Barry Strauss - The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium

The War That Made the Roman Empire

Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium

Barry Strauss

Author of The Death of Caesar and Ten Caesars

Ten Caesars: Roman Emperors from Augustus to Constantine

The Death of Caesar: The Story of Historys Most Famous Assassination

Masters of Command: Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, and the Genius of Leadership

The Spartacus War

The Trojan War: A New History

The Battle of Salamis: The Naval Encounter That Saved Greeceand Western Civilization

What If?: The Worlds Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been (contributor)

Western Civilization: The Continuing Experiment (with Thomas F. X. Noble and others)

War and Democracy: A Comparative Study of the Korean War and the Peloponnesian War (with David McCann, coeditor)

Rowing Against the Current: Learning to Scull at Forty

Fathers and Sons in Athens: Ideology and Society in the Era of the Peloponnesian War

Hegemonic Rivalry: From Thucydides to the Nuclear Age (with Richard Ned Lebow, coeditor)

The Anatomy of Error: Ancient Military Disasters and Their Lessons for Modern Strategists (with Josiah Ober)

Athens After the Peloponnesian War: Class, Faction and Policy, 403386 B.C.

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Copyright 2022 by Barry S. Strauss

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition March 2022

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Interior design by Paul Dippolito

Jacket design by Ryan Raphael

Jacket Art: Anthony and Cleopatra at the Bat, Johann Georg Platzer (170461), Apsley House, the Wellington Museum, London, UK Historic England/Bridgeman Images

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Strauss, Barry S., author. Title: The war that made the Roman Empire : Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium / by Barry Strauss. Other titles: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium Description: First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition. | New York : Simon & Schuster, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021007113 | ISBN 9781982116675 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781982116682 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781982116699 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Actium, Battle of, 31 B.C. | RomeHistoryCivil War, 4331 B.C. | Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, 30 B.C. | Antonius, Marcus, 83 B.C.?30 B.C. | Augustus, Emperor of Rome, 63 B.C.14 A.D. Classification: LCC DG268 .S77 2021 | DDC 937/.05dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021007113

ISBN 978-1-9821-1667-5

ISBN 978-1-9821-1669-9 (ebook)

In memory of my parents

Ancient names are, with a few exceptions, spelled following the style of the standard reference work The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

Nicopolis, Greece

High on a hill astride a peninsula lying between the sea and a wide and marshy gulf, in a seldom-visited corner of western Greece, stand the ruins of one of historys most important but least acknowledged war memorials. Its few remaining blocks only hint at the monuments original grandeur. Just decades ago, these stones lay in an overgrown, Ozymandian jumble, but today, after years of excavation and study of the site, they reveal something of their original craftsmanship.