When winter approached Cleopatra and Antony advanced with the whole army from Athens to Patrae, and there went into winter quarters. Patrae stood near the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth, on the Achaian side, not much more than 200 miles from the Italian coast. The fleet, meanwhile, was sent farther north to the Gulf of Ambracia, which formed a huge natural harbour with a narrow entrance; and outposts were placed at Corcyra, the modern Corfu, some 70 miles from the Italian coast. In the period of waiting which followed, when the storms of winter made warfare almost out of the question, Antony and Octavian exchanged several pugnacious messages. Octavian, constrained by the restlessness of his men and the difficulty of providing for them during the winter, is said to have written to Antony asking him not to protract the war, but to come over to Italy and fight him at once. He even promised not to oppose his disembarkation, but to offer him battle only when he was quite prepared to meet him with his full forces. Antony replied by challenging Octavian to a single combat, although, as he stated, he was already an elderly man. This challenge Octavian refused to accept, and thereupon Antony invited him to bring his army over to the plains to Pharsalia and to fight him there, where Julius Cæsar and Pompey had fought nearly seventeen years before. This offer was likewise refused; and thereafter the two huge armies settled down once more to glare at one another across the Ionian Sea.
Octavian now sent a message to Greece inviting the Roman senators who were still with Antony to return to Rome where they would be well received; and this offer must have found many ready ears, though none yet dared to act upon it. Several of these senators felt disgust at their leader’s intemperate habits, and were deeply jealous of the power of Cleopatra, whose influence did not seem likely to serve the cause of the Republic. The declaring of war against the Queen and not against themselves had touched them sharply, and to add to their discomfort in this regard news now came across the sea that Octavian, in making his official sacrifices to the gods at the opening of hostilities, had employed the ritual observed before a campaign against a _foreign_ enemy. He had stood, as the ancient rites of Rome prescribed, before the temple of Bellona in the Campus Martius, and, clad in the robes of a Fetial priest, had thrown the javelin, as a declaration that war was undertaken against an alien enemy.