Chapter 5: The Rise of Rome

Rome’s Rise to Power

The Geography of Italy

The boot-shaped peninsula of Italy, with the island of Sicily at its toe, occupies the center of the Mediterranean basin.
Like Greece and other Mediterranean lands, Italy enjoys a largely pleasant climate.
The winters are rainy, but the summer months are dry.
Geography encouraged Italy to look to the Mediterranean.
In the north Italy is protected by the Alps, which form a natural barrier.
In their southward course the Apennines leave two broad and fertile plains to their west: Latium and Campania.
These plains attracted settlers and invaders from the time that peoples began to move into Italy.
Among these peoples were those who would found Rome on the Tiber River in Latium.
The Tiber provided Rome with a constant source of water.
Rome thus stood astride the main avenue of communications between northern and southern Italy.
Positioned amid seven hills, Rome was defensible and safe from the floods of the Tiber.
Rome was in an excellent position to develop the resources of Latium and maintain contact with the rest of Italy.

The Etruscans

The culture that is now called Etruscan developed in north-central Italy about 800 b.c.e.
The Etruscans spoke a language that was very different from Greek and Latin, although they adopted the Greek alphabet to write it.
The writings themselves largely disappeared because many were written on linen books that did not survive.
The Etruscans established permanent settlements that evolved into cities resembling the Greek city-states, and they thereby built a rich cultural life.
The Etruscans farmed and mined for its rich mineral resources.
They traded natural products, especially iron, with their Greek neighbors to the south and with other peoples throughout the Mediterranean, including the Phoenicians, in exchange for a variety of goods.
Etruscan cities appear to have been organized in leagues, and beginning about 750 b.c.e. the Etruscans expanded southward into central Italy through military actions on land and sea and through the establishment of colony cities.
In the process of expansion they encountered a small collection of villages subsequently called Rome.

The Founding of Rome

Archaeological sources provide the most important information about this earliest period of Roman history, but later Romans told a number of stories about the founding of Rome.
The Romans’ foundation myths were told in a number of different versions.
In the most common of these, Romulus and Remus founded the city of Rome, an event later Roman authors dated precisely to 753 b.c.e.
These twin brothers were the sons of the war god Mars, and their mother Rhea Silvia.
The brothers, who were left to die by a jealous uncle, were raised by a female wolf.
When they were grown they decided to build a city in the hills that became part of Rome, but they quarreled over which hill should be the site of the city.
Romulus chose one hill and started to build a wall around it, and Remus chose another.
After Remus jumped mockingly over Romulus’s wall, Romulus killed him and named the city after himself.
He also established a council of advisers later called the Senate, which means “council of old men.”
Romulus and his mostly male followers expanded their power over the neighboring Sabine peoples, in part by abducting and marrying their women.
Later Roman historians continued the story by describing a series of kings after Romulus—the traditional number is seven—each elected by the Senate.
According to tradition, the last three kings were Etruscan, and another tale about female virtue was told to explain why the Etruscan kings were overthrown.
In this story, of which there are several versions, the son of King Tarquin, the Etruscan king who ruled Rome, raped Lucretia, a virtuous Roman wife, in her own home.
She summoned her husband and father to the house, told them to get revenge, and killed herself by driving a knife to her heart.
Her father and husband and the other Roman nobles swore on the bloody knife to avenge Lucretia’s death by throwing out the Etruscan kings, and they did.
Most historians today view the idea that Etruscan kings ruled the city of Rome as legendary, but they stress the influence of the Etruscans on Rome.
The Romans adopted the Etruscan alphabet, which the Etruscans themselves had adopted from the Greeks.
In this early period the city of Rome does appear to have been ruled by kings, as were most territories in the ancient world.
A hereditary aristocracy also developed.
Sometime in the sixth century b.c.e. a group of aristocrats revolted against these kings and established a government in which the main institution of power would be in the Senate, an assembly of aristocrats, rather than a single monarch.
Executive power was in the hands of Senate leaders called consuls, but there were always two of them and they were elected for one-year terms only, not for life.
Rome thereby became a republic, not a monarchy.
Under kings and then the Senate, the villages along the Tiber gradually grew into a single city, whose residents enjoyed contacts with the larger Mediterranean world.
The Capitoline Hill became the city’s religious center when the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus was built there.
In addition, trade in metalwork became common, and wealthier Romans began to import fine Greek vases and other luxuries.

