Battle of Actium

The Battle of Actium was fought on 2 September 31 BCE off the western coast of Greece, when the fleet of Octavian, commanded by his general Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, decisively defeated the combined naval forces of Mark Antony and Cleopatra VII of Egypt, effectively ending the long civil war that followed the assassination of Julius Caesar. Antony and Cleopatra's larger but more cumbersome fleet was outmaneuvered by Agrippa's more agile ships, and when Cleopatra's squadron broke off and fled the battle, Antony abandoned his own fleet to follow her, and his remaining forces largely surrendered to Octavian in the battle's aftermath. Antony and Cleopatra fled to Alexandria, where both took their own lives the following year, in 30 BCE, after Octavian's forces captured Egypt, and with Cleopatra's death the independent Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt, the last major Hellenistic successor state to Alexander the Great's empire, was annexed as a Roman province. Actium left Octavian as the unchallenged master of the Roman world, and in 27 BCE the Senate granted him the title Augustus, marking the traditional beginning of the Roman Empire and the end of the Roman Republic.