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A Book with Legs - Episode Summary: Barry Strauss - The War That Made the Roman Empire
Podcast Overview Title: A Book with Legs Host: Smead Capital Management Genre: Business, History, Investing Description: The podcast explores value investing through discussions with authors on books that influence investing decisions, aimed at curious-minded individuals.
Episode Details Title: Barry Strauss - The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium Guest: Barry Strauss Release Date: [Insert Release Date] Episode Description: Barry Strauss discusses his book recounting the Battle of Actium, focusing on the events leading to the conflict, the naval battle itself, and its implications for the Roman Empire.
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Key Themes and Discussions
Introduction
- Cole Smead introduces the episode and its focus on the Battle of Actium.
- Barry Strauss, a renowned classicist and military historian, discusses his motivations for writing the book:
- Inspired by Shakespeare’s "Antony and Cleopatra".
- Personal connection to the Battle of Actium from his educational experiences in Greece.
Historical Context
- The episode dives into the power dynamics following Julius Caesar's assassination:
- Key Figures: Mark Antony, Octavian (Gaius Octavius), and Cleopatra.
- Political Landscape: A struggle for power among Caesar's lieutenants and other political factions.
The Rise of Octavian
- Octavian's unexpected rise to power as Caesar's heir:
- Named in Caesar's will, despite being young and underestimated.
- His strategic political maneuvers, including accepting Caesar’s inheritance and displacing Antony’s influence.
Mark Antony's Character
- Antony is portrayed as a charismatic, adventurous leader but lacking in political judgment:
- His impulsive nature and emotional decisions lead to significant political missteps.
- Illustrations of his relationships, particularly with Fulvia and Cleopatra, and their influence on his political choices.
Cleopatra's Role
- Cleopatra’s political astuteness and her significance in the power struggle:
- As queen of Egypt, she sought to maintain her kingdom's independence.
- Her relationships with powerful Roman leaders and how they affected her rule.
The Triumvirate
- The formation of the Triumvirate involving Octavian, Antony, and Lepidus:
- A temporary alliance that ultimately leads to tensions and conflict among the three leaders.
The Battle of Actium
- Strategic Decisions: Antony’s decision to confront Octavian at Actium:
- The significance of the location and its naval potential.
- Poor supply lines and diminishing support weaken Antony's position.
- Naval Warfare: Agrippa’s strategic brilliance contrasted with Antony’s miscalculations.
- Defections: The theme of defection plays a critical role in Antony’s defeat as many of his supporters shift allegiance to Octavian.
Aftermath and Consequences
- The ramifications of the defeat at Actium for Antony and Cleopatra:
- Their retreat to Egypt and subsequent downfall.
- The transition of power to Octavian, who becomes Augustus, marking the beginning of the Roman Empire.
- The larger implications of this shift on Roman governance and society.
Cleopatra's Death
- Various accounts of Cleopatra’s demise, emphasizing her tragic fate:
- Different theories surrounding her death, including the use of an asp versus poison.
Key Takeaways
- The episode highlights the complexity of historical narratives and the interplay of personal relationships with political power.
- Barry Strauss offers insight into how the events of the Battle of Actium shaped the trajectory of Western history.
- The deep dives into character motivations, military strategies, and political machinations provide a multifaceted view of a pivotal moment in history.
Further Engagement
- To explore more about Barry Strauss’s work, visit his website [barrystrauss.com](http://barrystrauss.com).
- The podcast encourages listeners to engage in discussions about their favorite books by emailing [podcast@smeedcap.com](mailto:podcast@smeedcap.com) or following on Twitter @SmeadCap.
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This markdown document encapsulates the content and insights from the podcast episode, facilitating a clear understanding of the discussions surrounding Barry Strauss's book and the historical context of the Battle of Actium.
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Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:02You're listening to A Book With Legs, a podcast presented by Smeed Capital Management. At Smead Capital Management, we advise investors who fear stock market failure. You can learn more at SmeadCap.com or by calling your financial advisor. Welcome to a Book with Legs podcast. I'm Cole Smead. I'm the CEO and a portfolio manager here at Smead Capital Management. At our firm, we are readers and book junkies. It can be said that leaders are readers and we believe books provide us a great source of information for filtering what is and isn't important for us as investors. Investing is the last great liberal art and the best way to spend a lifetime of learning.
0:41This podcast is for readers, thinkers, business-minded people, and investors who want to grow their knowledge from great authors and their writing. Charlie Munger often talks about using multiple mental models and analysis. Our aim for this podcast is to help listeners test Munger's theory in business, markets, and people. Thanks for joining us today. We are going to discuss the buildup, the climax and the aftermath of one of the most important battles looking back a little more than two millennia. Barry Strauss is joining us to talk about his book, The War That Made the Roman Empire, Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium.
1:19To give you a little bit of background on Barry, he is a classicist and a military and naval historian. Mr. Strauss is an author of 10 books. To name a couple of his other titles would include Ten Caesars, The Spartacus War, and the Battle of Salamis. He is one of the foremost thinkers and writers on Greek and Roman history. Barry is the Bryce and Edith M. Bomar Professor in Humanistic Studies at Cornell University. He is also the Corliss Page Dean Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution and series editor of Princeton's Turning Points in Ancient History. He has also served as Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of Defense Analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School.
1:59He also holds a PhD from Yale and a BA from Cornell. I'm very excited to talk with Barry. Maybe podcast listeners do or don't know this, but one of my two majors in college was history. And I focused my history major on Greek and Hellenistic history. So Barry, this will be very fun to visit with you today. Thanks for joining me. Thanks, Cole. It's a pleasure to be here. um so on this book uh you know you you're you're a specialist you you are the genius in this arena for understanding the history um but what inspired you to write about actium particularly in this battle well first of all anyone who calls me a genius i'm very grateful to so thank you um shakespeare shakespeare got me interested in the subject um you know antony and cleopatra Cleopatra is just a fantastic play, and I've always wondered what was the real story.
3:01So that's what got me started. I think less sublimely, I had written about Julius Caesar in a couple of books, particularly about his assassination. It was the start of the story, and Cleopatra figures in there. And I'd written my next book was about this 10 Caesars, about 10 Roman emperors. And Augustus also really fascinated me. But then there's a and so I kind of wanted to fill in the blanks between the assassination of Caesar and, you know, Octavian's conquest and becoming the sole ruler of the Roman Empire. empire. But then there was a personal reason, and that is in 1978, actually in October of 1978, when I was a graduate student and spending the year at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, our group of students went on a trip, one of many trips from school, and we went to the site of the Battle of Actium, outside the city of Prevza.
