Sublime

One major change, however, was that Roman civil war now involved almost all the known world. Whereas the wars between Sulla and his rivals had witnessed occasional incidents in the East, the war between the Caesarians and the Pompeians played out right across the Mediterranean, from Spain to Greece and Asia Minor.

Julius Caesar, for example, was the first living person whose head featured on a coin minted in Rome.

On Friday, August 5, 1774, George Washington’s life changed forever when he was elected one of seven Virginia delegates to the general congress that would meet in Philadelphia, to be known as the First Continental Congress. When these statesmen were selected, Jefferson said, a “shock of electricity” flew through the air.24 The vote underscored the

The proposal prompted a series of increasingly bitter controversies. First, when one of his fellow tribunes, Marcus Octavius, repeatedly tried to veto it (some right of veto had been given to these ‘people’s representatives’ centuries earlier), Tiberius rode roughshod over the objection and had the people vote his opponent out of office. This enabl

Octavian – or Augustus, as he was officially known after 27 BCE (a made-up title meaning something close to ‘Revered One’) – dominated Roman political life for more than fifty years, until his death in 14 CE. Going far beyond the precedents set by Pompey and by Caesar, he was the first Roman emperor to last the course and the longest-serving ruler

Despite his rare appearances in Rome, Caesar initiated a vast programme of reforms going beyond even the scale of Sulla’s. One of them governs life even now. For – with some help from the specialist scientists he met in Alexandria – Caesar introduced into Rome what has become the modern Western system of timekeeping. The traditional Roman year was

Throughout the Roman world, the living emperor was treated very like a god. He was incorporated into rituals celebrated in honour of the gods, he was addressed in language that overlapped with divine language, and he was assumed to have some similar powers.