The period of Rome's early history, traditionally dated from its founding by Romulus in 753 BC to the establishment of the Republic in 509 BC.
The legendary background to Rome's foundation, connecting Rome to Troy through Aeneas and to Alba Longa through Romulus and Remus.
In Roman legend, Remus was killed during the dispute over who would rule the new city.
ParticipantsRemus
Rome
Legendary founder and first king of Rome. Later tradition credited him not only with founding the city, but also with creating Rome's army, Senate, citizen divisions, Sabine union, and early political institutions.
Romulus declared Rome an asylum, open to all comers regardless of origin (fugitives, exiles, and runaway slaves), rapidly increasing the city's population.
ParticipantsRomulus
Rome
Romulus appointed 100 leading men as senators (patres), creating Rome's first advisory council and the origin of the patrician class.
ParticipantsRomulus
Rome
Romulus organised Rome's fighting men into a legion of 3,000 infantry and 300 cavalry, drawn from the three original tribes.
ParticipantsRomulus
Rome
Lacking women, the Romans invited neighbouring peoples to a festival and seized the Sabine women as wives, provoking war with the Sabines.
ParticipantsRomulus
Rome
The Sabines captured Rome's citadel on the Capitoline Hill through the treachery of Tarpeia, who opened the gates in exchange for what the soldiers wore on their arms.
ParticipantsTitus Tatius, Tarpeia
Capitoline Hill
During the decisive battle, the Sabine women rushed between the two armies, begging their fathers and husbands to stop fighting, ending the war.
ParticipantsRomulus, Titus Tatius
Rome
Following the women's intervention, Romans and Sabines merged into a single community under the joint rule of Romulus and Titus Tatius, doubling Rome's population and its Senate.
ParticipantsRomulus, Titus Tatius
Rome
Romulus and the Sabine king Titus Tatius ruled Rome jointly for several years following the merger of their peoples.
ParticipantsRomulus, Titus Tatius
Rome
Romulus vanished during a sudden storm while reviewing troops. The senators claimed he had been taken up to heaven; later tradition held that the senator Proculus Julius reported seeing Romulus ascend as the god Quirinus.
ParticipantsRomulus
Rome
After Romulus's disappearance, the senators took turns ruling for a day while Romans and Sabines negotiated the succession, establishing the concept of an interregnum.
Rome
Second king of Rome, a Sabine credited with establishing Roman religious institutions, priesthoods, and the sacred calendar during a long era of peace.
Third king of Rome, who restored Rome's martial character after Numa's peace, destroyed Alba Longa, and absorbed its population into Rome.
Tullus Hostilius provoked a war with Rome's mother city Alba Longa, ultimately destroying it and absorbing its population after the Alban dictator Mettius Fufetius betrayed Rome in battle.
ParticipantsTullus Hostilius
Alba Longa
To settle the war between Rome and Alba Longa without mass bloodshed, three Roman brothers (Horatii) fought three Alban brothers (Curiatii) in single combat. The last surviving Horatius killed all three opponents.
ParticipantsTullus Hostilius
Alba Longa
The Alban dictator Mettius Fufetius agreed to fight alongside Rome against Veii and Fidenae but withdrew his forces during the battle, hoping both sides would destroy each other.
ParticipantsMettius Fufetius, Tullus Hostilius
After Mettius Fufetius betrayed Rome in battle, Tullus had him executed and ordered Alba Longa razed to the ground. Its entire population was resettled in Rome.
ParticipantsTullus Hostilius
Alba Longa
Fourth king of Rome, grandson of Numa, who formalised the ritual declaration of war, defeated neighbouring Latin communities, resettled their populations in Rome, and founded the port of Ostia.
Ancus Marcius defeated several neighbouring Latin communities who had raided Roman territory, using the newly formalised fetial ritual to declare war, then resettled the conquered populations on the Aventine Hill.
ParticipantsAncus Marcius
Rome
Ancus Marcius founded Ostia at the mouth of the Tiber, giving Rome its first port and access to maritime trade.
ParticipantsAncus Marcius
Ostia
Fifth king of Rome, an Etruscan outsider from Tarquinii who gained power through wealth and patronage. He expanded the Senate, began the Circus Maximus, celebrated the first Roman triumph, and adopted Servius Tullius as heir.
Tarquinius Priscus, an Etruscan outsider, secured election as king by sending Ancus Marcius's sons away and winning senatorial support through patronage and influence.
ParticipantsLucius Tarquinius Priscus, Sons of Ancus Marcius
Rome
Tarquinius Priscus expanded the Senate by adding new men loyal to him, increasing his political support base.
ParticipantsLucius Tarquinius Priscus
Rome
Tarquinius Priscus celebrated the first Roman triumph after victory over the Sabines, establishing the tradition.
ParticipantsLucius Tarquinius Priscus
Rome
Tarquinius Priscus began construction of the Circus Maximus as a venue for chariot racing and public games after victory over Latin neighbours.
ParticipantsLucius Tarquinius Priscus
Circus Maximus
Tanaquil interpreted a flame omen around the child Servius as a sign of future greatness; Tarquinius Priscus adopted him as heir.
ParticipantsLucius Tarquinius Priscus, Servius Tullius, Tanaquil
Rome
The sons of Ancus Marcius arranged Tarquinius Priscus's murder with hired attackers, believing he had denied them their birthright.
ParticipantsLucius Tarquinius Priscus, Sons of Ancus Marcius
Rome
Sixth king of Rome and adopted heir of Tarquinius Priscus. Credited with instituting the census, dividing citizens into wealth classes, creating the Comitia Centuriata, and building Rome's military-electoral class system.
Tanaquil claimed Tarquin was only wounded and had Servius act as king until his position was secure, enabling a smooth succession.
ParticipantsTanaquil, Servius Tullius
Rome
Latin communities contributed to a temple to Diana at Rome, acknowledging Rome's leading position among the cities of Latium.
ParticipantsServius Tullius
Rome
Seventh and last king of Rome. Usurped the throne by murdering Servius Tullius, ruled as a tyrant, weakened the Senate, and was expelled after Sextus Tarquinius raped Lucretia, triggering the founding of the Republic.
Lucius Tarquinius Superbus seized the throne and Servius Tullius was killed in the ensuing violence, aided by Superbus's wife Tullia.
ParticipantsLucius Tarquinius Superbus, Tullia Minor, Servius Tullius
Rome
Superbus framed a Latin noble by planting weapons and executing him without trial, intimidating Latin elites into submission.
ParticipantsLucius Tarquinius Superbus
Sextus Tarquinius raped Lucretia; she reported the crime to her family and died by suicide, triggering the revolt against the Tarquins.
ParticipantsSextus Tarquinius, Lucretia
Rome
After Lucretia's suicide, Brutus swore vengeance and rallied both the people in Rome and the army at Ardea against Superbus. The gates were closed against the king and the royal family was expelled.
ParticipantsLucius Junius Brutus, Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus
Rome
The period of Roman history beginning with the expulsion of the kings in 509 BC, characterised by annually elected magistrates and senatorial governance. The early Republic was dominated by patrician aristocrats, not broadly democratic.
The first century of the Republic, dominated by the Conflict of the Orders and wars with immediate neighbours (Volscians, Aequi, Veii). Ends with the Gallic Sack, which destroyed earlier records and marks the transition from legendary to historical Rome.
The Comitia Centuriata elected Brutus and Collatinus as the first consuls, replacing kingship with annually elected magistrates.
ParticipantsLucius Junius Brutus, Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus
Rome
Brutus made Romans swear an oath before Jupiter never again to allow a king to rule Rome.
ParticipantsLucius Junius Brutus
Rome
Collatinus resigned the consulship because Romans distrusted the Tarquin name, even though he had helped overthrow the monarchy. Publius Valerius replaced him.
ParticipantsLucius Tarquinius Collatinus
Rome
Young Roman nobles, including Brutus's sons, conspired with Tarquin's envoys to restore the monarchy. The conspiracy was exposed by a slave.
ParticipantsLucius Junius Brutus
Rome
Brutus allowed his own sons to be executed for treason after they joined the Tarquinian conspiracy to restore the monarchy.
ParticipantsLucius Junius Brutus
Rome
Tarquin persuaded Veii to attack Rome. Brutus and Publicola defeated them, but Brutus was killed in battle.
CommandersRome: Lucius Junius Brutus, Publius Valerius Publicola
Rome
Publius Valerius responded to public suspicion by demolishing his hilltop house and proposing laws protecting the Republic: any man seeking kingship could be killed, and citizens gained the right to appeal magistrate decisions to the people. These acts earned him the name Publicola ("friend of the people").
ParticipantsPublius Valerius Publicola
Rome
Rome probably lost: Porsenna likely captured or occupied the city before Rome regained independence. Roman tradition buried this under heroic legends of Horatius at the bridge, Mucius Scaevola's defiance, and Cloelia's escape, reshaping a humiliation into a story of unbroken resistance.
Horatius Cocles defended the bridge over the Tiber long enough for Romans to destroy it and prevent Porsenna's army crossing into the city.
ParticipantsHoratius Cocles
Rome
Gaius Mucius attempted to assassinate Lars Porsenna, killed the wrong man, then burned his own hand to demonstrate Roman resolve. In legend, Porsenna was unnerved and made peace.
ParticipantsGaius Mucius Scaevola
Rome
Cloelia, held hostage under the peace treaty with Porsenna, escaped by swimming the Tiber back to Rome with her fellow captives.
ParticipantsCloelia
Rome
A decisive battle in which Rome, under the dictator Aulus Postumius Albus, defeated the Latin League and reasserted Roman dominance over Latium.
CommandersRome: Aulus Postumius Albus
Lake Regillus
Plebeian soldiers withdrew to the Sacred Mount and refused to return until their grievances were addressed, forcing the Senate to negotiate.
Sacred Mount
306 members of the Fabii clan took sole responsibility for Rome's war against Veii and were wiped out defending an indefensible pass, a Roman Thermopylae. Only one Fabius survived to continue the line.
Tribune Volero Publilius proposed that tribunes be elected by the Tribal Assembly rather than the wealth-weighted Comitia Centuriata, reducing patrician influence over tribune selection.
Rome
Tribune Terentilius proposed that Rome's laws be written down and publicly posted so all citizens would be bound by the same rules and no man could rise above them. Patricians delayed the proposal for roughly a decade.
Rome
Caeso Quinctius, son of Cincinnatus, was charged by the tribune Verginius after violently breaking up plebeian demonstrations. Rather than face trial, he fled into Etruria. Cincinnatus was forced to sell most of his property to pay the bond, leaving him farming a small plot across the Tiber.
Rome
When a Roman army was trapped by the Aequi, Cincinnatus was appointed dictator, called from his farm, raised a new army, rescued the besieged legion, defeated the enemy, celebrated a triumph, and resigned after fifteen days.
Consular power was transferred to a board of ten men, the Decemvirate, tasked with collecting and codifying Roman law into a single uniform code.
Rome
Roman law was codified and published on bronze tablets in the Forum, creating Rome's first public written legal code. The Tables were memorised by all citizens and became the foundation of later Roman law.
Rome
After completing the Twelve Tables, Appius Claudius convinced the Decemvirs to remain in office illegally. He then tried to seize a freeborn plebeian woman, Verginia, by falsely declaring her a slave, provoking the people and army to revolt.
ParticipantsAppius Claudius Crassus
Rome
The people and army withdrew to the Sacred Mount again, forcing the Decemvirs to resign and regular consular elections to resume.
Sacred Mount
Law proposed by the tribune Canuleius legalising marriage between patricians and plebeians. Patrician resistance was half-hearted because Roman law followed the father's status alone, making blood-purity arguments absurd. Some patrician families also eyed the fortunes of wealthy plebeian families.
Rome
Right after the Lex Canuleia, the consulship was suspended and replaced (in some years) by military tribunes with consular power, initially three, later rising to four and six. Elected by the Comitia Centuriata, these tribunes were open to plebeians but less prestigious and more diluted than the consulship.
Rome
When consular tribunes made it possible that plebeians might hold executive authority, patricians peeled off census administration into a new office, the censorship, restricted to patricians. The censor controlled citizen classification and the voting blocs of the Comitia Centuriata.
Rome
During famine, the wealthy equestrian Spurius Maelius bought grain at his own expense and distributed it freely, becoming enormously popular. He then allegedly conspired to make himself king. Cincinnatus was appointed dictator for the second time, and when Maelius resisted summons, the Master of Horse killed him on the spot.
Rome
Fidenae, an Etruscan outpost under Roman control, revolted and called for Veii's help. After murdering Roman envoys and years of grinding conflict, Rome recovered the city around 425 BC but did not press into Veientine territory, leaving the final confrontation with Veii deferred but inevitable.
Veii lay twelve miles north of Rome, far too close for coexistence. After decades of rivalry over salt beds and fertile land, Rome committed to eliminating the city. The siege dragged on for years and forced Rome to keep soldiers in the field year-round for the first time, fundamentally changing Roman military practice.
The Senate introduced pay for soldiers so Rome could keep an army in the field year-round during the siege of Veii. Not a great sum or a permanent policy at first, but it set a precedent on the long road toward a fully professional army.
Rome
Camillus was appointed dictator after years of inconclusive siege. He tunnelled into Veii through its drainage system while distracting the defenders with a frontal assault. Roman troops emerged inside, opened the gates, and sacked the city.
CommandersRome: Marcus Furius Camillus
Veii
After Veii, Camillus celebrated a triumph riding a chariot drawn by four white horses (an honour traditionally reserved for kings). He then demanded soldiers return one-tenth of their booty to fulfil a vow to Apollo, enraging the people. A tribune brought charges for mishandling spoils, and Camillus went into voluntary exile.
Rome
Rome met Brennus and the Senones at the Allia River. The Gallic charge broke the Roman line almost immediately; many Romans fled to the Capitoline instead of defending the city, leaving Rome exposed.
After routing Rome's army at the Allia, Brennus and the Senones occupied and burned the city. Survivors held out on the Capitoline Hill until Rome paid a ransom of a thousand pounds of gold. When Romans protested the weighted scales, Brennus threw his sword on and declared "Vae victis." Later tradition claimed Camillus arrived to reverse the humiliation, but the ransom was probably the real end.
Rome
After the sack, Romans faced a ruined city and seriously considered abandoning Rome to move to Veii. Camillus argued that rebuilding was a moral necessity; to leave would be an admission of weakness. The Senate chose to rebuild, and Rome remained on the Seven Hills.
Rome
Rome rebuilt after the Gallic Sack and conquered the entire Italian peninsula through the Samnite Wars and the Pyrrhic War. The Conflict of the Orders was resolved, and the manipular legion replaced the phalanx.
After the Gallic sack, nearly every subdued neighbour attacked simultaneously: Volscians, Latins, and even Roman colonies. Camillus was repeatedly recalled to lead the defence. The constant warfare forced Romans to rebuild their city in frantic bursts with no planning, producing Rome's famously chaotic street layout.
Manlius Capitolinus was arrested for sedition after championing plebeian debt relief and hinting at overthrowing the Senate. His trial was held in view of the Capitoline, where he gestured to the hill to remind the crowd of his service during the Gallic siege. The patricians moved the trial to a location where the hill was not visible. Without the visual prop, the evidence stood on its own, and Manlius was convicted and thrown from the Tarpeian Rock.
ParticipantsMarcus Manlius Capitolinus
Rome
Tribunes Licinius and Sextius used their veto power to shut down all government business, including yearly elections, until their demands were met. No magistrates were elected for several years. The shutdown forced the Senate to negotiate. Camillus, appointed dictator for the fifth and final time in 367 BC, brokered the deal.
ParticipantsGaius Licinius Stolo, Lucius Sextius Lateranus, Marcus Furius Camillus
Rome
Lucius Sextius Lateranus was elected the first plebeian consul in 366 BC, the immediate result of the Licinian-Sextian Laws passed the previous year.
ParticipantsLucius Sextius Lateranus
Rome
A short war (343-341 BC) between Rome and the Samnites over control of Campania. Rome won three engagements in two years (Mount Gaurus, Cossus's ambush rescue, Suessula), led primarily by the consul Marcus Valerius Corvus. Ended with a truce, but proved to be only the first round of a fifty-year struggle that would dominate Italian politics.
Unable to resist Samnite raids, Capua sent envoys to Rome requesting aid. When Rome refused (bound by treaty with the Samnites), the Capuans formally surrendered their city, land, and citizens to Rome. The Senate accepted, gaining Campania's rich farmland, then informed the Samnites that Capua was now Roman territory. The Samnites refused to withdraw, triggering the First Samnite War.
Capua
First engagement of the First Samnite War. Corvus met the Samnites at the base of Mount Gaurus in Campania. The Romans won, but the battle was fiercer than expected, warning Rome that the Samnites were no ordinary raiders.
CommandersRome: Marcus Valerius Corvus
After the First Samnite War, Roman legions garrisoned near Capua grew envious of civilian wealth and began plotting rebellion. Unable to agree on a leader, they kidnapped the retired general Titus Quinctius and marched on Rome. The Senate named Marcus Valerius Corvus dictator. He met the mutineers at the Alban Mount and convinced them to stand down without bloodshed, then secured full clemency for the soldiers.
ParticipantsMarcus Valerius Corvus
Reforms of 342 BC requiring that one consul each year be plebeian and that ten years pass before a man could hold the same office again.
Rome
Final battle of the First Samnite War. Corvus marched light, producing a small camp that tricked the Samnites into thinking they faced a minor force. The Samnites dispersed to forage for a siege. Corvus attacked while they were scattered, taking their camp almost without a fight.
CommandersRome: Marcus Valerius Corvus
A war (340-338 BC) in which Rome crushed the Latin League after the Latins demanded full political equality, including a Latin consul. The two sides were near-identical in size, tactics, and language. The decisive Battle of Vesuvius broke Latin resistance, and a year of sieges reduced each city individually. Ended with Rome dissolving the League and dominating all of Latium.
Decisive battle of the Latin War, fought near Mount Vesuvius. The armies were evenly matched. When the Roman left flank under Decius began to fail, Decius performed the devotio: veiling himself in a ceremonial toga, he charged alone into the Latin line and fought until killed, consecrating the enemy army to the gods. Manlius then committed fresh reserves on the right and broke the Latins.
CommandersRome: Titus Manlius Torquatus, Publius Decius Mus (consul 340 BC)
After the Latin War, Rome abolished the Latin League permanently. The Senate decided each community's fate individually: those who cooperated or never rebelled received full Roman citizenship; moderate resisters kept trade and marriage rights but lost the vote; leaders of the revolt were dispossessed and their land colonised by Roman citizens.
Rome
Rome's longest and most gruelling war to date (327-304 BC). After the Latin War, Rome adopted a consciously expansionist policy and provoked the Samnites by planting colonies in their territory. The war lasted over twenty years and included catastrophic defeats like Caudine Forks alongside eventual Roman victory, establishing Rome as the dominant power in Italy.
Samnite commander Gaius Pontius trapped both Roman consular armies in a narrow pass by feeding them false intelligence. Unable to fight or escape, the Romans surrendered and were forced to pass under the yoke, one of the deepest humiliations in Roman military history.
CommandersSamnites: Gaius Pontius
Roman defeat early in the second phase of the Second Samnite War. Details are sketchy, but the dictator commanding the legion was killed. The loss nearly unravelled Roman power, with Campania close to defecting and Etruscans entering the war against Rome.
Major Roman victory over the Etruscans during the Second Samnite War period. After Fabius Rullianus's bold operations beyond the Ciminian Forest, the Etruscans regrouped but were defeated in a hard-fought battle near Lake Vadimo. The defeat broke Etruscan military resistance and left the Samnites increasingly isolated
CommandersRome: Quintus Fabius Maximus Rullianus, Lucius Papirius Cursor
The Samnites' last stand for Italian independence (298-290 BC). Recognising that peace with Rome meant slow absorption, they organised a grand coalition of Etruscans, Umbrians, and Gauls. The coalition was shattered at Sentinum (295 BC), the largest battle yet fought in Italy. With their allies gone, the Samnites fought on alone until final defeat at Aquilonia (293 BC) ended the fifty-year struggle.
The largest battle yet fought in Italy, with over 40,000 men per side. Rome faced a coalition of Samnites, Gauls, and Umbrians. Fabius Rullianus commanded the right against the Samnites conservatively; Decius attacked the Gauls aggressively on the left but his cavalry charge failed, throwing his own infantry into chaos. Decius performed the devotio like his father, sacrificing himself to rally the left. Fabius then enveloped the Samnites and pinned the remaining coalition between two armies.
CommandersRome: Quintus Fabius Maximus Rullianus, Publius Decius Mus (consul 312 BC)
Major Roman victory over the Samnites in 293 BC. The Samnites fielded an elite force remembered as the Linen Legion, but Lucius Papirius Cursor broke them at Aquilonia while Spurius Carvilius campaigned nearby. The defeat shattered Samnite military power near the end of the Third Samnite War.
Rome's first war against a professional Greek army (280-275 BC). After Tarentum provoked Rome and called on Pyrrhus for help, the Epirote king invaded Italy with 25,000 men and war elephants. He won at Heraclea and Asculum but suffered irreplaceable losses each time. After a failed Sicilian campaign, he returned to Italy and was defeated at Beneventum, withdrawing to Greece permanently. Rome gained all of southern Italy.
First battle between a Roman manipular legion and a full Greek phalanx. Pyrrhus defeated the Romans but was shaken by their discipline; they withdrew in formation rather than fleeing. Also the first time Romans encountered war elephants, which terrified their cavalry and tipped the battle.
CommandersEpirus: Pyrrhus of Epirus
Two-day battle between roughly equal armies of 40,000. The first day ended in stalemate after the Romans retreated up ground too steep for the phalanx. On the second day Pyrrhus forced the fight onto flat terrain where his elephants overwhelmed the Roman line. Pyrrhus won but lost many of his best officers, prompting his famous remark: "One more such victory and we are undone."
CommandersRome: Publius Decius Mus (consul 279 BC) · Epirus: Pyrrhus of Epirus
Pyrrhus left Italy in 278 BC to campaign in Sicily, where Greek cities in the east faced Carthage in the west. He drove the Carthaginians back to a single port but failed to dislodge them, and his dictatorial style alienated the Sicilian Greeks. Pressed by Roman advances on the mainland, he abandoned the campaign and returned to Italy in 275 BC.