The Roman Conquest of Italy

The Roman army was made up primarily of citizens of Rome organized for military campaigns into legions.
Alliances with the towns around them in Latium provided a large population that could be tapped for military needs, organized into troops called auxiliaries who fought with the legions.
These wars of the early republic later became the source of legends that continued to express Roman values.
One of these involved the aristocrat Cincinnatus, who had been expelled from the Senate and forced to pay a huge fine because of the actions of his son.
The Roman Senate actually chose many more men as dictator in the centuries after Cincinnatus, and not until the first century b.c.e. would any try to abuse this position.
In 387 b.c.e. the Romans suffered a major setback when the Celts—or Gauls, as the Romans called them—invaded the Italian peninsula from the north, destroyed a Roman army, and sacked the city of Rome.
The Romans rebuilt their city and recouped their losses.
They brought Latium and their Latin allies fully under their control and conquered Etruria.
Starting in 343 b.c.e. they turned south and grappled with the Samnites in a series of bitter wars for the possession of Campania.
The Romans won out in the end and continued their expansion southward.
In 280 b.c.e., alarmed by Roman expansion, the Greek city of Tarentum in southern Italy called for help from Pyrrhus, king of Epirus in western Greece.
Pyrrhus won two furious battles but suffered heavy casualties — thus the phrase “Pyrrhic victory” is still used today to describe a victory involving severe losses.
The Romans and the Carthaginians had made a series of treaties to help one another, and the Carthaginians attacked Sicily, drawing the armies of Pyrrhus away from Italy for a while and relieving pressure on the Romans.
The Romans made formal alliances with many of the cities of Magna Graecia and then turned north again.
As they expanded their territory, the Romans spread their religious traditions throughout Italy, blending them with local beliefs and practices.
Victorious generals made sure to honor the gods of people they had conquered and by doing so transformed them into gods they could also call on for assistance in their future campaigns.
Once they had conquered an area, the Romans built roads, many of which continued to be used for centuries and can still be seen today.
In politics the Romans shared full Roman citizenship with many of their oldest allies, particularly the inhabitants of the cities of Latium.
The extension of Roman citizenship strengthened the state and increased its population and wealth, although limitations on this extension would eventually become a source of conflict.

