Sublime

Caesar was duly elected consul for 59 BCE and, among a series of measures that strongly resembled the programmes of earlier, radical tribunes, sponsored legislation on behalf of the other two. He also secured a military command for himself in southern Gaul, to which a vast area on the other side of the Alps was soon added.

Sulla was the first dictator in the modern sense of the term. Julius Caesar would be the second. That particular version of political power is…

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But Augustus became something no Roman had been before: the commander-in-chief of all the armed forces, who appointed their major officers, decided where and against whom the soldiers should fight, and claimed all victories as by definition his own, whoever had commanded on the ground.

Octavian and Antony had come to blows in a series of military engagements in northern Italy and then patched things up again by forming with Lepidus a ‘triumvirate for establishing government’. This was a formal, five-year agreement that gave each of the three men (triumviri) power equal to consuls, their pick of what provinces they wanted and cont

CHAPTER 9 · THE TRANSFORMATIONS OF AUGUSTUS Caesar’s heir

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 de

At the end of 45 BCE he caused a particular stir when the death of one of the sitting consuls was announced on the very last day of the year. Caesar instantly convened an assembly to elect one of his friends, Caius Caninius Rebilus, to the vacant post for just half a day. This prompted a flood of jokes from Cicero: Caninius was such an extraordinar