ParticipantsPyrrhus of Epirus
Pyrrhus's final Italian battle. Roman fire arrows sent the war elephants crashing back through the Greek lines, inflicting heavy casualties on Pyrrhus's own infantry. With losses accumulated across three costly battles, Pyrrhus gathered what remained of his army and sailed home. Romans renamed the site from Maleventum ("bad events") to Beneventum ("good events") in celebration.
CommandersEpirus: Pyrrhus of Epirus
Rome expanded beyond Italy, fighting the Punic Wars against Carthage and the Macedonian Wars in the Greek East. Ended with the destruction of both Carthage and Corinth in 146 BC, leaving Rome unchallenged in the Mediterranean.
Campanian mercenaries (Mamertines) who had seized Messana invited a Carthaginian garrison against Hiero of Syracuse, then appealed to Rome to expel it. The Claudii (who held land and power in the south) won the Senate debate with visions of easy victory and the strategic necessity of controlling the straits. Rome sent troops, and Carthage mobilised for war.
Messana
Rome's first overseas war (264-241 BC), fought against Carthage for control of Sicily. Rome built navies from scratch repeatedly and lost entire fleets to storms, but always found more men and money. Rome won through sheer depth of resources, gaining Sicily as its first province.
First major land engagement of the First Punic War. Romans built a double wall around the city (one facing in, one facing out) and survived a Carthaginian counter-siege with supply help from Hiero. Rome won the pitched battle, but while legionaries scavenged for spoils the Carthaginian army inside slipped out unnoticed. The legions then sacked the undefended city, turning Sicilian opinion against Rome rather than intimidating others into submission.
Rome's first major naval victory. The corvus, a spiked boarding bridge, turned the sea battle into an infantry fight. An initial 30 Carthaginian ships were caught and their crews slaughtered; another 20 were taken as the rest tried to peel off. A third of the Carthaginian fleet destroyed, though the corvus was never again as effective once the surprise wore off.
Possibly one of history's largest naval battles (~600 ships, 200,000 men). Rome needed to protect 80 troop transports for its Africa invasion. Carthaginians outmaneuvered the Roman formation by baiting the lead ships out of position, but couldn't destroy the transports. Rome's fleet survived intact and launched the invasion of North Africa.
Xanthippus placed elephants at the front and cavalry on the wings. Regulus deepened his infantry line to absorb the elephants, fatally shortening his front. Carthaginian cavalry routed the Roman flanks, then closed the trap from behind while fresh infantry waited ahead. 13,000 of 15,000 Romans killed; Regulus captured. Rome's African adventure was over.
Consul Claudius Pulcher planned a surprise night raid on the Carthaginian fleet. When the sacred chickens refused to eat (a bad omen), he threw them overboard: "If they're not hungry, maybe they're thirsty." The attack was spotted, the fleet trapped against the coast. 90 of 120 ships lost, dooming the siege of Lilybaeum and ceding naval superiority to Carthage for years.
The decisive final battle of the First Punic War. Rome built a navy from scratch for the fourth time and blockaded the last Carthaginian outposts. Carthage hastily launched its entire fleet to break the blockade, but its inexperienced crews were routed by the now battle-hardened Roman sailors. Hamilcar, cut off from resupply, negotiated peace.
After the First Punic War, Carthage refused to pay its returning mercenaries. The mercenaries revolted and Carthage spent three years fighting its own ex-army. Carthage eventually won by hiring new mercenaries to fight the old ones, but the whole affair cost more than paying the original debt would have. The crisis left Carthage severely weakened and drove the Barca family to seek new resources in Spain.
Hamilcar marched his army across North Africa and into Spain in 237 BC, building an autonomous Barcid empire funded by silver mines. He minted coins associating his family with local gods and demanded the army swear loyalty to the Barca dynasty rather than Carthage. He conquered southwest Spain through ruthlessness toward chieftains and leniency toward common soldiers, before drowning during a retreat in 228 BC.
ParticipantsHamilcar Barca
Alongside the Illyrian campaign, Rome sent envoys to Greece explaining the limited scope of their war. The Greeks acknowledged Roman power as equal to their own, and Corinth invited Rome to participate in the Isthmian Games, formally accepting Rome into the Greek political world.
Rome's first military campaign east of the Adriatic. In less than a year the major Illyrian cities fell, Illyrian ships were banished from the sea, and southern Illyria was annexed as a Roman protectorate. A simultaneous diplomatic mission to Greece opened Rome's first formal relations with the Greek world.
Rome and Hasdrubal agreed that Carthage would not cross the River Ebro, which lies midway up Spain's Mediterranean coast. This left Saguntum, a city friendly to Rome, one hundred miles behind the Carthaginian line.
ParticipantsHasdrubal the Fair
A united Gallic army poured through the Alps intent on sacking Rome again. Rome mustered the full fighting capacity of Italy, destroyed the invasion at Telamon, then counterattacked and cleared the Gauls from northern Italy.
The first engagement of the Gallic invasion went poorly for Rome. The Roman army was trapped, but the Gauls chose to pillage the countryside rather than maintain their vigil, allowing the trapped legions to escape.
A Gallic army retreating north with booty was trapped in a coastal pass between two Roman armies. The Gauls fought desperately on two fronts but were crushed between the converging Roman lines. The main force of the Gallic invasion was destroyed.
After destroying the Gallic invasion at Telamon, Rome pressed its advantage and cleared the Gauls from northern Italy entirely. The Po Valley, long considered part of Gaul, became permanent Roman territory.
Hannibal besieged Saguntum, a city friendly to Rome but located in Carthaginian territory per the Ebro Treaty. Rome demanded Carthage halt the siege; Carthage refused, citing its legal rights. After eight months Saguntum fell and Rome declared war.
CommandersCarthage: Hannibal Barca
Hannibal invaded Italy by crossing the Alps and spent nearly twenty years defeating Roman armies on their own soil. Rome endured catastrophic losses but refused to surrender, eventually carrying the war to Africa. The closest Rome came to destruction until the Crisis of the Third Century.
Hannibal marched 50,000 men and 67 elephants from Spain through southern Gaul and over the Alps in a fifteen-day crossing as snow was setting in. He fought hostile natives, carved paths out of rock for pack animals, and lost half his army to the environment, combat, and desertion. Only 25,000 emerged into Italy, but the Romans were completely unprepared for a Carthaginian army on their soil.
ParticipantsHannibal Barca
The first battle of the Second Punic War in Italy. Scipio crossed the Ticinus River to engage Hannibal, but Roman cavalry was completely outclassed by the Numidians. The Romans were outflanked and driven back to their bridge, which they burned behind them. The defeat demonstrated Hannibal's superiority and caused local Gauls to rally to him.
CommandersRome: Publius Cornelius Scipio · Carthage: Hannibal Barca
Hannibal baited the impatient consul Sempronius Longus into charging out without breakfast, then crossing the freezing Trebia River in December. The soaking, exhausted Romans found Hannibal's well-fed army waiting on the far side, with 1,000 hidden cavalry behind them. Caught between two lines, the Roman army was destroyed. About 10,000 broke through to Placentia; the rest were killed or drowned trying to recross the river.
CommandersCarthage: Hannibal Barca
Hannibal bypassed the Roman-held roads by marching four days through a flooded swamp (losing sight in one eye to infection), then ravaged Etruria unopposed. Flaminius gave chase at double-time. Hannibal chose Lake Trasimene as his trap: infantry on the narrow strip between lake and hills, cavalry and troops hidden in the slopes above. When Flaminius charged through the northern entrance, Carthaginian cavalry sealed it behind him. Of 40,000 Romans who entered, 30,000 were killed or captured, including Flaminius.
CommandersRome: Gaius Flaminius · Carthage: Hannibal Barca
Varro packed 80,000 Romans close together on open ground to overwhelm Hannibal's 50,000. Hannibal deployed a convex semicircle of weaker troops in the centre to lure the Romans forward, with Libyan infantry on the wings and cavalry beyond. As the Romans pushed the centre back, the line inverted and the Libyans flanked them without moving. Carthaginian cavalry then sealed the rear. Between 50,000 and 70,000 Romans died, including 80 senators and 29 military tribunes.
CommandersRome: Gaius Terentius Varro · Carthage: Hannibal Barca
Marcellus besieged Syracuse for two and a half years. The mathematician Archimedes designed grappling hooks that could lift Roman ships from the water and catapults that launched enormous boulders with ease, making naval assault impossible. The city finally fell when pro-Roman nobles arranged a betrayal, letting Romans scale the walls during a festival. Marcellus then turned his troops loose to sack the city, during which Archimedes was killed.
CommandersRome: Marcus Claudius Marcellus
After Cannae, Capua (the second most important city in Italy) defected to Hannibal as part of his strategy to peel away Rome's allies. Rather than confront Hannibal directly, Rome besieged Capua to force him into reacting. Hannibal's attempt to draw the siege army away by marching on Rome failed. Capua surrendered, its pro-Carthaginian leaders were executed, and Rome held the initiative for the first time in the war.
ParticipantsHannibal Barca
Publius and Gnaeus Scipio had spent five years campaigning effectively in Spain, keeping Carthaginian reinforcements from reaching Hannibal. In 211 BC, Hasdrubal bribed their Celtiberian allies to desert, then the brothers were separated and each defeated individually. Both were killed within weeks of each other, erasing five years of Roman gains. A young officer held the remnants together until Rome could send a new commander.
ParticipantsPublius Cornelius Scipio
With Rome besieging Capua and refusing to engage him directly, Hannibal marched on Rome itself in 211 BC, coming within two miles of the city. He waited for the Romans to panic and lift the siege, but they only detached a portion of the siege army to reinforce the city. Capua remained besieged and soon surrendered.
ParticipantsHannibal Barca
Scipio marched his army to the Carthaginian capital in Spain while the three enemy armies were days away, coordinating a simultaneous naval assault under Laelius. A frontal assault on day one failed, but a local revealed that the lagoon bordering one wall drained at low tide. Next morning Scipio ordered a full assault on the main gate, then led a small force through the shallow lagoon, scaled the unguarded wall, and opened the gate from inside. Scipio released the Spanish hostages held by Carthage, winning local support that shifted the war.
CommandersRome: Scipio Africanus
Hasdrubal marched 30,000 men over the Alps to link up with Hannibal and form an army that could overrun Rome. Consul Nero, shadowing Hannibal 250 miles to the south, left a skeleton force tending extra campfires and force-marched north in seven days to join his colleague Livius. The combined consular armies trapped Hasdrubal against the Metaurus River. Nero led a flanking force around the Carthaginian rear. Hasdrubal, knowing the battle was lost, charged into the fighting and died.
CommandersCarthage: Hasdrubal Barca
Scipio's tactical masterpiece. For days he lined up with legions in the centre; the Carthaginians mirrored him. On the day of battle he reversed the formation (legions on wings, Spaniards in centre), harassed the enemy camp at dawn so they fought hungry, then attacked late. His legionary wings destroyed the weaker Carthaginian flanks and closed on the centre, echoing Hannibal's own methods. The rout ended Carthaginian control of Spain.
CommandersRome: Scipio Africanus
The final battle of the Second Punic War, fought near Carthage in 202 BC. Hannibal placed raw recruits in front with veterans behind, and elephants at the head. Scipio opened lanes in his formation so the elephants passed through harmlessly. The legions cut through the front lines but were halted by Hannibal's veterans. The battle hung in the balance until Masinissa's Numidian cavalry, having routed the Carthaginian horse, returned to strike Hannibal's rear. The Carthaginian army broke.
ParticipantsMasinissa
CommandersRome: Scipio Africanus · Carthage: Hannibal Barca
After Cannae, Philip V allied with Hannibal, but his envoys were intercepted. Rome sent a small force east with orders to recruit Greek allies rather than fight directly. The Aetolian League agreed to harass Philip, keeping him tied down in skirmishes for a decade. Rome won no territory and fought no major battles, but kept Philip out of the war with Hannibal.
Rome's first direct war in Greece. After two years of indecisive skirmishing, the consul Flamininus took command, recast the war as a defence of Greek liberty, and won Greek allies away from Philip. At Cynoscephalae in 197 BC, the Roman manipular system destroyed the Macedonian phalanx on broken ground. Flamininus declared Greece free, but Rome had no intention of allowing genuine independence: "freedom" meant obedience to Roman interests without the cost of a garrison.
A chance engagement on broken terrain in 197 BC. Philip's right wing, with the high ground, drove back the Roman left, but his left could not form the phalanx on rough ground and was broken. A Roman tribune then wheeled his maniples around and struck Philip's victorious right from behind. Philip escaped but his army was destroyed.
CommandersRome: Titus Quinctius Flamininus · Macedon: Philip V of Macedon
At a banquet hosted by Antiochus III, Scipio asked Hannibal who he considered the greatest general in history. Hannibal placed Alexander first, Pyrrhus second, and himself third. Scipio, expecting acknowledgement of his own superiority, asked where Hannibal would rank himself had he won at Zama. Hannibal replied that he would place himself above Alexander: a backhanded compliment implying that beating Scipio would have been an accomplishment, but that the Roman did not merit a place among the very best.
ParticipantsScipio Africanus, Hannibal Barca
The Aetolians invited Antiochus III to liberate Greece from Rome, but he arrived with only 10,000 men and found most Greeks hostile. Rome crushed his army at Thermopylae (where Cato the Elder made his name leading the flanking charge). Antiochus fled across the Hellespont; the Scipio brothers pursued into Asia Minor and destroyed his much larger army at Magnesia. The Taurus Mountains became Rome's eastern boundary.
Antiochus positioned his 10,000 men at the famous pass, hoping to repeat the Spartans' stand against the Persians. But the Romans knew the mountain paths around the position, and Cato the Elder led the flanking force that broke through to the Syrian rear. The battle was quick and decisive. Antiochus fled across the Hellespont to Asia Minor.
ParticipantsCato the Elder
CommandersSeleucids: Antiochus III
The Scipio brothers pursued Antiochus into Asia Minor with 50,000 troops, the first time Roman legions crossed into Asia. Antiochus gathered 70,000 Syrians and mercenaries on the border between Pergamum and Syria, but his undertrained army lacked the professionalism of the Romans. The numerical advantage was easily offset by Roman discipline, and the outcome was never in doubt. Antiochus's army was crushed, revealing the vast disparity between the two supposedly equal powers.
CommandersRome: Scipio Africanus · Seleucids: Antiochus III
Philip V's son Perseus renewed Macedon's challenge to Rome by expanding beyond treaty boundaries and allying with Syria. After three years of indecisive campaigning (during which undisciplined Roman legions pillaged Greek towns), the consul Aemilius Paulus took command, restored order, and destroyed Perseus at Pydna in 168 BC. Macedon was broken into four republics, Perseus paraded in chains, and the punitive sack of Epirus made clear that Rome would rule Greece through fear rather than goodwill.
Paulus flushed Perseus from his fortified position with a feint, forcing the Macedonians onto open ground where their phalanx could deploy. The phalanx initially pushed the Romans back, but drove them onto uneven ground where the rigid formation began to splinter. Roman maniples poured through the gaps and destroyed the phalanx from the inside. Perseus fled and the Antigonid dynasty ended.
CommandersRome: Aemilius Paulus · Macedon: Perseus of Macedon
On the march home from Pydna, the Roman army passed through Epirus and was unleashed on 70 towns. Over 150,000 locals were enslaved; the rest were killed or left destitute. The Epirots had nothing to do with Perseus's war. It was a deliberate act of terror: after thirty years of Greek conspiracies against "liberators" they claimed to love, Rome chose fear over goodwill. Future Greeks understood what crossing Rome meant, and the conspiracies stopped.
ParticipantsAemilius Paulus
Rome invaded a largely peaceful Carthage in 149 BC after Cato's faction convinced the Senate that Carthaginian economic recovery posed a threat. When Carthage refused the impossible demand to abandon their city and move inland, Rome besieged it for three years. Scipio Aemilianus finally took the city in 146 BC after six days of street fighting. The city was burned and its territory became a Roman province.
After a three-year siege, Scipio Aemilianus ordered the final assault in spring 146 BC. The walls were breached and six days of intense street fighting followed as the Carthaginians forced the Romans to fight for every block. Of 700,000 citizens, only about 50,000 remained by the end. The city was burned; legend claims the fires lasted ten days.
ParticipantsScipio Aemilianus
Carthage
Andriscus's revolt against Rome's hands-off settlement of Macedon. After reuniting the four republics and repelling an initial Roman force, he was crushed by Quintus Metellus at full strength.
A man named Andriscus appeared in Macedon claiming to be the son of Perseus, the last Macedonian king defeated at Pydna. He united the four republics Rome had carved out of Macedon and raised an army. An initial Roman expeditionary force was repelled. Rome sent the praetor Quintus Metellus with a proper army; he crushed Andriscus, who was captured and paraded in Metellus's triumph. Metellus earned the cognomen Macedonicus. Rome dissolved the republics and annexed Macedon as a province.
Rome
A swift Roman punitive campaign against the Achaean League in 146 BC. The consul Lucius Mummius besieged and burned Corinth to the ground; its population was sold into slavery. The destruction fell in the same year as Carthage, signalling that resistance to Rome ended in annihilation.
The consul Lucius Mummius besieged Corinth, the leading city of the Achaean League, after it defied Roman authority. The city was overcome and burned to the ground in a brutal display of power. The men were slaughtered and the women and children sold into slavery. Greek territory was absorbed into the Roman provincial system within a few years.
With no external threats remaining after 146 BC, Roman competitiveness turned inward. The next century was consumed by class conflict, the revolt of Italian allies, and civil wars among great men competing for power.
Tribune Tiberius Gracchus proposed capping landholdings and redistributing public land to dispossessed citizens, bypassing the Senate to bring the bill directly to the people's assembly. When a fellow tribune, Octavius, vetoed it at the Senate's instigation, Tiberius had him physically removed from office. The bill passed; a three-man commission began redistributing land, creating an estimated 75,000 new farms.
ParticipantsTiberius Gracchus
Rome
Attalus III of Pergamum died in 133 BC and willed his kingdom in western Asia Minor to the Roman people. When the Senate moved to take control of the inheritance, Tiberius Gracchus claimed it for the people and his land commission, forcing a direct confrontation over whether the Senate or the popular assembly held ultimate authority over state resources.
Facing prosecution once his tribunate ended, Tiberius stood for re-election, which his opponents condemned as an illegal bid for permanent power. Before voting could begin, a mob of senators led by Scipio Nasica (Tiberius's own cousin) descended on the assembly with clubs. Tiberius and several hundred supporters were beaten to death. When told, Scipio Aemilianus quoted the Odyssey: "So perish all who do the like again."
ParticipantsTiberius Gracchus
Rome
The state began purchasing and reselling grain at a fixed below-market price. Juries in corruption trials were opened to the equestrian class, breaking the Senate's monopoly on justice. Limits were placed on military service and the state was required to clothe its soldiers. The agrarian commission was relaunched and overseas colonies founded to relieve population pressure.
ParticipantsGaius Gracchus
Rome
Defeated at the polls in his bid for a third term, Gaius and his ally Fulvius Flaccus organised public demonstrations against the repeal of his reforms. When an opponent's herald was killed by Gracchan supporters, the Senate invoked an emergency decree (later called the senatus consultum ultimum) declaring Gaius and Fulvius enemies of the state. Fulvius was caught and killed with his sons. Gaius fled across the Tiber and, cornered, ordered his slave to kill him.
ParticipantsGaius Gracchus
Rome
A decade of war against the migrating Germanic Cimbri and Teutones, who swept into Rome's northern sphere and crushed several senatorial armies, culminating in the catastrophe at Arausio (105 BC). The repeated failures of noble commanders swept Gaius Marius to an unprecedented run of consulships. Marius annihilated the Teutones at Aquae Sextiae (102 BC) and then destroyed the larger Cimbri army at Vercellae (101 BC), ending the threat.
The opening Roman defeat of the Cimbrian War, near Noreia in the eastern Alps. A Roman force intercepted the migrating Cimbri but was routed. Not covered by Duncan's episodes; included as a timeline marker for the war's start.
The consul Marcus Silanus was sent north to suppress the Cimbri but was utterly defeated. The battle has no known name. The location and details are not covered by Duncan; included as a timeline marker.
A Roman force near Burdigala (modern Bordeaux) was defeated by the Cimbri and their Helvetian allies the Tigurini. The surviving officers were forced to lead their troops under the yoke, a ritual of humiliation. Duncan mentions this defeat but not the battle's name.
One of Rome's worst military disasters. The proconsul Caepio (a noble) refused to coordinate with the consul Mallius (a new man), keeping their armies separated on the banks of the Rhone. The Cimbri and Teutones destroyed Caepio's smaller force first, then swung back and crushed Mallius against the river. Casualties ran to roughly 80,000. Romans blamed the catastrophe on the haughty patrician's refusal to serve beneath a social inferior.
Popular demand for a proven commander over a string of discredited senatorial generals bent the rules that were supposed to stop it. After ending the Jugurthine War in 107 BC, Marius was returned as consul five more times in a row (104-100 BC), flouting at least two laws restricting re-election.
ParticipantsGaius Marius
Rome
Marius intercepted the Teutones in southern Gaul near Aquae Sextiae (modern Aix-en-Provence). When a Teutonic vanguard of 30,000 charged on contact, Marius routed them and concealed half a legion in the hills. The main Teutonic army marched forward in pursuit, passing the hidden cohorts. Marius turned to face them from the front; the hidden Romans struck from behind. Caught between two forces and unable to regroup, the Teutones were annihilated.
CommandersRome: Gaius Marius
Marius met the Cimbri on the plains of northern Italy near Vercellae, commanding alongside his consular colleague Catulus. The Cimbri outnumbered the Romans substantially and attacked with a headlong charge, advancing into the morning sun and blinding dust. Marius's force-marched, heavily drilled legions had the stamina to absorb the assault and grind down the less disciplined Germanic warriors. The Cimbri were destroyed; their threat to Italy was over.
CommandersRome: Gaius Marius
After Jugurtha seized Numidia by eliminating his co-heirs and killing Italian merchants caught in the conflict, Rome declared war. For years the campaign stalled, as Jugurtha used bribes to neutralise Roman commanders and keep to the mountains. Public outrage over the corruption swept Gaius Marius to the consulship in 107 BC. Marius adopted aggressive tactics and dispatched Sulla to a neighbouring kingdom to secure Jugurtha's betrayal. Delivered in chains, Jugurtha was paraded through Rome in Marius's triumph and executed.