The Roman Republic

The Roman State

The Romans summed up their political existence in a single phrase: senatus populusque Romanus, “the Senate and the Roman people,” which they abbreviated “SPQR.”
This sentiment reflects the republican ideal of shared government rather than power concentrated in a monarchy.
In the early republic social divisions determined the shape of politics.
Political power was in the hands of a hereditary aristocracy—the patricians, whose privileged legal status was determined by their birth as members of certain families.
Patrician men dominated the affairs of state, provided military leadership in time of war, and monopolized knowledge of law and legal procedure.
The common people of Rome, the plebeians, were free citizens with a voice in politics, but they had few of the patricians’ political and social advantages.
The Romans created several assemblies through which men elected high officials and passed legislation.
The earliest was the Centuriate Assembly, in which citizens were organized into groups called centuries based loosely around their status in the military.
In 471 b.c.e. plebeian men won the right to meet in an assembly of their own, the concilium plebis, and to pass ordinances.
The highest officials of the republic were the two consuls, who were elected for one-year terms by the Centuriate Assembly.
The consuls appointed quaestors to assist them in their duties, and in 421 b.c.e. the quaestorship became an elective office open to plebeian men.
The quaestors took charge of the public treasury and investigated crimes, reporting their findings to the consuls.
In 366 b.c.e. the Romans created a new office, that of praetor.
When the consuls were away from Rome, the praetors could act in their place.
The most important institution of the republic was the Senate, a political assembly that by tradition was established by Romulus.
Because the Senate sat year after year with the same members, while high officials changed annually, it provided stability and continuity.
Technically the Senate could not pass binding legislation during the republican period.
Its decisions had to be put to the Centuriate Assembly for a vote before they could become law.
Within the city of Rome itself the Senate’s powers were limited by laws and traditions, but as Rome expanded, the Senate had greater authority in the outlying territories.
The Romans divided the lands that they conquered into provinces, and the Senate named the governors for these, most of whom were former consuls or praetors.
Another responsibility of the Senate was to handle relations between Rome and other powers.
A lasting achievement of the Romans was their development of law.
Roman civil law, the ius civile, consisted of statutes, customs, and forms of procedure that regulated the lives of citizens.
As the Romans came into more frequent contact with foreigners, the consuls and praetors applied a broader ius gentium, the “law of the peoples.”
By the late republic Roman jurists had widened this principle still further into the concept of ius naturale, “natural law,” based in part on Stoic beliefs.
Natural law, according to these thinkers, is made up of rules that govern human behavior that come from applying reason rather than customs or traditions, and so apply to all societies.
Roman law came to be seen as one of the most important contributions Rome made to the development of Western civilization.

Social Conflict in Rome

Inequality between plebeians and patricians led to a conflict known as the Struggle of the Orders.
In this conflict the plebeians sought to increase their power by taking advantage of the fact that Rome’s survival depended on its army, which needed plebeians to fill the ranks of the infantry.
According to tradition, in 494 b.c.e. the plebeians literally walked out of Rome and refused to serve in the army.
They allowed the plebeians to elect their own officials, the tribunes, who presided over the concilium plebis, could bring plebeian grievances to the Senate for resolution, and could also veto the decisions of the consuls.
The plebeians wanted the law codified and published, but many patricians, including Cincinnatus and his son, vigorously opposed attempts by plebeians to gain legal rights.
After much struggle, in 449 b.c.e. the patricians surrendered their legal monopoly and codified and published the Laws of the Twelve Tables, so called because they were inscribed on twelve bronze plaques.
The Laws of the Twelve Tables covered many legal issues, including property ownership, guardianship, inheritance, procedure for trials, and punishments for various crimes.
Debtors no doubt made every effort to settle with their creditors.
The patricians also made legal procedures public so that plebeians could argue cases in court.
Later, in 445 b.c.e., the patricians passed a law, the lex Canuleia, that for the first time allowed patricians and plebeians to marry one another.
Licinius and Sextius were plebeian tribunes in the fourth century b.c.e. who mounted a sweeping assault on patrician privilege.
The long Struggle of the Orders had resulted in an expansion of power to wealthy plebeians.
Theoretically, all men could aspire to the highest political offices.
In reality, political power had been expanded only slightly and still resided largely in a group of wealthy families.
Access to the highest political offices was still difficult for any plebeian, who often had to get the support of patrician families if he wanted a political career.
Roman politics operated primarily through a patron-client system whereby free men promised their votes to a more powerful man in exchange for his help in legal or other matters.
The more powerful patron looked after his clients, and his clients’ support helped the patron advance his career.