4:04Nowadays, very accessible. There are 48 different destinations you can get to from the local airport. But in those days, it was quite a trek to get there overland on the very bad roads of Greece in 1978. And our teacher took us to the overgrown ruins of the victory monument that Augustus put up after the battle, Octavian, who became Augustus, at the site of his headquarters. And we were all totally blown away by this, two of the other students devoted their careers to studying it. One was Greek, became the head archaeologist of that part of Greece, and has done brilliant work on putting together the remains of what was this spectacular monument that Augustus put up there, and he's in the process of publishing.
4:53The other, an American, so the Greek's name is Konstantinos Zakos, the American William Murray at the University of South Florida. He's devoted his life to Hellenistic and early Roman naval history. And he measured the sockets in the monument where the rams of the ships that some of the ships, the selection of the ships that Octavian had captured from Antony and Cleopatra were put up. And he used them to try to reconstruct what had really happened in the battle. So I was really personally connected to this. And this is a story I really wanted to tell, given my own interest in naval history, my experience as a rower and my book on the Battle of Salamis.
5:36So your book begins from the Ides of March forward. To your point about Shakespeare, I was sitting at dinner with my daughter a couple nights ago with a friend, and we were talking about the books they read at school. And just so you know, in full disclosure, Barry, our kids go to a classically, a classical education school, a charter school here, which is just to your point, it's a blessing. Yeah. And so, so I mentioned, I mentioned that I was going to be talking with you and she brought up Julius Caesar and then immediately started riffing into Mark Antony's speech, you know, from Shakespeare.
6:14And it was one of those moments that I fell in love with my daughter yet again. But, but so that's really where your book begins, you know, teach us about the immediate vacuum, because everyone's very aware of, you know, E.T. Brute and that from Shakespeare, but speak about the power dynamics that the vacuum immediately created. Yeah, the assassination of Caesar left the question of who was going to rule in Rome, who was going to be top dog. And there were a number of contenders for that title. Well, Mark Antony, one of Caesar's main lieutenants, was one of the two consuls for the year. And so he was in a great position to dominate, though he had feared for his own life at the time of the assassination.
7:02The lead assassins, Marcus Brutus, Cassius and Decimus Brutus, they all wanted to run the show. Cicero returned to the political arena, and he did great work in moving the Romans towards an amnesty. But then there were others of Caesar's lieutenants and supporters. And the least likely one was his 18-year-old grandnephew, Gaius Octavius, who was with the Roman army at that point across the Adriatic Sea at Diracium. today in Albania, and who, as it turned out, Caesar had named as his chief heir in his will and to whom he had offered posthumous adoption, which actually was not legal according to Roman law.
7:56But law wouldn't decide the matter. Nobody really expected this kid to amount to much, but he made his way back to Rome and he accepted the adoption, demanded everyone call him Julius Caesar now. And the game was on as to who would dominate. So why do you think Julius looked to Octavian as heir? In other words, there could be an argument that Mark Antony just had as much, you know, right or ability to fill that role. Why do you think Julius chose this young man? Well, I think it's a great question. Part of the reason was that he was part of Julius Caesar's a blood relative of Caesar. He was his sister's grandson, and that counted for a lot in the Roman world.
8:47The Romans were fine with adoption, but they did not like to adopt outside the family. Of course, it's also true that Caesar did not have to have an heir who is a member of his family, but he wanted to create a dynasty. So that was important to him. But there's another aspect as well. And that Caesar was, in addition to being a great general and a great writer, he was a great politician. He was a cynical politician. He's as much of a realist and cynic about human nature as anyone. And I think he saw in young Gaius Octavius, as he was then called, I think he saw a chip off the old block, somebody who understood human nature, who had no illusions about it, and who knew how the power game was played.
9:30I think he had some doubts about Mark Antony and whether Antony would be up to the task. Antony also actually was a relative of his, a much more distant cousin than Gaius Octavius. But I think that Caesar thought Octavius in the end had a lot a lot more talent. And in your storytelling, you do a great job of explaining that Octavian was a learner. And he kind of comes across in your storytelling as a steel trap mind where he's watching events and he's making notes and even all, to where when he was with Julius, he was very much paying attention to that school was in session. Yep, absolutely. And you know, when Caesar was on his last campaign in Spain in 1945.
10:25Octavian went over there to join him. He had some health problems throughout his life, and so he was on a sickbed and couldn't get there in time for the climactic battle. But he got there not long afterwards, and he spent six months with Julius Caesar, traveling around with him, learning from him, no doubt sucking up to him and flattering him and impressing Caesar as this is the guy, This is the one. So Antony blocked Octavian from receiving what was his inheritance from the will of Julius. Was this Antony just playing politics and somewhat, I'll call it, somewhat jealousy because he was passed by for any inheritance?
11:09I don't think it was just jealousy, though he was human and that was surely part of it. And I think more of it was that he felt that he deserved to be Caesar's heir. He deserved to pick up Caesar's mantle. He deserved to be the one who would lead Rome. And I suppose less selfishly, he might have thought, who is this 18-year-old kid? I mean, the Romans did not. It was not a youth culture. And they would automatically be suspicious of someone so young who aspired to so much power. So he had all sorts of reasons to want to block Octavia. So then teach our listeners about Mark Antony's upbringing, because my context for thinking about Antony, I think of Antony as kind of like a Hemingway style character, you know, kind of likes adventure, likes going out, likes trying to conquer, and yet has some personal foibles that come with that.
12:02Yeah, there's no question that Antony was a guy's guy. You know, he loved battle. He loved war. He was, you know, swashbuckling. He came from an aristocratic family. He was, you know, pure-blooded Roman noble, which Octavian was not. And so he had a very high opinion of himself. He was a great speaker. He'd studied in Athens, so he knew his Greek, he knew his oratory. He was a very intelligent man. He also was a great ladies' man. You know, he was infamous for his affairs and his mistresses, and he had a series of wives, which is not so unusual in the Roman elite at that period. But he had shown on a number of occasions, well, two things really.
12:52One, he had shown that he didn't always have the best political judgment. He had unleashed a massacre in the Roman Forum a few years earlier that caused Caesar a lot of trouble while he was away from home. Caesar had to clean it up. Antony was a very good number two on the battlefield or a very good subordinate. But he never actually won a battle on his own. So there's some question as to whether he had the right stuff and whether he had what it would take to be number one. How important was his first wife, Fulvia, in kind of settling him? Because I think this is something that comes up where he's this brash womanizer and he runs this woman and she kind of tames him.