Gaius Marius was elected consul for 107 BC on a platform denouncing the slow, corrupt prosecution of the Jugurthine War. He took command in Africa, ended the war, and abolished the property requirement for military service to fill his legions.
ParticipantsGaius Marius
Rome
Marius abolished the property requirement for military service in 107 BC, opening the legions to any citizen regardless of land ownership. Service became a long-term career, rewarded with land grants on discharge and regular provisioning throughout. Able rankers were promoted into the officer corps at the expense of nobles who had claimed commands by birth. The armies of Caesar, Pompey, and Octavian were all structured on this template.
ParticipantsGaius Marius
Rome
A rebellion (91-88 BC) in which Rome's Italian allies broke away and formed a rival state centred on Corfinium (renamed Italica), with its own Senate and assemblies. Rome suppressed the revolt militarily (Marius in the north, Sulla in the south) but conceded the point with the Lex Julia (90 BC), granting citizenship to allies who laid down arms. Paradoxically, the Italians lost the war and won what they wanted, while Rome gained a united peninsula and lost its political cohesion.
Passed by the consul Lucius Julius Caesar during the Social War, the Lex Julia offered Roman citizenship to all Italian communities that had not joined the revolt and to any rebel who laid down arms. A follow-up measure, the Lex Plautia Papiria (89 BC), extended the offer further. Together the laws stripped the rebellion of its purpose and caused the vast majority of Italians to accept terms.
ParticipantsLucius Julius Caesar
Rome
Sulla broke the Italian siege of a besieged Roman legion near Nola in Campania. The grateful soldiers awarded him the Grass Crown (corona graminea), the most prestigious decoration in the Roman military, given by an army to the commander who saved it from destruction.
CommandersRome: Lucius Cornelius Sulla
Rome
The consul Pompeius Strabo besieged Asculum, the flashpoint city in Picenum where the revolt had begun with the massacre of Roman officials. After a long siege, Strabo took the city in 89 BC, executing the Italian leaders and enslaving the population. The fall of Asculum broke the back of resistance in the north and effectively ended the war's active phase.
CommandersRome: Pompeius Strabo
Rome
In retaliation for the Asiatic Vespers (88 BC), Rome dispatched Sulla east to recover the province of Asia and drive Mithridates out of Greece. Sulla sacked Athens and twice destroyed far larger Pontic armies at Chaeronea and Orchomenus. He then dictated the Peace of Dardanus from a position of total military superiority, imposing severe financial penalties on Asia before marching his army back to Rome.
On a single day in 88 BC, Mithridates VI orchestrated the coordinated massacre of an estimated 80,000 Roman citizens and Italian residents across Asia Minor. Local populations in cities throughout the region participated, binding them to Mithridates's cause and making compromise with Rome impossible. The massacre shocked the Roman world and made an immediate retaliatory war unavoidable.
Rome
After the tribune Sulpicius Rufus used mob violence to transfer the Mithridatic command from Sulla to Marius, Sulla refused to accept the ruling. He marched his six legions west from Campania, crossed the pomerium (the sacred city limit no army was permitted to enter), and took Rome by force. Marius barely escaped with his life. Sulla restored the Senate, declared Marius an enemy of the state, and then departed east for the Mithridatic War.
Rome
Sulla besieged Mithridates-controlled Athens, held by a puppet tyrant backed by a Pontic garrison. After months outside the walls, he stormed the city in a midnight raid in early 86 BC. Sulla gave his troops free rein; the slaughter was only stopped when Greek friends of Sulla pleaded for mercy. On his way out he burned the Athenian port of Piraeus as a final warning.
CommandersRome: Lucius Cornelius Sulla
Rome
After Marius returned from Africa and allied with the consul Cinna, their combined forces stormed Rome in late 87 BC: Sulla's partisans were hunted down and killed, and elections were held with only Marian allies alive to vote. Marius won a seventh consulship, then died of natural causes two weeks into office in 86 BC, leaving Cinna in sole command of Rome.
Rome
North of Athens in Boeotia, Sulla faced the Pontic general Archelaus at the head of an army roughly three times the size of the Roman force. Sulla chose fortified high ground and lured the Pontic cavalry and infantry into attacking uphill. He personally dashed from wing to wing to shore up pressure points, and after wave after wave was repulsed, he launched a decisive charge that encircled the Pontic army. The Pontic losses were catastrophic; Roman casualties were negligible.
CommandersRome: Lucius Cornelius Sulla
Rome
After the destruction of both Pontic field armies in Greece, Mithridates VI sued for terms. Sulla met him at Dardanus (on the Hellespont) and agreed to leave Mithridates in control of Pontus in exchange for his complete withdrawal from all other territories, the surrender of his fleet, and payment of a large indemnity. Sulla additionally levied five years of punitive back-taxes across all eastern provinces at a crushing rate, filling Rome's coffers and leaving Anatolia deep in debt.
ParticipantsLucius Cornelius Sulla, Mithridates VI
Rome
Sulla landed in Italy with five legions, defeated the Marian consuls in succession (their armies defecting rather than fight him), and allied with Pompey in the north and Crassus from Spain. The Samnites, fearing a Sullan restoration, threw in with the Marians. After months of campaigning, Sulla crushed the final Samnite-Marian army at the Colline Gate outside Rome in November 82 BC.
A desperate battle fought just outside Rome's Colline Gate in November 82 BC, between Sulla's army and a Samnite-Marian force that had marched directly on the city. Sulla's left wing was routed but Crassus annihilated the Samnite left. The enemy was encircled and destroyed; approximately fifty thousand died. On hearing the news, Marius the Younger committed suicide under siege.
CommandersSullans: Lucius Cornelius Sulla, Marcus Licinius Crassus
Rome
After his victory at the Colline Gate, the Senate proclaimed Sulla dictator with no term limit, breaking the ancient constitutional convention of a six-month maximum. He was the first holder of the office to have it indefinitely, making him in effect Rome's first dictator for life.
Rome
Sulla posted a list of approximately 1,500 proscribed enemies in the Forum, offering rewards for killing them. Harbouring the proscribed was a capital crime. The killing spread far beyond the original list; estimates put the total dead at 9,000, most with no real connection to the Marian cause. The young Julius Caesar, married to Cinna's daughter, survived only after Sullan relatives interceded on his behalf.
Rome
In 80 BC, believing he had repaired the Republic, Sulla announced he would resign the dictatorship at year's end. He stood for election as consul in 79 BC, won, served out his term in legitimate office, then retired to his country villa, where he worked on his memoirs and died in 78 BC. He wrote his own epitaph: "No greater friend, no worse enemy."
Rome
After Sulla's victory, the Marian general Quintus Sertorius refused to accept the new order and built a rival Roman state in Spain, complete with a shadow Senate and allied Iberian tribes. Metellus Pius and then Pompey both ran campaigns that could never pin him down. The war ended through betrayal: Sertorius was assassinated by his own officer Perpenna in 72 BC, and Pompey claimed Spain for Rome.
En route to Rhodes, Caesar was captured by Cilician pirates in the Aegean. He insisted they raise his ransom from 20 to 50 talents, dismissing 20 as insultingly low. He spent 40 days in their company, joining their games while repeatedly joking that he would crucify them once free. After the ransom was paid, he raised a fleet, hunted them down, recovered the money, and crucified the entire crew.
ParticipantsGaius Julius Caesar
After years of holding Rome at bay in Spain, Sertorius was murdered at a banquet by his own lieutenant Perpenna, who feared being permanently overshadowed. Without Sertorius, the rebel state collapsed. Pompey defeated the leaderless remnant in his first engagement with them and claimed credit for pacifying Spain.
ParticipantsQuintus Sertorius
Rome
A slave revolt at Capua in 73 BC that the Senate dismissed as banditry grew into a 70,000-strong army under Spartacus. Rome's early response was mixed: ad hoc militias were routed, and while consul Gellius destroyed the splinter force under Crixus, Spartacus defeated the other consul near the Alps. It took Crassus with a force of 50,000 to finally end the war in 71 BC.
The praetor Gaius Claudius Glaber besieged Spartacus's slave army on the slopes of Vesuvius, expecting to starve them out. At night the slaves used vines and improvised ladders to rappel down the sheer cliffs at the rear of the mountain and attacked the Roman camp from behind. Glaber's militia was annihilated.
Rome
While Spartacus marched north, the Gaul Crixus had split from the main army with roughly 30,000 men to continue raiding southern Italy. Consul Lucius Gellius Publicola caught up with Crixus near Mount Garganus and destroyed the force. At least two-thirds were killed, including Crixus himself.
Rome
Spartacus defeated the consular legions of Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus Clodianus in the Picenum region as the slave army marched north toward the Alps in 72 BC. Ancient sources disagree on the scale: Appian describes Spartacus then wheeling around to defeat the second consul Gellius as well, while Plutarch records only the one engagement against Lentulus as decisive before the march to the Alps.
Rome
Crassus trapped Spartacus at the toe of Italy after the pirates hired to ferry the slave army to Sicily took their payment and fled. Spartacus broke through the Roman lines but was run down; the slave army was destroyed and Spartacus was killed in the fighting. Crassus ordered 6,000 survivors crucified along the Appian Way.
Rome
After the Third Servile War, Crassus and Pompey each kept their armies camped outside Rome and refused to disband until the Senate agreed to a deal. Neither trusted the other to stand down first, and the Senate had no means to compel them. The result was a joint consulship for 70 BC.
ParticipantsMarcus Licinius Crassus, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus
Rome
When Caesar's aunt Julia died in 69 BC, Caesar arranged a public funeral and displayed images of her husband Gaius Marius in the procession, a direct challenge to the Sullan establishment that had banned them. The crowd responded enthusiastically. In the funeral oration Caesar traced the Julian gens back to Venus through Aeneas, publicly claiming divine ancestry before the Roman people.
ParticipantsGaius Julius Caesar
Rome
When Nicomedes of Bithynia willed his kingdom to Rome in 74 BC, Mithridates invaded rather than let Rome take it. Lucullus drove him out of Bithynia and invaded Pontus, winning a decisive victory at Tigranocerta (69 BC) against a far larger Armenian army. His soldiers refused to march further and the Senate recalled him. Pompey took command in 66 BC, defeated Mithridates, and forced him to flee; denied asylum by Tigranes, Mithridates killed himself in 63 BC.
Lucullus led two legions against Tigranes' army outside Armenia's new capital, Tigranocerta. The Romans were vastly outnumbered, but Lucullus attacked before Tigranes could organise his cavalry and routed the Armenian force. It was counted among the greatest Roman victories of its era.
Mediterranean piracy had crippled Roman trade for decades. In 67 BC Pompey was granted an extraordinary command: full imperium over the entire Mediterranean and all coastlines up to fifty miles inland. He divided the sea into thirteen zones, each under a subordinate commander, and swept west to east. The western Mediterranean was clear within forty days. The pirates fell back to their bases in Cilicia, where Pompey destroyed them. The whole campaign took three months.
ParticipantsGnaeus Pompeius Magnus
After twice failing to win the consulship, Catiline organised a plot to overthrow the government. He recruited indebted nobles, corrupt ex-senators, and landless veterans with promises of debt cancellation and power. In Rome, Gallic emissaries betrayed the conspiracy by handing the Senate signed letters from its leaders. Cicero's orations destroyed Catiline's standing; five conspirators were strangled without trial. Catiline fled to Etruria and died in battle at Pistoria in 62 BC.
ParticipantsLucius Sergius Catilina, Marcus Tullius Cicero, Marcus Porcius Cato
Rome
After the conspiracy in Rome collapsed, Catiline fled to Etruria and joined the rebel army Manlius had assembled. Cornered by Roman forces, the rebels were forced to fight. Catiline's force was destroyed. Sallust records that Catiline was found dead at the front of the battle line, having died honourably in battle.
In 60 BC Caesar brokered a secret pact with Pompey and Crassus. Each swore, with Caesar officiating in his role as Pontifex Maximus, to take no action that opposed the others. Pompey needed his eastern conquests ratified and land for his veterans. Crassus needed political cover and hoped alliance with a popular general would open the door to the military glory that had always eluded him. Caesar needed the consulship and money to fund his ambitions.
ParticipantsGaius Julius Caesar, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, Marcus Licinius Crassus
Rome
Caesar's co-consul Bibulus was the Senate's hand-picked foil, but he was so thoroughly sidelined that Romans mocked the year as "the consulship of Julius and Caesar." Caesar forced through a land bill using Pompey's veterans as muscle, had Pompey's eastern settlement ratified by the cowed Senate, passed the Lex Julia de Repetundis reforming provincial administration, and secured a five-year proconsular command over both Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaul via a tribune's bill in the Popular Assembly.
ParticipantsGaius Julius Caesar, Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus
Rome
Passed by Caesar as consul in 59 BC, the Lex Julia de Repetundis was a comprehensive statute governing the conduct of provincial governors. It set limits on the gifts a governor could accept, defined what counted as extortion, and established clear rules for accountability. It brought Roman rule of law to the administration of the empire's provinces and is often called Caesar's most enduring legislative achievement.
ParticipantsGaius Julius Caesar
Rome
Caesar took his Gallic command in 58 BC and immediately manufactured pretexts for conquest. He crushed the Helvetii at Bibracte, drove the German king Ariovistus back across the Rhine, subjugated the Belgic confederation, and made two invasions of Britain. He then crushed the great unified Gallic revolt led by Vercingetorix, besieging him at Alesia in 52 BC. Vercingetorix surrendered and Gaul became a Roman province.
As tribune in 58 BC, Clodius turned the long-standing subsidised grain price into a fully free dole for the citizens of Rome, ultimately feeding some 200,000 people. It was a populist masterstroke that bought him the loyalty of the urban mob. The free dole proved impossible to repeal. Even Augustus thought better of it, and it became a permanent fixture of imperial Rome.
ParticipantsPublius Clodius Pulcher
In 58 BC the tribune Clodius passed a law making it exile to have executed a citizen without trial, aimed squarely at Cicero for the Catilinarian executions, and drove him from Rome when Pompey declined to intervene. Cicero spent a wretched year in Macedonia. In 57 BC, with Pompey's backing and the tribune Milo's street muscle countering Clodius's gangs, he was recalled to an adoring welcome, though Clodius had razed his houses in the meantime.
ParticipantsMarcus Tullius Cicero, Publius Clodius Pulcher, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus
After the Helvetii turned and pursued Caesar's supply-starved army, the two forces fought a full day near the Aeduan town of Bibracte in 58 BC. The legions methodically gained the upper hand, captured the Helvetii baggage train, and broke the tribe's resistance. Survivors surrendered and Caesar ordered them back to Lake Geneva to serve as a buffer against Germanic incursions.
CommandersRome: Gaius Julius Caesar
Caesar drove Ariovistus's German force back across the Rhine after a hard day's fighting near the Rhine. The German right wing was broken by a charge led by Publius Crassus. Ariovistus escaped across the river on a raft, abandoning his family, and never crossed back.
CommandersRome: Gaius Julius Caesar
In 56 BC, with the Triumvirate fraying, Caesar met Pompey and Crassus at Luca to renew their pact. They agreed Pompey and Crassus would be consuls for 55 BC and then take Hispania and Syria, while Caesar's Gallic command was extended another five years. It was the alliance's last genuine act of cooperation: Julia's death in 54 BC and Crassus's death against Parthia in 53 BC soon left it dead in fact as well as spirit.
ParticipantsGaius Julius Caesar, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, Marcus Licinius Crassus
In 55 and 54 BC Caesar twice crossed the Channel into Britain, the first Roman general to do so. The first expedition was nearly a disaster: storms wrecked his fleet and he withdrew with little to show for it. The second, with 800 ships, penetrated inland and installed a friendly king before Caesar withdrew. Materially the invasions gained little, but as self-promotion they were spectacular.
ParticipantsGaius Julius Caesar
Caesar's daughter Julia, married to Pompey to cement the Triumvirate, died in childbirth in 54 BC. Her death removed the last personal link between the two men, and Pompey's refusal of Caesar's renewed marriage offer signalled that the alliance was over in everything but name.
ParticipantsGaius Julius Caesar, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus
Crassus invaded Parthia in 53 BC chasing the military glory that had always eluded him. Near Carrhae his ~40,000 men were destroyed by a far smaller Parthian force of horse archers, who poured arrows into the Roman square and wheeled away firing over their shoulders (the Parthian shot). Crassus's son Publius was killed leading a doomed cavalry charge, and Crassus himself died when peace talks collapsed into a brawl. It was Rome's worst defeat since Cannae.
CommandersRome: Marcus Licinius Crassus
When Milo's gang killed Clodius in a street brawl in 52 BC, the riots that followed climaxed with Clodius's supporters burning the Senate house as his funeral pyre. Desperate for order but unwilling to revive the dictatorship, the Senate made Pompey sole consul, an unprecedented near-dictatorial office. Pompey restored calm, but the Senate now leaned on him as its champion against Caesar, pushing the two former allies toward open conflict.
ParticipantsGnaeus Pompeius Magnus
Caesar's assault on Vercingetorix's hilltop stronghold of Gergovia in 52 BC failed when his troops pressed the attack too far against orders and were thrown back with heavy losses. It was Caesar's first clear defeat in Gaul, and it emboldened wavering Gallic tribes to join the revolt.
CommandersRome: Gaius Julius Caesar
Caesar trapped Vercingetorix's army inside the hill fort of Alesia in 52 BC and built a double ring of siege works (one facing in, one facing out) to hold off both the garrison and a massive Gallic relief army simultaneously. When the relief assault struck the weak point in the outer wall, Caesar led cavalry around its rear and broke it. Vercingetorix surrendered the following day, ending organised Gallic resistance.
CommandersRome: Gaius Julius Caesar · Gauls: Vercingetorix
Declared an enemy of the state in January 49 BC, Caesar crossed the Rubicon with a single legion and marched on Rome. Pompey, overestimating the invasion force, abandoned the city and withdrew to Brundisium, then sailed for Greece before Caesar could trap him. Caesar took Italy almost unopposed, then executed a lightning march to Spain where he manoeuvred Pompey's leaderless legions at Ilerda into surrender without a decisive battle. Returning to Rome, he held a brief dictatorship, reorganised the state's finances, and then made an unprecedented winter crossing of the Adriatic to pursue Pompey in Greece.
After the Senate declared him an enemy of the state for refusing to disband his army, Caesar led the Thirteenth Legion across the Rubicon, the small river marking the southern border of his province. Taking an army into Italy proper was open treason. Reputedly declaring "the die is cast", Caesar advanced on Rome before Pompey could prepare, beginning the civil war.
ParticipantsGaius Julius Caesar
In 49 BC Caesar marched to Spain to eliminate Pompey's leaderless legions before they could be used against him. After early reverses he manoeuvred the Pompeian army into a position cut off from supplies, and the two sides' soldiers began fraternising between the camps. Starved of food and will, the Pompeian commanders surrendered without a decisive battle, and most of their men promptly enlisted with Caesar.
CommandersCaesarians: Gaius Julius Caesar
Returning from Spain in late 49 BC, Caesar had himself appointed dictator, the first legal power he held since crossing the Rubicon. Unlike Marius and Sulla, who had used such power to slaughter their enemies, he reorganised the grain supply and the war-strained finances and then resigned after eleven days, taking only the consulship. The restraint repaired some of the damage his earlier looting of the treasury had done to his standing.
ParticipantsGaius Julius Caesar
Outside Dyrrhachium in 48 BC Caesar attempted to repeat the success of Alesia by walling Pompey's larger, well-supplied army into its coastal camp. Pompey countered with his own parallel lines, and the months of assault and counter-assault across the no-man's-land between the two walls resembled modern trench warfare. When Gallic deserters revealed a weak point in Caesar's wall, Pompey broke through; losing about a thousand men, Caesar was forced to abandon the siege and retreat inland.
CommandersCaesarians: Gaius Julius Caesar · Pompeians: Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus
At Pharsalus in Thessaly in 48 BC, heavily outnumbered, Caesar read Pompey's plan to crush his right flank with massed cavalry and secretly placed a hidden fourth line of infantry behind it. When Pompey's cavalry drove off Caesar's horsemen and charged forward, the fourth line broke them and swept around Pompey's flank. The larger army collapsed into a complete rout. Pompey fled the field and sailed for Egypt.
CommandersCaesarians: Gaius Julius Caesar · Pompeians: Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus
After Pharsalus, Pompey fled to Egypt hoping to raise a fresh army, but the ministers of the boy-king Ptolemy XIII decided to curry favour with Caesar by killing his rival. As Pompey was rowed ashore at Alexandria in 48 BC, the welcoming party stabbed him to death. When Caesar arrived and was presented with Pompey's severed head, he wept, ordered the assassins punished, and had his old partner buried with full honours.
ParticipantsGnaeus Pompeius Magnus
Trapped in Alexandria with a single understaffed legion after Pompey's murder, Caesar backed Cleopatra against her brother Ptolemy XIII and was besieged in the royal palace. He held out for months until a relief army reached Egypt in 47 BC; the combined force crushed Ptolemy's army at the Battle of the Nile. The young king drowned while escaping and Cleopatra was secured on the throne as a Roman client.
CommandersRome: Gaius Julius Caesar
In 47 BC, during his march back to Rome, Caesar turned aside to crush Pharnaces II of Pontus, son of Mithridates, who had overrun the region and castrated Roman citizens. Pharnaces gambled on a surprise dawn assault on Caesar's half-dug camp outside Zela, but the legions recovered and destroyed his army. Caesar reported the whole lightning campaign to a friend in three words: "Veni, vidi, vici" (I came, I saw, I conquered).
CommandersRome: Gaius Julius Caesar
In 46 BC the senatorial forces that fled Pharsalus regrouped in Africa under Metellus Scipio, backed by King Juba of Numidia, fielding ten to fourteen legions against Caesar's smaller, supply-starved army. At the port of Thapsus, set on a narrow isthmus, Scipio tried to trap Caesar in a bottleneck, but the cramped ground negated his numbers and let Caesar's veterans do the work. Caesar's troops, sensing the war's end, slaughtered some ten thousand of the enemy. Juba killed himself and Scipio drowned fleeing to Spain.
CommandersCaesarians: Gaius Julius Caesar
Holding Utica for the Senate after Thapsus, Cato the Younger refused to let Caesar add him to the long list of pardoned enemies. After a night reading Plato's Phaedo, the dialogue on Socrates's death, he stabbed himself. When a doctor stitched the wound, he tore it open again and died. His suicide made him a martyr for the dying Republic and denied Caesar the clemency he prized.
