Sublime

The Roman commander at the siege of Pompeii in 89 BCE, where the teenaged Cicero served as a very junior officer, was Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix, meaning ‘lucky’ or, rather more imposingly, ‘the favourite of the goddess Venus’.

Servius Tullius is supposed to have devised the method of counting and rank-ordering the Roman people known as the census.

He made the same point when he took (or, technically, was given) ‘the power of a tribune’ for life. He was linking himself to the tradition of popular politicians, going back at least to the Gracchi, who stood up for the rights and welfare of the Roman in the street.

Soon after the defeat of Veii, in 390 BCE a posse of marauding ‘Gauls’ sacked Rome. Exactly who these people were is now impossible to know; Roman writers were not good at distinguishing between those whom it was convenient to lump together as ‘barbarian tribes’ from the north, nor much interested in analysing their motives. But according to Livy,

Yet out of all this came an extraordinary, radically conservative attempt to rewrite Roman politics: wholesale change masquerading as an exercise in putting the clock back. Once re-established in the city in 82 BCE, Sulla engineered his own election as ‘dictator for making laws and restoring order to the res publica’. The dictatorship was an old em

Augustus is dead. Long live Augustus!

In December of that year the senate voted by a majority of 370 to 22 that Caesar and Pompey should simultaneously give up their commands. Pompey was actually in Rome at the time, but since 55 BCE, thanks to another piece of ingenuity, he had been the governor of Spain, doing the job remotely, through deputies – an unprecedented arrangement that bec