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The War That Was Never About Love: Octavian's Propaganda War
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Octavian's war against Cleopatra wasn't a romantic tragedy — it was a precision propaganda campaign designed to erase a rival and crown an emperor. This chapter reveals how a calculated smear turned history's most powerful queen into a myth.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Most people come to this chapter expecting a love story. What they find instead is a political execution.
By the mid-thirties BCE, the Roman world had already endured decades of civil war. Caesar's assassination, the chaos that followed, the wars between Octavian, Antony, and Lepidus.
Octavian didn't frame this as a conflict between two Roman men competing for power. That would have looked like exactly what it was: another civil war.
In thirty-two BCE, Octavian made his move. He obtained and publicly read what he claimed was Antony's actual will, held by the Vestal Virgins in Rome.
The period between the declaration of war and the Battle of Actium was one of mounting pressure on both sides. Antony's Roman supporters began to peel away.
On the second of September, thirty-one BCE, the fleets met off the coast of Actium. The battle that followed was the hinge point of the ancient world.
Back in Alexandria, the two of them made a series of moves that were part strategic calculation and part desperate improvisation. Cleopatra began fortifying her position.
With Antony dead, Cleopatra's options narrowed to almost nothing. Octavian's forces entered Alexandria without serious resistance.
Octavian returned to Rome and celebrated his triumph. He paraded representations of Cleopatra through the streets, including an effigy with a snake on her arm.
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