13:38Yes, so Anthony was a macho guy and an intelligent guy, but he needed a woman to calm him down, to organize him. He's not the only man in history who that is true. and Fulvia came from a political family. She'd been married twice before to Roman politicians, and she knew how the game was played, and she also happened to be an expert in putting on a political funeral, which she had done for her earlier husband, Clodius, after he had been assassinated about a decade earlier. And she probably is the one who whispered into Antony's ear and told him what to do to turn his disadvantage into – turn it around, do jujitsu on his opponents and turn Caesar's funeral into a winning event, which indeed it turned out to be.
14:39In many ways, it was a copy of what had been done earlier for her late husband, Clodius. So Cleopatra was also in Rome at the time of Julius's death. Can you teach us, teach our listeners about her background, you know, her upbringing and why she was in Rome at the time? Sure. So Cleopatra was one of the children of the previous king of the Ptolemaic dynasty. Ptolemy, the flute player, Ptolemy Auletes was her father. And he had stayed on his throne by staying close to Rome and being a very loyal ally of the Romans. He had two or three sons and two daughters. And it was often the case of these Macedonian ruling families.
15:29They killed each other. They made war on each other for the throne. And Cleopatra was the last one left standing. She fought one of her brothers, who was king. and she had become queen, but her brother drove her from the throne, shared it with her. And then when she was very young, she met Julius Caesar, who was a victorious general who had come to Egypt and they immediately began a love affair. Who seduced whom? We don't know. But it was certainly to Cleopatra's advantage. Caesar provided the muscle that she needed to defeat her brother who's actually killed in battle and she becomes the dominant partner.
16:21Another one of her brothers is then the co-ruler with her because having a sole female ruler was not really acceptable to the Egyptians. She eventually gets rid of him. Her sister who had tried to have her killed, she'd already had put away in a temple, I believe in Ephesus. Is that Arsinoe? Yes, Arsinoe, yes. Later on, Cleopatra orders her execution as well. And the brother, who is her co-ruler, conveniently dies. But every reason to suspect that that was a murder as well. She emerges triumphant as the queen of Egypt. And she has a very valuable prize. Her affair with Caesar produced a son who becomes Ptolemy XV.
17:13Caesar gives her permission to name the boy after him. The Alexandrians nicknamed him Caesarion. And that's the name that we know him by, Caesarion or Caesarion. It's often said. And he was the heir to the throne. He was her co-ruler. but she, since her son was just a kid, she was the de facto sole ruler of Egypt. She was still close to Caesar and she came to Rome both to represent her country and to continue the affair with Caesar. Cicero suggests that she had a miscarriage shortly after Caesar's assassination So there's good reason to think that she was pregnant with another child by Caesar.
18:04It just didn't work out. But she was trying to maintain her country's independence. Egypt had come close several times to being annexed by the Romans. And the only thing that saved Egypt was first that the Romans were also jealous of each other. They didn't want any one of them to be the dominant figure in Egypt. And Egypt was very important because it was the wealthiest place in the Mediterranean because of the agricultural riches brought by the flooding of the Nile and also because of the huge treasury the Ptolemies had amassed. The second reason why Egypt had maintained its independence is that it had a series of kings who knew exactly how far to go and exactly how to play the Romans.
18:49So Cleopatra was holding on to the independence of her kingdom. So early on in this book, you talk about Octavian securing two Roman legions to defect from Antony. He paid them. And I think he had even got the money because he didn't have his inheritance. So I think you said that he had kind of cobbled the money together through friends and to have this private army. This became a long-term theme of obviously the storytelling, which was defection from Antony. But this was the first instance he saw. And I feel like the entire story was like defection. Yes, that's right. Yeah. Octavian was just a very sly guy.
19:29And he was a master of turning his enemy's allies into his enemy's enemies and his own allies. As you say, this is the first great defection. And before in the run up to the Battle of Actium, there's a series of defections that really turns things around for Octavian. So, sly and dangerous fellow. So, Octavian, Antony, and Lapidus enter into a triumvirate of leadership, okay? And I look at this as it's a kind of a temporary agreement just to not be at each other's necks every day. So, can you explain, was this really, was the third part of the triumvirate there between Octavian and Antony just so that there was someone else there and they didn't have to go head to head?
20:15Maybe that was one of the reasons, but the fact of the matter is that at the time, Lepidus had controlled a series of armies, a series of legions of his own. So now maybe Octavian could have worked his magic and gotten him to defect. But I think that it probably made more sense for him, as you say, to have this buffer between him and Antony in the form of Lepidus. So the assassins of Julius were still at large, which was Brutus and Cassius. They were cleaning house among the gentry, though. I think you noted how many nobles were killed, how many knights were killed. Were they just culling Julius as loyalists?
21:03In other words, the people that believed in Caesar. Well, it's, you know, it's Antony. It's a triumvirate, Antony, Octavian, and Lepidus who are carrying out these purges. And so they're mostly going after Caesar's enemies rather than purging Caesar's supporters. Certainly Brutus and Cassius, who by now are in the east, they are killing off some of their enemies as well. But the main purging is being done by Antony and Octavian. So Antony and Octavian meet at Philippi with Brutus and Cassius. This is a very strange engagement. And why I love the story because it includes the fog of war. Yeah, that's right.
21:52Can you explain what transpired there and how the fog of war really changed the conflict? Sure. Well, you know, Brutus and Cassius, the assassins, had built up a very impressive army. Now, Octavian and Antony had a strong army as well. Brutus and Cassius had a great navy, though, and the other side hardly had any fleet at all. So really what they should have done was sat pretty and waited to starve the enemy out. Antony understands this and he forces their hand by building a causeway across a marsh that will allow him to attack the flank of the enemy army. And so the battle begins. Cassius is successful.
22:41but he thinks that Brutus' army has been defeated, which is not true. And so he thinks the entire battle is lost. And so Cassius commits suicide. In fact, they'd won. They'd won that day. And this is a disaster because Cassius is the military genius. He's the brains behind this army. Brutus is an orator, a philosopher, a statesman. He is no kind of general. and now they're stuck with Brutus as their leader, which is bad news. So then obviously Antony and Octavian are victorious over Brutus and Antony's looked at the overall victor because I think if I remember correctly, Octavian had fled the battle at one point.
