1983 Yitzhak Shamir (Herut) endorsed by Menachem Begin for Israelli
PM
1969 Unions want wage and price controls.
Sensing a slide in the nation's economy, long-standing AFL-CIO
leader George Meany calls on the government in 1969 to implement
wage and price controls. It wasn't until two years later that
President Nixon heeded his advice and installed a wage and price
freeze. However, the move did little to revive the slumping
economy. |
1963 Alabama troopers prevent
desegregation. . . for 8 days ^top^
Governor George C. Wallace, 44,
prevents the racial integration of Tuskegee High School in Tuskegee,
Alabama, by encircling the building with state troopers. Eight
days later, President John F. Kennedy federalized the Alabama
National Guard and called them to the area, forcing Wallace
to abandon his attempt to block the desegregation of Alabama
public schools.
George Wallace, one of the most
controversial politicians in US history, was elected governor
of Alabama in 1962 under an ultra-segregationist platform. In
his 1963 inaugural address, Wallace promised his white followers:
"Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!"
However, the promise lasted only six months. In June of the
same year, under federal pressure, he was forced to end his
blockade of the University of Alabama and allow the enrollment
of African-American students.
Despite his failures in slowing
the accelerating civil-rights movement in the South, Wallace
became a national spokesman for resistance to racial change,
and in 1964 entered the race for the US presidency. Although
defeated in most Democratic presidential primaries he entered,
his modest successes demonstrated the extent of popular backlash
against segregation. In 1968, he made another strong run as
the candidate of the American Independent party, and managed
to get on the ballot in all fifty states. On election day, he
drew ten million votes from all across the country.
In 1972, Governor Wallace returned
to the Democratic party for his third presidential campaign,
and under a slightly more moderate platform was showing promising
returns when he was shot by Arthur Bremer on 15 May 1972. Three
others were wounded, and Wallace was permanently paralyzed from
the waist down. The next day, while fighting for his life in
a hospital, he won major primary victories in Michigan and Maryland.
However, Wallace remained in the hospital for several months,
bringing his third presidential campaign to an irrevocable end.
After his recovery, he faded from national prominence and made
a poor showing in his fourth and final presidential campaign
in 1979.
During the 1980s, Wallace's politics
shifted dramatically, especially in regard to race. In 1983,
he was elected Alabama governor for the last time with the overwhelming
support of African-American voters. Over the next four years,
the man who had promised segregation forever made more African-American
political appointments than any other figure in Alabama history.
He died on 13 September 1998. |
1962 The Soviet Union agrees to send arms to Cuba to help it meet
"threats from aggressive imperialist elements".
1956 Tennessee National Guardsmen halt rioters protesting the admission
of 12 African-Americans to schools in Clinton.
1946 O'Neill's The Iceman
Cometh opens on Broadway ^top^
Hailed by many critics as Eugene
O’Neill’s finest work, The Iceman Cometh opens at the
Martin Beck Theater. The play, about desperate tavern bums clinging
to illusion as a remedy for despair, would be the last O’Neill
play to be produced on Broadway before the author’s death in
1953. Like many of his other works, the play drew on O’Neill’s
firsthand experiences with all-night dive bars and desperate
characters.
Although his actor father sent
him to top prep schools and to Princeton, O’Neill dropped out
of college after a year. He went to sea, searched for gold in
South America, haunted the waterfront bars in Buenos Aires,
Liverpool, and New York, and married briefly. He drank heavily.
In 1912, when O’Neill was nearly 30, he came down with tuberculosis
and was sent to a sanitarium in Connecticut. While recovering,
he wrote his first play and decided to devote himself to drama.
He began churning out gritty, realistic plays about lives on
the margins of society. He wrote nine plays from 1913 to 1914,
six from 1916 to 1917, and four in 1918. In 1917, a Greenwich
Village theater group, the Provincetown Players, performed his
one-act play Thirst. The group became closely associated
with O’Neill’s future work. In 1920, his first full-length play,
Beyond the Horizon, was produced on Broadway.
Between 1920 and 1943, O’Neill
wrote 20 long plays and several short ones. His work was groundbreaking
in its use of slangy, everyday dialogue, its dingy, run-down
settings, and his experimental use of light, sound, and casting
to set an emotional tone.
