Who won the Battle of Philippi?
At Philippi in Macedonia in October 42 BC, Mark Antony and the young Octavian defeated Marcus Brutus and Gaius Cassius, the leaders of the plot that had murdered Julius Caesar two years earlier. It was fought in two battles: in the first Cassius killed himself after a partial defeat, and in the second Brutus was beaten and did the same. Their deaths ended the cause of the Roman Republic and cleared the way for the rule of the Caesars.
Two years after the daggers of the Ides of March, the men who killed Julius Caesar and the men who avenged him brought their armies to the plain of Philippi in northern Greece. What was decided there, in two great battles fought three weeks apart, was nothing less than whether Rome would remain a republic or pass forever to one-man rule.3
After the Ides of March
When Julius Caesar was murdered in 44 BC, his heir Octavian and his lieutenant Mark Antony set aside their own rivalry, joined Lepidus in the Second Triumvirate, and hunted down Caesar's enemies in a wave of proscriptions that claimed even Cicero. The chief assassins, Marcus Brutus and Gaius Cassius, had meanwhile gathered a huge army and the wealth of the eastern provinces. In 42 BC the triumvirs crossed the Adriatic to destroy them.4
When was the Battle of Philippi fought?
Philippi was two battles, both fought in October 42 BC. Britannica dates the first to 3 October and the second to 23 October. The ancient historians give no calendar dates, but Plutarch, Appian and Cassius Dio all describe two separate battles some weeks apart.5
Two details in the ancient accounts fit that timetable. Plutarch and Appian both put the first battle on Cassius's birthday. Plutarch also says that Brutus did not hear of his fleet's victory in the Adriatic, won, according to Appian, on the same day as the first battle, until twenty days later; had he known, Plutarch believed, he would never have risked a second battle.6
The armies at Philippi
The forces that met near Philippi were vast: nineteen legions on the triumviral side and, by different counts, seventeen or nineteen for the Liberators, with tens of thousands more auxiliaries and cavalry, among the largest Roman armies ever to face each other. Brutus and Cassius took strong high ground astride the Via Egnatia and fortified two camps, planning to let hunger and time do their work rather than risk everything on a battle.7
Appian describes the ground in detail. The two Liberator camps stood on neighboring hills joined by a single fortified line, with marshes stretching toward the sea on one side and roadless gorges on the other. Their supply depot was on the island of Thasos and their warships lay at Neapolis, the modern port of Kavala. Antony, arriving first, camped boldly on the low plain below them, drawing water from freshly dug wells and fuel from the marsh.8
How many soldiers fought at Philippi?
Roughly 200,000 men: Britannica puts each army at about 100,000. Appian gives 19 legions on each side, the Liberators' not quite at full strength, with 13,000 horsemen against 20,000.9
Even the ancient writers disagreed about which army was larger. Plutarch says Brutus's army was much smaller than Octavian's, though splendidly equipped, with most of its armor decorated in gold and silver. Cassius Dio says the opposite: the Liberators had more men, but weaker troops. Plutarch and Appian agree that Roman armies of such size had never met before. For how the legions of the period were organized and fought, see our guide to how the Roman legion worked.10
Losses can only be estimated. For the first battle Appian, by his own admission guessing, puts the dead on Cassius's side, slave shield-bearers included, at about 8,000 and those on Octavian's side at twice that. Plutarch also gives 8,000 for the Liberators and, following Messala, who fought for Brutus, more than double that for the enemy.11
The first battle
For days the Liberators refused to come down. Antony, short of supplies, tried to go around them. For ten days, Appian says, his men secretly built a causeway through the reed marsh on Cassius's flank to cut the road to the Liberators' depot, and Cassius answered with a cross wall of his own running from his camp toward the sea.12
On about 3 October Antony forced the issue. He stormed Cassius's lines and overran his camp, while on the other wing Brutus's troops, charging without waiting for orders, broke through and took Octavian's camp, Octavian himself, who was sick, being absent from it. In the dust and confusion Cassius, cut off and wrongly believing the whole army was lost, had one of his own men kill him. It was in truth a drawn day, but the Liberators had lost their ablest soldier. On the same day, the Liberators' fleet destroyed a convoy in the Adriatic that was carrying reinforcements, including two legions, to the triumvirs.13
The second battle
For three weeks Brutus held his position, waiting for hunger to drive off the triumvirs, whose own supplies were running short, while his men grew restless. Around 23 October, pressed by his own officers, he came down to fight again. This time Antony and Octavian broke his line and his army disintegrated. Brutus escaped into the hills with a few companions and, rather than be taken, fell on his own sword.14
The ancient accounts fill in the picture. In the days before the battle the triumvirs seized a hill close to Cassius's old camp with four legions and stretched their lines toward the sea to cut the Liberators' supply road, and desertions made Brutus fear for his army's loyalty. The armies met in the middle of the afternoon, at about the ninth hour. Brutus's own wing again drove the enemy back, but the other wing, stretched thin to avoid being outflanked, gave way, and the victors poured through the gap and surrounded him. About 14,000 of his men later surrendered.15
How did Brutus and Cassius die?
