Battle of Philippi

In 42 BC the armies of Mark Antony and Octavian caught up with Brutus and Cassius, the leaders of the plot against Julius Caesar, on the plain of Philippi. The Republicans held two fortified camps on high ground with the sea at their backs, and the two sides faced each other for days. In the first battle Brutus broke through Octavian's wing and captured his camp, but Antony routed Cassius, who killed himself believing all was lost. Brutus held out for about three weeks, then risked a second battle and was beaten. He too took his own life, and the last great army of the Republic was gone.

The main accounts, by Appian and Plutarch, were written well over a century later and lean on lost contemporary memoirs, so the numbers and speeches in them are reconstruction. The ground has been studied through the line of the Roman road and the surviving city, but exactly where the two camps stood and where the lines met is argued rather than fixed. Octavian's absence from the first fight is told by his enemies as illness or cowardice and by his friends, and in his own memoir, as a warning dream, and the truth cannot now be recovered. Historians also disagree on how decisive the battle was, since the Republican cause had little left to lose after it, but the contest between Antony and Octavian was still to come.