Marcus Agrippa: Right-hand Man of Caesar Augustus (23 page)
Read Marcus Agrippa: Right-hand Man of Caesar Augustus Online
Authors: Lindsay Powell
Tags: #Bisac Code 1: HIS002000, #HISTORY / Ancient / General / BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Military, #Bisac Code 2: BIO008000 Bisac Code 3: HIS027000
Over the ensuing months Agrippa aggressively patrolled the Ionian Sea for prey and successfully intercepted many slow moving transports bringing Antonius foodstuffs and munitions from Asia, Egypt and Syria and captured or sank them.
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He landed an army at Methone (modern Methoni), a coastal town with strong defences built in the fourth century BCE on the southwestern-most tip of the Peloponnese. In charge of the stronghold was one of Antonius’ allies, Bogudes, king of Mauretania. In a surprise attack Agrippa laid siege, the place soon fell and he had Bogudes executed.
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Another of Antonius’ bases on the Peloponnese taken out of the war, Agrippa headed north again, looking out for merchant ships on the way and raiding Greek coastal settlements at will – all of which disturbed Antonius greatly.
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The news of Agrippa’s successful hunter strategy, of course, greatly heartened Caesar. Leaving Rome in the care of his trusted representative Maecenas, he relocated to Brundisium where he gathered together his supporters to impress upon them that he had the largest and strongest constituency among the Romans sympathetic to his cause.
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Caesar had assembled the bulk of his army and navy at Brundisium and Tarentum, and in the spring of 31 BCE they crossed the Adriatic Sea to Kerkyra unopposed – he intended to reach Actium, but a storm blew up preventing him from landing there.
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Having regrouped, Caesar gave the order for his main force and his supporters to make the sea crossing to Actium where he hoped to capture Antonius’ fleet.
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En route
, finding Korkyra to be abandoned, he occupied the city, anchoring his ships in the Fresh Water Harbour, and made it the base of his own naval operations. From it, Caesar launched reconnaissance missions.
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Map 7. The Actian War, 31 BCE.
Meanwhile, Agrippa struck Antonius’ forces wherever he found them, at sea or on land. In effect he had adopted the same military strategy Sex. Pompeius had so successfully executed to harass the communities of the Italian coast just a few years before. Using his swift fleet and battle-hardened marines he attacked Antonius’ garrisons and supply lines along the coastline of the Peloponnese. It is unlikely Agrippa held on to the captured targets for long: the objective seems to have been to degrade Antonius’ military assets, cause maximum disruption to his logistics and grind down the morale of troops and allies. Dio describes one of the chance naval encounters:
In the meantime a naval battle occurred. L. Tarius, it seems, was anchored with a few ships opposite Sosius, who hoped to achieve a notable success by attacking him before the arrival of Agrippa, to whom the whole fleet had been entrusted. Accordingly, Sosius waited for a thick mist, so that Tarius should not beforehand because aware of his numbers and flee, and suddenly sailed out just before dawn and immediately at the first assault routed his opponent and pursued him, but failed to capture him; for Agrippa by chance met Sosius on the way, so that he not only gained nothing from the victory, but perished, together with Tarcondimotus and many others.
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Antonius’ men seemed quite incapable of rallying a strong defence whenever Caesar’s general landed on the shore, apparently out of nowhere.
In preparation for a final, decisive battle in the spring Antonius had moved his fleet into the shallow waters of the Gulf of Ambracia, establishing a camp for his army to guard it on the southern peninsula facing the unpredictable Ionian Sea near a small hamlet called Aktio (Actium).
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Measuring about 40km (25 miles) long and 15km (9 miles) wide, the Gulf of Ambracia must have first seemed to Antonius as a safe harbour for his and Kleopatra’s fleet; but as the months passed it became increasingly apparent that their ships were becoming trapped inside.
