for their independence. The Romans suffered significant losses in the first two years of the war, which forced them to grant most of the concessions sought, including the right to full citizenship for any communities that had not revolted. Only then were the Romans able to defeat the remnant that held out for full independence. However, once the threat was past, the Romans found loopholes to reduce the influence of the Italians, such as limiting them to only 4 out of 35 voting blocs, so the Italian question remained an issue for the next sixty years.
During these episodes, the Roman aristocracy had found itself mostly unified in their response to the Gracchi and to the demands of the Italians, but even this unity shortly broke down. Lucius Cornelius Sulla (138–78 BCE) had come to prominence by serving as a lieutenant to Gaius MariusMarius (157–86 BCE) during a war against King Jugurtha of north Africa; Sulla had in fact been the key player in arranging for the capture of Jugurtha that ended the war. In 89 BCE, Sulla was elected to the consulship in order to pursue a war against King Mithridates of Pontus (modern Turkey), in part because of his success in the Social War. His rival Marius found a legal loophole to transfer the military command to himself as a private citizen, contrary to Roman custom but reminiscent of Scipio Africanus. When Sulla heard the news, he took six of the legions that had been preparing for war against Mithridates and marched on Rome to regain his command. This event marked the first time that a Roman commander had marched his troops against Rome; in theory a Roman general’s command expired as soon as he entered the city, but Sulla’s troops followed him anyway, lured by the promise of loot from the campaign. As soon as Sulla left the city again for his campaign, Marius returned and slaughtered his political opponents; he had their heads placed on spears around the Roman Forum. Marius died only seventeen days after returning to Rome, but not before Sulla was declared an exile and Sulla’s actions invalid. Thus when Sulla returned to Italy after a successful campaign, he was considered an outlaw and needed to fight a second civil war to regain his position within the state. After defeating his opponents in 82 BCE, Sulla had himself appointed dictator, typically an office reserved for a military emergency and limited to a six-month term. Sulla spent two years in office passing legislation that he hoped would restore unity and Rome’s traditional way of governing, and then resigned shortly before dying at his farm south of Rome.
Sulla’s reform package proved to be short-lived; the example he had set by his behavior – using military authority to ignore unfriendly legislation – proved stronger than the legislation itself. Within ten years, two individuals who rose to prominence through military commands, Marcus Licinius Crassus (115–53 BCE) and Gnaeus Pompey, better known as Pompey the Great (106–48 BCE), joined forces to undo much of Sulla’s legislation, which was viewed as too friendly to the traditionalists in the Senate. Pompey gained the consulship despite the fact that he was below the minimum age requirement for the office and over the next ten years, he conducted successful military campaigns throughout the entire Mediterranean, adding Syria, Lebanon, and Judaea to Roman holdings. Crassus meanwhile remained in Rome and built both his wealth and his connections. They were joined in the top ranks of Roman leadership by Julius Caesar (100–44 BCE), who in 63 BCE surprised almost everyone by winning election as pontifex maximus, the head of the college of pontiffs, a symbolically important office though with little real power.
When the traditionalist members of the Senate decided that the time had come to reassert their authority, they assigned Caesar to drain swamps in Italy during his consulship and refused to ratify Pompey’s treaty settlements from his campaigns. In response, the three politicians banded together in a loose alliance known as the First Triumvirate, which dominated Roman politics for the next ten years. As a result of the alliance, Caesar spent the next ten years conquering Gaul, even crossing briefly into Britain, while Pompey and Crassus were left to arrange matters in Rome, mostly to their liking, which included Crassus taking a command in 55 BCE to fight against the Parthian Empire on Rome’s eastern frontier. In 53 BCE, Crassus suffered a major defeat against the Parthians and was killed during an attempt to negotiate a surrender, thus ending the three-person alliance. The year before, Pompey’s wife Julia, the daughter of Caesar, had died during childbirth, leaving the alliance between Pompey and Caesar without any direct ties. The traditionalists in the Senate saw Crassus’ death as an opportunity to separate Pompey from Caesar, and they gradually won Pompey over to their side. Conflict between Pompey and Caesar became inevitable, though to this day scholars debate the reasons for the conflict and which of the parties was more responsible for its outbreak.
Caesar had much the better of the civil war that followed: crossing the Rubicon River, which marked the boundary of his province, he became the second Roman (after Sulla) to march on Rome. Pompey was unable to defend the city and moved first south and then across to Greece, where Caesar followed him and defeated him at the battle of Pharsalus (48 BCE). Returning to Rome, Caesar became dictator as Sulla had done and instituted many reforms to make for the smoother functioning of the Roman state (including a calendar reform that remains in use today). However, when Caesar became dictator for life, a small group of Senators formed a conspiracy, believing that Caesar was aiming to be king (or worse in Roman eyes, a god), and assassinated him in the Senate house on the Ides of March (March 15) in 44 BCE. His murder was, perhaps contrary to the expectations of the assassins, not met with support from the populace of Rome, and the assassins had to flee the city, leaving Caesar’s most trusted commander, Mark Antony (83–30 BCE), and Caesar’s heir, his 19-year-old grand-nephew Octavian (63 BCE–14 CE) to vie for power within the city.
The 13 years from 44 to 31 BCE were among the most unsettled periods in all of Rome’s history. Antony and Octavian maneuvered for the backing of Caesar’s supporters, while the traditionalists in the Senate, such as the orator Cicero, tried to influence the direction of affairs, and the assassins Brutus and Cassius gathered military resources in Greece. In 42 BCE, Antony and Octavian came to a formal agreement known as the Second Triumvirate (the third member, Marcus Lepidus ended up not playing a significant role in events), in which they gave themselves supreme power in Rome. They then turned their joint attention to eliminating Senatorial opposition – Cicero was among the first to go – and to defeating the assassins of Caesar in battle, which they accomplished at the battle of Philippi in 42 BCE. From there, Antony moved on to the East, where he attempted another attack on Parthia and developed a relationship with Cleopatra VII of Egypt (69–30 BCE). In the meantime Octavian had to fight off the navy of Sextus Pompey, the son of Pompey the Great, and reorganize affairs in Italy. The alliance between Octavian and Antony was inherently unstable, and although they agreed once to renew the Triumvirate, when the second five-year term ended in 32 BCE, Antony and Octavian quickly came to war. On September 2, 31 BCE, in a sea battle at Actium off the coast of Greece, Antony’s forces were decisively defeated; Octavian followed him to Alexandria, the capital of Egypt, and after a short siege overwhelmed the remnants of Antony’s forces. As immortalized by Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra committed suicide, leaving Octavian, soon to rename himself Augustus, as the sole ruler of the Mediterranean basin and marking (for modern historians) the end of the Roman Republic.
Marking Time
In placing the end of the Republic in 31 BCE, we have performed one of a historian’s most characteristic activities: dividing history into periods. Typically these divisions are based on characteristics that historians believe are common to this period. For instance, the medieval period, lying between the Roman Empire on the one side and the Renaissance on the other, is often characterized as having significant authority vested in religious officials. Larger periods, such as the Roman Republic that lasted for 500 years, are often divided into smaller units as well, and the process of deciding where to place the breaks forces us to think about larger trends in Roman history rather than the details of individual episodes.
Historians of ancient Rome have tended to divide its history into three broad phases based on the form of its government: the Monarchy (753–509 BCE) from Romulus to Tarquin; the Republic (509–31 BCE), when power was vested in magistrates elected by the citizen body; and the Empire (31 BCE–476 CE) following the battle of Actium, where power was again vested in one man. Other divisions are possible: one could use territorial