O’Neill’s family life had been
very unhappy. His father became rich playing just one theater
role, the Count of Monte Cristo, for many years and never succeeded
in becoming a more serious actor. His mother used morphine,
and his beloved older brother became an alcoholic. All three
died between 1920 and 1923. O’Neill wrote several autobiographical
plays about his family after they died, including A Moon
for the Misbegotten (produced in 1957) and Long Day’s
Journey Into Night (produced in 1956). Other major works
include The Hairy Ape (1923) and Mourning Becomes
Electra (1931).
Although O’Neill was an outgoing
host with an active social life during his second marriage,
he became reclusive during his third. In the 1940s, he developed
a degenerative nervous disease, and he died in Boston in 1953.
Many critics call O’Neill America’s first major playwright.
|
1945 Ho Chi Minh declares Vietnamese
Independence ^top^
Hours after the unconditional
Japanese surrender in World War II, Ho Chi Minh, 65, the veteran
Vietnamese Communist, proclaims the independent Democratic Republic
of Vietnam. Near the end of World War I, Ho Chi Minh emigrated
to France where, in 1920, he became a founding member of the
French Communist Party. He later traveled to the Soviet Union,
where he became a Comitern member and studied revolutionary
tactics.
Returning to East Asia in the
mid-1920s, he set about organizing revolutionaries in China,
and with the outbreak of World War II, returned to his Vietnamese
homeland. He organized a Vietnamese independence movement the
Viet Minh and raised a guerilla army to oppose the Japanese
occupation of Vietnam.
On 02 September 1945, Ho proclaims
the independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam, hoping to prevent
the French from reclaiming their former colonial possession.
In 1946, he would be elected president of Vietnam, but in the
same year, grudgingly accept the French demand that Vietnam
exist as an autonomous state within the French Union.
Nevertheless, fighting between
Vietnamese nationalists and the French broke out soon afterwards,
and in 1949, the French named Bao Dai their puppet emperor of
all Vietnam. In the same year, with military and economic assistance
of newly Communist China, Ho Chi Minh began a war of resistance
against French and Southern Vietnamese forces, who were armed
largely by the US
In 1954, the French suffered,
from the forces of general Giap, a major defeat at Dien Bien
Phu in northwest Vietnam, prompting the division of Vietnam
along the seventeenth parallel at the conference of Geneva.
Ho Chi Minh became president of North Vietnam and set about
organizing a Communist guerrilla movement in the South, the
"National Liberation Front," also known as the Viet Cong. Ho
and the Viet Cong successfully opposed a series of ineffectual
US-backed South Vietnam regimes and beginning in 1963, withstood
a decade-long military intervention by the United States. Ho
Chi Minh died in 1969, the day after the 14th anniversary of
his declaration of independence, and six years later Vietnam
was reunited as an independent Communist nation.
Vietnam declares its independence
and Nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh proclaims himself first president.
The proclamation paraphrased
the US Declaration of Independence in declaring, "All men
are born equal: the Creator has given us inviolable rights,
life, liberty, and happiness!" and was cheered by an enormous
crowd gathered in Hanoi's Ba Dinh Square. It would be 30 years,
however, before Ho's dream of a united, communist Vietnam became
reality. Born in 1890, Ho Chi Minh left Vietnam as a cook on
a French steamer in 1911. After several years as a seaman, he
lived in London and then moved to France, where he became a
founding member of the French Communist Party in 1920. He later
traveled to the Soviet Union, where he studied revolutionary
tactics and took an active role in the Communist International.
In 1924, he went to China, where he set about organizing exiled
Vietnamese communists. Expelled by China in 1927, he traveled
extensively before returning to Vietnam in 1941. There, he organized
a Vietnamese guerrilla organization the Viet Minh to fight
for Vietnamese independence. Japan occupied French Indochina
in 1940 and collaborated with French officials loyal to France's
Vichy regime. Ho, meanwhile, made contact with the Allies and
aided operations against the Japanese in South China. In early
1945, Japan ousted the French administration in Vietnam and
executed numerous French officials.
When Japan formally surrendered
to the Allies on 02 September 1945, Ho Chi Minh felt emboldened
enough to proclaim the independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
French forces seized southern Vietnam and opened talks with
the Vietnamese communists. These talks collapsed in 1946, and
French warships bombarded the northern Vietnamese city of Haiphong,
killing thousands. In response, the Viet Minh launched an attack
against the French in Hanoi on 19 December 1945 the beginning
of the First Indochina War.
