Rome’s transition from a republic to an empire touches upon many themes in Roman history. The century between the destruction of Carthage in 146 BC and the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC was characterized by the personal ambition of military dynasts like Sulla and Caesar, the flood of wealth (and ensuing decadence) afforded by Rome’s foreign conquests, and the bloody consequences of a military state exhausted of external enemies – only to turn its weapons on itself.
But what exactly was the Roman Republic? How did it differ from the Roman Empire? And how did it ultimately collapse?
Founded after the expulsion of Rome’s monarchy in the late sixth century BC, the Roman Republic endured for more than 500 years, presiding over Rome’s growth from an insignificant Latin township to one of the most expansive empires of the ancient world.
Our word republic comes from the Latin res publica, which means “public thing” or “public matter”. Politically, the Roman Republic combined elements of each previous form of government.
The two annually-elected consuls at its head represented the remnants of Rome’s monarchy; the Senate, composed of former office-holders and responsible for allocating funds and deciding on military interventions, constituted its oligarchic component; and the people’s assemblies, responsible for elections and passing legislation, made up the democratic element of ancient Rome. (At least superficially).
Given the violent circumstances in which the Roman Republic was founded (the Rape of Lucretia by the Etruscan Prince Tarquinius “the Proud”), it is understandable that the Romans felt a lasting antagonism towards the concept of kingship. So vehement was this hatred that the Romans structured their Republic to prevent, at least in theory, any one man from accruing enough power to become king.
And yet the greatest irony of Rome’s history is that, after fighting so hard trying to hold back the tide of one-man rule through a series of bloody civil wars at the end of the Republic, it was a return to monarchy in the form of the principate that the Romans ended up with.
This article looks at the series of events that led to the Roman Republic’s ultimate unravelling, and its replacement with one-man, autocratic rule under what’s commonly known as the Roman Empire.
The Destruction of Carthage 146 BC
There are two things you should know about Cato the Elder.
The first is that he was your archetypal Roman politician. A staunch conservative. A skilled orator. A vociferous spokesman for the back-to-basics agrarian values upon which the Republic had been founded, and, by extension, a sharp critic of flashy, perfumed Greek culture.
The second thing you need to know about Cato is that he really hated Carthage. Much to the ire of his fellow senators, Cato would end every speech he delivered in the Senate with the refrain Carthago delenda est, “Carthage must be destroyed!” Once he even began a speech by letting some fresh ripe figs fall from the folds of his toga onto the Senate House floor before informing his bemused colleagues that they had been harvested from a certain North African city just three days away. From Carthage, nonetheless.
One did not have to go back far to understand that Cato’s fear of Carthage was well-founded. Twice the Roman Republic had been at war with the naval and mercantile superpower (once during Cato’s lifetime) in a series of epic military campaigns historians call the Punic Wars.
The First Punic War (264 – 241 BC) was fought over control of the strategically important islands of Corsica and Sicily, which the Romans ultimately managed to wrestle from the Carthaginians. Much of Sicily’s barren landscape today, in fact, is due to deforestation during this period, in which the Romans were desperately cutting down trees to build ships for their navy. But while the First Punic War was a clear Roman victory, the Second Punic War (218 – 201 BC) didn’t go quite so well.
The Romans spent most of the war decisively losing land battles to Hannibal, who had the genius idea of marching his enormous army—complete with elephants—up from Africa, through Spain, over the Alps, and into Italy. (You might not be surprised to learn that only one elephant survived the crossing).
For reasons lost to history, when Hannibal arrived at the gates of Rome in 216 BC he chose not to take the city. Instead, he marched south and waged an ultimately unsuccessful campaign to win Rome’s Italian allies over before being recalled to Carthage and later defeated at the Battle of Zama. Cato’s incessant pleas for Carthage’s destruction come from the eve of the Third Punic War (149 – 146 BC): a short encounter, most of which was spent besieging the city of Carthage itself.
Under the leadership of Scipio Aemilianus, the Roman Republic soon starved Carthage into submission before brutally sacking it.
The destruction of Carthage and of the Greek city of Corinth the same year announced Rome as the new dominant power in the Mediterranean. But this victory wasn’t without its problems. The first was the massive influx of wealth (luxuria the Romans called it) that came from Roman supremacy in the Mediterranean and the corrupting influence this had on Rome’s supposedly simple, agrarian values.
