Book Review:'The War that Made the Roman Empire'
A well-written history of a conflict that many of us are familiar with, but whose details remain surprisingly opaque.
I’ve got a very significant backlog of books to review and am working on a few more (Andrew Roberts’ biography of George III and ‘Deep Work’ by Cam Newton seem likely to show up here). However, I’d read a couple of very positive comments on Twitter and wanted to take a look myself. Barry Strauss has written a really easy-to-consume history of the war between Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian. He spends a lot of time fleshing out some thoughts about how the war was conducted, but almost as interesting as the history is the way he is open about just how limited the sourcing is for a conflict that is so well known.
As is part of basically every high school education, I think most people are familiar with the general story of Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian. How Antony and Octavian fought Ceasar’s assassins to take control of Rome, how they divided the Empire, and how when Antony moved to the Eastern half of the Empire he fell in love with Cleopatra, the powerful and charismatic Queen of Egypt. Octavian and Antony then inevitably fell out, fought each other, and Octavian emerged the victor. Given the salience of the story in Western history, I had thought that there would be copious material on the conflict, but Strauss is quick to acknowledge how limited the sourcing is for our understanding of the actual war.
While noting that the victors wrote the history, in particular citing Octavian’s “Memoirs”, a famous volume in its time, but now one lost to the past. “Although [“Memoirs”] influenced a few later surviving ancient works, the memoirs themselves disappeared long ago. Those surviving works offer only a sketchy picture of Actium, and they contradict each other on important points. Nor do we have Antony or Cleopatra’s version, although those too have left a few traces in the extant sources. The real story is hard to recover.”1 One of Strauss’ most impressive accomplishments is knitting together the threads that remain while making clear that much of our understanding of the fighting is conjectural and may not be accurate.
A fantastic example of this is in the chapter dedicated to Marcus Agrippa’s assault on Methone, a key fortress securing Antony and Cleopatra’s supply chain on the western coast of Greece. While he spends some time explaining Methone’s importance and how we know of the Berber King who was in charge of the fort, he makes clear that we really have no idea how Agrippa seized the port. Strauss speculates on possible routes for Agrippa’s ship going from Italy to Methone and then discuss the pros and cons of different approaches to the storming of the town. While he offers what he thinks is most likely, by giving a wider array of options he provides a fuller sense of the realm of the possible while reminding us of how distant the conflict actually is (the war stretched from 32 BC to 29 BC with considerable maneuvering between the two in the five years prior to that).
While reading this, it’s a bit hard not to come across with a poor impression of Octavian, who is ruthless, treacherous, and ultimately successful. Much of the success or failure of various ventures in the fighting between the two factions (and in the fighting that preceded it in the various Roman civil wars) had to do not with battlefield prowess, but on the ability of one commander or another to bring detachments or allied forces over to their side from the other. The constant betrayals can be dizzying with several senior Romans going from side to side to side in a way that makes Churchill’s remark about his return to the conservative party seem quaint; “Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat.” Ultimately Antony is thwarted by a mixture of Agrippa’s superior generalship, disease decimating his land forces, and a steady stream of betrayals by his various commanders.
This was an interesting read, though it’s hard to draw any conclusions for the current day from it. I found it worth reading and it did prompt some reflection on the inherent brutality of war and the ability of time to wear away our ability to get ground truth about even the most high profile of historical events.
“The War that Made the Roman Empire”, Barry Strauss, 2022, p.4