During the eight-year war, Mao
Zedong's Chinese Communists supported the Viet Minh, while the
United States aided the French and anti-communist Vietnamese
forces. In 1954, the French suffered a major defeat at Dien
Bien Phu, in northwest Vietnam, prompting peace negotiations
and the division of Vietnam along the 17th parallel at a conference
in Geneva. Vietnam was divided into northern and southern regions,
with Ho in command of North Vietnam and Emperor Bao Dai in control
of South Vietnam.
In the late 1950s, Ho Chi Minh
organized a Communist guerrilla movement in the South, called
the Viet Cong. North Vietnam and the Viet Cong successfully
opposed a series of ineffectual US-backed South Vietnam regimes
and beginning in 1964 withstood a decade-long military intervention
by the United States. Ho Chi Minh died on 02 September 1969,
25 years after declaring Vietnam's independence from France
and nearly six years before his forces succeeded in reuniting
North and South Vietnam under communist rule. Saigon, the capital
of South Vietnam, was renamed Ho Chi Minh City after it fell
to the communists in 1975. |
1945 Japan signs unconditional
surrender ending WW II. ^top^
It is still 01 September in the
US when USS Missouri hosts formal surrender of Japanese
government to Allies. Representing the Allied victors are Gen.
Douglas MacArthur, commander of the US Army forces in the Pacific,
and Adm. Chester Nimitz, commander of the US Pacific Fleet,
now promoted to the newest and highest Navy rank, fleet admiral.
Among Allied officers from all of the participating countries,
present was Lt. Gen. Jonathan Wainwright, who had taken command
of the forces in the Philippines upon MacArthur's departure
and had been recently freed from a Japanese POW camp in Manchuria.
Shigemitsu would be found guilty
of war crimes and sentenced to seven years in prison subsequent
to the surrender. The grand irony is that he had fought for
concessions on the Japanese side in order to secure an early
peace. He was paroled in 1950 and went on to become chairman
of Japan's Progressive Party.
By the summer of 1945, the defeat
of Japan was a foregone conclusion. The Japanese navy and air
force were destroyed. The Allied naval blockade of Japan and
intensive bombing of Japanese cities had left the country and
its economy devastated. At the end of June, the Americans captured
Okinawa, a Japanese island from which the Allies could launch
an invasion of the main Japanese home islands. US General
Douglas MacArthur was put in charge of the invasion, which was
code-named "Operation Olympic" and set for November 1945. The
invasion of Japan promised to be the bloodiest seaborne attack
of all time, conceivably 10 times as costly as the Normandy
invasion in terms of Allied casualties.
On 16 July, a new option became
available when the United States secretly detonated the world's
first atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert. Ten days later,
the Allies issued the Potsdam Declaration, demanding the "unconditional
surrender of all the Japanese armed forces." Failure to comply
would mean "the inevitable and complete destruction of the Japanese
armed forces and just as inevitable the utter devastation of
the Japanese homeland." On 28 July, Japanese Prime Minister
Kantaro Suzuki responded by telling the press that his government
was "paying no attention" to the Allied ultimatum. US President
Harry Truman ordered the devastation to proceed, and on 06 August,
the US B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese
city of Hiroshima, killing an estimated 80'000 and fatally wounding
thousands more. After the Hiroshima attack, a faction of Japan's
supreme war council favored acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration,
but the majority resisted unconditional surrender. On 08 August,
Japan's desperate situation took another turn for the worse
when the USSR declared war against Japan. The next day, Soviet
forces attacked in Manchuria, rapidly overwhelming Japanese
positions there, and a second US atomic bomb was dropped on
the Japanese coastal city of Nagasaki.
Just before midnight on 09 August,
Japanese Emperor Hirohito convened the supreme war council.
After a long, emotional debate, he backed a proposal by Prime
Minister Suzuki in which Japan would accept the Potsdam Declaration
"with the understanding that said Declaration does not compromise
any demand that prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as
the sovereign ruler." The council obeyed Hirohito's acceptance
of peace, and on 10 August the message was relayed to the United
States. Early on 12 August, the United States answered that
"the authority of the emperor and the Japanese government to
rule the state shall be subject to the Supreme Commander of
the Allied Powers." After two days of debate about what this
statement implied, Emperor Hirohito brushed the nuances in the
text aside and declared that peace was preferable to destruction.
He ordered the Japanese government to prepare a text accepting
surrender.
