Review: Barry Strauss’s “The War That Made the Roman Empire”

“Barry Strauss, America’s foremost popular classicist, brings the story of Actium to life in ways that rival and surpass Shakespeare’s tragedy Antony and Cleopatra and Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra…”

“High on a hill astride a peninsula lying between the sea and wide and marshy gulf, in a seldom-visited corner of western Greece, stand the ruins of one of history’s most important but least acknowledged war memorials.” It is easy to forget war memorials scattered across the Mediterranean basin. After all, the ruins of cities, memorials, and ships dot the body of water sometimes called “the sea at the center of the world.” But this ruined war memorial is deserving of our attention, for our civilization is the direct descendant of the event it commemorated: the Battle of Actium.

In 31 B.C., over 600 ships built of wood and bronze and over 200,000 soldiers gathered on the western slopes and waters of Greece to contest for the future of Rome and the Western world. On one side was Octavian, the future emperor Augustus, and his entourage, which included the faithful Agrippa. On the other side was Mark Antony, one of Julius Caesar’s faithful lieutenants made famous by Shakespeare, and the most famous woman of antiquity, Cleopatra. Actium was one of the decisive battles on which the “hinge of history” would turn.

Barry Strauss, America’s foremost popular classicist, brings the story of Actium to life in ways that rival and surpass Shakespeare’s tragedy Antony and Cleopatra and Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra, which starred Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. The Battle of Actium, despite its ruined monument, is worth remembering. The cultural memory of Rome, its empire, and its gifts—good and bad—to the broader Western world still flicker its light. Two millennia later, most of us still vaguely know something about this battle.