Rome's revolution : death of the republic and birth of the empire
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Rome's revolution : death of the republic and birth of the empire
（Ancient warfare and civilization）
Oxford University Press, c2015
- : hbk
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 373-378) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Novelized, televised, and endlessly scrutinized by scholars, the fall of the Roman Republic marks one of history's great turning points. Historians have studied the descent of the Republic into civil war as a great political tragedy, a warning from the past about the unsustainability of empires; political scientists have labeled it a parable about militarism, populism, moral decay, or the inevitable corruption of political systems. Yet the familiar story of the Roman
Republic's downfall continues to be the story of its elites. What if we started thinking about Roman politics not from the perspectives of Caesar and Cicero, but from the point of view of the soldier, the peasant, or the pauper? In an original account of what he calls Rome's revolution, Richard
Alston reinscribes these humble protagonists into their tumultuous era. They, like the ruthless aristocrats they swore allegiance to, were political agents, negotiating their positions in the context of a "failed state."
Rome's Revolution blends riveting historical narrative with socio-economic analysis, restoring a rich context to the cataclysmic violence of the period. In addition to chronicling the drama of aristocratic rivalries, the book digs beneath the high politics of Cicero, Caesar, Antony and Octavian to examine the problems of making a living in first-century BC Italy. Portraying the revolution as the crisis of a violent society-both among the citizenry and among a ruling class whose
legitimacy was dwindling-Rome's Revolution provides new insight into the motivations that drove men to march on their capital city and slaughter their compatriots.
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- The Historian's Problem
- Death of a Dictator
- The Crisis of the Republic
- Caesar and Pompey
- Mutina: The Last Battle of the Republic
- A Victory Lost: The Defeat of the Senate
- The Revolution Begins
- Death in Rome
- The Revolution Complete: From Philippi to Perusia
- The Triumviral Wars
- Antony and Cleopatra: Love and its Enemies
- The Invention of Augustus
- The Augustan Republic
- Anarchy and Power
- The Imperial Order
- The Conquest of the World
- Buying Rome: Empire, Money, and Power in the Augustan Regime
- Death of an Emperor
- Epilogue: Tiberius the Emperor
- Bibliography
- Index
by "Nielsen BookData"