In the early hours of 15 August,
a military coup was attempted by a faction led by Major Kenji
Hatanaka. The rebels seized control of the imperial palace and
burned Prime Minister Suzuki's residence, but shortly after
dawn the coup was crushed. At noon that day, Emperor Hirohito
went on national radio for the first time to announce the Japanese
surrender. In his unfamiliar court language, he told his subjects,
"we have resolved to pave the way for a grand peace for all
the generations to come by enduring the unendurable and suffering
what is insufferable." The United States immediately accepted
Japan's surrender. President Truman appointed MacArthur to head
the Allied occupation of Japan as Supreme Commander of the Allied
Powers.
For the site of Japan's formal
surrender, Truman chose the USS Missouri, a battleship
that had seen considerable action in the Pacific and was named
after Truman's native state. MacArthur, instructed to preside
over the surrender, held off the ceremony until 02 September
in order to allow time for representatives of all the major
Allied powers to arrive. On Sunday, 02 September more than 250
Allied warships lay at anchor in Tokyo Bay. The flags of the
United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, and China fluttered
above the deck of the Missouri. Just after 09:00 Tokyo time,
Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu signed on behalf
of the Japanese government. General Yoshijiro Umezu then signed
for the Japanese armed forces, and his aides wept as he made
his signature. Supreme Commander MacArthur next signed on behalf
of the United Nations, declaring, "It is my earnest hope and
indeed the hope of all mankind that from this solemn occasion
a better world shall emerge out the blood and carnage of the
past." Ten more signatures were made, by the United States,
China, Britain, the USSR, Australia, Canada, France, the Netherlands,
and New Zealand, respectively. Admiral Chester W. Nimitz signed
for the United States. As the 20-minute ceremony ended, the
sun burst through low-hanging clouds. The most devastating war
in human history was over. |
1944 Troops of the US First Army enter Nazi-occupied Belgium.
1944 During WW II, George Bush (Sr.) ejects from a burning plane
1944
Anne Frank is sent to Auschwitz ^top^
In Nazi-occupied
Holland, thirteen-year-old Jewish diarist Anne Frank and her
family were forced to take refuge in a secret sealed-off area
of an Amsterdam warehouse on 6 July 1942. The day before, Anne's
older sister, Margot, had received a call-up notice to be deported
to a Nazi "work camp.
Born in Germany on 12 June, 1929,
Anne Frank fled to Amsterdam with
her family in 1933 to escape Nazi
persecution. In the summer of 1942, with the German occupation
of Holland underway, twelve-year-old Anne began a diary relating
her everyday experiences, her relationship with her family and
friends, and observations about the increasingly dangerous world
around her.
Just a few months later, under
threat of deportation to Nazi concentration camps, the Frank
family was forced into hiding in a secret sealed-off area of
an Amsterdam warehouse. Over the next two years, under the threat
of murder by the Nazi officers patrolling just outside the warehouse,
Anne kept a diary that is marked by poignancy, humor, and insight.
On 04 August 1944, just two months
after the successful Allied landing at Normandy, the Nazi Gestapo
discovers the Frank’s "Secret Annex. Along with another
Jewish family with whom they had shared the hiding place, and
two of the Christians who had helped shelter them, the Franks
were sent to the Nazi death camps. Anne, on 02 September 1944,
and most of the others ended up at the Auschwitz concentration
camp in Poland, although her diary was left behind, undiscovered
by the Nazis. On 30 October 1944, Anne was moved to Belsen.
In early 1945, with the Soviet
liberation of Poland underway, Anne was moved with her sister,
Margot, to the Bergen-Belsen concentration
camp in Germany. Suffering under the deplorable conditions of
the camp, the two sisters caught typhus
and died in early March, probably on 12 March in the case of
Anne.
After the war, Anne’s diary was
discovered undisturbed in the Amsterdam hiding place, and in
1947, was translated into English and published. An instant
bestseller which was eventually translated into over thirty
languages, The Diary of Anne Frank has served as a literary
testament to the six million Jews, including Anne herself, who
were silenced in the Holocaust. |
1936 1st transatlantic round-trip air flight
1930 The first non-stop airplane flight from Europe to the US
is completed in 37 hours as Capt. Dieudonné Coste and Maurice
Bellonte of France arrived in Valley Stream, N.Y., aboard the Point
d'Interrogation.
1915 Austro-German armies take Grodno, Poland.
1914 Le gouvernement français se réfugie à Bordeaux. Les troupes
allemandes ont appliqué le plan Schlieffen en contournant les défenses
françaises après avoir envahi la Belgique neutre. Elles sont à Senlis.
Le gouvernement et le président de la République Poincaré quittent par
un train spécial Paris menacé pour Bordeaux.
