Caesar’s Legacy: Civil War and the Emergence of the Roman Empire

In April 44 BC the eighteen-year-old Gaius Octavius landed in Italy and launched his take-over of the Roman world. Defeating first Caesar\'s assassins, then the son of Pompey the Great, and finally Antony and the Egyptian queen Cleopatra, he dismantled the old Republic, took on the new name \'Augustus\', and ruled forty years more with his equally remarkable wife Livia. Caesar\'s Legacy grippingly retells the story of Augustus\' rise to power by focusing on how the bloody civil wars which he and his soldiers fought transformed the lives of men and women throughout the Mediterranean world and beyond. During this violent period citizens of Rome and provincials came to accept a new form of government and found ways to celebrate it. Yet they also mourned, in literary masterpieces and stories passed on to their children, the terrible losses they endured throughout the long years of fighting.

• Provides a gripping narrative of the rise to power of Rome’s first emperor, Augustus • Uses an unusually broad range of evidence: historic sources, creative literature, coins, works of art • Analyses for the first time the distinctive features of the triumviral period • Exploits recently-published inscriptions to explore in full the impact of Rome’s civil wars on the inhabitants of the provinces

Introduction: missing years; 1. Soldier and a statesman; 2. Fights for freedom; 3. Land appropriations; 4. From discord to harmony?; 5. Struggle for survival; 6. The new nobility; 7. Sense of promise; 8. Out of chaos consent.

\'By close and intelligent readings of very different types of contemporary evidence, Osgood makes the reader understand the horror of those years in the lives of ordinary Romans. His mastery of a very wide range of modern scholarship is matched by an admirably direct and accessible style. Caesar\'s Legacy is a historical work of real distinction.\'

– Times Literary Supplement

\' … a fine achievement … A vision of the triumviral period now exists where none existed before. In his first book, Mr Osgood provides an admirable demonstration of original scholarship, and he is to be warmly congratulated.\'

– Bryn Mawr Classical Review