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Cleopatra under the red canopy, already through the line. The treasury of Egypt is in the holds behind her.

The last war of the Roman Republic was declared against a foreign queen, because that was easier to sell. Antony held the East with Cleopatra's fleet and Cleopatra's money; Octavian held Italy, and he had seized Antony's will from the Vestal Virgins and read it to the Senate: legacies to Cleopatra's children, and instructions that Antony be buried beside her in Alexandria. Rome could forgive a civil war, but not an address. By the summer of 31 BC Antony's grand fleet sat blockaded inside the Ambracian Gulf on the west coast of Greece, while Octavian's admiral Agrippa picked off the supply ports and malaria worked through the rowing benches. Antony burned the ships he could no longer crew. On 2 September he came out to fight, or to leave; the fleets have argued about which ever since, because his captains had stowed the sails aboard, and you carry sails to run, not to battle. For hours the heavy quinqueremes ground against Agrippa's lighter line. Early in the afternoon the wind came round, and Cleopatra's squadron of 60, waiting in the rear with the war treasury in the holds, raised sails and went through the middle of the fight and out to sea. Antony left his flagship, boarded a faster ship, and followed with a few dozen more. Plutarch spent one furious sentence on it: he was dragged along after the woman as if he had grown into her flesh. The fleet he abandoned fought on into the evening without knowing it was leaderless, then surrendered or burned. The nineteen legions on shore waited a week for orders and went over in a body. A year later Octavian took Alexandria; Antony and Cleopatra managed their exits by sword and, the story says, by snake; Egypt became a province, and the man who had been Octavian became, within four years, Augustus. On the headland above the battle he built a Victory City, Nicopolis, with a monument faced in the bronze rams of captured warships. The rams are gone, but archaeologists still count the empty sockets. Lorenzo A. Castro painted the battle in 1672 in the only navy he knew: baroque galleys with gilded sterns, streaming pennants, an admiral's barge got up like a floating throne room. In his left foreground Cleopatra already goes, canopied in red behind a mermaid figurehead, prow toward Egypt; in his right, sailors cling to a capsized gilded wreck. The canvas hangs in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich among the fleet actions, where it is the oldest war in the room.