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Its narrow entrance to the Ionian Sea – a 700m wide channel between Actium on the south and Berenike (modern Berenikea) on the north – formed a natural bottleneck which Caesar’s ships could now blockade. The southern promontory projected northwards – like a spike – into the channel formed by the curve of the opposite shore. Antonius had already taken the prime position on the southern promontory and established his army camp close to Actium, a place sacred to the god Apollo.
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He had erected watchtowers on each side of the spur of land at the entrances of the channel and stationed ships in between to patrol it.
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Antonius may have expected to come to battle with Caesar earlier in the year. He installed his men ‘on the farther side of the narrows, beside the sanctuary [of Apollo], in a level and broad space’, but its disadvantages as a long-term base of operations soon revealed themselves; the site ‘was more suitable as a place for fighting than for encamping; it was because of this fact more than any other that they suffered severely from disease, not only during the winter, but much more during the summer’.
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Even today the shoreline is broken up by numerous marshes, which form an estuary system. Malaria and dysentery are two diseases suspected of afflicting his troops. Agrippa’s successful raids on Antonius’ supply ships denied
Antonius’ men much needed fresh food. The morale of the ordinary men, which had been high at the start of the year, sank as the heat rose and their living conditions worsened.
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Nevertheless, Antonius still held on to the Gulf of Corinth and employed the steward, the freedman Theophilos, in the city to receive grain from parts of Greece which were still loyal to him, and relay them to Anticyra across the Gulf on the coast of Boeotia, while under the close supervision of officers and men under his orders.
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News reached Antonius that the consulship he expected to receive on 1 January 31 BCE was denied him and, instead, Caesar was sworn in with M. Valerius Messalla Corvinus.
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He was now a private citizen without legal authority to act in the name of Rome. In a snub to the Senate Antonius used the title of consul anyway.
Arriving from Korkyra in June or July, Imperator Caesar
Divi filius
landed his troops on the shores of Epirus ‘and took up a position on high ground there from which there is a view over all the outer sea around the Paxos islands and over the inner – Ambracian – gulf, as well as over the intervening waters’.
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He quickly fortified his position, constructing walls from it down to Gomarus, the outer harbour.
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In keeping with this defensive posture, rather than run the gauntlet and sailing his ships through the channel to the Gulf, Dio reports that Caesar had many of his triremes dragged over land,
using newly flayed hides smeared with olive oil instead of runways, yet I am unable to name any exploit of these ships inside the Gulf and therefore cannot believe the tradition; for it certainly would have been no small task to draw triremes over so narrow and uneven a tract of land on hides. Nevertheless, this feat is said to have been accomplished in the manner described.
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Caesar’s men, who enjoyed clean water from the nearby springs and Louros River and fresh provisions from Italy, were in good health and high spirits.
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Agrippa joined Caesar and together the men worked on their campaign strategy. They knew this was their chance to deal a devastating blow to Antonius. Antonius realized it too. To tip the odds in his favour, he moved some of his troops across the strait and set up a camp directly facing his opponent while his cavalry rode around the Gulf to attack Caesar from the east.
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His men harried Caesar’s as they dug their fortifications of a ditch, palisade and watchtowers. The particular target of his attack was Caesar’s valuable supply of fresh water. Plutarch reports that Antonius was also thought to have shown great skill in enclosing sources of potable water behind secure barriers to deprive the enemy of it, since there were few places to find it and the ones there were tasted bad.
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In response, Caesar despatched some troops into mainland Greece and Macedonia with the intention of drawing Antonius away.
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Indeed he enjoyed some success when M. Titius and Statilius Taurus made a sudden charge on Antonius’ cavalry, defeated it and won over Philadelphos, king of Paphlagonia.
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Antonius’ tactical move, however, meant that his troops were now split on both sides of the Gulf. Agrippa took this opportunity to make ‘a sudden dash with his fleet’.
