Antony, whom he defeated at Actium in 31 BC and who committed suicide a year later, along with his paramour, Cleopatra. (As the imperator gave the order to murder Cleopatra’s teenaged son Caesarion—a potential rival, since the youth’s father had been Julius Caesar himself—he remarked that “too many Caesars is no good thing.”) Master of the world at thirty-three, he then set about consolidating his power, craftily legitimating his autocratic rule under the forms of traditional republican law, and establishing the legal, political, and cultural foundations for empire that would persist, in one
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