Barry Strauss, a Cornell classics professor and Hoover Institu­tion fellow, has the rare ability of being able to bring ancient history to life in a way that is both profoundly learned and highly readable. This book is about the struggle between Octavian (later Emperor Augustus) and Mark Antony and his wife Cleopatra, so the story essentially covers the history of Rome from the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 b.c to the suicides of the married couple in 30 b.c. With so much of the detail of that well-trodden ground still highly disputed, especially in the areas of motivations, battle tactics, and weapons technology, Strauss takes care to guide and advise his readers without lecturing them, while giving them the reassurance of being in the hands of someone with comprehensive knowledge of both the ancient sources and modern interpretations and theories.

In addition to retelling one of the epic stories of our civilization, Strauss provides a revisionist take on the 14 years that did indeed create the Roman Empire out of a failed-state Republic that all sides paid lip-service to before it collapsed so ignominiously. Because of his victory and 44-year subsequent rule as emperor, Octavian ensured that almost all the published records of the Roman civil war were written by his acolytes and hired hack writers. Yet for Strauss the heroes of the struggle are clearly the doomed Antony and Cleopatra.

Strauss rightly admires Plutarch, who wrote over a century after the war, but does not adopt his pro-Augustus stance as so many subsequent historians have, any more than he takes literally Cicero’s attacks on Mark Antony in the Philippics, pointing out that Cicero had executed Antony’s stepfather during the Catiline Conspiracy in 63 b.c. Other important sources such as Cassius Dio are viewed through a similarly critical lens, ultimately forcing us to appraise the war anew.

Even the moment of the climactic naval battle of Actium in 31 b.c., in which Octavian and his brilliant gen­eral Marcus Agrippa destroyed Antony’s fleet, is portrayed as a “brave, risky, but necessary” breakout attempt by Antony that deliberately sacrificed most of his ships in order for him and Cleopatra to escape to Egypt with around a third of his fleet and almost all their treasure, to fight another day. Two thousand years of historians’ accusations of betrayal are rejected by Strauss in a believable apologia in which he argues that such ruthlessness was common to ancient statesmen, and there was little point in the entire fleet being lost.

Actium was a truly terrible battle: Corpses were used to try to check the flames on board ships; men committed suicide on burning vessels or were shot by arrows when they took off their armor to try to swim away; others were speared in the water, and “some al­legedly were eaten alive by denizens of the deep. Sharks are no longer common in the Mediterranean, but they were in ancient times, and they attacked humans.”

Strauss is particularly good at emphasizing the sheer noisiness of a naval battle of the day. Recounting a Sicilian battle of 36 b.c., he writes of

the shouts of the rowers, the loud cries of the helmsmen, and the exhortations of the generals. As the soldiers leaped on to the deck of an enemy ship, they cried the watchword to their comrades in order to try to identify one another. There was the twang of arrows, the hissing of javelins, the detonation of catapults as they discharged their load, the whoosh of stones in the air, and the crash of their landing. A violent and rending crash of a ship’s beak taking a bite out of the enemy accompanied each ramming. A splash marked the sound of each man jumping into the sea to try to save his life.

Despite the fact that Octavian’s fleet outnumbered Antony’s by two to one at Actium, and most readers will know the outcome of one of history’s most famous battles, Strauss somehow manages to maintain the suspense and tension until its end.

Another welcome revisionist aspect to this book is the agency that Strauss gives to the women of the time — principally Cleopatra herself but also the Romans Fulvia, Julia, Atia, Calpurnia, Octavia, and Livia — who emerge as far more important stateswomen than in typical histories of the period. These women clearly had far more influence as advisers, propagandists, and matriarchs in moments of crisis than is suggested by the mere walk-on roles that have been ascribed to them by historians hitherto.

Strauss considers Cleopatra to have been “one of history’s greatest female statesmen,” noting, “After two centuries of decline and defeat, she turned around her country’s fate. At home, she pre­sided over prosperity.” He points out that she was the first Egyptian monarch in three centuries actually to speak Egyptian and that she reclaimed most of the lost territories of the Ptolemaic Empire. “She was the greatest Mace­donian ruler since Alexander,” he concludes in a powerful eulogy, “and the greatest Egyptian queen since Hatshep­sut.”

She was badly let down by the Roman men in her life: Julius Caesar by getting assassinated so negligently despite being warned by Calpurnia and others on the Ides of March, and Mark Antony, who, after his victory over Caesar’s assassins at Philippi in 42 b.c., badly underestimated Octavian. For all that Strauss rightly emphasizes quite how many of the ancient sources and a surprisingly large number of modern ones parrot the Augustan party line, he has his own strong criticisms of Mark Antony, who was comprehensively outclassed in the land-based part of the Actium campaign, especially by Agrippa.

Antony nonetheless receives a eu­logy from Professor Strauss scarcely less fulsome than Cleopatra’s. “Everyone loved Antony,” he writes, “from the wo­men who adored him to the men who stuck by him. He was a strong man who shared his soldiers’ suffering and commanded their loyalty.” It is a generous portrayal — even if Antony clearly did not share his sailors’ suffering at Actium. Strauss adds that “Antony was a great diplomat, forging a lasting settlement in the Roman East.” Yet despite being a great man, Antony was “living in an age of giants. It wasn’t enough to keep him from meeting his match, and repeatedly.”

Octavian emerges from this book as a monster, though a highly politically astute one who recognized his own limitations, especially in the military sphere. Comparisons to Stalin are not made, but they abound. “From 44 to 30 b.c.,” Strauss writes of Octavian, “he had fought, lied, cheated, and trampled on the law. It is estimated that he killed more than a hundred senators.”

As well as being a ruthless manipu­lator and a master of the weaknesses of others, Octavian was tremendously lucky at key moments. Once the Roman general Quintus Dellius had defected and revealed Antony’s battle plan for Ac­tium to Octavian, for example, Antony did nothing to alter it. Similarly, the outbreaks of malaria and dysentery in Antony’s camp did more to win the war than Octavian’s generalship. Moreover, it is hard to believe that had Julius Caesar appointed his trusted old comrade Antony as his successor in his will, rather than his untested 18-year-old great-nephew Octavian, the events so superbly recounted in this fine book would ever have happened.