ParticipantsMarcus Porcius Cato
Returning to Rome in 46 BC, Caesar celebrated four consecutive triumphs for his victories in Gaul, Egypt, Pontus, and Africa, with lavish banquets and games. The captive Vercingetorix, held six years for the occasion, was paraded and then strangled. But when floats bearing the images of the dead Cato and Metellus Scipio passed, the crowd's mood soured, uneasy at celebrating the deaths of fellow Romans and wondering whether any Republic was left to defend.
ParticipantsGaius Julius Caesar
After the war, Caesar launched a sweeping civil overhaul. A fresh census exposed abuse of the free grain dole, which he halved, and revealed a hollowed-out middle class, which he addressed by granting citizenship to immigrant professionals and resettling tens of thousands of the urban poor onto provincial farms. He enlarged the depleted Senate to a thousand members, admitting loyal men from across the empire, and extended citizenship widely to bind the provinces to Rome.
ParticipantsGaius Julius Caesar
In 46 BC Cleopatra came to Rome as an honoured guest, bringing Caesarion, her young son by Caesar and his only child, nicknamed Little Caesar. Cicero found her infuriating and Calpurnia can hardly have welcomed her husband's lover parading their illegitimate child, yet she charmed the city and the Senate formally named her a Friend of Rome.
ParticipantsGaius Julius Caesar, Cleopatra VII
In March 45 BC, on a slope outside Munda in Spain, Caesar's roughly 40,000 men faced some 70,000 raised by Pompey's sons. Caesar charged uphill from the weaker position, took personal command of the right wing to stop a near-rout, rallied his troops, broke the enemy left, and his cavalry surrounded the Pompeians. He remarked afterwards that he had often fought for victory but at Munda fought for his life.
CommandersCaesarians: Gaius Julius Caesar
After returning from Spain in late 45 BC, Caesar stepped down as consul and had the Senate name him dictator, first for ten consecutive yearly terms and then, in early 44 BC, in perpetuity. He wore purple triumphal robes at public games, sat on a golden throne in the Senate, had his statue carried with the gods on holy days, and arranged a contrived prophecy that only a king could conquer Parthia. Suspicions that he sought to make himself king became the chief catalyst for his assassination.
ParticipantsGaius Julius Caesar, Marcus Antonius
A conspiracy of some sixty senators chose the Ides of March to act, knowing Caesar was days away from departing for his Parthian campaign. Despite his wife Calpurnia's nightmares and a soothsayer's warning, Caesar was persuaded to attend a Senate meeting in Pompey's Theatre. Mark Antony, who had heard a plot was afoot, tried to reach him beforehand but was held back from the chamber. Caesar died with twenty-three stab wounds, only one of them fatal.
ParticipantsGaius Julius Caesar, Marcus Junius Brutus, Gaius Cassius Longinus, Marcus Antonius
Two days after the Ides of March, Mark Antony brokered a Senate truce granting Caesar's assassins, who called themselves the Liberators, amnesty in exchange for ratifying all of Caesar's acts and appointments.
ParticipantsMarcus Antonius, Marcus Junius Brutus, Gaius Cassius Longinus
Caesar's widow Calpurnia retrieved his will from the Temple of Vesta and gave it to Antony, who found himself passed over despite years of loyal service. Three-quarters of the fortune went to his 19-year-old great-nephew Octavius, posthumously adopted as his son, with Marcus Brutus named contingent heir had Octavius been dead or refused.
ParticipantsGaius Julius Caesar, Marcus Antonius, Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, Marcus Junius Brutus
Antony delivered a funeral oration over Caesar's body in the Forum, displaying his bloodstained toga and naming each assassin at each stab hole. He also claimed, falsely, that Caesar's will left the bulk of his property to the citizens of Rome.
ParticipantsMarcus Antonius, Gaius Julius Caesar
When Antony seized Cisalpine Gaul and besieged the province's Liberator governor Decimus Brutus at Mutina, the Senate declared him an enemy of the state and sent the consuls Hirtius and Pansa, with Octavian in tow, to relieve the siege. Antony was beaten back at Forum Gallorum and Mutina and retreated to Gaul, but both consuls died in the fighting.
Marching north to relieve Mutina, the consul Pansa's raw recruits were ambushed and crushed by Antony's veterans. Returning to camp complacently, Antony's men were then surprised by Hirtius's army marching from the north, and only nightfall saved them from a rout. Octavian, left behind to guard the camp, missed the battle entirely.
CommandersAntonians: Marcus Antonius
Six days after Forum Gallorum, the consular army stormed Antony's camp and broke through its gates, lifting the siege of Mutina. Hirtius was killed fighting near Antony's tent, and Pansa died of his earlier wounds within days, leaving Octavian in command of both consuls' legions.
CommandersRepublicans: Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus
After the Senate refused his first demand, Octavian marched his army to Rome, camped outside the walls, and asked again. At just 19, without holding any of the offices that normally preceded it, he was granted the consulship.
ParticipantsGaius Julius Caesar Octavianus
Having formed the Second Triumvirate and funded their war through proscription, Antony and Octavian ferried nineteen legions across the Adriatic before a Liberator naval blockade could close in, marching to destroy the armies Brutus and Cassius had raised in the East. Two battles at Philippi, three weeks apart, ended organised republican resistance for good.
On a small island in the River Lavinius, Antony, Octavian, and Lepidus negotiated for two days and formed the Commission of Three for the Ordering of the State, with Lepidus acting as broker for what was really a bargain between Antony and Octavian.
ParticipantsMarcus Antonius, Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, Marcus Aemilius Lepidus
To fund the war against Brutus and Cassius, the triumvirs revived proscription, a practice Caesar had refused to use, posting a list of 2,500 names in the Forum with their property and lives forfeit. Cicero was added at Antony's insistence and killed that December.
ParticipantsMarcus Antonius, Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, Marcus Tullius Cicero
Antony made Cicero's proscription a deal breaker and Octavian, unable to talk him out of it, relented. Soldiers caught up with Cicero in December 43 BC. He offered his neck without resistance, asking only that they get it right the first time.
ParticipantsMarcus Tullius Cicero, Marcus Antonius
Antony built a causeway through the undefended marsh south of Cassius's camp and stormed it when his engineers were discovered. At the same time Brutus overran the triumviral camps rather than reinforce Cassius, who, believing the battle lost, had a slave kill him.
ParticipantsGaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, Marcus Junius Brutus
CommandersTriumvirs: Marcus Antonius, Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus · Liberators: Gaius Cassius Longinus, Marcus Junius Brutus
Pressed by his officers against his own judgement, Brutus abandoned Cassius's blockade strategy and committed to a pitched battle. After hours of close fighting the Liberator line broke, and Brutus took his own life rather than be captured.
ParticipantsGaius Julius Caesar Octavianus
CommandersTriumvirs: Marcus Antonius, Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus · Liberators: Marcus Junius Brutus
Antony took the East with eight legions and the ambition of a Parthian campaign; Octavian took the West, though Antony kept Cisalpine Gaul for himself. Lepidus, left holding only Italy while the other two went their separate ways, became the odd man out from the start.
ParticipantsMarcus Antonius, Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, Marcus Aemilius Lepidus
Fulvia and Lucius Antony's rebel army found itself without real backing: Antony's own generals in Italy, wary of moving against Caesar's heir without his direct order, stood aside. Agrippa besieged the rebels at Perusia and took the town, ending the revolt as quickly as it had begun.
With the treasury empty and no conquest plunder to pay off roughly 40,000 veterans due for retirement, Octavian arbitrarily confiscated land across Italy. Riots broke out between evicted freeholders and settled veterans, and when he halted the confiscations, too little land had been seized to satisfy the veterans either.
ParticipantsGaius Julius Caesar Octavianus
Octavian sent Agrippa to besiege the fortress town of Perusia, where Fulvia and Lucius Antony had gathered their rebel army. After a long siege the town fell, though the victory was credited to Octavian rather than the general who actually won it.
ParticipantsFulvia
CommandersOctavians: Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa
With centurions on both sides refusing to fight neighbours and kin, Antony and Octavian were left to settle their standoff at Brundisium themselves. They reconfirmed the triumviral alliance, and Antony conceded Gaul while Lepidus was nominally kept on with Africa.
ParticipantsMarcus Antonius, Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, Octavia the Younger
In exchange for lifting his blockade, Sextus was legalised as governor of Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica, promised a future consulship, and granted amnesty for the proscribed exiles sheltering with him.
ParticipantsGaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, Sextus Pompeius
Octavian's first assault on Sicily in 38 BC ended in disaster, his fleet wrecked at the Straits of Messana. Agrippa spent the following year secretly building and training a new fleet, and in 36 BC a three-pronged invasion cornered Sextus, whose forces were decisively broken at Naulochus.
Meeting at Tarentum, Antony and Octavian renewed the triumvirate on the same East-West terms as before, this time sealed not by marriage but by a troop exchange: Antony's ships for Octavian's legions.
ParticipantsMarcus Antonius, Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus
After a year spent secretly building and training a new fleet, Agrippa met Sextus's ships off Naulochus in a hard-fought, evenly matched battle. His larger, better-equipped ships gradually won out, and by day's end the Pompeian captains surrendered en masse.
ParticipantsGaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, Sextus Pompeius
CommandersOctavians: Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus · Sextians: Sextus Pompeius
After conquering most of Sicily himself, Lepidus claimed the island by right of conquest. Octavian subverted his legions into mass desertion and unilaterally expelled him from the triumvirate.
ParticipantsMarcus Aemilius Lepidus, Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus
Antony summoned Cleopatra to Cilicia, where he styled himself the new Dionysus to her new Isis. Their bargain was mutual: Cleopatra funded Antony's planned Parthian campaign with Egyptian revenue, and Antony became the Roman patron guaranteeing her throne that Caesar had once been.
ParticipantsMarcus Antonius, Cleopatra VII
Antony delegated the counter-campaign to his general Ventidius, who fought Pacorus to a standstill over three years before cornering and killing him outside Antioch, restoring Roman control of Syria and Judea.
After three years of campaigning, Ventidius cornered the Parthian prince Pacorus outside Antioch and killed him in battle, breaking the momentum of the Parthian invasion of Syria and Judea.
CommandersRome: Publius Ventidius Bassus
Antony deposed the weak client kings who had governed the East since Pompey's day, from Pontus to Judea, replacing them with competent Hellenised monarchs loyal to himself. Octavian would later survey the settlement and leave it largely intact.
ParticipantsMarcus Antonius
Local guides betrayed the location of Antony's slow baggage train, and Parthian cavalry burned his siege engines along with it, leaving him unable to take a city for winter quarters. The king of Armenia then defected, and Antony was forced into a brutal retreat through hostile mountains to the Mediterranean.
With no pretext to disband the legions he would soon need against Antony, Octavian spent two years subduing Illyricum, reaching as far as the Danube. Personally leading a charge across a gangplank during one siege, he silenced the persistent rumours of his cowardice for good.
ParticipantsGaius Julius Caesar Octavianus
At his Alexandrian triumph, the first ever held outside Rome, Antony proclaimed his children by Cleopatra rulers of Roman client territory and named Cleopatra Queen of Kings and Caesarion, Julius Caesar's son, King of Kings.
ParticipantsMarcus Antonius, Cleopatra VII
As consul, Octavian publicly charged Antony with living in sin with Cleopatra, dishonoring Octavia, executing Sextus Pompeius without trial, and waging foreign wars without the Senate's consent. Antony's supporters read a countercharge in reply, accusing Octavian of forging Caesar's adoption papers.
ParticipantsGaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, Marcus Antonius
When the triumvirate's ten-year term expired, Octavian publicly renounced the title of triumvir and argued that Antony's refusal to do the same made his continued rule in the East an illegal usurpation of the Senate's authority.
ParticipantsGaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, Marcus Antonius
Bottled in the Ambracian Gulf after Agrippa's capture of Methone, Antony broke out to fight at Actium and lost the bulk of his fleet. The following year Octavian invaded Egypt in a pincer movement, and Antony's army dissolved outside Alexandria without a real battle.
Tipped off by a defector, Octavian demanded Antony's will from the Vestal Virgins, and when they refused, stormed the temple and seized it himself. Read aloud, it left much of his estate to his children by Cleopatra, reaffirmed Caesarion as Caesar's true heir, and asked to be buried in Alexandria.
ParticipantsGaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, Marcus Antonius
Agrippa raced across the storm-tossed Ionian Sea and seized Antony's critical supply hub at Methone in a surprise assault before Antony could react, cutting off his fresh supplies and exposing him to a maritime blockade.
CommandersOctavians: Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa
Agrippa's fleet swung around to envelop Antony's line, forcing him to rotate it and open a gap in his own centre. Cleopatra's reserve squadron broke through that gap under favourable winds, and Antony abandoned his flagship to follow her. Roughly forty of his ships burned and the remaining 130 surrendered within the week.
ParticipantsMarcus Antonius, Cleopatra VII
CommandersOctavians: Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa · Antonians: Marcus Antonius
With no land or spoils left to reward his time-served veterans, Octavian faced a mutiny in Italy. Agrippa failed to pacify the men, forcing Octavian to return in person and issue IOUs against a settlement once Antony was finally beaten.
ParticipantsGaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa
The son of the deposed triumvir Lepidus plotted to assassinate Octavian on his return to Rome, modelling the scheme explicitly on the conspiracy against Caesar. Maecenas, left running the city, uncovered the plot and had the conspirators executed.
ParticipantsGaius Julius Caesar Octavianus
Antony's Egyptian navy surrendered without a fight as soon as it came within hailing distance of Octavian's fleet, and his cavalry, then his infantry, deserted in turn. Left alone on the field outside Alexandria, Antony's army had simply dissolved around him.
ParticipantsMarcus Antonius
CommandersOctavians: Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus · Antonians: Marcus Antonius
Told falsely that Cleopatra was already dead, Antony stabbed himself and was carried dying to the half-built mausoleum where she was sheltering. Rather than be paraded as a trophy in Octavian's triumph, Cleopatra took her own life soon after, according to legend by provoking a snake smuggled in a basket of figs.
ParticipantsMarcus Antonius, Cleopatra VII, Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus
Touring Alexandria after Cleopatra's death, Octavian had Alexander the Great's mummified remains displayed and came away unhumbled, a pointed contrast to Julius Caesar, who had once despaired before the same shrine over his own comparatively modest achievements.
ParticipantsGaius Julius Caesar Octavianus
Caesarion, Cleopatra's son by Julius Caesar and reported to be about 15 years old, was the one remaining rival claim to the Caesar name. Octavian had him executed, reportedly remarking that two Caesars was one Caesar too many.
ParticipantsGaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, Cleopatra VII
Octavian arrived home in August 30 BC to a Rome unsure whether the Senate or he was truly in charge, and what to do with the 60 legions still under arms. Still serving as consul, he had all the legitimate authority he needed for the moment, deferring the constitutional question.
ParticipantsGaius Julius Caesar Octavianus
Antony's name was struck from the official annals and erased from monuments and statues raised over the previous thirty years, and no future son of the Antonius clan was permitted to bear the praenomen Marcus.
ParticipantsGaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, Marcus Antonius
Octavian celebrated three triumphs in a single year, for Illyricum, Actium, and Alexandria. With Antony erased from memory, the last two were recast as victories over Cleopatra alone, and her surviving children by Antony, the twins and their younger brother, were paraded through the streets in chains. Caesarion, her son by Caesar, had already been executed.
ParticipantsGaius Julius Caesar Octavianus
Octavian annulled every law passed under the Second Triumvirate, signalling a return to the rule of law. He and Agrippa, now co-consul, demobilised the army from 60 to 28 legions, paying retirement bonuses in cash from the Alexandrian treasury, and took the office of censor to cut the Senate from 1,000 members toward 800, backing off under pushback to let holdouts stay.
ParticipantsGaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa
The period of Roman history beginning with Augustus's First Settlement in 27 BC, when constitutional government gave way to rule by a single princeps holding overwhelming military and legal authority behind a restored Republican facade.
The system of government Augustus established in 27 BC, in which a single princeps held overwhelming military and legal power while the Senate, magistracies, and Republican forms continued to operate on the surface.
The line of Augustus's own house, five emperors joined by blood, marriage and adoption rather than by any settled rule of succession, from the First Settlement to Nero's suicide.
Rome's first emperor, Augustus ruled as princeps, First Citizen, rather than king or dictator, preserving the Senate and magistracies as a working facade over a reign secured by the Settlements of 27 and 23 BC. His forty-year rule ended a century of civil war and founded the dynasty that would govern Rome for the next hundred years.
Octavian staged his own resignation before the Senate, which begged him to reconsider and granted him ten years' proconsular authority over the frontier provinces of Spain, Gaul, Cilicia, Syria, and Egypt. The Senate named him Augustus, though he preferred the plainer title princeps, First Citizen.
ParticipantsGaius Julius Caesar Octavianus
Touring his new provinces, Augustus found Gaul between revolt and anarchy after years of neglect and Spain just as chaotic. He fell severely ill soon after crossing the Pyrenees and spent over a year recovering by the mountain springs while his lieutenants fought on without him, finally bringing Spain under firm Roman, or more accurately Augustan, control.
Against Livia's advice, Augustus favoured his nephew Marcellus over his stepson Tiberius, marrying him to his daughter Julia and pushing through special legislation waiving the minimum age requirement so the 21-year-old could be elected aedile for 23 BC.
ParticipantsMarcus Claudius Marcellus, Julia
A plot against Augustus, either uncovered or invented, implicated the consul Aulus Terentius Varro Murena, Maecenas's brother-in-law. Maecenas discussed the affair at home, his wife warned her brother, and Murena fled, permanently rupturing Maecenas's closeness with Augustus.
Nearly dying of illness and facing a bottleneck from his own unbroken run of consulships, Augustus resigned the consulship on 1 July 23 BC in exchange for tribunicia potestas, letting him attend, propose, and veto legislation, and maius proconsular authority valid in any province, including the Senate's own.
Alongside his own settlement, Augustus had Agrippa granted similar at-large proconsular authority, making him something of a co-emperor, then sent him east to Samos, most likely as the one man he trusted to negotiate with Parthia over Crassus's lost legionary standards.
ParticipantsMarcus Vipsanius Agrippa
Just as his aedileship was winding down successfully, the 22-year-old fell suddenly ill and died within the year, leaving Augustus without a designated heir.
ParticipantsMarcus Claudius Marcellus
A grain shortage after plague crippled the Italian farms set Rome rioting, and the crowd demanded Augustus take the dictatorship. He refused, citing Mark Antony's abolition of the office after Caesar's assassination, and said he would rather be stabbed in the throat than hold it.
Augustus sent his 22-year-old stepson Tiberius to restore Roman influence over Armenia, the buffer kingdom between Rome and Parthia. A native revolt deposed the pro-Parthian king before the legions arrived, leaving Tiberius only to crown Rome's chosen successor.
Armenia
Augustus backed a show of legionary force in Syria with a diplomatic overture, and the King of Parthia agreed to return the legionary eagle standards lost at Carrhae, along with Roman prisoners, in exchange for a lasting peace.
The Senate acknowledged that the at-large proconsular authority it had granted Augustus at the Second Settlement had never been meant to exclude Italy, giving him lawful command of the troops he kept stationed around Rome.
Rome
Having failed to shrink the Senate by purging its rolls, Augustus raised the wealth qualification for membership instead, then created a standing committee of thirty men to steer its legislative business, with himself as its only permanent member.
Rome
Alarmed by a falling birth rate, Augustus offered legal privileges to Romans who married and had children, and penalised those who would not marry, hoping to make single life so unpleasant that marriage looked like a reprieve.
Rome
Augustus made adultery a criminal offence against the state rather than a private matter of family honour, with the death penalty possible in certain cases, though his own well-known infidelities left the law widely ignored.
Rome
Julia and Agrippa's sons gave Augustus the blood heirs his succession plan had never had. He adopted both as infants, took them into his own household and oversaw their upbringing himself, which quietly reduced Tiberius and Drusus to stand-ins holding the place until the boys grew up.
ParticipantsGaius Caesar, Lucius Caesar, Julia, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa
Rome
Noricum, covering much of modern Austria, had been friendly to Rome since at least 170 BC and had supported Caesar during his civil wars. Augustus took it without a campaign, simply sending a proconsul in to occupy the territory and completing the annexation of the land south of the Danube.
Tiberius and Drusus spent a single summer subduing the tribes of the Alpine region that became the province of Raetia, on the pretext that Roman travellers had been ill-treated in the passes. Rather than simply taxing the defeated, they deported the men, selling many into slavery and marching the rest off their land, and left the women, children and old men behind.
ParticipantsNero Claudius Drusus
Seeing what Roman intentions were, the Pannonian tribes rose against annexation. Octavian had beaten them during his Illyrian campaigns twenty years earlier without formally incorporating their territory, and the same fierce independence that made them resist Rome kept them from combining against it, so the legions picked them off one tribe at a time.
ParticipantsMarcus Vipsanius Agrippa
Lepidus had held the office of Pontifex Maximus since Caesar's death, and kept it through the twenty-three years of obscurity that followed his expulsion from the triumvirate. It was the one honour Augustus could not simply take, and on Lepidus's death he assumed it, becoming the formal head of Rome's religion as well as its state and its army.
ParticipantsMarcus Aemilius Lepidus
Rome
Sent to bring the annexation of Pannonia to a close, Agrippa wintered in the Balkans planning the next summer's campaign and fell ill. He turned for home in March, worsened on landing at Brundisium, and was dead at 51 by the time Augustus reached him. Augustus laid him in his own mausoleum.
ParticipantsMarcus Vipsanius Agrippa
Given the armies of the Rhine, Drusus drove east year after year and reached the Elbe, the river Augustus wanted for a frontier. Every winter he had to fall back into Gaul, and the tribes he beat in the field never behaved like a conquered people, so the ground was never actually held.
ParticipantsNero Claudius Drusus
With Julia widowed a second time, Augustus refused to marry her outside the family and settled on Tiberius, who was happily married to Vipsania and had a young son by her. Tiberius was made to divorce her anyway. The new marriage was a disaster: Julia answered her father's dynastic bookkeeping with open affairs, and after their only child died in infancy Tiberius gave up on her entirely.
Winding down a successful consulship and about to follow his brother up the chain of command, Drusus fell from his horse on campaign and could not recover from the injuries. Tiberius rode 200 miles through hostile country with a single Gallic guide and reached him before the end, then led the body back to Rome. Livia never got over it, and Antonia never remarried.
