The Battle of Actium

The event

Caesar's assassination did not restore the Republic — it simply set his heirs against each other. The Second Triumvirate that avenged his death soon fractured, and Rome's Mediterranean world split into an uneasy division of power between Octavian, Caesar's adopted grandnephew and heir in the west, and Mark Antony, allied with and romantically involved with Cleopatra, the last Ptolemaic queen of Egypt, in the east.

Octavian skillfully framed the coming conflict not as another Roman civil war but as a defense of Rome against a foreign queen who, propaganda claimed, had seduced a Roman general away from his duty. The two sides finally met at sea off the western coast of Greece near Actium in September 31 BC. Antony and Cleopatra's larger but more cumbersome fleet was outmaneuvered and devastated by Octavian's admiral Agrippa; Antony and Cleopatra broke through the blockade and fled to Egypt, where within a year both took their own lives rather than be paraded through Rome in Octavian's triumph.

With Antony dead and Egypt annexed as a Roman province, Octavian stood without rival over the entire Mediterranean world for the first time in Roman history. Within a few years the Senate would grant him the title 'Augustus,' inaugurating the age of the emperors — and it is this same man, ruling in unchallenged peace after Actium, who would one day order the census mentioned in Luke 2:1 that brought Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem.

Other witnesses

• Plutarch, Life of Antony 66-77
• Suetonius, Life of Augustus 17