23:30But I think you did a good job explaining that it wasn't necessarily Antony's success, it was Brutus and Cassius's failure. Yes. You know, Antony was successful because the enemy foolishly agreed to fight him. This is a case where the enemy should have stayed on the defensive and starved out Antony and Octavian, which is exactly what Octavian does at Actium. They had – Brutus and Cassius had the upper hand because they controlled the sea. They had the navy. The enemy had no supplies. So that's the game they should have played, but instead they go for battle and that's what lost it for them. Even then, they might've won the battle, if not, as you say, for the fog of war.
24:16Sure, yeah. So then Antony does a very Roman thing. He heads East to start extracting allegiances from all the allies of Brutus and Cassius. And you touch on that theme later with Augustus or Octavian later, but he also goes in a very Antony way, sleeping his way east with ladies as well. But this was just kind of like a classic Roman mop up. Yes, yes, it was. It was a classic Roman mop up. The only caveat I would say is that Antony's long-term goal is to renew the military campaign that Caesar was unable to carry out because he was assassinated. And that is attacking Parthia, you know, attacking the Iranian empire of the day.
25:00That was his plan. So he eventually ends up in, you know, Cleopatra's world and he becomes, you know, her partner and lover during his trip east as he's doing this. But she was no Roman. Okay. The other theme that your book draws out to really tell this difference between the power that Antony and Cleopatra had with, you know, the position that Octavian sat in was ultimately as powerful as she was, as incredible as she was, she was no Roman. Was this really the fatal error from the beginning, is that this woman wasn't a Roman? No, I don't think it was a fatal error. I mean, I'm not sure what you're driving at in her.
25:48Well, in other words, would it have been any different if he had tried to find power through another woman in Rome versus this woman who obviously was known, but was not looked at to be the future of Rome. I see what you're saying. I guess I'm skeptical of the idea that a lot of historians have that Antony was doomed because the Romans would never fight for him because he had this Greco-Egyptian woman wife. I think he could have gotten away with it, especially if Cleopatra had not insisted on staying with the expedition, on going with him to Athens, from Ephesus to Athens, and then from Athens to Actium.
26:38But because she was there, it really did cost him in terms of propaganda, in terms of discomfort that some people felt, both because she was a woman and because she was the queen of Egypt. Certainly Antony had other non-Roman allies and Roman armies often had non-Roman allies. I don't think that would have bothered anyone. But it's Cleopatra's particular position, the fact she's female, the fact that she has so much power over Antony both because she is his paymaster, she's paying for his armies, and because she's sleeping, sharing his bed and is the mother of three of his children. That certainly did bother people.
27:19But she wasn't about to leave because she didn't trust Anthony and she didn't trust Octavian. Anthony had had spats with Octavia before and then had patched them up. Cleopatra couldn't afford to have that happen. So Anthony divorces Octavia. And so Anthony's married to Octavian's sister, bizarre as that may seem. Sure. All the time he's having this affair with Cleopatra, he's actually technically married to a Roman woman by whom he has two children, two daughters. And he only divorces her a few months before the Battle of Actium. In many ways, this was a fatal error to divorce her. It did not play well with the Roman public.
28:06In other ways, it gave the message to his own army that he was making a credible commitment, that he had all his skin in the game, that he was burning his bridges and was really serious about it. Cleopatra was really afraid that even in spite of this, that Octavian would find some way to patch up a deal between himself and Antony and, you know, reboot the marriage in some way or other. So she was there. She felt she had to protect her investment in this guy and make sure he didn't turn on her. So I want to go to Octavia because I think she's very interesting as it pertains to, you know, kind of the interim agreement that the triumvirate comes to.
28:48You know, the original agreement ended in 38 B.C. and needed to be renewed. Antony headed back west to do this. And Octavia, she seems like to be the glue in this negotiation. In other words, she she helps kind of patches it together. the trade was ships for legions, right? One had ships, one had legions. Were they just kicking the can down the road? In other words, this was, again, they knew that this had to come to head, but at least Octavia made sure it wasn't gonna be that day. I think that's true. I think they must have known, given Rome's past history, that there was a good chance that this would come to a head, as you say.
29:29and I think they were each trying, each one was trying to build up his forces to be in a position to win. Of course, they might also have thought, well, who knows, maybe this time will be different. Maybe this time we can actually share power. Sure. But especially Octavian, it looks like he wanted to go for broke. He wanted it all. Well, to your point, and this was one of your entertaining notes in your book when you mentioned that Antony's marriage to Octavia was the old godfather adage, keep your friends close and your enemies even closer. And to your point, I think you do a good job of showing that Octavia was his wife, but she probably was not by any means a friend.
30:19She was more for Octavian. um so so in this triumvirate though i mean antony's east uh you know obviously octavian's in the west i the one thing that caught my eye and and what made me think a lot about you know antony was he was like a legionnaire's leader he was not a he was not a ship master right he was not a master of the sea and octavian octavian could sit there and enroll legionnaires in italy which is where Romans found their fighting soldiers. And so wasn't that just a, I'll call it a supply issue where he had all these ships from his relationship with Cleopatra, but that never brought the legionnaires that he was used to leading, which sat in Italy.
31:05No, he had a problem, especially after he loses a large part of his army, maybe as much as 25 % in his ill-fated Parthian expedition. He invades what is now Northwestern Iran and he's utterly defeated and has to beat his way home through being harassed all the way. It's not quite as bad as it might seem, though, because there were a fair number of Roman citizens living in the east and their sons could be recruited as legionaries. and it wasn't completely impossible to enlist non-Roman citizens and turn them into legionaries. We have some from this period. Of course, later on during the empire, that becomes the name of the game and by the second century, few Roman citizens, few Italians are legionaries anymore.
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32:01Sure. But in this period, it is a problem. So I loved your Roman beatitude and I'll quote this from your book. Blessed are the peacemakers, a Roman might have said, but not as blessed as the conquerors. And you touch on a very interesting subject. You mentioned that victory in battle was actually easier than peace in Rome. In a way it was. I mean, the Romans were, this was a militaristic culture and Romans were expected to prove themselves in battle and to conquer, to add to the holdings of the imperium, the empire. Furthermore, Roman military doctrine was aggressive, always being on the offensive.
32:54Making peace was not something that was admired as much in Rome. It was important, but nobody got to celebrate a triumph for making peace. You only got to celebrate a triumph for a military victory. So Cleopatra, you know, she had certain rights and privileges that you just didn't see in that world as a woman. But I want to come back. So if it wasn't a fatal error for Antony to be in relationship with her, okay, that wasn't the beginning of the end, I'll call it. But was there a certain subset of Romans that would look at Antony under her power structure as kind of a half blood? Was there a subset of people that looked at him that way?