ParticipantsNero Claudius Drusus
Maecenas died in October, four years after Agrippa. Augustus, who had spent his youth fighting his elders for power, was now the elder himself, surrounded by younger men whose every dealing with him was coloured by the fact that he held all of it. The advisers who had known him before power and could still speak to him plainly were gone.
ParticipantsGaius Maecenas
Fresh from a consulship and newly granted the same tribunician power Augustus held, Tiberius was slated to go east and settle Armenia again. Instead he announced that he was leaving public life altogether and sailed for Rhodes. Ancient and modern writers have offered the same three explanations ever since: that he saw he was only a placeholder, that he was clearing the stage for Gaius and Lucius, and that he was escaping Julia.
Augustus had thought his daughter a model of the virtue his marriage laws demanded, while Rome knew she had spent years carrying on affairs with men of every rank, among them a Gracchus and Mark Antony's son Iullus. When it finally reached him he banished her for life. Her named lovers were exiled or forced to suicide, and when the crowds begged him in the street to relent he refused. Julia was dead to him.
ParticipantsJulia
Rome
Augustus swallowed his misgivings and sent his eighteen-year-old grandson east to deal with Parthian meddling in Armenia, basing him on Samos. Gaius brokered a compromise: Parthia's candidate took the Armenian throne, and Parthia acknowledged that Armenia lay in Rome's sphere. Not everyone in Armenia accepted it, and in the revolt that followed Gaius took a wound besieging a small town. It never healed, and he died on the coast of Anatolia at twenty-four.
ParticipantsGaius Caesar
Nineteen years old and due to hold the consulship the following year, Lucius was travelling to Spain on assignment when illness took him in Gaul. He was dead before word that anything was wrong could reach Rome. Augustus had raised him as his own, and every hope for a Julian dynasty now rested on his brother alone.
ParticipantsLucius Caesar
Eighteen months took Tiberius from forgotten exile to heir apparent. With Lucius and then Gaius dead, Augustus had no one else, and the letters from Rhodes he had refused to open were finally answered. Tiberius came home, was adopted, and had his at-large powers granted afresh. The price was that he adopt his own nephew Germanicus, who carried Julian blood through Antonia, so that after a detour through a Claudian the throne would return to a Julian.
ParticipantsGermanicus
Rome
Agrippa Postumus, the last surviving son of Agrippa and Julia, grew violent and cruel, and after years of complaints Augustus banished him to an island that was little more than a rock. The year after, Julia the Younger followed her mother into a string of affairs and then into exile, though rumour held the real charge was a part in a plot against the regime. Her first husband had already been executed for treason.
Arminius brought Varus word of a revolt to the northwest that did not exist, and Varus marched three legions out to put it down. The column went strung out along a narrow muddy road in heavy rain, baggage and camp followers mixed in among the troops, no scouts ahead and no battle order, and where the ground narrowed between a wooded hill and marshland the Germans struck it from a fortified slope. The army was cut in half over two days of running fight. Varus and most of his surviving officers killed themselves when a second ambush closed the road. The 17th, 18th and 19th legions, with their cavalry and auxiliaries, some 20,000 men, were destroyed. Augustus stopped shaving for months when the news reached him, the traditional mark of Roman mourning.
CommandersRome: Publius Quinctilius Varus · Germans: Arminius
In the spring of AD 14 Augustus made an unexplained visit to the grandson he had exiled seven years earlier. Within months Augustus was dead, and imperial agents reached the island and killed Postumus almost at once. Augustus, Livia and Tiberius were all suspected of giving the order, and when the accusations landed on Tiberius he loudly opened an inquiry to clear his name, which the old inner circle moved just as quickly to shut down before it aired anything.
ParticipantsAgrippa Postumus
Livia's elder son by her first marriage, adopted as Augustus's stepson and eventually his successor. Given his first military command in Armenia at 22, he went on to campaign in the Alps and along the Danube before succeeding Augustus as Rome's second emperor.
Augustus was barely dead before legions in Pannonia and on the Lower Rhine seized their camps, drove out their officers and demanded shorter service and the bonuses the old princeps had promised. Tiberius would not go himself. He sent his son Drusus to Pannonia with two cohorts of Praetorians and Sejanus as adviser, and Drusus conceded nothing, working the men over one by one through the night until they handed up their ringleaders for pardon. On the Rhine, Germanicus was offered the throne by his own troops, refused it, and then simply granted their demands, paying the discharge bonuses out of his own pocket.
ParticipantsDrusus Julius Caesar, Germanicus, Lucius Aelius Sejanus
Germanicus had decided that idleness was what turned soldiers mutinous, so he sent them across the Rhine, telling them that whatever they plundered would stand in for the bonuses they had been promised. There was no strategic aim beyond revenge for the Teutoburg Forest. He took upwards of 100,000 men in the spring of 15, captured Arminius's wife, won on the Ems, and reached the Teutoburg battlefield to find the dead still unburied with skulls nailed to the trees, which he had covered by a funeral mound. Arminius trapped him in a swamp and threw the advantage away, and a storm wrecked his fleet in the North Sea on the way home, though the stories of him dragging survivors ashore only made him more loved. He never brought Arminius to a decision.
ParticipantsGermanicus, Arminius
Tiberius could not simply cancel campaigns whose victories reflected well on his regime, so he promoted the man conducting them instead. Germanicus was recalled and given a triumph, displaying two of the three legionary standards lost with Varus, and was then sent east with at-large proconsular authority. It was framed as the next step for a man destined to succeed, and meant as a way of getting him away from the armies that loved him.
ParticipantsGermanicus
Rome
Germanicus spent two years in the East settling disputes and sightseeing, clashing constantly with Piso, whom Tiberius had planted in Syria to obstruct him. Then he went down to Egypt, a province Augustus had closed to men of rank without the emperor's written permission, and Tiberius's irritation appears to have turned murderous. Shortly after returning to Antioch Germanicus fell ill and did not recover. The household found human remains, tablets with his name struck through and piles of ash about the house, and took them for a curse. He told Agrippina not to seek justice for his sake and to beware of Tiberius, and died at thirty-four.
ParticipantsGermanicus, Agrippina the Elder, Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso
Agrippina said openly that Piso had killed her husband and that Tiberius was behind Piso, and once the charge was public the emperor could not refuse a trial without appearing to confirm it. Piso faced the Senate defiant, calling the death a sad twist of fate, and found the body unsympathetic. When Tiberius declined to use his prerogative to save him, Piso killed himself, unless he was killed to stop him talking. Rome drew its own conclusion about who had wanted Germanicus dead.
ParticipantsGnaeus Calpurnius Piso, Agrippina the Elder
Rome
Sejanus, hated by Drusus and blocked from ever being safe under his reign, seduced Drusus's wife Livilla and persuaded her to poison her husband. She administered it herself in 23 AD, and the murder passed as natural death for almost a decade, until a slave who knew of it wrote to Tiberius after Sejanus's own fall. Tacitus treats the loss as the point after which Tiberius, denied the son he had been grooming to share his burdens, gave way to the despair that shaped the rest of his reign.
ParticipantsClaudia Livia Julia
Worn down by Sejanus's steady drip of treason charges against Agrippina's circle, Tiberius retreated to his villa on the island of Capri in AD 26. He would send word for years that he was coming back to Rome, but he never set foot in the city again, ruling in absentia for the rest of his reign while Sejanus ran the capital in his name.
ParticipantsLucius Aelius Sejanus
In AD 31 Sejanus reached a shared consulship with Tiberius, the formal power he had sought for years, and was undone within months. Warned that his prefect had turned against him, Tiberius first arranged a replacement Praetorian Prefect, then had a letter read before the Senate that turned from routine business into a denunciation demanding Sejanus's trial and execution. Sejanus, stripped of the Guard's protection, was arrested and strangled the same day. Rome rioted at the news, tearing his body apart and hunting down his known associates; a slave's letter soon after exposed his and Livilla's part in the murder of Drusus nine years earlier.
ParticipantsLucius Aelius Sejanus
Rome
A man claiming to be the Son of God was executed in the Roman province of Judea. It had no immediate impact on Roman affairs, but within a few years Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus began the spread of Christianity, which would eventually become the empire's official and then dominant religion.
Third son of Germanicus and Agrippina, nicknamed Caligula ("Little Boots") for the miniature soldier's boots he wore as a toddler in his father's Rhine camp. Spared Tiberius's purge of the rest of his family for being too young to matter, he spent six years as Tiberius's ward on Capri before becoming Rome's third emperor in AD 37 to widespread public celebration. A severe illness that October is the point ancient sources place his turn towards the cruelty and excess that would define his short reign.
Crowds lined the road for twenty miles to welcome Caligula to Rome, and he moved fast to give them a clean break from Tiberius's terror: the treason trials were cancelled, the informers' records burned in a public bonfire, and the exiled recalled and pardoned. Tiberius's will had named Tiberius Gemellus, Drusus and Livilla's son, as Caligula's joint heir, but the Praetorian Guard declared for Caligula alone and Gemellus was frozen out of the succession, then executed within the year. Caligula also brought the remains of his mother and brothers back to Rome for burial in the imperial mausoleum, and renamed the month of September for his father Germanicus.
Rome
Wanting the military glory his office was supposed to carry, Caligula led legions across the Rhine in AD 39, staged a mock battle against allied Gauls dressed as Germans, and fled back across the river when real Germans were reported nearby. A conspiracy involving a Roman governor was uncovered during the campaign; his brother-in-law was executed and his two surviving sisters, Agrippina and Julia Livilla, were exiled. The following year he lined up his legions on the Channel coast, ordered them to collect seashells as spoils of a "victory" over Neptune, and returned to Rome to celebrate a triumph for both campaigns.
By early AD 41 a member of the Praetorian Guard, Cassius Chaerea, whom Caligula had endlessly mocked over an old injury, had begun plotting with senators who wanted the emperor gone. The Praetorian Prefect, himself under investigation for treason, tacitly let the plot proceed. Chaerea and two accomplices cornered Caligula after a theatrical performance in January AD 41 and stabbed him to death. The assassins went on to kill his wife Caesonia and infant daughter so that no blood heir would survive him. Chaerea hoped the killing might let the Senate restore the Republic, but the Praetorian Guard had other ideas: they found Caligula's uncle Claudius in hiding and declared him emperor before the conspirators could reach him.
Rome
Fourth of the Julio-Claudian emperors, younger son of Drusus and Antonia, born in 10 BC. A stammering embarrassment his own family wrote off and barred from any public career, he was elevated by the Praetorian Guard after Caligula's assassination on the assumption that a reputed fool would be easy to control. He proved instead to be one of Rome's more capable emperors, rebuilding the state's administration around a cabinet of freedmen secretaries and adding Britain to the empire where Julius Caesar had failed.
With Caligula dead, the Senate argued over which of its own members should become princeps and could not agree, revealing how entrenched one-man rule had already become: nobody seriously proposed restoring the Republic itself. While the Senate talked, the Praetorian Guard settled the matter on its own and declared for Claudius, whom it expected to control. The Senate extracted one concession: an amnesty for Caligula's wider circle of assassins and conspirators, many of them senators. Claudius honoured it, but refused to spare the lead assassin, Cassius Chaerea, who was tried and executed, a warning against ever repeating the act.
Rome
Within a year of Claudius's accession, the governor of Dalmatia conspired with a Roman senator to march his legions on Rome and depose him. When the moment came, the troops refused to join a march against the emperor, and the exposed governor committed suicide. Claudius had already taken the precaution of bribing the army for its loyalty on taking office.
Claudius needed a military victory to be taken seriously, and Britain offered the chance to succeed where Julius Caesar had failed a century before, along with mineral wealth and an end to the island's use as a haven for rebellious Gauls. Aulus Plautius led four legions and some 20,000 auxiliaries across the Channel in AD 43, talking down a pre-invasion mutiny only when the freedman Narcissus addressed the men and the novelty amused them into standing down. The brothers Togodumnus and Caratacus led the British resistance and were defeated in successive battles at the Medway and the Thames. Claudius himself arrived late with reinforcements, including sixteen war elephants, in time for the ceremonial finish, and eleven local kings surrendered. He returned to Rome for a triumph, having contributed little of the actual fighting. The future emperor Vespasian, commanding one of the four legions, spent the following years extending Roman control west to Exeter.
The office of censor had sat vacant since Augustus. Claudius revived it in AD 47, sharing the post with Lucius Vitellius, and used its authority over the senatorial rolls to purge families suspected of plotting against him. He went further, admitting Gallic provincials to the Senate over fierce conservative objection, arguing that the empire's multinational character had to be embraced if it was going to survive the way Rome itself had once absorbed the Latins and then the rest of Italy.
Rome
Messalina, feeling her position slip as Agrippina and her son gained ground as an alternative Julian line, had taken a lover, the consul-designate Gaius Silius, and pushed a plot to marry him and replace Claudius. In AD 48, while Claudius was away in Ostia, she married Silius in a lavish public ceremony. Narcissus, who had worked alongside Messalina but kept his deeper loyalty to Claudius, decided the emperor had to know and told him directly, then blocked every attempt she made to reach Claudius privately before he could be talked round. Confronted with the evidence, including imperial property already moved into Silius's house, Claudius wavered over her fate; Narcissus used the emperor's own seal to send the execution order before he could be swayed, and Messalina died by a soldier's sword after failing to take her own life.
ParticipantsValeria Messalina
Rome
Aulus Plautius governed the new province until 47, consolidating the conquest with veteran settlements and new tax arrangements. His successor, Ostorius Scapula, pushed the frontier west into Wales, where Caratacus had retreated to run a guerrilla war against the occupation. In AD 50 Ostorius finally drew him into a set battle at a fortified position Caratacus had prepared, and the Romans stormed it, capturing his wife and brothers. Caratacus himself escaped.
ParticipantsCaratacus
Last of the Julio-Claudian emperors, raised to the throne at sixteen by his mother Agrippina the Younger and quickly resentful of her control. He broke with her, had his stepbrother Britannicus poisoned and eventually had Agrippina herself killed, while cultivating a popularity with the common people that his own aristocratic critics, who wrote the histories, never forgave him for. His fall in AD 68 ended the dynasty.
With Claudius dead, Agrippina the Younger moved before anyone could contest the succession. She had already sent Narcissus, Britannicus's strongest backer, away from Rome on business, and Claudius's will was suppressed to keep Britannicus from his inheritance. Britannicus and his sisters were kept confined in the palace while Nero alone was marched out before the Praetorian Guard, whose Prefect Burrus ordered the soldiers to hail him as emperor. A hastily convened Senate session confirmed what the Guard had already decided, and the sixteen-year-old Nero became Rome's fifth emperor with no serious opposition raised.
ParticipantsNero, Agrippina the Younger, Britannicus, Burrus
Rome
Agrippina the Younger's hold over her son did not survive his adolescence. In early AD 55 Nero fell for the freedwoman Claudia Acte, and when Agrippina tried to forbid the affair he shut her out instead of giving up his mistress. Seneca and others close to Nero encouraged the affair, since it was useful in quashing rumours about Nero's true relationship with his own mother. From this point Agrippina's influence over her son collapsed.
ParticipantsNero, Agrippina the Younger
Rome
Losing her influence over Nero, Agrippina the Younger reversed course and began courting Britannicus, hinting he had as much right to the throne as his adoptive brother and threatening to take him to the Praetorians and confess her own part in Claudius's death if Nero ignored her. She made the threat months before Britannicus came of age, giving Nero time to act first. The day before Britannicus was to take the adult toga that would have let him contest the throne, he was invited to dinner at the palace, poisoned, and died on the spot.
ParticipantsBritannicus, Nero, Agrippina the Younger
Rome
By AD 59 Nero had decided his mother had to die, most plausibly because Agrippina had thrown her support behind his cousin Rubellius Plautus as a rival emperor. Several attempts to stage her death as an accident failed, including a shipwreck she survived by swimming to shore, so Nero finally sent an assassin to stab her outright. She is said to have died bidding him strike her womb. Nero announced that his mother had been caught plotting against him and had taken her own life; no one believed it, but it stood as the official account.
ParticipantsAgrippina the Younger, Nero
Trouble over who ruled Armenia, Rome's buffer kingdom against Parthia, had been building since the end of Claudius's reign. Nero sent the general Corbulo to train an army and, in AD 58, invade. Corbulo swarmed Armenia with small detachments, burned the capital Artaxata once Tiridates fled it, and took the southern capital Tigranocerta by intimidation rather than siege, installing a Roman client king by the end of AD 59. Parthia's attention returned once its own internal troubles settled, and in AD 62 a second Roman commander, Paetus, was routed and forced to surrender at Rhandeia. Corbulo was given emergency command of the whole East, marched a large force back into Armenia, and negotiated a settlement with Vologases in AD 63: Parthia could nominate the Armenian king, but Rome had to ratify him.
With Corbulo occupied defending Syria, Nero sent the inexperienced Paetus to hold Armenia. A Parthian army caught his dispersed forces by surprise in the winter of AD 62, and Paetus fell back into a fortified camp at Rhandeia rather than fight his way clear. Panicked and unwilling to wait for Corbulo's relief force, he surrendered his besieged army to Vologases, who forced the Romans to build him a bridge and marched them out under the yoke, an echo of the Caudine Forks centuries before.
CommandersRome: Caesennius Paetus · Parthia: Vologases
Corbulo, given emergency imperium over the East after Paetus's surrender at Rhandeia, marched a large force back into Armenia. Vologases sued for terms before a battle could be fought, knowing Corbulo would not be caught as Paetus had been. The two sides agreed that Parthia would appoint the king of Armenia but that Rome would ratify the choice, and Tiridates laid his diadem before a statue of Nero, swearing not to wear it until Nero placed it there himself.
Rome's annexation of the Iceni kingdom and the flogging of their widowed queen Boudica ignited a revolt that drew in disaffected Britons from across the province. With the Roman governor Suetonius Paulinus and much of his army away in Wales, Boudica burned Camulodunum, Londinium and Verulamium in succession, destroying a relief legion sent against her along the way. Nero and his advisors briefly considered abandoning the province altogether. Suetonius Paulinus finally brought her to battle at a defensible position on Watling Street and, though heavily outnumbered, broke her army when its retreat collapsed into its own baggage train.
Suetonius Paulinus gathered about 10,000 men and chose a defensible position on the trade route later known as Watling Street, its narrow approach limiting how many of Boudica's far larger force could attack at once. When the British charge stalled against the Roman line, the retreat collapsed into the wagons and dependents Boudica had stationed behind her own army, and the legions cut the trapped mass down. Boudica took poison rather than be captured.
CommandersRome: Suetonius Paulinus · Britons: Boudica
Nero had never been happy in the arranged marriage to Claudius's daughter that tied the Julian and Claudian wings of the dynasty together, and by AD 62 his mistress Poppaea Sabina was pressing him to make her his wife instead. When she announced she was pregnant, Nero divorced Claudia Octavia on grounds of infertility, banished her to the island that had held Agrippina the Elder, and married Poppaea eighteen days later. The public, who had liked Claudia Octavia and thought well of her, carried statues of her through the streets demanding her recall. Nero wavered, then had her killed and the death dressed up as a suicide. It was the first time the people turned on him, and the goodwill never came back.
ParticipantsPoppaea Sabina
Rome
The fire broke out near the Circus Maximus and burned for between five and seven days before it ran out of fuel, destroying three of Rome's fourteen districts outright and badly damaging seven more. Part of the imperial palace went, along with the hearth of the Vestal Virgins and the Temple of Jupiter Stator, which legend held Romulus himself had founded. With no clear cause to point to, Rome decided its emperor had done it, and the story spread that he had watched from a height singing the sack of Troy to his lyre. Tacitus, hostile to Nero but usually reliable on facts, has him out of the city when it started, hurrying back to organise shelter and food for the displaced and then rewriting the fire code and the city's street plan in the rebuilding. What kept the rumour alive was what he built next: the Golden Palace, across a vast stretch of the ground the fire had cleared.
Rome
Discontent among the aristocracy hardened into a plot around Gaius Calpurnius Piso, a senator and orator well regarded at every level of Roman society, who concluded that the best available replacement for Nero was himself. Faenius Rufus, one of the two Praetorian Prefects, agreed to present him to the Guard once Nero was dead, and dozens of senators, bureaucrats and officers joined by word of mouth, Seneca among them. It never got as far as an attempt: a young officer whose career had stalled was sounded out, decided informing would serve him better than joining, and a freedman's secretary supplied the details in April AD 65. Piso and the rest were ordered to kill themselves or exiled, and a frightened Nero went back to running treason trials.
ParticipantsGaius Calpurnius Piso, Seneca
Rome
Poppaea Sabina died in the summer of AD 65, pregnant with Nero's second child. The tamer account has her dying naturally in childbirth; the version Suetonius and Tacitus preferred has Nero kicking her to death in a fit of rage during an argument. Grief-stricken or guilt-stricken depending on which story is believed, Nero had her embalmed rather than cremated so he could keep visiting her in the imperial mausoleum.
Rome
Decades of friction between Rome and Judea, dating back to Pompey's entry into the Temple's Holy of Holies, came to a head in AD 66. The Roman governor's seizure of the Temple treasury's surplus triggered an armed uprising: the militant Sicarii seized the fortress at Masada, killed the high priest they accused of collaboration, and wiped out the small Roman garrison in Jerusalem. When a legion sent from Syria to restore order was ambushed and destroyed at Beth Horon that November, Rome could no longer treat the revolt as a local matter. Nero appointed Vespasian to crush it, and by early 68 Vespasian's army held the north of the province and was moving south. The civil wars halted the campaign, and once Vespasian had the throne his son Titus finished it, taking Jerusalem in AD 70 and burning the Temple. The last holdouts at Masada fell in AD 73.
With the Roman garrison in Jerusalem wiped out, the legate of Syria marched a legion into Judea to restore order. The rebels ambushed it at the pass of Beth Horon that November, destroying the legion and capturing its eagle standard. The victory convinced the rebels Rome could be beaten, and convinced Rome the revolt could no longer be treated lightly.
Vindex, the Roman governor of a Gallic province, declared in March AD 68 that he would no longer take orders from Nero, whose tax demands to cover his own extravagance had become intolerable. Rather than claim the throne himself, Vindex backed Servius Sulpicius Galba, the governor of Spain, though Galba stayed noncommittal and left him exposed. Nero ordered Verginius Rufus, governor of Upper Germany, to put the revolt down, which he did in a short, decisive battle; Vindex took his own life rather than be captured. Verginius's own troops then hailed him imperator on the spot, offering to back him against Nero, but he refused and stayed loyal, quietly outliving the chaos that followed by three decades.
