Minor Roman Civil War PODs

Two minor PODs:

What if there wasn't a severe outbreak of malaria in Mark Antony's camp before the Battle of Actium? In OTL, malaria wiped out a large portion of his men and left many of his ships undermanned, forcing the Roman general to burn many of them.

And what if Mark Antony's friend and general Quintus Dellius did not defect to Octavian's side and deliver him the battle plans for Actium?
 
If Antony wins the fight at Actium and becomes the military strongman of the new era, he's still going to face Augustus's problems of a Roman public hardly sympathetic to absolutism and thus the problem of how to determine succession. An Antonino-Ptolemaic dynasty may replace the Julio-Claudians but if there's no resolution of the succession, one emperor makes the least mistake and then the secret of Empire comes out and things proceed as per OTL.
 
Would he continue giving out more Roman land to his sons and daughters with Cleopatra though? And wouldn't that anger the more conservative members of the Senate even if he's the current military strongman holding the strings of the Roman Republic?
 
Would he continue giving out more Roman land to his sons and daughters with Cleopatra though? And wouldn't that anger the more conservative members of the Senate even if he's the current military strongman holding the strings of the Roman Republic?

Yes, and this might lead to an earlier Year of Four Emperors and make that point in time more confusing than it already was. An Antonine-Ptolemaic Dynasty is unlikely to last as long as the Julio-Claudian one did, though Antony would probably lead to a Rome with a bit more of an emphasis on a navy (which as the empire establishes control of the Mediterranean and removes piracy will be posing long-term issues of just what the Navy's supposed to do) and this Rome is also probably going to focus on Parthia more than on Germany.
 
Top