And besides, Suetonius had access to Augustus' personal correspondence and so had a better glimpse into the character of the man himself -- habitual grammatical lapses and all -- than we do. His vices and eccentricities are here along with his virtues. So where is the coherent coverage of the civil wars? It may simply have been a casualty of Suetonius' "grammatical" biographical approach, which organizes its material along thematic and not chronological lines and so can mislead modern readers looking for a more straightforward year-to-year narrative. Significantly, the wars are the first of the "subject headings" (49) into which Suetonius dissects Augustus and his imperial career, and thus arguably the most important. It is only by accident that this section of the text follows immediately on the prefatory discussion of Augustus' upbringing and early career, just as it would in a chronological narrative. After this, it is easy for the casual reader...
Unlike any of the Twelve Caesars to come (much less their predecessors), Augustus is unique in needing to establish the basic forms of imperial power and succession, but again, Suetonius' approach is not especially well suited to analyzing this evolution from triumvir to emperor in a way that casual readers will find informative. Ultimately, Suetonius is interested in depicting good and bad men and how they wield power, and only secondarily in pondering the apparatus of imperium itself.
Roman Republic, which took place over a century from the end of the Punic Wars in 146 BC to the establishment of autocracy and military dictatorship under Julius Caesar after 45 BC, and then Octavian-Augustus from 31 BC, one of the most important questions would be: what were the main causes for its failure? There are no simple answers to that, of course, although almost certainly socioeconomic factors were
Conventional literature would come to see Cleopatra as an exploitive whore, responsible for the downfall of virtuous men like the Ptolemies, Julius Caesar and, inevitably, Marc Antony as well. So is this reported by historical accounts such as that by Cassius Dio who reflected that "Indeed she so enchanted and enthralled not only Antony but all others who counted for anything with him that she came to entertain the hope that she would rule the
Roman Empire in Greece & the East The gradual "Romanization" of the Hellenistic world is attested to solidly by material culture: architectural, archeological and numismatic evidence abounds to show that the Romans would have a real and substantial presence in those eastern areas which had once been the dominions of Alexander the Great. But in order to assess the Hellenistic response to this Romanization, we need to look beyond the material
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