Roman Expansion

The Punic Wars

Beginning in the fifth century b.c.e. the Romans and the Carthaginians made a series of treaties with one another that defined their spheres of influence, and they worked together in the 270s b.c.e. to defeat Pyrrhus.
This competition led to the first of the three Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage.
The First Punic War lasted for twenty-three years (264–241 b.c.e.).
Of the seven major naval battles they fought with the Carthaginians, the Romans won six and finally wore their opponents down with superior resources and military might.
In 241 b.c.e. the Romans took possession of Sicily, which became their first real province.
The peace treaty between Rome and Carthage brought no peace, as both powers had their sights set on dominating the western half of the Mediterranean.
In 238 b.c.e. the Romans took advantage of Carthaginian weakness to seize Sardinia and Corsica.
The Carthaginians responded by expanding their holdings in Spain, under the leadership of the commander Hamilcar Barca.
In the following years Hamilcar and his son-in-law Hasdrubal subjugated much of southern Spain and in the process rebuilt Carthaginian power.
In 221 b.c.e. Hannibal became the Carthaginian commander in Spain and laid siege to Saguntum, a Roman-allied city that lay within the sphere of Carthaginian interest and was making raids into Carthaginian territories.
The Romans declared war, claiming that Carthage had attacked a friendly city.
So began the Second Punic War, one of the most desperate wars ever fought by Rome.
In 210 b.c.e. Rome found its answer to Hannibal in the young commander Scipio Africanus.
Scipio copied Hannibal’s methods of mobile warfare and using guerrilla tactics and made more extensive use of cavalry than had earlier Roman commanders.
In 202 b.c.e., at the town of Zama near Carthage, Scipio defeated Hannibal in a decisive battle.
The Second Punic War contained the seeds of still other wars.
Unabated fear of Carthage combined with the encouragement of Cato the Elder led to the Third Punic War, a needless, unjust, and savage conflict that ended in 146 b.c.e.
During the war with Hannibal, the Romans had invaded the Iberian Peninsula, an area rich in material resources and the home of fierce warriors.
Scipio’s victory meant that Roman language, law, and culture, fertilized by Greek influences, would in time permeate this entire region, although it would be another century before the Iberian Peninsula was completely pacified.

Rome Turns East

During the Second Punic War, King Philip V of Macedonia made an alliance with Hannibal against Rome.
The Romans, in turn, allied themselves with the Aetolian League of Greek city-states.
The cities of the league bore the brunt of the fighting on the Greek peninsula until after the Romans had defeated Hannibal in 202 b.c.e.
Then the Roman legions were deployed against Macedonian phalanxes, and the Macedonians were defeated in a series of wars.
In 148 b.c.e. they made Macedonia into a Roman province
The Romans had used the discord and disunity of the Hellenistic world to divide and conquer it.
Declaring the Mediterranean mare nostrum, “our sea,” the Romans began to create political and administrative machinery to hold the Mediterranean together under a political system of provinces ruled by governors sent from Rome.

Roman Society

Roman Families

The male head of household was called the paterfamilias.
Fathers held great power over their children, which technically lasted for their children’s whole lives.
In the early republic, legal authority over a woman generally passed from her father to her husband on marriage, but the Laws of the Twelve Tables allowed it to remain with her father even after a marriage.
In order to marry, both spouses had to be free Roman citizens.
Roman law prohibited marriages between slaves, between a slave and a free person, and initially between plebeians and patricians.
If their owner allowed it, slaves could enter a marriage-like relationship called contubernium, which benefited their owner, as any children produced from it would be his.
Weddings were central occasions in a family’s life, with spouses chosen carefully by parents, other family members, or marriage brokers.
Women could inherit and own property under Roman law, though they generally received a smaller portion of any family inheritance than their brothers did.
The Romans viewed the model marriage as one in which husbands and wives were loyal to one another and shared interests and activities.
Traditionally minded Romans thought that mothers should nurse their own children and personally see to their welfare.
Most people in the expanding Roman Republic lived in the countryside.
Farmers used oxen and donkeys to plow their fields, collecting the dung of the animals for fertilizer.
Most Romans worked long days, and an influx of slaves from Rome’s wars and conquests provided additional labor for the fields, mines, and cities.
Well-educated slaves served as tutors or accountants, ran schools, and designed and made artwork and buildings.
For loyal slaves the Romans always held out the possibility of freedom, and manumission, the freeing of individual slaves by their masters, was fairly common, especially for household slaves.
Membership in a family did not end with death, as the spirits of the family’s ancestors were understood to remain with the family.
They and other gods regarded as protectors of the household — collectively these were called the lares and penates — were represented by small statues that stood in a special cupboard or a niche in the wall.
They were honored in special rituals and ceremonies.