33:35Yes, definitely. Definitely. But by the same token, there's a subset of Romans among the nobility who look at Octavian as also a half blood. Because he is only a Roman noble by virtue of his mother's mother. He doesn't come from the city of Rome, although he probably grew up there But he comes from this town 25 miles south of Rome Velletri, Vellitri, Velletri Today, and his father You know, becomes a senator His father becomes an important person But I think that to the most blue-blooded families like the Antonii Octavian is an imposter and this is an extremely snotty rank-bound society extremely snobby society i meant to say excuse me so as he's going into battle cleopatra anthony's coming into battle um you know as a roman general she's at his side accompanying him um could she do this just because she's cleopatra and she says I'm coming with you, Antony?
34:45Or was there any need for that? In other words, who was really sharing or was someone taking? Yeah, well, I mean, as I said, she wanted to be there because she didn't trust him. She didn't trust Octavian not to come up with a deal, not to pull a rabbit out of his hat. And she also was the queen of Egypt and she wanted to make sure that Egypt's interests were represented. in what went on. Sure. So why could she get away with this? In part because she was Cleopatra, the great charmer. In part because she was Antony's mistress. In part because she was Antony's paymaster. She funded the army and the navy.
35:34They needed her. The ships had been built in Alexandria by Egyptian Alexandrian technicians. and shipwrights. On top of that, she bought Roman politicians. We know of one of them whose name, I'm sorry, I'm having a senior moment. I've forgotten his name. One of the leading supporters of Antony. We know that Cleopatra had given him a very important concession in the Egyptian economy. So he was able to hear this very steady and lucrative income coming from controlling the market in one product, I forget which. So that's the way she bought politicians and made sure that she would get a careful listening to.
36:23There were Romans who wanted to send her home from Ephesus who said, she's got to go. You know, she's poison. It's propaganda suicide to have Cleopatra around. There are men who don't want her because she's a woman and there are men, Romans are not on her because she's an Egyptian. But she insisted and she got her way. So to use one of those names, I know I'll probably butcher it when I say this, but Ahenobarbis was one of those people who did not like her, but ultimately had to tolerate her because of the situation she was in. Yes, absolutely. Yes, he is the leader of the movement to get rid of Cleopatra to send her home.
37:03So you touched on it quickly a couple of times earlier, but I mean, just give us some gravitas or what kind of gravitas did Alexandria carry in that day and age? Because it's a city that, you know, you think of like the wonders of the world and it had the lighthouse, but you know, it's not a city that's much talked about outside of a discussion like this. It's kind of a combination of Cambridge, Massachusetts and Las Vegas, you know, it is the great intellectual center. And, you know, it's also, I guess I should add Silicon Valley because it's also a technological center. You know, it's in Alexandria not long after this that engineers invented the first steam engine.
37:46They just didn't see what any practical application it could have. It's also the medical center of the ancient world. and it is a glittering city, you know, known for its beautiful public monuments and its streets and also its sin city. It's a place where there's a lot of decadence going on as well. Rome, by comparison, was at this period was somewhat Spartan. It was not built up anywhere near the degree to which Alexandria was. And, you know, Augustus later on famously says, I found Rome, a city of bricks. I left it a city of marble. The truth of the matter is he didn't even find it a city of bricks.
38:32It's under Augustus, the technology of making Roman bricks is perfected. Before him, it's a city of mud bricks. So Rome cannot compete with Alexandria at this time. And Alexandria is also just dripping in money. It's just so wealthy. Sure. Yeah, you pointed out how the commerce there was a big driver of that wealth. Yes, yes. It's a seaport both for naval and for maritime occupations. So then Antony turns to divorce Octavia. Did that have to be done? To your point earlier, was that his way of saying, okay, this time is different. You know, we're not gonna fight like we used to. This is a different fight we're in.
39:19I think so. It didn't have to be done. And there was a propaganda loss in doing that.
39:29But there was also a certain advantage because it signaled to his supporters, I'm not kidding. This really is, this is not some kind of faint. This is not a bargaining chip. this is really a war and we're going to fight it out to the finish. It also had a propaganda value in the East because in the East, Cleopatra was worshipped as a goddess, as Isis or Aphrodite. And Antony was worshipped as her divine consort, as Osiris or as Dionysus. And this allowed them to say, we really are together. It's really the two of us against the world. We've gotten rid of this Roman. And the Romans were very unpopular in the East.
40:09they were considered to be, by many people, they were considered to be these evil outside conquerors. So Cleopatra in a way is leading a very popular movement against the Romans. So why was Actium the place for Antony to stand his ground ultimately? In other words, later we'll talk about some of the issues that he had there, but what was the importance of that position in Greece? It's a great harbor. Actium is at the entrance to the Gulf of Ambracia. And this is a very large body of water. It's like a lake, except it's got seawater. And it provides this magnificent harbor. It's protected from the elements.
40:57And this is an area where the wind blows up a lot. So being inland, but having access to the sea was really terrific. It's also along the way to Italy. So the way to get to Italy from Greece in general is not to sail across the open sea, but rather to hug the coast of Greece and then Albania, and then cross at the narrowest point, about 150 miles, to the heel of the Italian boot. That would be the way to do it. So maybe in an ideal world, Antony should have made his base further north in what is now southern Albania. As I said, it's the city of Durachium that's closer to Italy. He doesn't do so for one or both of two reasons.
41:45One reason is that Cleopatra doesn't want it. She wants to flee closer to Egypt in order to guard the route to and from Egypt. And the second reason is that there's some evidence to suggest that Octavian had grabbed Dyrrachium. According to the agreement when they set up the triumvirate, Dyrrachium should have belonged to Antony. But the evidence is not 100 % clear, but it suggests that Octavian actually had taken the place for himself. So one of the questions you open up, and it seems like this is kind of debated and obviously we'll never find the answer to it. but the debate is why did he not just go invade Italy?
42:26Why did he stay in Greece and not take the fight to Octavian? That is the question, why didn't Antony invade Italy? And I mean, the short answer is, I don't know. But the longer answers are, first of all, he may have lost his nerve. You know, it was an easy sail a row across the Adriatic Sea. That's not the issue. The difficulty is that he would have had to take a fortified city like Brundisium or leave it in his rear, which was not particularly safe. It's also true that having Cleopatra with him made it more difficult because that would have been a propaganda net loss for Antony had he arrived in Italy with the Queen of Egypt as his mistress and his lover, the mother of his children, with her at his side.
