86 Chapter 5Capua. To the east, Mithradates of Pontus resumed his
aggression, while in the Mediterranean as a whole,
widespread piracy threatened trade and communica-
tions throughout the empire.
The Senate responded to each crisis by granting
extraordinary appointments, often in violation of the
constitution, and then refusing full honors to the vic-
tors when they returned. The Senate was especially
stingy in denying them the great ceremonial proces-
sions known as triumphs. Grants to veterans were also
delayed. The senators thought that in this way they
could weaken the authority of successful commanders,
but their policy served only to irritate them. Although
Pompey and Crassus feared and disliked each other, in
60 B.C. they made common cause with another popular
politician, Gaius Julius Caesar (100–44 B.C.), to
dominate the elections and create a kind of govern-
ing committee known as the First Triumvirate.
Pompey and Crassus had disbanded their legions
when they returned to Rome. They either were loyal to
republican institutions or failed to understand that
Marius and Sulla had changed the political rules. Cae-
sar’s vision was clearer. He knew that talent alone was
useless without an army, and he used the power of the
triumvirate to grant him proconsular authority over
Cisalpine Gaul. From 58 to 50 B.C. he conquered Gaul,
an area roughly equivalent to modern France, and
raided Britain. A master of public relations, he offered a
selective account of these exploits in the Commentaries,a
classic that remains the first book read by most students
of Latin.
The Gallic campaign brought Caesar enormous
wealth, an army of hardened veterans, and a reputation.
The other triumvirs were less fortunate. Crassus died in
53 B.C. while fighting in Asia. At Rome, an inactive
Pompey grew fearful of Caesar’s ambitions, and the
Senate, sharing his distrust, ordered Caesar to return
home as a private citizen. Knowing that to do so would
end his career and perhaps his life, Caesar crossed the
Rubicon, the small river that divided Cisalpine Gaul
from Italy, and marched on Rome in 49 B.C.
The civil war that followed lasted three years. Be-
cause legions loyal to either Pompey or Caesar could
be found from Spain to Syria, it involved almost every
part of the empire. Pompey was murdered at Alexan-
dria in 48 B.C., but his friends continued the struggle
until 46 B.C. when Caesar returned to Rome in tri-
umph as sole consul. Caesar’s power, like Sulla’s before
him, was based on control of a professional army
whose ties to the political order had been broken by
the Marian reforms. Unlike Sulla, Caesar did not in-
tend to retire. Though Caesar’s rule was destined to
be brief, the Roman republic had fallen, never to be
revived.The Rise of Augustus and the Augustan Principate
Caesar’s rule was generally benign and devoted to re-
form, including the proclamation of a new calendar that
remained standard in Europe until the sixteenth cen-
tury, but it was autocratic and clearly unconstitutional.
On the ides of March (March 15) in 44 B.C. he was as-
sassinated as he entered the Senate house. The conspir-
acy involved sixty senators under the leadership of G.
Cassius Longinus and Marcus Junius Brutus, who be-
lieved that his death would restore the powers of the
senatorial class. The murder led to thirteen more years
of war and the establishment of what amounted to an
autocratic state. The violent and dramatic events of this
period have fired the imagination of writers and artists
down to the present day and have been analyzed by a
host of political theorists.
Caesar’s heirs were his close associate Marcus Anto-
nius (Mark Antony) and his grandnephew Gaius Oc-
tavius (63 B.C.–A.D. 14), then a boy of eighteen. Antony,
in a famous funeral oration, turned the mob against Cae-
sar’s assassins and forced them to flee the city. Those
senators who were not assassins but who favored the
restoration of the republic feared that Antony, or
Antony in combination with Octavius, would seize con-
trol of the state. Their leader was Marcus Tullius Cicero
(106–43 B.C.), the brilliant lawyer, writer, and philoso-
pher whose works are among the finest monuments of
Latin literature. Cicero’s political career had been
blocked only by his failure to achieve military com-
mand. He was the finest orator of the age. He easily per-
suaded the Senate that Antony was unprincipled and a
potential tyrant and that a consular army should be sent
against him. He then tried to drive a wedge between
Octavius and Antony, who resented that most of Cae-
sar’s enormous wealth had been left to the younger man.
Caesar’s heirs disliked one another, but the policy
misfired. When the consuls of 43 B.C. died fighting
against Antony in Cisalpine Gaul, the Senate, on Ci-
cero’s advice, gave Octavius command of the armies but
refused him the consulship because he was still only
nineteen years old. The future Augustus, who now
called himself Julius Caesar Octavianus, went to Rome
with his legions and took the office by force.
Octavian, though young, understood the need for
overwhelming military power. He made peace with
those who commanded the remaining legions—Antony