ParticipantsVindex, Verginius Rufus
Once Galba was declared an enemy of the state, one of the Praetorian prefects declared for him and much of the Guard followed. Nero fled toward Ostia hoping to escape by sea, but the soldiers there refused him and taunted him with a line from the Aeneid. Back in the palace, he found his guards and friends had all deserted him and could not find anyone willing to kill him. A freedman hid him at a villa outside Rome, where he had a grave dug while repeating that the world was losing an artist. When the Senate declared him a public enemy to be beaten to death on capture, and horsemen were heard approaching, he finally stabbed himself in the throat. He died on 9 June AD 68, aged thirty, having ruled for fourteen years. His death ended the Julio-Claudian dynasty.
ParticipantsNymphidius Sabinus
Rome
The eighteen months after Nero's death in which Galba, Otho, Vitellius and Vespasian held the throne in turn, the first time the legions rather than the Julio-Claudian house decided who was emperor.
Governor of Spain whom Vindex backed as a replacement for Nero without ever fully committing himself. Declared an enemy of the state by Nero, he had little choice but to accept the role, and became emperor once Nero's own guards and the Senate abandoned him. An old-stock patrician raised on Cato-the-Elder-style frugality and strict discipline, he ran his court through three advisers known as the Three Pedagogues, and sealed his own fate by adopting Piso over the ambitious Otho. He squandered his reputation on the march from Spain, killing hesitant officials with their families and massacring a legion of former marines at the Milvian Bridge, and refused the Guard any payment on his accession. His brief, troubled reign opened the Year of the Four Emperors.
Before his death Nero had raised a new legion, mostly from marines and sailors, who ranked far below full legionaries. Unwilling to lose their new status, they met Galba at the Milvian Bridge as he approached Rome and demanded that he confirm their promotion. When they refused his order to disperse and a few drew swords, Galba ordered his own legion to attack, and thousands were killed. He then revived the long-abandoned practice of decimation on the survivors. He was within the letter of military law, but his own men were disgusted and Rome was horrified, and he entered the city a feared and hated man.
ParticipantsGalba
Rome
The Rhine legions had revolted against Galba, but when news came that Otho had killed him and taken the throne, their commanders had come too far to stop. After an exchange of letters in which each offered the other money and influence to stand down, Otho called his Balkan legions to northern Italy. Vitellius stayed on the Rhine while two columns under Fabius Valens and Aulus Caecina crossed the Alps, the two generals loathing each other and racing to arrive first. Caecina was beaten off from Placentia and walked into his own failed ambush on the road to Bedriacum, but in April the Othonian generals, pressing to attack before their reinforcements arrived, were caught on the march near Cremona and broken at the First Battle of Bedriacum, and Otho killed himself the next morning. Once the eastern legions had proclaimed Vespasian in July, the plan was for Mucianus to lead an army west while Vespasian held Egypt. The Balkan legions, facing Vitellius's punishment for backing Otho, would not wait, elected Antonius Primus their general and invaded Italy on their own. Vitellius sent Caecina north, but Caecina tried to take his army over to Vespasian, and his troops put him in chains and fought on without him. The Flavians won the Second Battle of Bedriacum in October and sacked Cremona after it surrendered. Valens was captured at sea. In December, Vitellius's own men blocked his abdication, the Capitol burned during the siege of Vespasian's brother Flavius Sabinus, and the Flavians stormed Rome, the last Vitellians making their stand in the Praetorian camp.
CommandersVitellians: Fabius Valens, Aulus Caecina · Flavians: Antonius Primus, Mucianus
The Rhine legions had crushed Vindex and stayed loyal to Nero, but Galba rewarded the Gallic tribes that had joined Vindex and gave the soldiers nothing, and they remembered him as the harsh commander Caligula had once sent to discipline them. When Fonteius Capito, commander of the Lower Rhine, was killed by two of his officers, one of them Fabius Valens, Galba sent the inexperienced Vitellius to replace him. On 1 January 69, at the prodding of Aulus Caecina, two legions of the Upper Rhine refused to renew their oath to Galba, toppled his statues and swore instead to the Senate and people of Rome. Vitellius, in Cologne, told his commanders they must either fight the mutineers or join them; Valens was the first to hail him imperator, and within two days every legion on the Rhine had declared for him.
ParticipantsVitellius, Fabius Valens, Aulus Caecina
On 10 January 69 Galba presented his adopted heir, Lucius Calpurnius Piso, to the Praetorian Guard, with no word of the payment they had been denied. Otho, passed over and borrowing heavily against a succession that would now never come, spent the last of his money buying twenty-three guardsmen. Five days later he slipped out of a ceremony at the Temple of Apollo, rallied the Guard in their camp and sent cavalry to find Galba, who had been carried out into the Forum in his litter. The riders overturned it and stabbed him to death. Vinius was killed with him, and Piso was cornered and killed at the Temple of Vesta. Galba was seventy and had ruled just over seven months, and within hours the Praetorians and the Senate had made Otho emperor.
ParticipantsOtho, Titus Vinius
Rome
One of Nero's closest drinking companions until Nero took his wife Poppaea Sabina in AD 58 and exiled him to govern Lusitania, where he administered conscientiously for nearly a decade. When Galba revolted against Nero, Otho backed him eagerly, convinced by an astrologer's prediction that Galba would adopt him as heir, and having bought Titus Vinius's support with a promise to marry his daughter. Passed over for Piso instead, and deep in debt against the succession he had expected, he had Galba assassinated within the week, and the Praetorians and the Senate made him emperor within hours.
At a council of war at Bedriacum the Othonian generals decided to attack at once rather than wait for the rest of the Balkan legions, and to keep Otho, who had no heir, safe at Brixellum. The army took two days to cover the thirty miles to Cremona, and on the second day Otho's brother tried to march it past the city to camp beyond. Valens and Caecina saw the Othonians strung out on the road with their baggage and attacked. The untried Othonians fought better than expected, but first their left flank and then their right were overrun, and they fled back to Bedriacum and sent to negotiate terms.
ParticipantsFabius Valens, Aulus Caecina
CommandersVitellians: Fabius Valens, Aulus Caecina
Otho heard of the defeat at Bedriacum from survivors reaching Brixellum that evening. He still had reinforcements on the way and the Praetorians around him begged him to fight on, but he decided he had taken his one chance and would not prolong a war that could only spill more Roman blood. He handed out what money he had, urged his supporters to flee, and early on the morning of 16 April stabbed himself in the heart. He was thirty-six and had ruled for almost exactly three months, and the manner of his death came to be remembered as one of the noblest in Roman history.
ParticipantsOtho
Genial, gluttonous and unambitious, Vitellius rose through good-natured popularity rather than talent, serving as consul under Claudius and proconsul of Africa under Nero. His father, warned by a horoscope that his son would bring disaster if given an army, kept him out of military postings for most of his career, but Galba gave him command of the legions on the Lower Rhine. Those legions refused to renew their oath to Galba on New Year's Day 69 and acclaimed Vitellius emperor instead, a revolt he had no hand in starting himself.
Vespasian had paused his war in Judea when Nero died and waited on events in the West, but two eastern governors pressed him to bid for the throne himself: Mucianus in Syria, hungry for the military glory his post denied him, and Tiberius Julius Alexander, the Jewish-born prefect of Egypt, who expected Vitellius to remove him. Vespasian was encouraged by a prophecy that the future ruler of the world would come from Judea, but he hesitated, so on 1 July 69 Alexander administered the oath of loyalty to Vespasian to his own legions. Vespasian's troops in Judea hailed him days later, Mucianus swore in Syria on 15 July, and the Balkan legions followed, bringing the whole of the East behind him.
Marching on Cremona, Antonius Primus's army beat off a Vitellian cavalry attack but did not reach the main Vitellian force until late afternoon. Neither side would withdraw, and the armies fought through the night, some ten hours of sporadic, bloody fighting, a rare sight in ancient warfare. At dawn one Flavian legion, long stationed in the East, turned to greet the rising sun as was its custom, and the exhausted Vitellians, taking it for the arrival of reinforcements, broke and fled to Cremona.
ParticipantsAntonius Primus
CommandersFlavians: Antonius Primus
When Vitellius's attempt to abdicate was blocked by his own troops, Vespasian's brother Flavius Sabinus, who had been negotiating it, set out to proclaim his brother in the Forum and ran into Vitellians who had not given up. Driven onto the Capitoline Hill, he barricaded himself there, and over a night and a day of fighting the Temple of Jupiter burned. His men deserted him, and he was captured and executed, which ended any chance of a negotiated end and brought Antonius Primus's army straight on to Rome.
ParticipantsFlavius Sabinus
Rome
When Vitellius stripped the Rhine to invade Italy, the Batavians, long exempt from tax in return for their auxiliaries and now pressed for still more troops, rose under Julius Civilis. He posed as fighting for Vespasian and pinned down the two legions left on the Lower Rhine, but when the Flavians won and he refused to lift the siege, it was clear he fought for the Batavians alone. A Belgic leader claiming descent from Julius Caesar raised Gaul as well and won over two more legions, and in early 70 the besieged legions surrendered on a promise of safe passage and were massacred. Vespasian sent a large army to crush the revolt, and when Jerusalem fell Civilis saw that he had lost the distraction he had counted on, surrendered, and accepted his old treaty with harsher terms.
CommandersBatavians: Julius Civilis
The Brigantes, the largest pro-Roman tribe in Britain, turned on Rome while the civil war of AD 69 pulled the island's legionary commanders in different directions. An anti-Roman faction overthrew their collaborating queen, the same queen who had handed Caratacus to the Romans in AD 51, and Rome's greatest ally on the island became its greatest threat. Vespasian's new governor put Agricola in charge of the pacification, which he pursued from AD 71 to 75, successfully but not definitively.
ParticipantsGnaeus Julius Agricola
On 18 December Vitellius announced he was stepping down, but the troops who had staked their lives on him blocked his way out of the Forum and marched him back to the palace. Once the Flavians had stormed the city, he wandered the deserted palace alone until they found him. They marched him through the streets to the Gemonian Steps and beheaded him, paraded his head through the city and threw his body in the Tiber. He was fifty-four and had reigned just over nine months, and the Senate declared Vespasian emperor.
ParticipantsVitellius
Rome
The house Vespasian founded once the civil war of AD 69 was won, passed to his sons Titus and Domitian, and ended with Domitian's assassination in AD 96.
Born in AD 15 to an equestrian father and a mother who was a senator's sister, Vespasian rose through the cursus honorum and made his name commanding a legion in Claudius's invasion of Britain, subduing the southern coast and earning the right to wear triumphal regalia in public. A consulship in 51 capped his career, and he retired, only to be coaxed back by Nero as governor of Africa in 63, an appointment he ran with unusual honesty. He fell out of favour after dozing through one of Nero's performances, but when the Great Revolt broke out Nero had nowhere else to turn, and Vespasian was recalled to crush it. In AD 69, with the West torn apart by civil war, the eastern legions proclaimed him emperor, and his forces won the throne from Vitellius by December. His sons Titus and Domitian would follow him, and all three ruled Rome as the Flavian dynasty.
Months after his father became emperor, Titus surrounded Jerusalem with four legions, cut off its supplies and opened negotiations. Inside, the Jewish leadership was split between moderates and hardliners, who fought each other with assassinations and burned the city's food stores to force a fight to the end. Titus broke through an outer wall in May, and after heavy street fighting the last defenders around the Temple Mount were overcome and the whole city was in Roman hands by September. The soldiers plundered it and burned the rest, the great Temple included, against Titus's explicit orders. Josephus, who was with Titus, put the dead at over a million, a figure no modern historian accepts.
ParticipantsTitus
CommandersRome: Titus
The last and most famous pocket of resistance after Jerusalem fell was the mesa-top fortress of Masada, held by 960 Sicarii. It was so nearly impregnable that the Romans spent a full year building ramparts just to reach the walls. When they finally broke down the gate with a battering ram on 16 April 73, they found the entire population dead by a mass murder-suicide, chosen rather than slavery. The siege has held a central place in Jewish memory ever since.
Vespasian's elder son, who commanded a legion under his father in Judea, turned back from a mission to Galba when Galba was killed, and took over the war against the Jews once Vespasian went west, taking Jerusalem in AD 70. His father made him his colleague in power, and he succeeded him in 79. His father had made him Praetorian prefect and enforcer, and he came to the throne feared as another Nero, but his two-year reign proved generous: he abolished the treason courts, led the relief after Vesuvius and the fire of AD 80, and opened the Colosseum. He died of an illness in September 81 with no son, and his brother Domitian succeeded him.
In August or October AD 79, months into Titus's reign, Mount Vesuvius on the Bay of Naples erupted and buried the surrounding countryside in sixty feet of ash and volcanic rock. Pompeii was destroyed along with numerous other Campanian towns, and between 10,000 and 25,000 people died, among them the naturalist Pliny the Elder, attempting a rescue. The fallout preserved Pompeii as a near-perfect time capsule of first-century life. Titus appointed two ex-consuls to lead the relief and paid for the clean-up and rebuilding from the imperial treasury.
ParticipantsTitus
A great fire in the spring of AD 80, smaller than Nero's but serious, which felled a number of important buildings in Rome, among them the original Pantheon built by Marcus Agrippa. Titus hurried back from Pompeii and again put the imperial treasury behind the victims.
ParticipantsTitus
Rome
Vespasian's younger son, born in AD 51, twelve years after Titus and largely ignored by his father. With his mother and sister dead by 66 he was raised by his uncle Flavius Sabinus, lived through the whole of 68-69 in Rome, and escaped the Vitellian storming of the Capitol disguised as a devotee of Isis. Mucianus and then his father kept him in ceremonial roles, though Titus passed him suffect consulships, and in AD 70 he married Domitia Longina, daughter of the general Corbulo. He took the throne on Titus's death in 81 and ruled as an open autocrat, stripping the Senate of practical authority, governing through equestrians, and making himself censor for life. The Senate damned his memory after his assassination in 96.
When Titus died on 13 September 81, Domitian left his brother's body and hurried to the Praetorian camp to be hailed emperor, and the Senate confirmed him as Augustus the next day. His first act was to deify Titus by his own edict, without waiting on the Senate, which had taken six months to approve Vespasian's godhood.
ParticipantsDomitian
Rome
Son of the Paulus who died at Cannae. Given command of the eastern army in 168 BC after years of indiscipline and plundering by previous consuls. Immediately restored order, outmanoeuvred Perseus with a feint from the north, and destroyed the Macedonian army at Pydna. On the march home, he let his troops loose on Epirus as a punitive example: 70 towns sacked and 150,000 enslaved, despite the locals having no part in Perseus's war.
Appears inBattle of Pydna, Sack of Epirus
Legendary Trojan prince who fled the fall of Troy and settled in Italy, where his descendants would found Rome.
The youngest of Julia and Agrippa's children, born after his father died and named for it. He grew violent and cruel, was exiled to a barren island in AD 7, and was killed there within days of his grandfather's death. Augustus visited him in his last spring and left him out of the final will, which is as clear an answer as survives about whether he was ever going to be brought back.
Appears inMurder of Agrippa Postumus
Julia and Agrippa's daughter, and so Augustus's granddaughter, married to Germanicus to keep the Julian line in the succession. She carried her husband's ashes back from Antioch herself and, against his dying advice, named Piso as his killer and Tiberius as the man behind Piso. Her version of events was widely believed, and it is where Rome's hatred of its emperor began. Once Livia died, Tiberius let Sejanus move against her and her two eldest sons openly.
Appears inDeath of Germanicus, Trial of Piso
Germanicus and Agrippina the Elder's daughter, recalled from exile under Claudius with her son by her first marriage. Her marriage to her own uncle Claudius in AD 49, over rival candidates backed by his other freedmen, scandalised Rome and set her on the path to placing that son, the future emperor Nero, on the throne. She held real power for a time after Claudius's death, heading the new cult of the divine Claudius and attending the Senate from behind a curtain, but Nero's break from her and his murder of Britannicus ended it, and Nero eventually had her killed.
Appears inAccession of Nero, Nero's Break with Agrippina the Younger, Murder of Britannicus, Death of Agrippina the Younger
Usurper king of Alba Longa who deposed Numitor and ordered the exposure of Romulus and Remus.
A pretender who claimed to be the son of the vanquished Perseus and grandson of Philip V. Reunited the four Macedonian republics that Rome had created after Pydna, raised an army, conquered Thessaly, and repelled an initial Roman expeditionary force. Crushed when Rome sent a full-strength army, captured, and paraded through Rome in triumph.
King of the Seleucid Empire, the largest successor state to Alexander's conquests. Joined Philip V in attacking Egyptian territory, then accepted an Aetolian invitation to "liberate" Greece from Rome. Defeated at Thermopylae and destroyed at Magnesia, he was confined behind the Taurus Mountains and burdened with punishing indemnities. Notably sidelined Hannibal (living at his court in exile) from any meaningful command.
Appears inBattle of Thermopylae (191 BC), Battle of Magnesia
Daughter of Octavia and Mark Antony, married to Drusus as part of Augustus's programme of keeping the succession within the household. The marriage was happy and produced three children. Widowed young, she refused to remarry and lived on as a widow for another five decades, which Rome took as the mark of an exemplary matron.
A legate among the Balkan legions who, when his fellow officers wanted to wait for Mucianus, argued for invading Italy at once while the Vitellians were still drunk on victory. The troops elected him their general, and the army that won the war for Vespasian did so without ever being authorised to: it beat the Vitellians at the Second Battle of Bedriacum, sacked Cremona while he took a bath, and stormed Rome.
Appears inCivil War of AD 69, Second Battle of Bedriacum
Censor (312 BC) who built the Via Appia and Rome's first aqueduct while simultaneously manipulating Senate rolls and refusing to leave office for five unprecedented years. In old age, blind and retired, he persuaded the Senate to reject Pyrrhus's peace offer while a foreign army remained on Italian soil.
Leading Decemvir who helped produce the Twelve Tables but then refused to surrender power. His attempt to seize the freeborn Verginia by declaring her a slave triggered the Second Secession.
Appears inDecemvirate Power Grab
A German king who led his tribe across the Rhine into Gaul and was recognised, with Caesar's own backing, as a friend of the Roman people. When he refused Caesar's demands (no more Germans crossing the Rhine, return of Gallic hostages, no war on allied Gallic tribes), Caesar defeated him and drove his army back toward the Rhine. Ariovistus escaped across the river on a small raft and never crossed back.
A German chieftain who served Rome as an auxiliary commander, earned citizenship for it, and spent two years as Varus's trusted adviser while secretly organising a rising. What he had learnt in the legions told him his tribesmen could not win a set-piece battle, so he built a trap instead and led Varus into it.
Appears inBattle of the Teutoburg Forest, Germanicus's Campaigns Across the Rhine
An early supporter of Galba in Spain, rewarded with command of a legion on the Upper Rhine, who was soon accused of embezzlement and had every reason to fear the strict new emperor. He stoked his men's resentment into the New Year's Day mutiny, then led Vitellius's smaller, faster eastern column into Italy ahead of the agreed plan, racing his rival Valens. He was beaten off from Placentia and saw his ambush on the Bedriacum road turned against him before the two columns joined to win at Bedriacum.
Appears inCivil War of AD 69, Revolt of the Rhine Legions, First Battle of Bedriacum
Appointed dictator to defeat the Latin threat at Lake Regillus, then resigned after victory, demonstrating the Republican model of temporary emergency power.
Appears inBattle of Lake Regillus
Widowed queen of the Iceni, flogged and publicly humiliated when Rome voided her husband's will and annexed their kingdom. Her revolt burned three Roman settlements before Suetonius Paulinus crushed her army at the Battle of Watling Street, after which she took her own life.
Appears inBattle of Watling Street
Leader of the Senones who defeated Rome at the Allia, sacked and occupied the city for seven months, and demanded ransom. When Romans complained about weighted scales, he threw his sword on and declared "Vae victis" ("woe to the conquered").
Claudius's son by Messalina, displaced as heir when Claudius adopted Nero and named him co-heir ahead of his own son. Shut out of the succession on Claudius's death and confined to the palace, he was poisoned at dinner the night before he was to come of age.
Appears inAccession of Nero, Murder of Britannicus
Nero's Praetorian Prefect, who gave the Guard the order to hail the sixteen-year-old as emperor on Claudius's death. Alongside Seneca, he stood as a counterweight to Agrippina the Younger's influence over the young emperor. He died of illness in AD 62, and the prefect Nero chose to replace him, Tigellinus, encouraged the emperor's appetites rather than restraining them.
Appears inAccession of Nero
Inexperienced Roman commander sent to hold Armenia while Corbulo defended Syria. His panic when a Parthian army caught his dispersed forces led to a humiliating surrender at Rhandeia in AD 62.
Appears inBattle of Rhandeia
Son of Cincinnatus. A violent young patrician who broke up plebeian demonstrations in the Forum. The tribune Verginius gathered witnesses and brought capital charges; Caeso fled into Etruria rather than face trial, forcing Cincinnatus to sell most of his property to pay the bond.
Caesar's third wife, married in 59 BC to seal his alliance with her father Lucius Calpurnius Piso, who followed him in the consulship. She dreamed of his death the night before the Ides of March and begged him not to go to the Senate. After the murder she retrieved his will from the Temple of Vesta and handed it to Mark Antony.
British resistance leader who fought Claudius's invasion from its start, first at the Medway and Thames and then for years as a guerrilla in Wales, until a final battle in AD 50 cost him his family, though not his own freedom. Betrayed shortly after by an allied queen, he was brought to Rome and impressed the Senate into sparing his life.
Appears inCaratacus's Last Stand
The great conservative of mid-Republic Rome, defender of old Roman virtue against the Hellenising influence of men like Scipio. Made his name at Thermopylae in 191 BC, leading the flanking charge that broke Antiochus's army. Dominated Roman politics for fifty years, constantly opposing cultural change and prosecuting those he considered corrupt (including Scipio Africanus). Idolised by later generations who held him up as the embodiment of a mythical golden age of frugality and stoic duty.