Greek Influence on Roman Culture

Romans developed a liking for Greek literature, and it became common for an educated Roman to speak both Latin and Greek.
The new Hellenism profoundly stimulated the growth and development of Roman art and literature.
The Roman conquest of the Hellenistic East resulted in wholesale confiscation of Greek paintings and sculpture to grace Roman temples, public buildings, and private homes.
In literature the Greek influence was also strong.
Roman authors sometimes wrote histories and poetry in Greek, or translated Greek classics into Latin.
All early Roman literature was derived from that of the Greeks, but it flourished because it also spoke to Roman ways of thinking.
Many rich urban dwellers changed their eating habits by consuming elaborate meals of exotic dishes.
During the second century b.c.e. the Greek custom of bathing also gained popularity in the Roman world.
Conservative Romans railed against this Greek custom, calling it a waste of time and an encouragement to idleness and immorality.
The baths were socially important places where men and women went to see and be seen.
Baths were also places where people could buy sex, as the women and men who worked in bathhouses often made extra income through prostitution.
Because of this, moralists portrayed them as dens of iniquity, but they were seen by most Romans as a normal part of urban life.

Opposing Views: Cato the Elder and Scipio Aemilianus

Romans differed greatly in their opinions about Hellenism and other new social customs.
Two men, Marcus Cato (234–149 b.c.e.) and Scipio Aemilianus (185–129 b.c.e.), serve as representatives of these opposing views.
Marcus Cato, called Cato the Elder, was a plebeian and owned a small rural estate, but his talent caught the eye of high patrician officials and he became their client.
In 195 b.c.e. he was elected consul.
A key issue facing Cato was the heated debate over the repeal of the Oppian Law.
Rome needed money to continue the war, and the law decreed that no woman was to own more than a small amount of gold.
The law was passed in part for financial reasons, but also had gendered social implications, as there was no corresponding law limiting men’s conspicuous consumption.
The law was lifted, although later in his political career Cato pushed for other laws forbidding women from wearing fancy clothing or owning property.
Cato set himself up as the defender of what he saw as traditional Roman values: discipline, order, morality, frugality, and an agrarian way of life.
He even criticized his superior Scipio Africanus for being too lenient toward his troops and spending too much money.
Cato held the office of censor, and he attempted to remove from the lists of possible officeholders anyone who did not live up to his standards.
Scipio believed that broader views had to replace the old Roman narrowness.
He developed a more personal style of politics that looked unflinchingly at the broader problems that the success of Rome brought to its people.
He embraced Hellenism wholeheartedly.
Scipio represented the new Roman—imperial, cultured, and independent.
As a boy he had received the traditional Roman training, learning to read and write Latin and becoming acquainted with the law.
He formed a lasting friendship with the historian Polybius, who after being brought to Rome as a war hostage was his tutor.
Polybius actively encouraged him in his study of Greek and in his intellectual pursuits.
In later life Scipio’s love of Greek learning, rhetoric, and philosophy became legendary.
Scipio also promoted the spread of Hellenism in Roman society, and his views became more widespread than those of Cato.
Rome absorbed and added what it found useful from Hellenism, just as earlier it had absorbed aspects of Etruscan culture.

