SPQR

Aeneas and more

The Roman electoral system openly and unashamedly gave extra weight to the votes of the rich; and many of them must have concluded that Cicero was a better option than Catiline, whatever their snobbish disdain for his ‘newness’.

Equally worrying for Roman traditionalists was the sense that Antony was beginning to treat Alexandria as if it were Rome, even to the point of celebrating the distinctively Roman ceremony of triumph there, after some minor victory in Armenia. ‘For the sake of Cleopatra he bestowed on the Egyptians the honourable and solemn ceremonies of his own co

grandfather was a hero of the war against Hannibal, with the extra claim to fame of being the first man known to have entered combat with a prosthetic hand – probably just a metal hook that replaced his right hand, lost in an earlier battle.

Livy suggests that the same rivalry and ambition that had marred the relationship of Numitor and Amulius trickled down the generations to Romulus and Remus.

CHAPTER TWO · IN THE BEGINNING Cicero and Romulus

It was not, in other words, to go back to Horace, that civil war was the curse and destiny of Rome from its birth; Rome had projected its obsessions with the apparently unending cycle of civil conflict back onto its founder.

Only the offspring of the rich spent their youth learning grammar, rhetoric, philosophy and how to make speeches – or the less meaty syllabus, from reading and writing to spinning and music, offered to girls. Child labour was the norm.

In line with this, Numa’s foundation had two different but related aspects. On the one hand, he established a series of priesthoods to perform or oversee major rituals, including, among an otherwise overwhelmingly male line-up, the Vestal Virgins, with their duty to keep the flame alight on the city’s sacred hearth in the Forum. On the other hand,