The second was with its annually changing leaders, the republican form of government was barely capable of administrating Italy, never mind the whole Mediterranean basin.
The third, least considered problem is that like any major power the Roman Republic needed a powerful enemy against which to direct its excessive military energy. With no existential threat to the Roman Republic’s survival, the daggers drawn for war started pointing inwards.
The Murder of Tiberius Gracchus
Reflecting on the downfall of his beloved Republic, the great orator, philosopher, and politician Marcus Tullius Cicero picked out one event, some 80 years previous, which signalled the beginning of the end.
“The death of Tiberius Gracchus,” Cicero wrote, “and even before that the whole rationale behind his tribunate, divided a united people into two distinct groups and thus paved the way for civil war.“
No doubt Cicero was right about the significance of Tiberius’s death and his problematically populist politics (the “troubling rationale behind his tribunate,” as Cicero politely puts it). But to call the Romans united before the arrival of Tiberius Gracchus would be a little disingenuous.
At its foundation, the Roman Republic was split socially between plebeians and patricians.
The patricians, hereditary aristocrats, essentially took all political and religious offices for themselves, monopolising control of government and leaving the plebeian masses with a load of debt and little way out of it.
This came to a head with the Conflict of the Orders in 494 BC, in which Rome’s plebeians did what today’s Italians still do best and went on strike.
This walkout of the masses brought Rome to a grinding halt and eventually won the plebeians a series of political liberties. One was the creation of a popular assembly with their own elected official to preside over it: the “Tribune of the Plebs”.
The Tribune of the Plebs was sacrosanct, meaning nobody could lay a hand on him at risk of being outlawed or hunted down and murdered by a plebeian mob.
It was to this position that Tiberius Gracchus, a celebrated war hero, and brother-in-law of Carthage’s hammer, Scipio Aemilianus, was elected in 133 BC. And what was the main agenda Tiberius wanted to push through? The requisitioning of land from Italy’s rich and its division among the disgruntled, landless poor.
This obviously didn’t go down well with the patricians, who responded by getting their man Marcus Octavius (Tiberius’s fellow tribune) to repeatedly veto Tiberius’ legislation. Tiberius’s response was simple but effective: he put before the people a motion to vote Octavius out of office. It passed.
His reform then passed and a generous sum of money from the recently incorporated kingdom of Attalus III of Pergamum provided the funds to implement it. But retirement after his year in office wouldn’t do for Tiberius, and wanting to see the job through until the end he stood for the tribunate a second time. For his senatorial enemies, this was too much.
In 133 BC Tiberius was murdered along with 300 of his supporters, bludgeoned to death by a chair leg as votes were being counted in the Plebeian Assembly.
As Cicero realised, his death set a dangerous precedent. Legally speaking, as Tribune of the Plebs Tiberius should have been physically untouchable. But this completely was disregarded. Instead, his murder set an example as the first case of extreme violence being used where politics had failed to settle matters. Unsurprisingly, it wouldn’t be the last time violence infused the politics of the Roman Republic. Surprisingly, however, history would be repeated just over 10 years later with Tiberius’s younger brother, Gaius.
The Murder of Gaius Gracchus
Tiberius’s brutal murder left his younger brother to one of two choices. Either he would shy away from politics and public life entirely (or if he had any involvement at least to tow the senatorial line) or he would see his brother’s land reform legislation through to the end, and maybe implement some radical legislation of his own.
Gaius Gracchus opted for the latter.
To his credit, Gaius managed what his brother could not, holding the position of tribune two years in a row in 123 and 122 BC. He also surpassed his brother in the scale and radicalism of his reforms. He outlawed bribery, and enabled people to appeal the death penalty. He made the Roman Republic the only state in the Mediterranean to provide a state-subsidised grain ration to each Roman citizen, an innovation that lasted for centuries. And in his land reforms he established colonies abroad where citizens could emigrate (one of them being the recently razed site of Carthage which—contrary to popular belief—was never sown with salt).
Gaius’ popularity with the masses and brazen disregard for the wishes of the patricians made him unsurprisingly even more unpopular than his brother. It could have been behind-the-scenes senatorial scheming that explains why, when he went for the tribunate again in 121 BC, he failed to secure it. Things then went from bad to worse as he barely managed to stop one of the consuls for that year Lucius Opimius from repealing his legislation. And then, during a street brawl, a posse of Gracchan supporters stabbed Opimius’s attendant to death with styluses (the pen on this occasion proving mightier than the sword), forcing Gaius to flee as the Senate announced a state of emergency.