The Late Republic

Reforms for Poor and Landless Citizens

Land won by conquest was generally declared public land.
Wealthy people rented public land — though rents were frequently not collected—and bought up small farms, often at very low prices, to create huge estates, which the Romans called latifundia.
The owners of the latifundia occasionally hired free men as day laborers, but they preferred to use slaves, who could not strike or be drafted into the army.
Using slave labor, and farming on a large scale, owners of latifundia could raise crops at a lower cost than could small farmers.
Confronted by these conditions, veterans and their families took what they could get for their broken and bankrupt farms and tried their luck elsewhere.
Most veterans migrated to the cities, especially to Rome, and although some found work, most did not.
Growing numbers of landless citizens held ominous consequences for the strength of Rome’s armies.
Landless men, even if they were Romans and lived in Rome, could not be conscripted into the army.
The landless ex-legionaries wanted to be able to serve in the army again, and they were willing to support any leader who would allow them to.
After his election as tribune in 133 b.c.e., Tiberius proposed that Rome return to limiting the amount of public land one individual could farm and distribute the rest of the land to the poor in small lots.
When King Attalus III of Pergamum died and left his wealth and kingdom to the Romans in his will, Tiberius had the money appropriated to finance his reforms.
Many powerful Romans became suspicious of Tiberius’s growing influence with the people, and some considered him a tyrant.
When he sought to be re-elected as tribune, riots erupted among his opponents and supporters, and a group of senators beat Tiberius to death in cold blood.
The death of Tiberius was the beginning of an era of political violence.
Although Tiberius was dead, his land bill became law.
Furthermore, Tiberius’s brother Gaius Gracchus (153–121 b.c.e.) took up the cause of reform.
Like his brother Tiberius, Gaius aroused a great deal of personal and factional opposition.
When Gaius failed in 121 b.c.e. to win the tribunate for the third time, he feared for his life.
In desperation he armed his staunchest supporters, whereupon the Senate ordered the consul to restore order.
Gaius was killed, and many of his supporters died in the turmoil.

Political Violence

The death of Gaius brought little peace, and trouble came from two sources: the outbreak of new wars in the Mediterranean basin and further political unrest in Rome.
In 112 b.c.e. Rome declared war against the rebellious Jugurtha, king of Numidia in North Africa.
Numidia had been one of Rome’s client kingdoms, a kingdom still ruled by its own king but subject to Rome.
Client kingdoms followed Rome’s lead in foreign affairs but conducted their own internal business according to their own laws and customs.
The Roman legions made little headway against Jugurtha until 107 b.c.e., when Gaius Marius, a politician not from the traditional Roman aristocracy, became consul and led troops to Numidia.
Marius was unable to defeat Jugurtha directly, but his assistant, Sulla, bribed Jugurtha’s father-in-law to betray him, and Jugurtha was captured and later executed in Rome.
Before engaging the Germans, Marius encouraged enlistments by promising his volunteers land after the war. Poor and landless citizens flocked to him.
Marius and his army conquered the Germans, but when Marius proposed a bill to grant land to his troops once they had retired from military service, the Senate refused to act, in effect turning its back on the soldiers of Rome.
Rome was dividing into two political factions, both of whom wanted political power.
The populares attempted to increase their power through the plebeian assembly and the power of the tribunes, while the optimates employed the traditional means of patron-client relationships and working primarily through the Senate.
The favored general of the optimates was Sulla, who had earlier been Marius’s assistant.
Sulla’s military victories led to his election as consul in 88 b.c.e., and he was given commands of the Roman army in a campaign against Mithridates, the king of a state that had gained power and territory in what is now northern Turkey and was expanding into Greece.
Before he could depart, however, the populares gained the upper hand in the assembly, revoked his consulship, and made Marius the commander of the troops against Mithridates.
Riots broke out.
Sulla fled the city and returned at the head of an army, an unprecedented move by a Roman general.
Sulla’s forces were relatively successful against Mithridates, but meanwhile Marius led his own troops into Rome in 86 b.c.e., undid Sulla’s changes, and killed many of his supporters.
Sulla returned in 83 b.c.e., and after a brief but intense civil war he entered Rome and ordered a ruthless butchery of his opponents.
Dictators were supposed to step down after six months, but Sulla held this position for two years.
In 79 b.c.e. Sulla abdicated his dictatorship because he was ill and believed his policies would last.
Yet civil war was to be the constant lot of Rome for the next forty-eight years, and Sulla’s abuse of political office became the blueprint for later leaders.

