ign as the first
of the Roman Emperors, under the name and title of Augustus.

It brought to a close the series of civil wars which followed the murder of
his grand-uncle, Julius Caesar. The triumvirs, Mark Antony, Octavian, and
Lepidus, had avenged the assassination by a wholesale proscription of their
political opponents, all of whom indiscriminately they charged with the
guilt of the deed; and had defeated Brutus and Cassius on the plains of
Philippi. They had parcelled out the Empire among them, and then quarrelled
over the spoil. Octavian, the dictator of the West, had expelled Lepidus
from the African provinces that had been assigned to him as his territory.
Antony was now his only remaining rival. Caesar's veteran lieutenant held
the Eastern provinces of the Empire. During the years he had spent in the
East he had become half Orientalized, under the influence of the famous
Queen of Egypt, Cleopatra, for whose sake he had dismissed his wife
Octavia, the sister of Octavian, in order that the Egyptian might take her
place. He had appeared beside her in Alexandria wearing the insignia of the
Egyptian god Osiris, while Cleopatra wore those of Isis. Coins and medals
were struck bearing their effigies as joint rulers of the East, and the
loyalty of Rome and the West to Octavian was confirmed by the sense of
indignation which every patriotic Roman felt at the news that Antony spoke
openly of making Alexandria and not Rome the centre of the Empire, and of
founding with the Egyptian Queen a new dynasty that would rule East and
West from the Nile.

The question to be decided in the civil war was therefore not merely
whether Octavian or Antony was to be the ruler of the Roman world, but
whether Eastern or Western influences were to predominate in shaping its
destinies. Antony was preparing to carry the war into Italy, and assembled
on the western shores of Greece an army made up of the Roman legions of the
eastern provinces and large contingents of Oriental allies. During the
winter of B.C. 32-31, he had his head-quarters at Patrae (now Patras), on
the Gulf of Corinth, and his army, scattered in detachments among the coast
towns, was kept supplied with grain by ships from Alexandria. Antony's war
fleet, strengthened by squadrons of Phoenician and Egyptian galleys, lay
safely in the land-locked Ambracian Gulf (now the Gulf of Arta), approached
by a winding strait that could easily be defended.

But Octavian had determined to