With the backing of the Senate, Opimius managed to talk some Cretan Archers (who just happened to be hanging around) into joining his improvised lynch mob. He then set about massacring around 3,000 Gracchan supporters, either butchering on the spot or executing them after a series of sham trials over the coming days.
Gaius at this point was taking refuge on the Aventine Hill. But with the Cretan Archers approaching, and seeing no way out of his mortal predicament, Gaius ordered his slave to stab him to death; an order his slave obligingly carried out.
Like Tiberius before him, Tiberius was then subjected to what we now call Damnatio Memoriae – the attempted obliteration of someone’s existence from the historical record. His body was thrown into the Tiber, his widow was forbidden from mourning him, and his house was confiscated and destroyed by the State.
If Tiberius’s death had set a precedent then his younger brother’s death entrenched it. Senatorially sanctioned, factional violence was now seeping into the mainstream of Roman politics as a legitimate way of removing one’s enemies. Ostensibly, these enemies were threats to the state, but in reality they threatened no more than the status quo.
To keep up appearances, Opimius was made to stand trial for his slaughter of thousands. But as it was just for effect he was soon acquitted. As things were beginning to calm down in Rome, however, tensions were reaching breaking point among Rome’s allies across Italy.
The Social War
Calling any war social is as much a misnomer as calling any war civil. But in this case we can make an exception. Socius in Latin means, “ally”, and it was precisely Rome’s allies that revolted against the powerful city state in 91 BC, sparking off the first of the series of civil wars that came to characterise the end of the Roman Republic.
Why Rome’s allies revolted is another question. Roman propaganda would later stress that it was so they could obtain full Roman citizenship, which was ultimately granted to them anyway. But we should always remember that history is written by the victors. Surviving traces of allied propaganda suggest the opposite; that the allies had fought to cut loose from the snowballing city-state of Rome.
The big question in the early 90s BC was citizenship, specifically whether it should be extended to Rome’s Italian allies. It was a tricky issue. Some allied towns were doing very well out of their relationship with Rome, enjoying a generous share of war booty in exchange for manpower for Rome’s legions and taxation for Rome’s coffers. But they were still very much second-class citizens: practically excluded from having a say in Roman policymaking through voting and often subject to some brutally harsh treatment at the hands of rogue Roman officials.
The idea of enfranchising Rome’s allies led to an outbreak of xenophobia back in the capital. On the rostrae of the Roman Forum, Gracchus’s old enemies addressed crowds, warning them how Rome would imminently be swamped by immigrants intent on stealing their jobs and taking up their spaces at the games and festivals (rhetoric that’s all too familiar today). Then in 92 BC, a populist Tribune of the Plebs called Marcus Livius Drusus tried to pass legislation extending citizenship to the Italian allies, earning him a dagger in the heart from an unknown assassin.
Drusus’s death roughly coincided with an act of mass genocide against Roman citizens in the Apulian town of Asculum in 91 BC, leading directly to war across Italy. Among the cities Rome that rebelled against Rome was Pompeii, which was besieged in 89 BC. Pompeii is, of course, famous for the disaster it suffered 168 years later. But almost as famous as the southern Italian city was the man who was besieging it, Lucius Cornelius Sulla “Felix”, a patrician of illustrious heritage and one of the chief architects of the Roman Republic’s ruin. And this is the real contribution of the Social War in the Republic’s downfall: it provided a stage for some of the big generals of the time, like Sulla and Marius, and with the faith invested in them by the Roman people led them to overreach with their power.
Sulla Marches on Rome
Lucius Cornelius Sulla was a remarkable soldier. As a general in the Social War he was awarded the rare corona graminea (a grass crown, similar to the Medal of Honour) for his personal ability and bravery. As a politician he was equally successful, becoming consul for the first time in 88 BC, aged around 50 years old, and for the second in 80 BC. However, he also holds the debatable honour of being the first Roman to invade Rome, not once, but twice.
Invading Rome wasn’t Sulla’s only infamous innovation. In 87 BC, after first marching on Rome and either butchering or expelling his enemies with his troops, Sulla became the first recorded Roman to apply the term hostis or “enemy of the state” internally: to political, rather than foreign, enemies.
This set a troubling precedent. And when Sulla left Rome in 87 BC to wage war against the Asian King Mithridates VI, his enemies, especially his main rival Gaius Marius, repaid the favour.
