Sublime

What did happen next was four years of civil war. Some of Caesar’s supporters in Rome rushed to join him in northern Italy, while Pompey was pushed into the command of the ‘anti-Caesarians’ and decided to leave Italy and fight from his power base in the East. In 48 BCE his forces were defeated at the Battle of Pharsalus in northern Greece, and

Fourteen centuries later, Cleopatra was not so lucky. After three years of joint rule with her brother, she was deposed and sent into exile. Instead of taking this tamely, she assembled an army and turned to the most accessible powerful Roman for help.

Egypt had a significant supporting role too. It was there that Pompey, the man who had once ruled the Roman world, met his ignominious end in 48 BCE. He was expecting a warm welcome as he put to shore. In fact, he was decapitated by the henchmen of a local dynast, who calculated that disposing of the enemy leader would ingratiate him with Caesar.

In October 42 BCE, the united forces of the triumvirate defeated Brutus and Cassius near the town of Philippi in the far north of Greece (the focus of much of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar), and the victorious allies then began even more systematically to turn on one another. In fact, when Octavian returned from Philippi to Italy to oversee a massive

The most pressing political issue of the period, however, came not directly from Rome but from Caesar in Gaul. He had left Italy in 58 BCE on a five-year command, and this was rolled on for another five years in 56 BCE – with the warm support, in public at least, of Cicero, who pointed to the danger of Gallic enemies much as he had earlier pointed

Against this background, three men – Pompey, Julius Caesar and Marcus Licinius Crassus – made an informal deal to use their combined influence, connections and money to fix the political process in their own interests. This ‘Gang of Three’, or ‘Three-Headed Monster’, as one contemporary satirist put it, for the first time effectively took public