome married one another — Antony wed and had children with Octavian’s sister — and battled and betrayed one another with mind-numbing intricacy. Caesar had smashed the Roman Republic, and Octavian and Antony each sought to define what would replace it. 

Cleopatra is the third figure in this drama to have altered history, and the most indelible. The heir to the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt, she is described by Professor Strauss as “the greatest Macedonian ruler since Alexander and the greatest Egyptian Queen since Hatshepsut.” With Antony, she sought to rule not only Egypt, but the world.  

It was Cleopatra’s riches that financed Antony’s campaign against Octavian, and it was her son with Julius Caesar — Caesarion, the last pharaoh, after three millennia —  who presented the greatest threat to Octavian’s legitimacy. Through her, Mr. Strauss explains, “Antony fell in love with the East” and “embraced his roles as the consort of a queen, the father of princes, and the founder of dynasties.” 

“The War That Made the Roman Empire” is particularly good at taking the measure of Mark Antony, a man who failed but did so with panache. “Antony was a great man, but, living in an age of giants, it wasn’t enough,” is how Professor Strauss sums it up. Put otherwise — “compared to most people, he was a colossus, but at the level on which he played, he was a subordinate.”

That harsh evaluation is vindicated by his comportment at the Battle of Actium itself. Antony missed the opportunity to attack Italy, Octavian’s heartland, and instead lingered in a defensive crouch despite possessing both a superior fleet and Cleopatra’s fiscal resources. While Octavian thought strategically and acted decisively, Antony dithered and delayed. 

One of the book’s key insights is that it was Octavian’s capture of the port of Methone, in the year before the final showdown at Actium, that sealed Antony’s fate. Mr. Strauss compares this “thunderbolt” to George Washington crossing the Delaware River and the Japanese assaulting Pearl Harbor. Octavian was shrewd where Antony was complacent, and imaginative where his opponent was indolent.

The fall of Methone meant that Antony and Cleopatra’s enormous fleet could not supply itself. He had the better boats, but Octavian had the better strategy and a clearer picture of the kind of naval war that would deliver him victory. As Mr. Strauss reminds, “military history is full of campaigns marked by ill-conceived strategies and poor logistical planning.” 

By the time Octavian and Antony’s boats bobbed in the waves on September 2, 31 before the common era, the outcome was largely determined. Antony and Cleopatra engineered an escape by shooting through Octavian’s fleet, but the latter’s motto of festina lente, or “make haste slowly,” served Octavian in good stead as he tightened the net around the couple in Egypt.

The suicides of Antony and Cleopata have become the stuff of Shakesperean legend, and Augustus would go on to become the greatest Roman leader of them all. He was the man who not only founded an empire but laid the groundwork for  modern Europe. All of that began, however, in battle. He pressed advantages and imagined possibilities, and his reward was nothing less than a large part of the globe. 

At a time when military strategy, the movement of troops, and control of the seas is once again in the headlines due to the war in Ukraine, the legacy of Actium is that the biggest force does not always translate into victory. Leadership, morale, and strategic vision matter. Cohesion is essential. Know your own weaknesses as well as those of your enemies.

Presidents Biden, Putin, and Zelensky would do well to take note.