45
once more did the unexpected. In 49 BCE, he illegally marched his
provincial soldiers into Italy, threatening the Senate and Rome itself.
“The die is cast,”
27
he said as he knowingly plunged the realm into a
civil war.
In that fateful conflict, Caesar eliminated Pompey and other rivals
and gained full control of Rome. He had grandiose plans for signifi-
cantly reorganizing the republican system into a more autocratic gov-
ernment ruled by one person. But he made the serious and for him
tragic mistake of openly declaring himself dictator for life. Hearing
this, a group of irate senators decided that they must save the Republic
by any means necessary. On March 15, 44 BCE, they stabbed him to
death and ran into the streets proclaiming liberty.
The First Citizen and Empire
Once more, a seeming return to normalcy proved only an illusion, for
slaying Caesar did not save the Republic. Instead, still more ambitious
individuals vied for ultimate power over the government. First, Cae-
sar’s adopted son, Octavian, and his trusted military associate Mar-
cus Antonius, better known to posterity as Mark Antony, combined
forces. They waged a brief but bloody civil war against the dictator’s
principal assassins, who went down to defeat in battle in Greece in
October 42 BCE.
Many of the remaining senators worried that Rome’s republican
government as they knew it was now doomed, and they were right.
History now seemed to repeat itself yet again. Mirroring the rivalries
between Marius and Sulla and between Pompey and Crassus, Antony
and Octavian soon turned on each other. Antony, who during the re-
cent war had taken command of Rome’s eastern provinces, teamed up
with Cleopatra, the Greek queen of Egypt. In still another civil con-
flict, together they tried to wrest the western half of the realm from
Octavian. But in 31 BCE he soundly defeated them in western Greece.
In the following year, Antony and Cleopatra committed suicide.
That left Octavian in complete charge of the fractured Republic and
thoroughly war-weary and demoralized Roman populace. Like his
adoptive father, he felt that the old republican system should be re-
placed by some sort of benign or enlightened one-man rule. However,
Octavian saw the wisdom of avoiding Caesar’s main mistake—openly