After bringing the Mithridatic War to a successful resolution in 83 BC, Sulla once again marched on Rome. The following year, Sulla’s legions met those of Marius at the Colline Gate, on the northern outskirts of Rome (see the map below) and fought a decisive battle.
The Battle of the Colline Gates saw the loss of an estimated 50,000 Romans, and resulted in the establishment of Sulla as the sole ruler (or rather dictator) of Rome.
Having secured power, Sulla made another violent contribution to politics by introducing the proscriptions.
This essentially involved Sulla writing up the names of thousands of his political enemies and posting them as lists in the forum. People were then at liberty to hunt these people down and bring Sulla their heads for a bounty.
Sulla passed two significant senatorial reforms before retiring from public life: doubling the Senate’s membership from around 300 members to 600 and introducing minimum age requirements for each position of office.
With the latter, Sulla was effectively pulling up the ladder behind him as the measure ensured nobody could replicate what he had done. In doubling the size of the Senate, however, he also doubled the number of disgruntled senators who would never achieve true political success by becoming one of only two consuls elected every year; intensifying the already murderously intense competition that characterised republican politics of this period.
So loathed was Sulla that when he died in retirement, in 78 BC at the age of 60, rumours started circling that his skin had turned to worms. Had it not been for the intervention of the young, upcoming general Gnaeus Pompeius (“Pompey Magnus” as he came to be known), Sulla’s body wouldn’t even have been granted the burial rites he was due.
But Sulla’s tomb bore chilling testament to the man whose remains it held, reading, “No better friend; no worse enemy”.
The Curious Career of Gaius Marius
A novus homo or “new man” in Roman politics, Gaius Marius was the first example of meritocracy outstripping aristocracy in the history of the Roman Republic.
He first proved his incredible abilities while commanding the legions as consul against the North African King Jugurtha in 107 BC. One of the late Republic’s big foreign bogeymen, Jugurtha was instrumental in showing how the republican system—with its annually changing shared leadership—was woefully ill-equipped to deal with external threats, particularly if they couldn’t be neutralised within the year.
Hence why after returning from the Jugurthine War in 105 BC Marius was soon reappointed consul, and given command of the Roman forces against the dangerous marauding Germanic tribes of the Teutones and the Cimbri. He was elected consul a staggering five years in a row from 104 – 100 BC, completely contravening the tradition that nobody could hold it twice within 10 years. But the confidence Rome placed in him turned out to be well-founded: he commanded with distinction and by 101 BC had destroyed them completely.
There are two main reasons why Marius contributed so heavily to the Roman Republic’s eventual collapse. The first was that he reformed and expanded the Roman Army so it could become the personal fighting force of an aspirational warlord. Before the Marian reforms, only those who came from families with land were allowed to enlist, perhaps explaining why the Gracchi had been so eager to divide up the elite’s share of the land among the masses. After his reforms, anybody could join the legions, swelling the ranks of a professional Roman army.
The second and more significant reason why Marius set in motion the end of the Roman Republic is that he flaunted the republican tradition of temporary consular rule by getting himself repeatedly re-elected. He was partly able to do this by appealing to the masses through populist politics and rhetoric, taking up the mantle of the Gracchi. But more importantly, Marius was a phenomenally skilled general, offering Rome stability and assuredness at a time of crisis.
His last years were spent battling, and losing to, his younger rival Sulla. When Marius died in 88 BC it was with a whimper rather than a bang. A tribune had tried to get Marius voted to the command against Mithridates. But Sulla had marched to Rome to stop this from happening. Delirious on his deathbed, the nearly 70-year-old Marius nevertheless believed he had been appointed general. However misplaced, it was perhaps fitting testament to the faith people had shown in him throughout his career.
Gnaus Pompey Magnus: Rome’s Proto-Emperor
From Sulla’s supporter to the darling of the Senate, the life of Gnaeus Pompey “Magnus” was nothing if not remarkable. As a young man, Pompey’s military successes were many. Having cleared the Mediterranean of pirates, he then defeated the menacing King Mithridates in the East, making his former kingdom a Roman province, before going on to annex Armenia, Syria and Judaea. But with great responsibility came great power. And for Pompey could see his expansionist vision through, the Senate had to grant him powers in terms of duration and the number of soldiers under his command that surpassed even Marius.
