Sublime

By a convenient coincidence, King Attalus III of Pergamum had died in 133 BCE, and – combining a realistic assessment of Roman power in the eastern Mediterranean with a shrewd defence against assassination by rivals at home – he had made ‘the Roman people’ the heir to his property and large kingdom in what is now Turkey. This inheritance provided a

The proposal prompted a series of increasingly bitter controversies. First, when one of his fellow tribunes, Marcus Octavius, repeatedly tried to veto it (some right of veto had been given to these ‘people’s representatives’ centuries earlier), Tiberius rode roughshod over the objection and had the people vote his opponent out of office. This enabl

And it was this problem that Tiberius determined to solve when he was elected a tribune of the people for 133 BCE. He straight away introduced a law to the Plebeian Assembly to reinstate smallholders by distributing plots of Roman ‘public land’ to the poor.

According to a pamphlet written by his younger brother Gaius, quoted in a much later biography, this was the moment when Tiberius first became committed to reform. As he later put it to the Roman people, many of the men who fought Rome’s wars ‘are called masters of the world but have not a patch of earth to call their own’. To him, that was not fai

After the cremation, Livia – now called Augusta, because Augustus had formally adopted her in his will – rewarded with the sum of a million sesterces the man who swore that he had seen Augustus soaring to heaven. Augustus was now a god.

In the end, despite all his efforts, Augustus was back where he could have started all along, with Livia’s son Tiberius, who became the next emperor in 14 CE. Pliny the Elder could not resist pointing out one other irony of this. Tiberius Claudius Nero, the new emperor’s father, had been on Antony’s side in the civil war, and his family had been am

CHAPTER 9 · THE TRANSFORMATIONS OF AUGUSTUS Caesar’s heir

On the death of Nerva in 98 CE, Trajan’s succession was so guaranteed that the new emperor did not even return to Rome…

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The first emperor