![]() Mary Beard, author of SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, writes that the triumvirate’s main achievement was a “new round of mass murder.” Octavian and Antony brutally purged the republic’s leadership by killing their enemies and potential rivals. “He was a cunning, ruthless politician who knew how to play both sides,” Barry Strauss, author of Ten Caesars: Roman Emperors from Augustus to Constantine, says of Octavian. The forces of the two competing leaders clashed until Octavian and Antony called a truce and agreed to share power with another of Caesar’s former deputies, Lepidus, in the Second Triumvirate. Octavian quickly amassed a private army and outbid Antony for the support of several legions. In his will, Caesar had named his sickly, 18-year-old great-nephew Octavian as his primary heir and provided for his adoption. Although former deputy Mark Antony positioned himself as Caesar’s rightful successor by delivering a powerful funeral oration, the slain ruler had pre-empted that outcome. Instead of stabilizing the Roman Republic, the assassination plunged it into another civil war as Caesar’s supporters battled the assassins and then each other. ![]() If Caesar had been an autocrat, the lower and middle classes didn’t seem to mind as they benefitted from his radical reforms such as the cancellation of debts and adjustment of the tax code. He was shocked to find that outrage, rather than praise, greeted news of the dictator’s killing. One of the assassination’s leading planners, Marcus Junius Brutus, had prepared to deliver a speech celebrating the Roman Republic’s restoration right after Caesar’s murder.
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