43:20And the third reason maybe that Cleopatra didn't want to do it, that she didn't want to see this battle won on land by the Roman legions, but rather won at sea. An Egyptian built ships with a large Egyptian contingent in the fleet. Pick one of those three reasons or maybe a combination of the three of them. And you have Antony declining to invade Italy. Yeah, the other theme that comes up in your story is you talk about, you know, if they want to go to war, you got to pay soldiers. And so this financial game was always going on in the background. I think you gave an example of Antony cutting coins that had more lower quality metal content.
44:03And here you have Octavian trying to figure out how to cobble the money together, which was really his biggest problem as they got ready for battle. but one of the kind of the precursor issue in this battle was the defeat of Methone by Agrippa. That was a city that Antony had. Can you explain what Methone was and how devastating this was to the campaign? Sure, Methone is a port somewhat over 100 miles south of Actium in the southwest coast of Greece, the tip of the southwest coast of Greece in the Peloponnesus. It is a great natural harbor protected from the elements by some barrier islands off it.
44:50Actually, islands. I'm not sure they're barrier islands. And it's a crucial point on the lifeline, the supply lifeline. Greece cannot afford to feed all the men in Antean Cleopatra's army, not to mention Octavians. You have to get food from somewhere. And they got their supplies from Egypt and Syria. It was transported westward by a chain of merchant ships who had protection by naval ships as well. And they would stop at various places in Greece, and one of them is Mithoni. And from there, having come from the east, having sailed east by northwest, excuse me, west by northwest, they now sail north by northwest along the coast of Greece to Actium.
45:38But this is stopped dead by Agrippa, who takes Mithoni in a very daring raid in March of the year 31, thereby making it infinitely harder to supply Antony and Cleopatra's army and navy. So Octavian took senators to the battle with him. Wasn't this your godfather principle again? Keep your enemies close or your friends close, your enemies even closer. Or I also thought about it. You shouldn't be worried about the people in front of you. It's the people behind you. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, Octavian, you know, he wants us to think that he had all of Italy behind him and he was so popular before this battle.
46:23But in fact, that's not true. There were a lot of people who preferred Antony in spite of Cleopatra and a lot of people who disliked Octavian. And they certainly, there were riots over the taxes that he levied. And he was worried that if he left the senators at home, they might betray him. He didn't know what Antony was going to do. He thought it's possible that Antony could invade Italy and start a battle in the rear. So, yeah, he made them come with him. Yeah, and I think Octavian, he understood and the incentive structures that needed to be in place to tie groups together is something that Octavian did superbly.
47:04And obviously Antony struggled mightily in that respect. The other really funny story you had, obviously Cleopatra, she was a show woman. She could entertain. And one of the more entertaining parts of your book was when you included her quote, when speaking about Octavian, she said, what's so terrible if Caesar is sitting on a ladle? Now that doesn't sound like much in our day, but could you explain what she was chiding him when she said that? Okay, so he had landed at a place that's called the ladle in Greek, to rune, in ancient Greek. And I've been there. You could imagine it looking like a ladle out at sea.
47:44This is meant to be a dirty joke about Octavian pleasuring himself, shall we say. Also, Antony had spread rumors or his people had spread rumors that Octavian had been Caesar's, not just his grandnephew, but that the two of them had had an affair. They'd been Caesar's boy in every sense of the word. So Cleopatra's playing on this. Yeah, so Antony's camp at Actium, I mean, this just seems like disaster from Methone on. You know, he's there and you explain the supply issues they had with things like water because of the landscape of the land. And Antony also had people defecting right up to the battle with Octavian at Actium.
48:35Wasn't this just this recurring theme continue to play out right at the moment of, you know, of trial? Absolutely. The fact that, you know, as we've seen, Octavian is a master of deception and defection. And it's clear that Antony's not winning. So the Octavian's fleet, led by his brilliant Admiral Agrippa, goes on to inflict defeat after defeat on Antony's warships and causing ever greater supply problems. And so Octavian is able to peel away people from Antony's camp. Also, one of them, Anna Barbas, who we saw earlier, was opposed to Cleopatra being there. Finally, he's had enough. So he defects and he goes to Antony because Cleopatra refuses to go home and he thinks she's got to go home.
49:33And he was the strongest military tactician on Antony's side, I think is what you explained. Yes, and navies were his specialty. He was the best admiral that they had and they lose him. Yeah, so Socious makes a run to try to break free, and that fails. And then the night before battle, Antony and Cleopatra decide to burn ships because they don't have enough people. I mean, if you're Octavian and you're Agrippa and you're watching these flames and this smoke rise, doesn't that tell you that in some respects you've already won because they can't man the ships they brought? I think so. And they would have known it in any case because they were defectors up to the last minute.
50:20There's a very prominent person in Antony's camp named Delius. And Delius defects like the day before the battle or just very, very close to the battle. So Antony, Octavian and Agrippa know what's going on. And yet Octavian is not sure that he's going to win. And he suggests to Agrippa, why don't we let them go and we'll chase them back to Egypt. and we'll get people to defect to us there and we'll surrender and we'll win that way. It's too risky to fight a battle. And Agrippa gently takes his boss aside and says, no, that's not the right move at this point. We're gonna win this battle. So let's fight it.
50:59And Octavian had, I can't remember if it was Agrippa, but he had had awkward moments like that in prior battles in his life. I think you told a story where in a similar kind of cord where he was gonna kill himself because they thought they were gonna lose. And he was stopped. He was stopped to say, no, like we're not going to lose. You don't need to do this. That's a very good point. Octavian had seen with personal experience that battle was scary and maybe he wasn't the most courageous man in the world on the battlefield. So he is tempted to try to let him go and then use what he's good at, which is basically suborning treason to get various people to come over to him.
51:39Exactly. So September 2nd, 31 BC, we're in Actium. Can you explain the events of that morning? Sure. So, you know, Antony and Cleopatra have decided that this is gonna be a breakout battle. They know that they're not going to be able to take all of their ships out of there, but they wanna fight their way out. And they're willing to try to attack Agrippa's line to make one last run for it, one last attempt. Maybe they'll get a lucky break. But they're not counting on it because they have done an unusual thing. They have loaded their masts onto their ships. Now, in ancient warships, they were both sailing ships and rowing ships, but they used the sailing part only to get from point A to point B.