Both chose death over capture. After the first battle Cassius, unable to see clearly what was happening and believing the worst, had his freedman Pindarus kill him. After the second, Brutus spent the night cut off in the hills and then died on his own sword, helped, in some accounts, by his friend Strato.16
Cassius's death was a mistake. Plutarch and Appian tell how he saw a body of horsemen riding toward him and sent his friend Titinius to find out who they were. They were Brutus's men, and they greeted Titinius with cheers, but Cassius took the noise for his capture, withdrew into a tent and gave his neck to Pindarus. Titinius returned to find him dead and killed himself; Cassius Dio tells the same story of a centurion. Brutus wept over the body and called Cassius the last of the Romans.17
In Plutarch's account Brutus died in the night after the second battle; in Appian's, on the following day. Plutarch, drawing on the account of Brutus's friend Volumnius, says he begged his companions in turn to help him die, then fell on his sword; some, he adds, said that Strato held the blade for him. In Appian, Strato drives the sword into his side, and in Cassius Dio, Brutus simply asks a bystander to kill him. Antony covered the body with his own costly purple cloak and sent the ashes to Brutus's mother, Servilia. Suetonius says the head was sent to Rome to be thrown at the feet of Caesar's statue, while Cassius Dio says it was lost at sea in a storm on the way.18
Did Antony or Octavian win at Philippi?
Both commanded the winning side, but the battlefield victory was Antony's. Octavian was ill throughout the campaign. In the first battle his camp was overrun and he survived only because he had left it. Plutarch writes that Antony was everywhere victorious, and Suetonius says the captives saluted Antony as their general while abusing Octavian.19
Octavian told his own version in his memoirs. Plutarch and Appian both report that he wrote of a dream, in Plutarch's version a friend's, warning him to leave the camp that day; Suetonius, by contrast, says that in the first battle Octavian was driven from his camp and only just escaped to Antony's wing, and that after the victory he treated the prisoners so cruelly that they answered him with open abuse. Yet it was Octavian who would be the real winner in the long run.20
The end of the Republic
Philippi was one of the largest and most decisive battles of the Roman civil wars. With Brutus and Cassius dead, the cause of the Republic was finished; no one would again raise an army to restore it. The Roman world was carved up among the victors, and the only question left was which of them would rule it, a rivalry between Antony and Octavian that would run on until Actium in 31 BC and the rise of Octavian as the emperor Augustus.21
The ancient historians saw the same turning point. Appian, writing under the emperors, judged that Rome's form of government was settled chiefly by the work of that day. Cassius Dio thought that Philippi, unlike the civil wars that followed, was fought over liberty itself, and that afterward the Romans would fight only over which master to obey. For Philippi's place among Rome's other decisive battles, see our guide to the greatest battles of ancient Rome.22
What happened after the Battle of Philippi?
The victors divided the Roman world. Antony went east to raise the money promised to the soldiers; Octavian returned to Italy to settle the veterans on confiscated land. The land seizures led to the Perusine War of 41 to 40 BC, and the rivalry between Antony and Octavian ended only at Actium in 31 BC.23
Lepidus, the third triumvir, was pushed aside. Accused of dealing with Sextus Pompeius, he lost his provinces and was later given Africa instead. In the east Antony met Cleopatra, the start of the alliance that would end at Actium. In Italy, Appian says, crowds of dispossessed farmers filled the Forum and the temples in protest. Antony's brother Lucius Antonius, backed by Antony's wife Fulvia, took up arms, was besieged in Perusia (Perugia) and starved into surrender; Britannica dates the siege to the winter of 41 to 40 BC. Soon afterward the two men made a fresh division of the empire, by Appian's account drawing the line at Scodra in Illyria, with everything east of it going to Antony and everything west to Octavian. Nine years later their rivalry was settled at sea off Actium, and the victory made Octavian Augustus, Rome's first emperor.24
Where is Philippi, and what is there today?
Philippi lies in eastern Macedonia, in northeastern Greece, near the modern port of Kavala. The battle was fought on the plain west of the city. The ruins of the ancient city, which stands on the Via Egnatia at the foot of its acropolis, have been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2016.25
Settlers from Thasos founded the city as Krinides. Philip II of Macedon took it over, fortified it and named it after himself. After the battle it became a Roman colony, later named Colonia Augusta Julia Philippensis, and was rebuilt as what UNESCO calls a small Rome. In 49 or 50 AD the apostle Paul preached there, and Greek tradition holds that he founded the first Christian church on European soil; the remains of the city's great basilicas and of the Octagon, its cathedral, built over an earlier church dedicated to Paul, survive among the ruins. Earthquakes and Slavic raids led to the lower city being abandoned early in the 7th century. The battlefield itself is not part of the World Heritage Site: two battlefield components west of the city were withdrawn from the nomination on the advice of ICOMOS, UNESCO's advisory body.26
