Emperors and dynasties
In the prevailing tradition, Kings were expelled from Rome and the Republic
was inaugurated in 509 BC. Libertas was the watchword of those rebelling
against the monarchy (led by a Brutus) and of the assassins of the ‘perpetual’
dictator Julius Caesar in 44 BC (also led by a Brutus). From 30 BC , the date
of the battle of Alexandria (following the battle of Actium in 31 BC ), the
Romans again fell under the control of one man, Octavian, renamed
Augustus in 27 BC , and this time monarchy endured. The Kings had presided
over a small city with a modest rural hinterland. Augustus was master of a
mighty empire, with a huge metropolis at its centre. The empire had been
won by sustained military and diplomatic effort over centuries. But the
Republican government, presided over by the senate, failed to integrate
within the institutions of the city- state the two key institutions of empire,
the provinces and the army. The senate proved incapable of controlling the
army commanders who conquered foreign lands, in theory on its behalf, or
their soldiers, who in the last century of the Republic acted more like clients
of their commanders than citizens of Rome. In the end, the generals and
their soldiers brought down the Republic in prolonged civil war.
Augustus was in a stronger position than any of the powerful and
ambitious individuals who had preceded him, including Caesar, his adoptive
father. He was militarily more secure than Caesar and showed greater
political skills. While never releasing his hold on power, he refashioned his
public position to make it appear less monarchic. The basis of his power was
and remained the army, but he negotiated a modus vivendi with the senate
(while ruthlessly suppressing opposition, real or imagined), and won broad
support across the population, in Rome, Italy and the provinces, by clever
propaganda and popular policies. His rule marks a dramatic break with the
normal practice of offi ce- holding under the Republic, which was limited to
a single year, though in the last decades of the Republic the extraordinary
commands awarded to or wrested by Sulla, Crassus, Pompey and Caesar
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Introducing the Principate
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