52:31When they actually fought a battle, they took the masts down. They actually took them off the ships to make them lighter so they could get up to ram speed and ram the enemy or board the enemy ship if that's what they were going to do. But in this case, they kept the masks on. Why? Because they were planning. They thought that in all likelihood, they were going to have to make a run for it. And they wanted to have the wind at their back. And they knew that in the afternoon, usually in this part of the world, there was a wind from the west, a wind from the northwest that would blow down in the afternoon.
53:05and they wanted to be able to catch the wind with their sails, which would allow them to escape the enemy who would not be going into battle with sails, but would be going into battle just with oars. So Cleopatra, the one question I was asking, why did she stay so long? Because they build this plan where she's going to break, but they knew things weren't going their way days before this, to your point about the defections and whatnot. Why didn't she try to make a run for it, you know, days, weeks earlier? Well, she was invited to do so by some of the commanders in Antony's army who wanted her out of there.
53:45That's a really good question. And I would think it's because she really, again, she doesn't trust Antony. She wants to make sure this goes to her advantage. Also, maybe on some level, she loves Antony. She feels their fate is intertwined and she wants to get him out of there. She feels that if she leaves, he might either make a deal with Octavian or go down with the ship, neither of which would have been good for her. So maybe she felt that all things considered, this was the best of a bad series of alternatives. You know, it was known that Cleopatra was going to be, you know, making a run the whole time as where Antony went into battle.
54:27And you bring up this kind of question where was he always expecting to cut and run or was it just opportunistic based on, you know, what he had going on in front of him? And is there a lot of debate on whether he was gonna do one or the other or do you think everyone agrees that he was gonna run the whole time? No, there's a debate. I mean, the short answer, it's a great question. Short answer is we don't know. On the one hand, he loads the masks on the ship, which suggests he's gonna cut and run. Sure. On the other hand, he actually does attack the enemy line. He does fight. So why does he do it?
55:04I guess I think it's because he's a Roman. And he feels, you know, I'm not a Roman man if I don't actually try to fight a battle. And who knows? I might even win. We have these great state-of-the-art ships from the Alexandrian shipyards, and the Roman ships are not as good as ours. Yeah, they outnumber us, and the men are better fed and all that. But you never know. The gods of battle might give us a victory. So I think that's what's making him tick. So then you also talk about, here's a grip, you know, maybe the greatest naval seafarer in military conflict of his time. And explain the role that fire had in this battle.
55:45You know, obviously Octavian's fleet using it against Antony's fleet. Right. So after Antony flees, his men keep fighting. Either they don't know he's left, they don't believe he's left, or they feel that they're going to get killed or enslaved if they don't keep fighting. And Octavian had actually enslaved some of the rowers who fought for Sextus Pompey, an earlier foe. And so what Agrippa and Octavian agreed to do is to actually use flame arrows to destroy, to burn some of the enemy ships. and they're quite deadly and effective. Anthony and Cleopatra go to Alexandria, ultimately following Actium.
56:34And you mentioned that they could have rebuilt. Now, I guess, you know, based on what you know and in your expertise in the subject, what was the likelihood they actually could rebuild or were they ultimately just buying time in Alexandria? It's a really good question. You know, Cleopatra is not one to give up. And she does try to rebuild a fleet. It's destroyed by her enemies, the Nabataean Arabs. Roughly, they live where Jordan is now. She had clashed with them before. One of the purposes of this fleet is to go to India and, you know, rebuild their lives there out of the way of Octavian. They also toy with the idea of going to Spain and having a redoubt there in the mountains of Spain.
57:28That's where others had held up against the Romans before, though ultimately in the end, even though they held out for a long time, in the end they were defeated by the Romans. I think she's serious and probably because Cleopatra, you know, she's a brilliant mind. She's a strategist. I'm sure she's also thinking, and maybe this will be bargaining chips. Sure. You know? So, and also when you mentioned India, I think to myself, back to my history major, India was the legacy of Alexander the Great. I mean, that's why they had this, you know, understanding that they could go to India because of the relationships that they had with, you know, obviously the ruling parties in those places.
58:07Yes, very true. Very true. You know, obviously Octavian goes to his Roman mop up. Okay, he starts going to the former enemies and explaining the circumstances and seeking allegiances with them. But really this becomes, there's so many of these defections in these alliances that disappear for Antony. This just reads like it's his season of no confidence that people are voting daily on. That's right, absolutely. I mean, Actium was just a smashing victory. and I think that Antony had run away he hadn't died with his men the way a real Roman was expected to do so I think he's holding a very losing hand a very weak hand at this point of course it was always possible that Octavian could have died, in fact he almost does die in a storm on his way back to Italy so furthermore Cleopatra a, there's a mutiny of the troops in Italy.
59:12So, you know, they could have thought something might turn up. Sure. Cause, cause then he turns and this is like, this is, I think of this as like brilliance of Octavian. And by the way, to your point, if there's anything I think of Octavian's life, he had a lot of trouble dying, even when he wanted to kill himself. So, so he starts, negotiations with Antony and Cleopatra, but it's not a two-way negotiation. It's really a three-way negotiation. He's negotiating with Cleopatra and he's also negotiating with Antony kind of separately. Explain kind of the rounds and what was negotiated, particularly with Cleopatra.
59:53Well, Cleopatra, you know, she's Antony's lover, but she's also the queen of Egypt. And she's the very proud heir of a dynasty that has ruled this country for 300 years. And she's a mother. She has four children. And she desperately wants to see her children survive and if at all possible, for one of them to succeed her as the monarch of Egypt. And she wants Egypt to maintain its independence and not be annexed by Rome. She's willing to bargain away Antony. She's willing to give him up to Octavian and I think he knows it in order to save her children. Even though three out of her four kids are Antony's children, she doesn't care.
1:00:42So explain how Antony's life came to an end because this falls right on that idea you just mentioned that she was willing to bargain Antony's life. Right. Well, you know, we know that Octavian marches on Egypt. Egypt is very defensible by land. There's only narrow routes to get in both the east and the west, and there's strong fortresses blocking it. The fortress in the west defected to Augustus, Octavian. It's commanded by a relative of his. The fortress in the east surprisingly surrenders to Octavian. And some people think that Cleopatra gave them the message, surrender to this guy. But in any case, his army and navy converge on Alexandria.