Appears inBattle of Thermopylae (191 BC)
Tiberius's niece, sister of Germanicus and Claudius, married to Tiberius's son Drusus. Seduced by Sejanus, she agreed to poison her husband in AD 23 so that the two of them might one day marry and rule together. The murder went undiscovered for nearly a decade, until a slave wrote to Tiberius after Sejanus's fall exposed her, and she died in disgrace soon afterward.
Appears inMurder of Drusus, the Son of Tiberius
Daughter of Ptolemy XII, Cleopatra was locked in a dynastic civil war with her younger brother Ptolemy XIII, whose court ministers had driven her from Alexandria. When Caesar arrived in 48 BC she had herself smuggled past her brother's guards to reach him. Caesar restored her as co-ruler, she became his mistress, and in 46 BC she visited Rome, bringing Caesarion, Caesar's only son. After Caesar's death she allied herself just as closely with Mark Antony, who proclaimed her Queen of Kings in 34 BC.
Appears inCleopatra's Visit to Rome, Antony and Cleopatra's Alliance, Donations of Alexandria, Battle of Actium, Deaths of Antony and Cleopatra, Execution of Caesarion
A hostage given to Porsenna under the peace treaty, who escaped by swimming the Tiber back to Rome with her fellow captives, then was returned to Porsenna and freed by him.
Appears inCloelia's Escape
Roman general who first made his name fighting Germanic tribes under Caligula and Claudius, then spent years training an army before Nero sent him to reclaim Armenia from Parthia. His methodical campaign made him the most celebrated Roman soldier of his generation and won him the governorship of Syria. Nero, grown fearful of his own generals, ordered him to commit suicide in AD 67 on suspicion of disloyalty.
Appears inArmenian Settlement
Daughter of Scipio Africanus and mother of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus. Left a widow in her mid-thirties, she oversaw her children's upbringing personally and was praised for her frugality, learning, and devotion to family above personal comfort. Romans later venerated her as the ideal of the Republican matron, the dutiful daughter of the Republic's greatest general who had raised two of the most consequential politicians of the late Republic.
A trusted Caesarian general who joined the Liberator conspiracy despite his closeness to Caesar, Decimus Brutus was serving as governor of Cisalpine Gaul when Antony demanded the province. His refusal triggered the War of Mutina, and after the siege was lifted he was abandoned by Octavian, deserted by his troops, and killed while fleeing through Gaul.
Legendary queen of Carthage whose curse on Aeneas explained Rome's enmity with Carthage.
Tiberius's only son by Vipsania, sent in his father's place to put down the Pannonian mutiny, which he did by sowing doubt among the men overnight rather than by conceding anything. With Germanicus dead he had no rival for the succession, until his wife Livilla poisoned him at Sejanus's urging in AD 23.
Appears inMutinies of the Accession
An unscrupulous commander near the end of an undistinguished career, who felt badly treated by Galba. He was one of the two officers who killed Fonteius Capito, commander of the Lower Rhine, probably because Capito refused to join their plot rather than for the treason they charged him with. He then worked on Capito's replacement, Vitellius, was the first to hail him emperor, and led the larger, western column of the invasion of Italy, surviving two mutinies on the march.
Appears inCivil War of AD 69, Revolt of the Rhine Legions, First Battle of Bedriacum
Vespasian's brother, living in Rome during the civil war, who negotiated Vitellius's abdication on his behalf. When Vitellius's own troops blocked the abdication, Sabinus was driven onto the Capitoline and killed.
Appears inBurning of the Capitol
Antony's wife Fulvia joined his brother Lucius in raising a rebellion against Octavian using discontented veterans and evicted freeholders, claiming Antony's approval. When Perusia fell she went into exile in Greece and died there the following year, after Antony blamed her for the revolt in a bitter final confrontation.
Appears inSiege of Perusia
The elder son of Julia and Agrippa, born in 20 BC and adopted by Augustus as an infant along with his brother Lucius. He was the first blood heir Augustus had, and was raised in his grandfather's household to take the throne. Rome doted on him to the point of electing him consul at fourteen, an honour Augustus vacated, and he grew up haughty and self-indulgent for it.
Appears inAdoption of Gaius and Lucius, Gaius Caesar's Eastern Command
Senator and orator with a good reputation across Roman society, who watched Nero's reign deteriorate and concluded that the best available replacement was himself. The conspiracy that formed around him in AD 65 drew in dozens of senators, officials and officers before it was betrayed, and he was ordered to take his own life.
Appears inPisonian Conspiracy
A capable soldier who salvaged the survivors of Crassus's Parthian disaster, Cassius backed Pompey in the civil war, was pardoned by Caesar, and never reconciled himself to one-man rule. As one of Caesar's enemies from the start, he became the chief instigator of the assassination plot and recruited the reluctant Brutus to lend it respectability. Believing the first battle of Philippi lost in 42 BC, he had a slave kill him.
Appears inAssassination of Caesar, Amnesty for the Liberators, First Battle of Philippi
Consul of 207 BC who made one of the boldest decisions of the war. While shadowing Hannibal in the south, he left a skeleton force tending multiple campfires and force-marched 250 miles north in seven days to join his colleague Livius against Hasdrubal. The gamble paid off at the Metaurus, where Nero's flanking attack turned the battle into a rout.
Consul who commanded Rome's fleet at Mylae (260 BC), winning Rome's first major naval victory using the corvus boarding device. Took command after his colleague Scipio Asina was captured, and destroyed a third of the Carthaginian fleet.
Popular plebeian consul of 217 BC whose maverick streak led Rome to disaster at Lake Trasimene. Refused to return to Rome for the religious transfer-of-power ceremonies, which his critics blamed for angering the gods. Charged headlong after Hannibal and was killed in the ambush.
Appears inBattle of Lake Trasimene
Younger brother of Tiberius, born the year their father died and raised entirely by Cornelia. Driven by family duty and revenge for his brother's murder, he was elected tribune in 123 BC and pushed the broadest reform programme Rome had yet seen, touching grain supply, the courts, the army, land redistribution, and Italian citizenship. He won a second term but failed to secure a third, when the Senate declared him an enemy of the state.
Appears inReforms of Gaius Gracchus, Death of Gaius Gracchus
A patrician who survived Sulla's proscriptions, Caesar won the consulship for 59 BC as part of the First Triumvirate with Pompey and Crassus, then secured the proconsulship of Gaul. Over the next decade he conquered Gaul, twice crossed into Britain, and built an army loyal to him personally. When the Senate ordered him to disband, he crossed the Rubicon and won a four-year civil war. As perpetual dictator he allied with Cleopatra and reformed the calendar before being assassinated on the Ides of March, 44 BC.
Appears inCaesar's Capture by Pirates, Caesar's Funeral Oration for Julia, First Triumvirate, Julius Caesar's Consulship, Lex Julia de Repetundis, Battle of Bibracte, Battle of Vosges, Conference of Luca, Caesar's Invasions of Britain, Death of Julia, Battle of Gergovia, Siege of Alesia, Crossing the Rubicon, Battle of Ilerda, Caesar's First Dictatorship, Battle of Dyrrhachium, Battle of Pharsalus, Alexandrian War, Battle of Zela, Battle of Thapsus, Caesar's Quadruple Triumph, Caesar's Reforms, Cleopatra's Visit to Rome, Battle of Munda, Caesar Dictator Perpetuo, Assassination of Caesar, Caesar's Will, Caesar's Funeral
A frail, unremarkable 19-year-old kept out of Caesar's campaigns by an overprotective mother, Octavian was named Caesar's principal heir and posthumously adopted in his will. Against his mother's pleading, he took the name Gaius Julius Caesar to claim his adoptive father's legacy and avenge his death.
Appears inCaesar's Will, Battle of Mutina, Octavian's First Consulship, Second Triumvirate, Triumviral Proscriptions, First Battle of Philippi, Second Battle of Philippi, Division of the Empire after Philippi, Octavian's Land Confiscations, Treaty of Brundisium, Pact of Misenum, Naval Disaster at Messana, Treaty of Tarentum, Battle of Naulochus, Expulsion of Lepidus, Octavian's Illyrian Campaign, Octavian's Indictment of Antony, Dissolution of the Second Triumvirate, Seizure of Antony's Will, Battle of Actium, Veterans' Mutiny, Plot of the Younger Lepidus, Capture of Alexandria, Deaths of Antony and Cleopatra, Octavian Visits Alexander's Tomb, Execution of Caesarion, Octavian's Return to Rome, Damnatio Memoriae of Antony, Octavian's Triple Triumph, Reforms of 28 BC, First Settlement
Plebeian tribune and co-author of the Licinian-Sextian Laws with Lucius Sextius Lateranus. He helped force open the consulship to plebeians and pushed reforms on debt and public land, though tradition says he was later prosecuted for violating his own land law.
Appears inLicinian-Sextian Laws
Octavian's closest political adviser, Maecenas tempered the reprisals against Antony's former allies and ran Rome while Octavian and Agrippa campaigned. He patronised Virgil and other poets whose work built the Augustan image, but a fatal indiscretion during the Murena affair cost him his place in the inner circle for good.
Appears inDeath of Maecenas
Disgruntled Roman general who allegedly defected to the Volscians and led them to the gates of Rome before withdrawing after his mother's appeal. The story likely explains a Roman defeat by attributing it to another Roman rather than to foreign superiority.
A novus homo from Latium who rose on military merit against the resistance of the old guard, Marius was elected consul seven times, an unprecedented record. He ended the Jugurthine War, repelled the Cimbrian invasion, and transformed the army by recruiting the landless poor. His feud with Sulla culminated in mutual coups and proscriptions; Marius died two weeks into his seventh consulship in 86 BC.
Appears inConsecutive Consulships of Marius, Battle of Aquae Sextiae, Battle of Vercellae, First Consulship of Marius, Marian Reforms
Attempted to assassinate Lars Porsenna, killed the wrong man, then burned his own hand to demonstrate that Romans would endure any suffering rather than submit.
Samnite commander who engineered the trap at the Caudine Forks (321 BC). Used false intelligence to lure both Roman armies into a narrow pass, then sealed both exits. His father advised either extreme generosity (release them, win eternal friendship) or extreme cruelty (kill them all); Pontius chose a middle path, forcing the Romans to pass under the yoke, which won him no friends and eliminated no enemies.
Appears inBattle of the Caudine Forks
Popular plebeian politician who denounced Fabius's caution and promised to crush Hannibal with overwhelming numbers. Elected consul for 216 BC, he and his colleague Paulus commanded the largest army Rome had ever fielded (80,000 men). On his day of command at Cannae, Varro packed the legions together on open ground and attacked, leading directly to catastrophe. He fled the battle and survived; Paulus stayed and died.
Appears inBattle of Cannae
Son of Drusus and Antonia, and the condition Augustus attached to adopting Tiberius. Married to Augustus's granddaughter Agrippina, he carried Julian blood through his mother, which was the point: after a detour through a Claudian, the throne was meant to come back to a Julian. He settled the Rhine mutiny, refused the throne his own legions offered him, spent two years avenging the Teutoburg Forest, and died at thirty-four in Antioch convinced he had been poisoned on his adoptive father's orders.
Appears inAdoption of Tiberius, Mutinies of the Accession, Germanicus's Campaigns Across the Rhine, Recall and Triumph of Germanicus, Death of Germanicus
A confidant of Tiberius, sent out as governor of Syria at the same time Germanicus was given the eastern command, and apparently for the sole purpose of obstructing him. He refused Germanicus's troop requests, cancelled his staff appointments and unpicked his provincial decisions. When Germanicus died believing himself poisoned, Piso was tried for it, found no support from the emperor he had served, and killed himself.
Appears inDeath of Germanicus, Trial of Piso
Consul in 260 BC and ancestor of two of Rome's greatest generals. While scouting ahead with 17 ships, he greedily attacked a coastal city and was trapped in the harbour by the Carthaginian fleet. His panicked sailors abandoned ship; he was captured and earned the nickname Asina ("the Ass").
Born in southern Gaul in AD 40 to a senatorial family, his father executed by Caligula, Agricola served as a military tribune in Britain during Boudica's revolt. When Otho's fleet killed his mother while sacking the Gallic coast in AD 69 he joined the Flavians, and Vespasian gave him a legion in Britain, where he spent AD 71-75 pacifying the Brigantes. He returned as governor in 78 for an unusually long seven years, a strict and honest administrator who tried to Romanise the province by educating the sons of its nobility and replanning its towns. His son-in-law was the historian Tacitus, which is why his career is known in such detail.
Appears inRevolt of the Brigantes
Son of the consul Pompeius Strabo, Pompey raised three legions from his father's veterans at twenty-three and joined Sulla's civil war. Sulla rewarded his campaigns in Sicily and Africa with a triumph, and sarcastically titled him "Magnus" (the Great) when he refused to disband his army until the honour was granted. He joined the First Triumvirate with Caesar and Crassus before eventually leading the Senate's cause against Caesar and being defeated at Pharsalus.
Appears inJoint Consulship of Crassus and Pompey, Pompey's Anti-Piracy Campaign, First Triumvirate, Exile of Cicero, Conference of Luca, Death of Julia, Pompey's Sole Consulship, Battle of Dyrrhachium, Battle of Pharsalus, Death of Pompey
Carthage's best general in the final years of the First Punic War, running a guerrilla campaign from Mount Eryx with minimal support from a disinterested Senate. Negotiated the final peace treaty. Made his nine-year-old son Hannibal swear an oath of eternal hatred for Rome before sailing to rebuild Carthaginian power in Spain.
Appears inBarcid Conquest of Spain
Son of Hamilcar Barca, raised in army camps in Spain and sworn to eternal enmity with Rome. Elevated to command at twenty-five, he crossed the Alps with his army and won every major battle in Italy for fifteen years. His troops never mutinied. He was finally recalled when Scipio threatened Carthage itself and was defeated at Zama in 202 BC.
Appears inSiege of Saguntum, Hannibal's Crossing of the Alps, Battle of the Ticinus, Battle of the Trebia, Battle of Lake Trasimene, Battle of Cannae, Siege of Capua, Hannibal's March on Rome, Battle of Zama, Scipio and Hannibal at Ephesus
Hannibal's younger brother, left to command in Spain while Hannibal invaded Italy. Fought the elder Scipiones for years, then tangled with young Scipio Africanus. Deciding the war could only be won by joining Hannibal, he crossed the Alps with 30,000 men in 207 BC but was intercepted and killed at the Metaurus. His severed head was thrown into Hannibal's camp.
Appears inBattle of the Metaurus
Hamilcar's son-in-law who succeeded him in Spain after his death in 228 BC. Less a conqueror than a governor, he consolidated Barcid power, founded New Carthage as his capital, and signed the Ebro Treaty with Rome. Assassinated by a tribesman avenging a murdered chieftain; his death brought the twenty-five-year-old Hannibal to supreme command.
Appears inEbro Treaty
King of Syracuse who briefly resisted Rome in 264 BC, then pragmatically allied with them in 263 BC after facing four legions. The alliance lasted 50 years until his death, providing essential logistical support throughout the First Punic War and helping Rome establish itself as a Mediterranean power.
The last of three Roman brothers who fought three Alban brothers (Curiatii) to decide the war between Rome and Alba Longa. He killed all three opponents by feigning retreat.
Legendary Roman hero who defended the bridge over the Tiber single-handedly long enough for it to be destroyed, preventing Porsenna's army from crossing into the city.
Appears inDefence of the Sublician Bridge
Grandson of Masinissa who served under Roman command in Spain, where he observed how easily Roman commanders could be bribed. After seizing the Numidian throne by murdering his co-heirs, he bribed his way through Roman diplomatic commissions and commanders to escape justice for years, becoming a public scandal that eventually brought Marius to power.
Augustus's daughter by his first wife Scribonia, Julia was married to her cousin Marcellus as part of her father's succession plans, the first of several marriages arranged for dynastic purposes. Marriage to Agrippa gave Augustus the grandsons his succession needed, and when Agrippa died she was handed to Tiberius against the wishes of both.
Appears inMarriage of Marcellus and Julia, Adoption of Gaius and Lucius, Marriage of Tiberius and Julia, Exile of Julia
Caligula's favourite sister, one of the three daughters of Germanicus and Agrippina. Caligula kept her at his side in place of a wife during his bachelor periods and had her named in the legionary loyalty oath. She died of a fever in AD 38, and Caligula had her deified.
A hereditary prince of the Batavians, made a Roman citizen as a reward for twenty-five years' service in the legions, who led his people's revolt in AD 69 under cover of backing Vespasian and surrendered only when the fall of Jerusalem left Rome free to deal with him.
Appears inBatavian Revolt
Etruscan king of Clusium who attacked the new Roman Republic after Tarquin's expulsion.
Livia returned to Rome with her husband Tiberius Claudius Nero and infant son under the amnesty of the Pact of Misenum. Octavian fell for her at first sight, divorced Scribonia the day she bore his daughter Julia, and married Livia three days after she bore her second son.
Sent along as adviser when Tiberius's son Drusus went to settle the Pannonian mutiny, and made Praetorian Prefect the following year. From that post he became the emperor's indispensable lieutenant, consolidating the Guard's power, engineering Drusus's murder, and dominating the empire from Tiberius's retreat to Capri until his own sudden fall and execution in AD 31.
Appears inMutinies of the Accession, Tiberius's Withdrawal to Capri, Fall of Sejanus
The younger son of Julia and Agrippa, born in 17 BC and adopted by Augustus alongside his brother Gaius, held in reserve behind him in the succession.
Appears inAdoption of Gaius and Lucius, Death of Lucius Caesar
Populares consul of 87 BC who was driven from Rome by his co-consul and allied with the returning Marius to storm the city. After Marius's death in 86 BC, Cinna ruled Rome as the dominant figure, re-elected consul each year until 84 BC. When Sulla marched home from the east, Cinna assembled an army to intercept him but was stoned to death by his own mutinying troops.
Sulla served as Marius's quaestor in Numidia and personally secured Jugurtha's surrender, beginning a long rivalry with Marius over credit for the victory. During the Social War he commanded in the south and emerged as Rome's foremost general. After marching on Rome in 88 BC and defeating Mithridates in the east, he returned to win a civil war against the Marian faction (83-82 BC), became Rome's first dictator for life, carried out sweeping constitutional reforms to restore the Senate's supremacy, then voluntarily resigned the dictatorship in 80 BC and died in 78 BC.
Appears inRelief of Nola, Siege of Athens, Battle of Chaeronea, Battle of Orchomenus, Peace of Dardanus, Battle of the Colline Gate
Consul of 90 BC and a patrician of the Julian gens, elder kinsman of the future dictator. He commanded the Roman forces in the south during the first year of the Social War against the Samnites, with Sulla serving under him. Before leaving office he sponsored the Lex Julia, the law that offered citizenship to loyal and surrendering Italian allies, politically defusing the rebellion.
Appears inLex Julia
Led the revolt against the Tarquins after Lucretia's death and became one of the first two consuls of the Roman Republic.
Appears inExpulsion of the Tarquins, Founding of the Roman Republic, Brutus's Anti-Monarchic Oath, Tarquinian Conspiracy, Execution of Brutus's Sons, Battle of Silva Arsia
A close ally of Sulla who inherited his eastern command, Lucullus was one of Rome's most capable generals of the era. He successfully prosecuted the Third Mithridatic War, driving Mithridates from Bithynia and deep into Armenia. His campaign eventually stalled when officers loyal to Pompey encouraged the troops to refuse orders, and the Senate recalled him in 66 BC. He returned laden with eastern treasure and spent his remaining years in celebrated luxury.
Dictator and four-time consul during the Second Samnite War. As dictator in 325 BC, he nearly executed his Master of the Horse Fabius Rullianus for disobeying orders and engaging the Samnites without authorisation. Lost the army's support over the incident, then won it back through humility and personal attention before leading them to victory. Remembered as one of the best commanders of his generation.
Appears inBattle of Lake Vadimo
Twice-appointed dictator who became Rome's archetype of republican virtue. Called from his farm to rescue a trapped army from the Aequi (458 BC), he won, triumphed, and resigned after fifteen days. His voluntary surrender of absolute power made him the model citizen-soldier for later Romans.
A patrician from a long-faded consular family, Catiline was charismatic and brave but repeatedly willing to subvert legal process when it suited him. He was twice acquitted of serious charges on the testimony of powerful patrons, twice denied the consulship, and finally turned to conspiracy. His plot to overthrow the government was exposed by Cicero and he was killed at Pistoria in 62 BC leading the remnant of his army.
Appears inCatilinarian Conspiracy
Plebeian tribune and partner of Licinius Stolo in the struggle that produced the Licinian-Sextian Laws. After those reforms opened the consulship to plebeians, Sextius became the first plebeian consul in 366 BC.
Appears inLicinian-Sextian Laws, First Plebeian Consul
Husband of Lucretia and one of the first two consuls of the Roman Republic alongside Brutus.
Appears inExpulsion of the Tarquins, Founding of the Roman Republic, Resignation of Collatinus
Roman noblewoman whose rape by Sextus Tarquinius and subsequent suicide triggered the revolt that ended the monarchy.
Appears inRape of Lucretia
An amiable patrician of the Aemilian gens, Lepidus served Caesar as a dependable, unthreatening lieutenant, winning the 46 BC consulship over the discredited Antony on reliability alone. That same trustworthiness made him the junior third partner brokering the Second Triumvirate, until overreaching with a claim to Sicily in 36 BC got him stripped of power for good.
Appears inSecond Triumvirate, Triumviral Proscriptions, Division of the Empire after Philippi, Treaty of Brundisium, Expulsion of Lepidus, Augustus Becomes Pontifex Maximus
Born to a wealthy plebeian family, Antony wasted a dissolute youth on wine, women, and debt, then found his calling as a cavalry officer in the East and in Gaul, where he became one of Caesar's finest commanders. A cousin of Caesar's mother, he became the general's closest friend and most dogged defender. As tribune in 49 BC his expulsion from the Senate gave Caesar the pretext he needed to march on Rome.
Appears inCaesar Dictator Perpetuo, Assassination of Caesar, Amnesty for the Liberators, Caesar's Will, Caesar's Funeral, Battle of Forum Gallorum, Second Triumvirate, Triumviral Proscriptions, Death of Cicero, First Battle of Philippi, Second Battle of Philippi, Division of the Empire after Philippi, Treaty of Brundisium, Treaty of Tarentum, Antony and Cleopatra's Alliance, Mark Antony's Reorganisation of the East, Donations of Alexandria, Octavian's Indictment of Antony, Dissolution of the Second Triumvirate, Seizure of Antony's Will, Battle of Actium, Capture of Alexandria, Deaths of Antony and Cleopatra, Damnatio Memoriae of Antony
Led Rome's invasion of North Africa and marched to the gates of Carthage. Rather than negotiate reasonable terms, his ego demanded total surrender: dismantle the navy, leave all islands, submit to Roman sovereignty. Carthage refused, hired Xanthippus, and Regulus was crushed and captured. His vanity extended the war by a decade.
