Velleius Paterculus and the Battle of Actium

The paper aims at analyzing the treatment by Velleius Paterculus of the battle of Actium and of the end of Antony and Cleopatra in the year 30 in Egypt: the purpose is to compare the main features of the Velleian narrative with other historical and also poetic traditions, in order to point out its peculiarities. The traditions that Velleius could find on the facts regarding the battle of Actium and on those immediately following that event included: versions aligned with the Augustan ideology and with the features that the first princeps considered appropriate for conveying the desired reading of history; versions hostile to Augustus; versions not hostile to Augustus, but marked by an independent reconstruction of the events, with the inclusion of details that weren’t suitable to highlight the glory of the winner. Through such analysis, it appears that in Velleius’narrative, behind the tendency to synthesis, obliterations and alterations of causal connections can often be detected; so the historian was able to characterize his own version as favorable to Augustus, whose propaganda he transposes, moreover seeing him already at Actium as leader of the Iulianae Partes in a battle regarded as decisive, while to Antony and Cleopatra is only left a heroic suicide, in such a way to assert – at the same manner as those previous poetic traditions aligned with Augustus – that the victory had not been brought back against enfeebled cowards.