Status Updates From Augustus: First Emperor of ...

This was a war fought by large and clumsy armies, where none of the senior officers had any experience of warfare on so grand a scale.

Writing over a century later, Tacitus would characterise the years of civil war and triumvirate as an era when there was ‘neither law, nor custom’. Basic institutions had broken down and were replaced with arbitrary power.

When [a died on 31 December, he hastily turned a legislative assembly into a voting assembly and elected another of his henchmen as consul for the rest of the day. Cicero joked that ‘in the consulship of Caninius nobody ate lunch. However, nothing bad occurred while he was consul – for his vigilance was so incredible that throughout his entire consulship he never went to sleep,’ but privately said that it was enough