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With Antonius’ navy effectively trapped in the Gulf of Ambracia,
Agrippa’s ships were largely free to roam the adjacent Gulf of Corinth and sail down the western coast of the Peloponnese. There they harassed their adversary’s men and sank his warships and grain transports. It seems, at least to judge by his successes, that Agrippa relished the assignment. With his flotilla and troop of marines he was very effective at hit and run missions. Many of the targets were of high strategic value, which Antonius could ill afford to lose. ‘Finally, right before the eyes of Antonius and his fleet’, writes Velleius Paterculus, ‘Agrippa had stormed Leucas (Levkas)’ (where he captured numbers of enemy ships), ‘had taken Patrae’ (conquering Q. Nasidius in a sea-fight), ‘seized Corinthus’ (a strategically important city), ‘and before the final conflict had twice defeated the fleet of the enemy’.
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The island of Leucas, laying south of Actium, was a significant win for Agrippa. With vessels stationed there and in the Bay of Gomaros to the north, he could effectively run a blockade and attack any ships of Antonius’ fleet attempting to enter or leave the strait.
On land, Caesar tried to provoke Antonius to fight. In Dio’s account he would not engage:
Caesar constantly drew up his infantry in battle order in front of the enemy’s camp, often sailed against them with his ships and carried off their transports, with the object of joining battle with only such as were then present, before Antonius’ entire command should assemble. For this very reason the latter was unwilling to stake his all on the cast, and he had recourse for select days to feeling out his enemy and to skirmish until he had gathered his legions.
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Orosius’ report presents a very different picture in which ‘Antonius decided to hasten the beginning of the battle’, but ‘after quickly drawing up his troops, he advanced toward Caesar’s camp but suffered defeat’.
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Failing to make any significant impact on his opponent, three days later Antonius evacuated his second camp on the Epirot side of the Gulf and withdrew under the cover of night to his main base near Actium.
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In Antonius’ headquarters the presence of Kleopatra seemed more to hinder than to help him. In the wake of these military reverses and dwindling grain supplies, Antonius called a council of war. According to Dio, the Egyptian queen – allegedly unsettled by bad auguries – won the day with her advice that they should entrust the best strategic positions to garrisons, and that the rest should depart to Egypt with herself and Antonius.
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Her fears affected Antonius, who began to suspect everyone else who remained of scheming against him: among many, he tortured and put to death Iamblichus, king of a tribe of the Arabians, and handed over senator Q. Postumius to be ripped apart.
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As the last days of August counted down, Antonius suffered several high profile defections, among them the client kings of Galatia Amyntas of Galatia, who had been sent into Macedonia and Thrace to recruit mercenaries, and Deiotaros (Deiotarus); and the Romans Domitius Ahenobarbus, smarting from unrelenting abuse by the queen, and Q. Dellius.
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A practical man of many years’ military experience and consul of 32 BCE, Ahenobarbus was a loyal friend of Antonius, fighting with him
in Armenia, but even he could no longer stand having his advice and recommendations overruled by the woman from Egypt.
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He sneaked out of the camp and slipped over the channel where he presented himself to Caesar. Deeply upset by the betrayal, nevertheless Antonius respected the man and had his personal effects and slaves sent over in another boat.
For months the adversaries had played a high-stakes waiting game. ‘The two leaders neither were dismayed nor relaxed in their preparations for war,’ writes Dio, ‘but spent the winter in spying upon and annoying each other.’
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Yet this stalemate could not last indefinitely. It served neither side’s interests to drag the war out through another winter. Both needed a resolution to the conflict. Caesar and Agrippa were fully intent on ending the conflict at Actium. With their opponent holed up in the Gulf of Ambracia here was an opportunity either to inflict a crushing military defeat, or at a minimum to leverage their position to negotiate a diplomatic settlement. According to Dio’s account, Caesar’s plan was to let his adversaries sail out of the strait and then to chase after them with his swifter fleet to capture Antonius and Kleopatra without bloodshed.
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It was Agrippa who feared their opponents would flee under sail and get away.
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On the basis of his admiral’s advice Caesar withdrew his own proposal.