Sublime

Even more chilling is the story of how Domitian turned sadism into a solitary pastime. He is said to have shut himself up alone in his room, whiling away the hours torturing flies by killing them with his pen. ‘Is there anyone in there with the emperor?’ someone once asked. ‘Not even a fly’ was one courtier’s sharp reply.

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

CHAPTER 5 · A WIDER WORLD The descendants of Barbatus

Then, from the mid 20s BCE, he arranged to be granted a series of formal powers that were modelled on those of traditional Roman political offices but not the offices themselves: he took ‘the power of a tribune’ but did not hold the tribunate, and ‘the rights of a consul’ without holding the consulship.

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

Caesar also became part of the calendar, as well as rewriting it. It may not have been until after his assassination that the month Quintilis was renamed Julius, our July, after him;