1901 US Vice President Theodore Roosevelt advises, "Speak softly
and carry a big stick," in a speech at the Minnesota State Fair.
It was neither the first nor the last time he would say that. During
TR's term as Governor of NY State he fought with the party bosses, particularly
Boss Tom Platt regarding a political appointment. Roosevelt held out,
although the boss threatened, to "ruin" him. In the end the boss gave
in. Looking back upon his handling of the incident, Roosevelt thought
he 'never saw a bluff carried more resolutely through to the final limit.'
And writing to a friend a few days later, he observed: 'I have always
been fond of the West African proverb: "Speak softly and carry a big
stick; you will go far." The proverb and the policy followed him
into numerous instances in his career, including his policies abroad
during his presidency.
1898 Battle of Omdurman: Sir Herbert Kitchner leads the British
to victory over the Mahdists, and takes Khartoum.
1890 The Property Tax Party At a meeting on 02 September 1890,
delegates of the Single Tax National League stuck to their ideological
guns and passed the main and only plank of their party platform: a
single tax that would be assessed on all property.
1870 At Sedan, having surrendered the previous evening, Napoléon
and 83'000 French soldiers are taken prisoner by the Prussians.
1864 The forces of Union General William T. Sherman march into
Atlanta, Georgia—one day after the Confederates evacuate the city.
1863 Siege of Fort Wagner, Charleston Harbor, South Carolina continues
1862 McClellan is restored to
full command ^top^
President Lincoln reluctantly
restores Union General George B. McClellan to full command after
General John Pope's disaster at Second Bull Run on 29 August
and 30 August. McClellan, commander of the Army of the Potomac,
saw much of his army transferred to Pope's Army of Virginia
after his failure to capture Richmond during the Seven Days'
Battles in June 1862.
Pope, who had one chance to prove
his leadership at Second Bull Run against Confederate General
Robert E. Lee, failed miserably and retreated to Washington.
He had not received any help from McClellan, who sat nearby
in Alexandria and refused to go to Pope's aid. After a summer
of defeats, the Union forces in the east were now in desperate
need of a boost in morale. Even though McClellan was, in part,
the architect of those losses, Lincoln felt he was the best
available general to raise the sagging spirits of the men in
blue. The president recognized McClellan's talent for preparing
an army to fight, even if he had proven to be a poor field commander.
Lincoln wrote to his secretary John Hay: "We must use the tools
we have. There is no man in the Army who can man these fortifications
and lick these troops into shape half as well as he. If he can't
fight himself, he excels in making others ready to fight.
There was little time for the
Union to dawdle after Second Bull Run. Lee's army lurked just
40 km from Washington, and had tried to cut off the Union retreat
at Chantilly on 01 September. Even as Lincoln restored McClellan's
command, the Confederates were starting to move northward. McClellan
was soon on the road in pursuit of Lee's army. |
1798 The Maltese people revolt against the French occupation,
forcing the French troops to take refuge in the citadel of Valetta in
Malta.
1792 Verdun, France, surrenders to the Prussian Army.
1784 English clergyman Thomas Coke, 37, is consecrated, the first
"bishop" of the Methodist Episcopal Church, by founder John Wesley. Coke
afterward journeyed to America, where he and Francis Asbury oversaw Methodism
in the Colonies.
1752 Last day of Julian calendar in Britain, British colonies
1715 Début de la régence de
Philippe d'Orléans. . ^top^
Le roi Louis XIV est mort, il
y a seulement un jour. Un testament fait de Philippe d'Orléans
le régent du royaume. Louis XIV a écrit : "Mon neveu, je vous
fait régent du royaume. Vous allez voir un roi dans le tombeau
et un autre dans le berceau. Souvenez-vous toujours de la mémoire
de l'un et des intérêts de l'autre. Mais il a subordonné son
pouvoir à celui du duc du Maine. Philippe s'élève lors de la
lecture du testament contre cette clause. Le Parlement consent
à le casser, en échange de la restitution du droit de remontrance,
supprimé soixante ans plus tôt. Pour qu'aucune contestation
soit possible, le Régent demande au nouveau roi, qui n'a que
cinq ans, de le désigner pour seul régent lors d'un lit de justice
devant le Parlement le 12 septembre suivant. |
1636 Jean de Brébeuf, Jesuit missionary, baptizes the first
Iroquois ever to become a Christian. The man, a Seneca chief, is later
tortured to death.