Civil War

Sulla’s political heirs were Pompey, Crassus, and Julius Caesar, all of them able military leaders and brilliant politicians.
Pompey (106–48 b.c.e.) began a meteoric rise to power as a successful commander of troops for Sulla against Marius in Italy, Sicily, and Africa.
He defeated Mithridates and the forces of other rulers as well, transforming their territories into Roman provinces.
Crassus (ca. 115–53 b.c.e.) also began his military career under Sulla and became the wealthiest man in Rome through buying and selling land.
In 73 b.c.e. a major slave revolt broke out in Italy, led by Spartacus, a former gladiator.
The slave armies defeated several Roman units sent to quash them.
Finally Crassus led a large army against them and put down the revolt.
Spartacus was apparently killed on the battlefield, and the slaves who were captured were crucified, with thousands of crosses lining the main road to Rome.
Pompey and Crassus then made an informal agreement with the populares in the Senate.
The forces of the rebels were put down in 63 b.c.e. by an army sent by Cicero (106–43 b.c.e.), a leader of the optimates who was consul at the time.
The rebellion and Cicero’s skillful handling of it discredited the populares.
The man who cast the longest shadow over these troubled years was Julius Caesar (100–44 b.c.e.).
His account of his military operations in Gaul (present-day France), the Commentaries on the Gallic Wars, became a classic of Western literature.
Caesar was a superb orator, and his personality and wit made him popular.
In 60 b.c.e. Caesar returned to Rome from Spain and Pompey returned from military victories in the east.
Together with Crassus, the three concluded an informal political alliance later termed the First Triumvirate, in which they agreed to advance one another’s interests.
Personal ambitions undermined the First Triumvirate, and it eventually disintegrated.
Caesar then led his army against those loyal to Pompey and the Senate in Spain and Greece.
In 48 b.c.e., despite being outnumbered, he defeated Pompey and his army at the Battle of Pharsalus in central Greece.
Caesar followed Pompey to Egypt, Cleopatra allied herself with Caesar, and Caesar’s army defeated Ptolemy’s army, ending the power struggle.
Pompey was assassinated in Egypt, Cleopatra and Caesar became lovers, and Caesar brought Cleopatra to Rome.
In the middle of defeating his enemies in battles all around the Mediterranean, Julius Caesar returned to Rome several times and was elected or appointed to various positions, including consul and dictator.
He was acclaimed imperator, a title given to victorious military commanders and a term that later gave rise to the word emperor.
Caesar began to make a number of legal and economic reforms.
He issued laws about debt, the collection of taxes, and the distribution of grain and land.
He reformed the calendar and sponsored celebrations honoring his victories.
Caesar was wildly popular with most people in Rome, and even with many senators.
Other senators, led by Brutus and Cassius, two patricians who favored the traditional republic, opposed his rise to what was becoming absolute power.
In 44 b.c.e. they conspired to kill him and did so on March 15—a date called the “Ides of March” in the Roman calendar—stabbing him multiple times on the steps of the theatre of Pompey, where the Senate was meeting that day.
The conspiring senators called themselves the “Liberators” and said they were defending the liberties of the Roman Republic.
Caesar had named his eighteen-year-old grand- nephew and adopted son, Octavian, as his heir.
In 43 b.c.e. Octavian joined forces with Mark Antony and another of Caesar’s lieutenants, Lepidus, in a formal pact known later as the Second Triumvirate.
Together they hunted down Caesar’s killers and defeated the military forces loyal to Pompey’s sons and to the conspirators.
The three came into conflict, and Lepidus was forced into exile by Octavian, leaving the other two to confront one another.
Both Octavian and Antony set their sights on gaining more territory.
Cleopatra had returned to rule Egypt after Caesar’s death, and supported Antony, who became her lover as well as her ally.
In 31 b.c.e. Octavian’s forces defeated the combined forces of Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium in Greece, but the two escaped.
Octavian pursued them to Egypt, and they committed suicide rather than fall into his hands.
Octavian’s victory at Actium put an end to an age of civil war.
For his success, the Senate in 27 b.c.e. gave Octavian the name Augustus, meaning “revered one.”
That date is generally used to mark the end of the Roman Republic and the start of the Roman Empire.