Pompey was the first Roman to be treated like a god. In the East, cults spread up around him, including a group of pompeiastae (“Pompey-worshippers”) on the island of Delos. A number of cities were named in his honour, including Pompeiopolis and Magnopolis. In Rome, Pompey’s powers almost amounted to autocratic. He used the immense personal wealth he’d accrued during his campaign to fund extensive building programmes, including the construction of Rome’s first permanent, stone theatre. The Senate even made him sole consul in 52 BC, the first time this had ever happened in the history of the Roman Republic.
The problem Pompey faced back in Rome was the same Sulla and Marius had faced before him and Julius Caesar would face after him: that the political system of the Roman Republic had no way of recognising (and rewarding) exceptional individual achievement. A triumphant general, who had expanded the Roman Empire and in some cases even enjoyed worship as a god, was expected to settle back into the Senate at sit as one among equals. Clearly this was anathema to the Republic’s more egotistical figures, and while consuls were, in theory, meant to renounce their power at the end of each year and retire to the back benches, there were certain ways around it.
Short of following in Sulla’s footsteps and marching on Rome, one was to make sure that if you couldn’t keep hold of power yourself, you could at least skew things in your favour by getting ‘your man’ elected. This is precisely what Pompey did when he teamed up with two other aspiring politicians, Gaius Julius Caesar and the richest man in Rome Marcus Licinius Crassus, and formed the First Triumvirate.
Caesar Crosses the Rubicon
The First Triumvirate worked well initially. Pompey got his legislation through the Senate, Caesar got his consulship in 59 BC and command in Gaul soon after, and Crassus got… well more money. But things rapidly started going downhill when Crassus got himself killed by the Parthians in 53 BC. While Caesar was away campaigning in the North, the kind of one-on-one rivalries the third man was meant to keep in check (“three’s a crowd”) broke out between Caesar, the hard-done-by general, and Pompey, the Senate’s champion.
The Senate’s problem with Caesar was by now a familiar one. He’d exponentially expanded Roman territory, conquering Gaul and even making it across the famed channel to the mystical land of Britain. Senators worried the extent of his exploits would all go to his head so, deciding to cut him down to size, they decided to prosecute him once his consulship was up over the illegality of his war (in particular the genocide he had committed). Quite understandably Caesar didn’t want to be prosecuted upon his return. Problematically for the Senate, he had several legions at his disposal to protect him from being so.
Backed into a corner, Caesar took a leaf out of Sulla’s book and decided to march on Rome. In 49 BC he crossed the Rubicon, the demarcation where he should have disbanded his army. We now have next to no idea where the River Rubicon would have been. Caesar is often credited with saying “the die is cast” (alea iecta est) as he crossed, suggesting that he realised he’d crossed the point of no return in marching to civil war. This is actually a mistranslation. What he was really saying was, “well I’ve thrown the dice now, let’s hope I’m lucky.”
As chance would have it, he was. Days before Caesar’s arrival Pompey fled Rome with various senatorial colleagues to set up base in Greece. Caesar consolidated power in Rome before pursuing his rival. The two fought all over the Empire, but the decisive battle came at Pharsalus, Greece, in 48 BC. Pompey’s army was routed, and Pompey fled to Egypt where he met a particularly nasty end.
Upon his arrival, Pompey was decapitated on the beach by an old comrade, Lucius Septimius. He was working under the orders of the Pharaoh Ptolemy XIII who was trying to ingratiate themselves with Caesar. It failed. When Caesar arrived in Alexandria later that year and received Pompey’s head as a gift he had Septimius executed and installed a new ruler in Egypt, Cleopatra. Caesar would then spend the next three years until 45 BC campaigning on and off, mopping up the remnants of the senatorial resistance.
The Ides of March and its Aftermath
Two of history’s most pervasive myths surround Julius Caesar.
The first is that he wanted to be king. Several sources tell us that Caesar’s right-hand man, Mark Antony, once tried to place a crown upon his head during the Lupercalia but Caesar refused, to the rapturous applause of the crowd. The second is that Caesar was an emperor. Part of the confusion relates to the word “emperor”. Coming from the Latin imperator, it actually meant military general or conqueror, while the word imperium (from which we get our word “empire”) referred to Rome’s conquered territories.
Like Sulla before him, Julius Caesar did declare himself dictator – not a savoury title but a legal one nonetheless. Dictatorship didn’t have the cultural baggage it has today, where it evokes despots like Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi and Kim Jong-un. Instead, it meant temporarily abandoning the rule of two consuls for one-man rule in order to guide the Roman Republic through a period of serious trouble.