1:01:32And Antony goes out and tries to win a last victory, but he realizes that he is doomed. And so the night before he dies, he throws one last party, a ghoulish party, to say goodbye to his friends. And then he goes out and tries to fight the next day, but his soldiers desert him. He goes back into town and decides to commit suicide. He's also told that Cleopatra has defected from him. That's Cleopatra, excuse me. He is told falsely that Cleopatra is dead. Just as Cassius is confused by the fog of war at Philippi, so Antony is confused by, shall we say, the fog of power politics in Alexandria. And he decides to commit suicide.
1:02:21He asks his faithful slave to kill him, but the faithful slave runs himself in instead. Maybe he thought his life, he'd be tortured if he dared to kill Antony. And so then Antony falls on his own sword, but he botches the deal. He botches the job and he's bleeding out, but he's still alive. And Cleopatra, who at this point has locked herself into her mausoleum with all her treasure, gets word of what's going on. Because I don't think there's much that happens in Alexandria. Cleopatra's spies don't tell her about. And she has Anthony come to see her. It's kind of a tragicomic way that he has to be hauled up in the scaffolding of this still uncompleted building.
1:03:04and he goes up to see her and then dies in her arms. So, you know, his was, you know, falling on a sword and killing himself. Hers has a little more myth and interest to how, you know, her death came about. Teach our listeners about how her life ended. Sure, so there are two versions in the text and then there's one that scholars have invented. So in the text, Cleopatra commits suicide. The more dramatic version, the one that Shakespeare uses, is that she smuggles in an asp, which is just a generic word for a snake, maybe a cobra, and that the snake bites her and poisons her, and she dies from the snake bite.
1:03:49Attired in her royal regalia as queen, she dies on her throne, and that's where Octavian discovers her too late to save her life, and her two faithful attendants die with her. Version two, which is also an ancient source, says, nah, it was just more garden variety poison that she used to kill herself. Because she had a history of drugs and poison. She was into that stuff. Yes. Alexandria, as I said, is the medical center of the ancient world. And our sources tell us that she conducted these incredibly inhumane experiments in the weeks leading up to this, where she has her doctors try to poison prisoners to see which is the least painful way to die.
1:04:37Think about that. And version three, which only exists in the mind of modern scholars, is she didn't commit suicide at all. Octavian knocked her off and then pervade the suicide myth to take the heat off him for killing a queen. But I don't buy that. Well, yeah, I think in the first one you mentioned, I think there was even, there's kind of like a sub theory under number one where it wasn't a single cobra. It was baby cobras because they can lethally provide enough venom to kill someone versus a grown cobra couldn't do that. And you could fit them in the basket of flowers, right? Which I thought that, man, that's some creativity.
1:05:20I like this. Yes, different herpetologists have different theories. I consulted one for my book and I know that one of my colleagues, Egyptologist consulted a different herpetologist for her book and came up with a completely different answer. So ultimately though, this begats the reign of Augustus Caesar as we know him with the death of Antony and Cleopatra and then begins because obviously Octavian's got to pay off all these debts from paying soldiers. you know he I mean he almost sounds like a Republican president here in the United States where it's like hey war's over I'm going to send a bunch of you home because I can't afford you we're going to cut taxes and we're going to go out and do a lot of business and and begins what we now know as Pax Romana yes yes the Roman peace yes I mean it it works out well for the ancient world in the end.
1:06:15Octavian goes from being a warlord who fights other warlords to be number one in Rome to being a senior statesman who turns out to have a vision for how to end the civil wars that have plagued the republic and to bring peace to the Roman world. Unfortunately, for lovers of republican liberty, that gets lost in the shuffle. It's now going to be a monarchy and people aren't going to be as free. They're not going to have as much political freedom as they had before. But the good, that's the bad news. The good news is it's going to be a period of peace and relative prosperity. So things we didn't cover in our discussion that I loved in your book that was late in it.
1:06:59We didn't talk about Cleopatra or Antony's progeny's fate, which there was very unique for each of them was very interesting. We didn't talk about the triumph, which I think is great storytelling of what he did once he got back to Rome. We also didn't talk about how this ended the pharaonic dynasty. I mean, what had been a longstanding, you know, ruling class there in Egypt. But let me ask you, Barry, what else do you think that we didn't touch on that you do think needs to be mentioned to our audience? A good question. I mean, maybe what would have happened had it gone the other way? What was at stake?
1:07:37and if the battle had gone the other way, I think the center of gravity of the Roman Empire would have gone eastward and Alexandria would have become the de facto second capital of the empire. The city of Rome might never have been built up as it was under Augustus to become a rival to Alexandria and Antony and his descendants would have been much more interested in fighting Parthia than Augustus ever was. If the Romans had managed to defeat Parthia, then Iraq and Iran would have become part of the Roman Empire with incalculable consequences for human history. By the same token, it's not clear that part of Germany and Britain would have become part of the Roman Empire because the Romans would have been looking eastward.
1:08:29So really a lot's at stake in this battle. Well, to your point, eventually Constantine was going to be looking East. So that was an inevitability, even if Augustus led that was to come. So Barry, this has just been a total blessing to visit with you. I love this book, as you can tell. It's a wonderful piece of work. And I always told myself in college, I really wanna go to Greece. and I'm at the edge of my seat thinking I need to go back to that again. So I was gonna ask you, where can people follow you? Where can our listeners and our audience follow you going forward? It's really easy, barrystrauss.com.
1:09:12That's my website. There's lots of information about me. I have a podcast, which I don't do all that often, but actually it's being released right now, a season about how to win a war. and I blog twice a month. You can sign up if you want free to subscribe to that on the website so you'll get updates and won't miss anything or just visit the website. It's barrystrauss.com. Barry, this has been just wonderful. For our podcast listeners, I would argue you need to go double down on your Roman history by buying a copy of Barry's book, The War That Made the Roman Empire. Barry Strauss's writing teaches you an epic era of history, but also entertains you with the culture and the humanity that is timeless, as we've talked about.
1:10:02If you enjoyed our discussion with Barry, go to Apple, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts. Give us a review, rating, or recommendation for other podcast listeners. For our listeners, if you have a great book that you'd like to recommend, you can email us at podcast at smeedcap.com. That's podcast at smeedcap.com. You can also send suggestions for us on our Twitter handle, at SmeadCap. Thank you for joining us for A Book With Legs podcast. We look forward to the next episode.
1:10:50Thank you.
From the publisher
In this episode, Barry Strauss joins Cole to discuss his book, The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium. Barry’s book recounts the fierce conflict at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC. The conversation covers the events leading up to the civil war, how the historic naval battle at Actium was fought, and what may have happened to the Roman Empire had Antony and Cleopatra been victorious.