Caesar's co-consul in 59 BC, chosen by the Senate to obstruct him. When conventional methods failed, he declared all remaining days of the year holy to suspend public business. When he came to the Forum for a final confrontation, Caesar's supporters dumped manure on his head and broke his fasces. He withdrew to his house for the rest of the year, issuing edicts Caesar ignored.
Appears inJulius Caesar's Consulship
Rome's most aggressive commander during the Second Punic War, known as the "Sword of Rome" (paired with Fabius as the "Shield"). Five-time consul who kept pressure on Hannibal in southern Italy while others avoided engagement. Recaptured Syracuse for Rome after a prolonged siege.
Appears inSiege of Syracuse
Octavia's son and Augustus's nephew, Marcellus was favoured over Tiberius as heir and married to Julia. Special legislation let him take the aedileship at 21, but he fell sick and died before the office's promise could be tested.
Appears inMarriage of Marcellus and Julia, Death of Marcellus
Patrician who married his elder daughter to a patrician and his younger daughter to the plebeian Licinius Stolo. When the younger daughter lamented she would never receive the same honours as her sister, Fabius worked with Licinius to break the patrician monopoly on the consulship.
Rome's dominant figure of the early 4th century BC, holding five dictatorships. Captured Veii, convinced Romans to rebuild after the Gallic sack (earning the title "second founder of Rome"), and brokered the Licinian-Sextian compromise that opened the consulship to plebeians.
Appears inFall of Veii, Licinian-Sextian Laws
A republican of impeccable pedigree, descended from the Brutus who drove out Rome's last king, Marcus Brutus fought for Pompey at Pharsalus, surrendered, and was pardoned and favoured by Caesar, who treated him almost as a son. Constant pressure from fellow conspirators finally pushed him into the plot, and he used Caesar's trust to lure him to his death. Defeated by Antony and Octavian at Philippi in 42 BC, he took his own life rather than be captured.
Appears inAssassination of Caesar, Amnesty for the Liberators, Caesar's Will, First Battle of Philippi, Second Battle of Philippi
After the Marians killed his family, Crassus raised troops in Spain, returned to fight for Sulla, and won the Battle of the Colline Gate. He rebuilt the family fortune through proscription purchases, silver mines, and a predatory fire brigade, becoming Rome's wealthiest citizen and one of the three triumvirs alongside Caesar and Pompey. Seeking military glory to match his wealth, he invaded Parthia and was destroyed at Carrhae in 53 BC.
Appears inBattle of the Colline Gate, Joint Consulship of Crassus and Pompey, First Triumvirate, Conference of Luca, Battle of Carrhae
Tribune of 91 BC who proposed extending citizenship to Rome's Italian allies as part of a broader reform package intended to strengthen the Senate's hand. The Senate blocked his legislation regardless. Shortly after, Drusus was assassinated, and his death was the spark that ignited the Social War.
Patrician who saved the Capitoline during the Gallic siege, earning the cognomen "Capitolinus." Later broke with his class to champion plebeian debt relief, paying soldiers' debts from his own pocket. Accused of plotting to overthrow the Senate, he was convicted at a trial famously relocated away from the Capitoline and thrown from the Tarpeian Rock.
The most inflexible defender of senatorial tradition in the late Republic, Cato made his name by demanding the immediate execution of Catiline's conspirators over Caesar's objection. He became the optimates' figurehead against Caesar and the triumvirs, held Utica for the Senate after Thapsus, and killed himself rather than accept Caesar's pardon, becoming a martyr whose memory Caesar's furious Anti-Cato pamphlet only strengthened.
Appears inCatilinarian Conspiracy, Death of Cato
A novus homo from Arpinum, Cicero rose through the cursus honorum on oratory skill alone. As consul in 63 BC he crushed the Catilinarian conspiracy, but Clodius used the executions to drive him into exile in 58 BC. He returned the following year and spent the next decades navigating the triumvirs' dominance, sidelined from real power but remaining Rome's foremost voice, and thorn in Caesar's side, most visibly when his eulogy of Cato provoked Caesar's furious Anti-Cato reply.
Appears inCatilinarian Conspiracy, Exile of Cicero, Triumviral Proscriptions, Death of Cicero
Roman commander who supposedly earned the name "Corvus" when a raven helped him defeat a Gaul in single combat. Elected consul at twenty-three, he became one of the great early Republican generals, winning in the First Samnite War and later calming the Campanian mutiny without bloodshed.
Appears inBattle of Mount Gaurus, Mutiny of the Campanian Garrison, Battle of Suessula
Lowborn, Agrippa met Octavian at school and became his lifelong friend, a gifted natural soldier who impressed veterans in a way the frail young aristocrat never could. Octavian handled politics, Agrippa handled armies, and most of the victories later credited to Octavian were won by Agrippa in the field.
Appears inSiege of Perusia, Battle of Naulochus, Capture of Methone, Battle of Actium, Veterans' Mutiny, Reforms of 28 BC, Elevation of Agrippa, Adoption of Gaius and Lucius, Conquest of Pannonia, Death of Agrippa
Exiled Numidian prince who had fought against Scipio in Spain before defecting to Rome. His cavalry was the decisive factor at Zama, driving off the Carthaginian horsemen and returning to strike Hannibal's rear. Rewarded with an independent Numidian kingdom, he reigned for fifty years as Rome's loyal ally in North Africa, mirroring the role Hiero of Syracuse had played in Sicily.
Appears inBattle of Zama
Dictator of Alba Longa who betrayed Rome by withdrawing his forces during a joint battle, prompting Tullus Hostilius to destroy Alba Longa in retribution.
Appears inTreachery of Mettius Fufetius
King of Pontus on the Black Sea coast, Mithridates VI built his kingdom into the dominant power of Asia Minor and waged three wars against Roman expansion. His coordinated massacre of some 80,000 Roman and Italian residents (the Asiatic Vespers, 88 BC) triggered the first. He retained his throne through two wars before being finally defeated by Pompey and committing suicide in 63 BC.
Appears inPeace of Dardanus
Governor of Syria, who had risen as high as the existing order would let him and resented how low that was. Stuck in a largely diplomatic post with no prospect of military glory, he saw in the capable, well-liked Vespasian the vehicle for his own ambitions, pressed him to bid for the throne, swore the Syrian legions to him, and set out west with the main Flavian army, only to be beaten to Italy by Antonius Primus.
Appears inCivil War of AD 69, Proclamation of Vespasian
Livia's younger son by her first marriage, and Tiberius's brother. He took Raetia alongside Tiberius, then held the armies of the Rhine and drove into Germania as far as the Elbe. Outgoing where his brother was awkward, he was the popular one of the pair, and his death after a fall from his horse in 9 BC left Tiberius the only adult heir Augustus had.
Appears inConquest of Raetia, Drusus's Campaigns in Germania, Death of Drusus
Deposed king of Alba Longa, grandfather of Romulus and Remus.
Praetorian prefect under Nero who, once it was clear Nero was finished, told the Guard that Galba would pay them handsomely for abandoning him. Galba had promised no such thing. With Galba still lingering in Spain, Sabinus decided he wanted the throne for himself and spread a rumour that he was Caligula's son. A Guard already ashamed of deserting Nero so readily would not follow him, and he was dead within days: by his own hand in one account, killed by his own men in another. The payout he had promised became the grievance that later cost Galba his life.
Appears inDeath of Nero
Octavian's sister, recently widowed, who was married to Antony in 40 BC to seal the Treaty of Brundisium, binding the two triumvirs together through family as well as politics. Antony's open disregard for her while living with Cleopatra in Alexandria became Octavian's most effective piece of propaganda against him. She outlived Antony by decades but mourned her son Marcellus, who died in 23 BC, for the rest of her own life.
Appears inTreaty of Brundisium
Son of Philip V who engineered his brother's execution to secure the throne. Inherited Macedon in 179 BC and immediately began testing Roman patience: expanding beyond treaty boundaries, allying with Syria, and stirring revolt in Illyria. After three years of inconclusive war he was defeated at Pydna by Aemilius Paulus, paraded through Rome in chains, and died in exile.
Appears inBattle of Pydna
King of Macedon with ambitions to reunite Greece under Macedonian rule. Allied with Hannibal after Cannae, but Rome recruited Greek allies to keep him occupied. After the Second Punic War he joined Antiochus III in attacking Egyptian territory, prompting Pergamum and Rhodes to call on Rome. Defeated at Cynoscephalae in 197 BC, he was stripped of his fleet and confined to Macedon. His son Perseus renewed the challenge a generation later.
Appears inBattle of Cynoscephalae
Greek historian from the Achaean League, taken to Rome as a hostage after Pydna in 167 BC. Taken in by the family of Aemilius Paulus, he became the tutor and close companion of Scipio Aemilianus. Wrote the Histories to explain to his fellow Greeks how Rome conquered the Mediterranean in barely fifty years.
Consul of 89 BC who replaced Caepio in command of the northern theatre of the Social War after Caepio fell in battle. Pompeius Strabo conducted the brutal siege of Asculum (the city where the revolt had begun) and took it in 89 BC, effectively ending resistance in the north. His teenage son Gnaeus Pompeius served with him during the campaign.
Appears inSiege of Asculum
Wife of Nero's friend Otho, and by AD 58 the emperor's mistress. It was widely said she had married Otho in the first place to put herself in Nero's way. Unwilling to stay a mistress, she pressed Nero to set aside Claudia Octavia, and when she fell pregnant in AD 62 he did, marrying her eighteen days after the divorce. With Burrus dead soon after, she and her circle dominated the court that Seneca then withdrew from. She died in AD 65, pregnant with Nero's second child.
Appears inDivorce of Claudia Octavia
Patrician who caused a scandal that forced Caesar to divorce his wife, then arranged his adoption into a plebeian family to stand for tribune of the plebs. As tribune in 58 BC he drove Cicero into exile, sent Cato to Cyprus on a mission, and passed the free grain dole. He built street gangs that fought running battles with Milo's rival gang and was killed by Milo's men in 52 BC.
Appears inLex Clodia Frumentaria, Exile of Cicero
Consul of 218 BC, first Roman commander to face Hannibal in Italy. Wounded at Ticinus and saved by his eighteen-year-old son (the future Scipio Africanus). Campaigned with his brother Gnaeus in Spain for five years, denying Carthage reinforcements for Hannibal, until both were killed in 211 BC.
Appears inBattle of the Ticinus, Defeat of the Scipiones in Spain
Third-generation Decius Mus, grandson and son of the two who performed the devotio. Consul during the Pyrrhic War, he led Roman forces at the Battle of Asculum (279 BC) with new anti-elephant devices. Whether he also performed the devotio is uncertain; some ancient sources claim he did, but the tradition is less well attested than for his father and grandfather.
Appears inBattle of Asculum
Son of the Decius Mus who performed the devotio at Vesuvius. As consul at Sentinum in 295 BC, he followed his father's example by ritually sacrificing himself in battle, rallying the Roman army against the Samnite-Gallic coalition.
Appears inBattle of Sentinum
Roman commander remembered for two acts of exemplary self-sacrifice. As a military tribune in the First Samnite War, he saved a trapped legion and earned the Grass Crown; as consul in the Latin War, he performed the devotio, ritually dedicating himself and the enemy army to the gods by dying in battle.
Appears inBattle of Vesuvius
Governor of Germania, given the job of consolidating Roman control and turning the country into a province. He trusted the German chieftain Arminius implicitly, dismissed the warnings brought to him as slander, and marched three legions into the ambush Arminius had prepared. He killed himself when the last trap closed.
Appears inBattle of the Teutoburg Forest
Tribune of 88 BC who allied with Marius to advance a package of populares legislation, most controversially transferring the Mithridatic command from the consul Sulla to the aging Marius. To prevent the Senate from overturning the vote, Sulpicius deployed armed gladiators who physically ejected hostile senators. The move worked: the assembly voted as Sulpicius and Marius intended. The response was Sulla's unprecedented march on Rome. When Sulla took the city, Sulpicius was hunted down and killed.
Replaced Collatinus as consul, helped defeat Tarquin's Etruscan allies, and passed laws protecting the Republic, including the right of appeal and the law allowing anyone seeking kingship to be killed. Earned the honorific Publicola ("friend of the people").
Appears inBattle of Silva Arsia, Publicola's Reforms
Once marched as a child captive in a Roman triumph, Ventidius rose through Antony's patronage to command his own army, fighting Pacorus's Parthian invasion to a standstill over three years before killing him outside Antioch. He became the only man in Roman history to hold a triumph after once having been paraded as a captive in one.
Appears inBattle of Antioch
King of Epirus and second cousin of Alexander the Great. With limited opportunity in the post-Alexandrian east, he answered Tarentum's call for aid against Rome in 280 BC. He won at Heraclea and Asculum but suffered irreplaceable losses each time, coining the term "Pyrrhic victory." After failing to hold either Italy or Sicily, he withdrew to Epirus in 275 BC and was killed in street fighting at Argos in 272 BC.
Appears inBattle of Heraclea, Battle of Asculum, Pyrrhus's Sicilian Campaign, Battle of Beneventum
Head of the Fabii, appointed dictator after Lake Trasimene in 217 BC. His refusal to engage Hannibal earned him the nickname "the Delayer" and kept Rome alive through its most dangerous year. Later opposed Scipio's African invasion, representing old-guard caution against the new charismatic style of command.
Five-time consul and one of Rome's central commanders in the Samnite Wars. He first became famous for defying Papirius Cursor as Master of the Horse, then later helped secure major Roman victories against the Etruscans and at Sentinum. Grandfather of the more famous Fabius Maximus Cunctator.
Appears inBattle of Lake Vadimo, Battle of Sentinum
Marian general and gifted unconventional commander who refused to accept the Sullan settlement. Where other Marian holdouts were quickly crushed, Sertorius built a genuine rival Roman state in Spain, complete with a shadow Senate and Iberian alliances, and proved impossible to defeat in the field. He was undone by treachery from within rather than Roman arms.
Appears inAssassination of Sertorius
Twin brother of Romulus, killed during Rome's founding after jumping over the newly built walls.
Appears inFoundation of Rome, Death of Remus
Daughter of Numitor, forced into the Vestal order by Amulius. Said to have been impregnated by Mars, giving birth to Romulus and Remus.
Son of Aemilius Paulus (victor of Pydna) and adoptive grandson of Scipio Africanus. Elected consul and given command in Africa after two years of inconclusive siege, he blockaded Carthage's harbour and starved the city before ordering the final assault in 146 BC. Allegedly wept at the burning city, quoting Homer on the fall of Troy.
Appears inDestruction of Carthage
Considered one of the greatest generals of antiquity, Scipio volunteered at twenty-five to take command in Spain when no other Roman would. He transformed Roman tactics by studying Hannibal: surprise, deception, and outthinking rather than outfighting. He ended Carthaginian power in Spain, carried the war to Africa, and defeated Hannibal at Zama. Cato later accused him of misappropriating war funds; he retired bitterly to Campania, his tomb allegedly reading "ungrateful fatherland, you will not even have my bones."
Appears inCapture of New Carthage, Battle of Ilipa, Battle of Zama, Scipio and Hannibal at Ephesus, Battle of Magnesia
The Stoic philosopher Claudius brought in to tutor his adopted son Nero, who became the young emperor's chief adviser alongside the Praetorian Prefect Burrus. Not an original thinker, his importance to Western philosophy lies in putting Stoic ideas into comprehensible language, much as Cicero had done for Greek thought before him. Burrus's death in AD 62 left him isolated in a court run by Poppaea Sabina and her circle, and once they began spreading talk that he was embezzling from the treasury he withdrew into private life. It bought him three years: caught up in the Pisonian Conspiracy, he was ordered to take his own life in AD 65.
Appears inPisonian Conspiracy
The younger son of Pompey the Great, Sextus escaped Spain after Munda and rebuilt himself as admiral of the Liberator fleet, blockading Italy's grain supply from the sea. Legalised as governor of Sicily by the Pact of Misenum, he was later crushed at Naulochus in 36 BC and executed the following year.
Appears inPact of Misenum, Battle of Naulochus
Son of Tarquinius Superbus whose crime against Lucretia triggered the fall of the monarchy.
Appears inRape of Lucretia
Sons of King Ancus Marcius who were displaced by Tarquinius Priscus and later arranged his assassination.
Appears inElection of Tarquinius Priscus, Assassination of Tarquinius Priscus
A slave trained as a gladiator at Capua, Spartacus led the breakout of 73 BC and emerged as the revolt's dominant commander. He consistently outmanoeuvred the Roman forces sent against him, growing a band of fugitives into a disciplined army of roughly 70,000. His strategic intentions remain unclear: having marched to the Alps he turned back south, and no ancient source explains why. He was killed in the final battle against Crassus in 71 BC.
Wealthy equestrian who bought grain during famine and distributed it freely, becoming enormously popular. The Senate accused him of conspiring to make himself king, and he was killed by the Master of Horse when he resisted summons during Cincinnatus's second dictatorship.
Roman governor of Britain whose legions were away campaigning in Wales when Boudica's revolt broke out. He abandoned both Londinium and his own reinforcements' timetable rather than fight on ground of her choosing, then destroyed her army at the Battle of Watling Street.
Appears inBattle of Watling Street
Wife of Tarquinius Priscus who interpreted the flame omen over Servius Tullius and engineered his accession by concealing Priscus's assassination.
Appears inAdoption of Servius Tullius, Tanaquil's Deception and Servius's Accession
Roman woman who betrayed the citadel to the Sabines by opening the gates, and was killed by them, crushed under their shields.
Appears inSabine Seizure of the Citadel
Grandson of Scipio Africanus through his mother Cornelia, and brother-in-law of Scipio Aemilianus. Served in Carthage and Spain; in 137 BC he brokered a treaty to free 20,000 captured Roman soldiers, which the Senate publicly rejected at Scipio Aemilianus's instigation. The humiliation drove him to seek power through the people rather than the Senate. Elected tribune in 133 BC, he pushed radical agrarian reform by bypassing the Senate entirely and appealing directly to the popular assembly.
Appears inGracchan Land Reform, Death of Tiberius Gracchus
Praetorian Prefect from AD 62, appointed after Burrus died. Where Burrus had worked to restrain Nero, Tigellinus urged him on, and spent some seven years in office persecuting the emperor's enemies and arranging his entertainments. Nero's decline tracks his rise closely enough that the two are hard to separate.
King of Armenia at the height of its power, Tigranes II had married a daughter of Mithridates and built his kingdom into the dominant force in the region. When Rome demanded he surrender Mithridates, he refused. After his defeat he reassessed when Pompey arrived with a larger army and a formidable reputation, denied Mithridates asylum, and submitted to Rome. He was allowed to keep his throne as a client king, making Armenia a buffer between Rome and Parthia.
Consul during the Latin War, famous for executing his own son Titus to enforce military discipline after he disobeyed orders by accepting (and winning) single combat with a Latin. His severity made him a symbol of old Roman discipline, and he later helped secure victory at Vesuvius alongside Decius Mus.
Appears inBattle of Vesuvius
Consul who transformed Rome's indecisive Greek campaign into a decisive victory. A passionate Philhellene, he recast the war as a defence of Greek liberty, winning city after city away from Philip. Dragged out peace negotiations to ensure he kept command rather than a successor stealing his glory. Defeated Philip at Cynoscephalae, then declared the "Freedom of Greece," withdrawing garrisons while binding the Greeks to Roman interests through obligation rather than occupation.
Appears inBattle of Cynoscephalae
Sabine king who led the war against Rome after the abduction of the Sabine women, then co-ruled with Romulus following their peoples' unification.
Appears inSabine Seizure of the Citadel, Intervention of the Sabine Women, Union of Romans and Sabines, Co-rule of Romulus and Titus Tatius
The most influential of Galba's three advisers, a senator dogged by scandal and, by Tacitus's account, the most worthless of men. He backed Otho's claim to be Galba's heir in exchange for a promised marriage to his daughter, profited from the auctions of property Galba seized, and was killed alongside Galba in the Forum.
Appears inAssassination of Galba
Daughter of Servius Tullius and wife of Tarquinius Superbus who conspired in her father's murder and allegedly drove her chariot over his body.
Appears inMurder of Servius Tullius
Claudius's third wife, an influential member of Caligula's court before her marriage to Claudius gave him a protector during those dangerous years. As empress she bore him two children and ran a private purge of anyone she considered a threat, before her own downfall in AD 48.
Appears inFall of Messalina
The Arvernian chieftain who united the Gallic tribes in 52 BC for the last great revolt against Rome. He fought a scorched-earth campaign and handed Caesar a sharp defeat at Gergovia, but was cornered at Alesia, where the double-walled Roman siege left him no escape. He surrendered to spare his men, was imprisoned for six years, paraded in Caesar's triumph, and executed.
Appears inSiege of Alesia
Roman governor of Upper Germany who crushed Vindex's revolt on Nero's orders. His own troops hailed him imperator afterward, offering to back him against Nero, but he refused and stayed loyal, then slipped quietly away from the chaos that followed to live another thirty years.
Appears inRevolt of Vindex
Roman governor of a Gallic province who declared against Nero's tax demands in March AD 68. He backed Galba rather than claim the throne himself, but was crushed by Verginius Rufus and took his own life rather than be captured.
Appears inRevolt of Vindex
Agrippa's daughter by his first wife, married to Tiberius in 19 BC to keep the succession inside the family. The marriage was a happy one and produced a son, which made Augustus's later order to divorce her a grievance Tiberius never let go of.
Appears inMarriage of Tiberius and Julia
King of Parthia who installed his brother Tiridates on the Armenian throne, defied years of Roman pressure to have him confirmed, and twice outmanoeuvred Rome's commanders in the field before agreeing a compromise that let Tiridates keep his crown.
Appears inBattle of Rhandeia, Armenian Settlement
Spartan mercenary general hired by Carthage in desperation. Diagnosed the problem as leadership, not the army itself: the infantry was solid, the cavalry magnificent, the elephants indestructible. Crushed Regulus at Bagradas, then was driven out by jealous Carthaginian nobility who feared his popularity.