Problematically, Caesar added the addendum perpetuo meaning that he was setting himself up as a dictator for life.
Caesar styling himself dictator in perpetuo proved too much for staunch republicans who saw in him a potential tyrant or, worse, a king. On the Ides of March (15, 44 BC) he was surrounded by a group of senators in the newly constructed Senate House incorporated within the complex of the Theatre of Pompey – Caesar’s arch-rival. There, beneath a statue of Pompey, Caesar was stabbed to death in a messy, mismanaged assassination. According to the biographer Suetonius, who had access to Caesar’s autopsy report, only one of Caesar’s 32 wounds was lethal; that inflicted by his old friend, Brutus.
The conspirators killed the man, but they could not kill the momentum, and Caesar’s corpus of laws and politics survived his mortal body. The Senate had failed to account for Caesar’s enormous popularity, and with an enraged Roman populace vying for their blood, the conspirators fled east.
Caesar’s vast wealth passed to his nephew and adopted heir, Octavian. Along with Caesar’s finances, Octavian also inherited his political ambitions. The first step was to avenge his uncle and bring the conspirators to justice, which he did by forming an uncomfortable alliance with Mark Antony and Marcus Lepidus (the Second Triumvirate).
In November 42 BC the Triumvirate came up against Caesar’s assassins and the leaders of the republican faction, Brutus and Cassius, at Philippi in Greece. Brutus and Cassius were defeated, committing suicide shortly after, and with the East liberated and the external threat neutralised (at least for the moment), the triumvirs set about partitioning the Roman Empire. Octavian took control over Spain and Italy, Antony took the East, and Lepidus was left with the smaller Roman province of Africa.
The Battle of Actium (31 BC)
You would be forgiven for thinking that civil war was genetically hardwired into the Romans. After all, their foundation myth, Romulus and Remus, was built around an inexplicable act of fratricide, and in the hundred or so years that spanned the days of the Gracchi to the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, barely any time passed in which various factions of senators, allies, or legionaries weren’t butchering each other to consolidate one faction’s grip over Rome.
While the defeat of Brutus and Cassius in 42 BC gave the Roman world some space to breathe after almost 20 years of continuous civil war, it also set in motion the final contest between the two men left standing: Octavian and Mark (the third triumvir, Lepidus, was something of a non-entity by this stage). The prize was clear; with the Senate now largely impotent, the winner would become the Roman Empire’s first sole ruler in over 500 years.
In Egypt, Antony shacked up with Egypt’s last pharaoh Cleopatra, renouncing his wife Octavia, Octavian’s sister. This gave Octavian all the ammunition he needed to attack his rival. He waged a war of propaganda against the drunk, orientalised, anti-Roman Antony, turning public opinion firmly against Caesar’s former wingman.
Antony didn’t exactly help himself either; Rome relied on Egypt for its grain supply – which was what Antony threatened to withhold to spite his rival.
Things finally came to a head at the Battle of Actium, just off the Greek coast, on September 31 BC. Octavian’s forces came up against Antony and Cleopatra in one of the ancient world’s most significant (yet most underwhelming) naval battles. Despite everything being evenly matched, Cleopatra inexplicably withdrew her ships towards the end of the day. Antony followed, leaving his troops leaderless. Those who couldn’t escape surrendered. Victory for Octavian followed shortly after, and Antony and Cleopatra, realising they had lost the war and had no future other than (at best) as Octavian’s prisoners, committed suicide in Alexandria the next year.
Sick of the civil wars and bloodshed that had consumed the empire for almost a century, Rome was ready for peace. Whatever the cost. And if that meant sacrificing the government of the Roman Republic for one-man rule under Octavian, that was a price worth paying. Presiding over a sham Senate, Octavian gradually took up all offices and amassed all powers to make himself the sole ruler of the Roman world.
To his credit, Octavian (or Augustus, as he would later rename himself) played his role well as Rome’s first emperor. While in reality holding all the power, he never made a display of doing so, residing on a relatively modest residence on the Palatine Hill. Refusing to be treated as any senator’s superior, he referred to himself as princeps inter pares, “first amongst equals”.
It was a legacy of modesty that some of his more notorious successors, like Caligula, Nero, and Commodus, would have done well to learn from.
