Sublime

The underlying issue was brutally straightforward. Would Caesar, with more than 40,000 troops at his disposal only a few days from Italy, follow the example of Sulla or of Pompey?

Sometime around 10 January 49 BCE, Julius Caesar, with just one of his legions from Gaul, crossed the Rubicon, the river that marked the northern boundary of Italy.

By a convenient coincidence, King Attalus III of Pergamum had died in 133 BCE, and – combining a realistic assessment of Roman power in the eastern Mediterranean with a shrewd defence against assassination by rivals at home – he had made ‘the Roman people’ the heir to his property and large kingdom in what is now Turkey. This inheritance provided

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