The army of Antony, consisting of nineteen legions and twelve thousand cavalry, and numerous auxiliaries, Cilicians, Paphlagonians, Cappadocians, Jews, Medes, Arabs, amounted to one hundred and ten thousand men. His fleet numbered nearly five hundred vessels of three, five, eight, and ten banks of oars. These last, built in Egypt, were veritable floating fortresses, surmounted with towers and furnished with powerful war-engines. Octavius had eighty thousand foot soldiers recruited in Italy, Sicily, Spain, and Gaul, ten thousand horse, and but two hundred and fifty vessels, triremes with rostra and light Liburnian galleys in about equal numbers. If the land forces were about of equal effective strength the disproportion between the naval forces was immense; but the ships of Octavius made up for their inferiority of numbers by their superiority of manœuvring, and the excellence of their crews, who had all been with Agrippa during the long Sicilian war. On the contrary, Antony’s sailors were comparatively few, and most of them were going into battle for the first time; his heavy ships were clumsy in their evolutions,—as the hyperbolical Florus expressed it: “The sea groaned under their weight, and the wind exhausted itself in moving them.” The army of Antony occupied the northern point of Acarnania, with a strong detachment on the coast of Epirus, which was directly opposite. Firmly entrenched within defenses raised during the winter, he commanded the narrow passage into the Gulf of Ambracia in which his fleet was moored. Octavius had pitched his camp in Epirus, at a short distance from the advanced posts of Antony. Antony held an excellent position for defense, which enabled him to resist successfully the attacks of the Romans: for the Pass of Actium could not be forced; but he was blockaded on the side of the sea whence almost all his stores and munitions must reach him.