1415 Bohemian and Moravian nobles send a document to the Council
of Constance upholding Hus and saying they will fight
1192 Richard I ("The Lionhearted," who will become king of England)
negotiates a treaty with Muslim general Saladin to allow access of Christians
to the Holy City, ending the third crusade.
0909 A French Duke offers Berno of Blaume the land for a monastery
at Cluny. Cluny becomes a center of reform for three centuries.
31 B.C. Battle of Actium:
Octavian's victory at sea. ^top^
At the naval battle of Actium
in the Ionian Sea, Roman leader Octavian defeated the alliance
of Roman Mark Antony and Cleopatra, queen of Egypt. Antony's
fleet was burned and five thousand of his men were killed. The
Roman world, previously divided between Mark Antony and Octavian,
was now solely in the hands of Octavian, who as Augustus Caesar
becomes the first Roman emperor. Mark Antony and Cleopatra would
commit suicide in the following year.
With the assassination of Roman
dictator Julius Caesar in 44 B.C., Rome fell into civil war.
To end the fighting, a coalition the Second Triumvirate
was formed by three of the strongest belligerents. The
triumvirate was made up of Octavian, Caesar's great-nephew and
chosen heir; Mark Antony, a powerful general; and Lepidus, a
Roman statesman. The empire was divided among the three, and
Antony took up the administration of the eastern provinces.
Upon arriving in Asia Minor, he summoned Queen Cleopatra to
answer charges that she had aided his enemies. Cleopatra, ruler
of Egypt since 51 B.C., had once been Julius Caesar's lover
and had borne him a child, who she named Caesarion, meaning
"little Caesar." Cleopatra sought to seduce Antony as she had
Caesar before him, and in 41 B.C. arrived at Tarsus on a magnificent
river barge, dressed as Venus, the Roman goddess of love. Successful
in her efforts, Antony returned with her to Alexandria, where
they spent the winter in debauchery.
In 40 B.C., Antony returned to
Rome and married Octavian's sister Octavia in an effort to mend
his increasingly strained relationship with Octavian. The triumvirate,
however, continued to deteriorate. In 37 B.C. Antony separated
from Octavia and traveled to the East, arranging for Cleopatra
to join him in Syria. In their time apart, Cleopatra had borne
him twins, a son and a daughter. According to Octavian's propagandists,
the lovers were then married, which violated the Roman law restricting
Romans from marrying foreigners. Antony's disastrous military
campaign against Parthia in 36 B.C. further reduced his prestige,
but in 34 B.C. he was more successful against Armenia. To celebrate
the victory, he staged a triumphal procession through the streets
of Alexandria, in which Antony and Cleopatra sat on golden thrones,
and their children were given imposing royal titles. Many in
Rome, spurred on by Octavian, interpreted the spectacle as a
sign that Antony intended to deliver the Roman Empire into alien
hands. After several more years of tension and propaganda attacks,
Octavian declared war against Cleopatra, and therefore Antony,
in 31 B.C. Enemies of Octavian rallied to Antony's side, but
Octavian's brilliant military commanders gained early successes
against his forces.
On 02 September 31 B.C., their
fleets clashed at Actium in Greece. After heavy fighting, Cleopatra
broke from the engagement and set course for Egypt with 60 of
her ships. Antony then broke through the enemy line and followed
her. The disheartened fleet that remained surrendered to Octavian.
One week later, Antony's land forces surrendered. Although they
had suffered a decisive defeat, it was nearly a year before
Octavian reached Alexandria and again defeated Antony. In the
aftermath of the battle, Cleopatra took refuge in the mausoleum
she had had built for herself. Antony, informed that Cleopatra
was dead, stabbed himself with his sword. Before he died, another
messenger arrived, saying Cleopatra still lived. Antony was
carried to Cleopatra's retreat, where he died after bidding
her to make her peace with Octavian. When the triumphant Roman
arrived, she attempted to seduce him, but he resisted her charms.
Rather than fall under Octavian's domination, Cleopatra committed
suicide on 30 August 31 B.C., possibly by means of an asp, a
poisonous Egyptian serpent and symbol of divine royalty. Octavian
then executed Cleopatra's son, Caesarion, annexed Egypt into
the Roman Empire, and used Cleopatra's treasure to pay off his
veterans. In 27 B.C., Octavian became Augustus, the first and
arguably most successful of all Roman emperors. He ruled a peaceful,
prosperous, and expanding Roman Empire until his death in 14
A.D. at the age of 75. |
490 -BC- Phidippides runs 1st marathon, seeking aid from Sparta
vs Persia.
|