Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

by Tom Holland

The fundamental principle of political life in the Republic had been brutally illustrated: ‘that no one citizen should be permitted an eminence so formidable that it prevents him from being questioned by the laws’.12 Even

Pompeius Magnus – ‘Pompey the Great’ – could boast a career that had fused illegality and self-aggrandisement to sensational effect. At the age of twenty-three, he had raised his own private army. A series of glamorous and lucrative commands had followed. Not for the man once nicknamed ‘the youthful butcher’13 the grind of a conventional career. Startlingly, he managed to win his first consulship – at the tender age of thirty-six – without ever having joined the Senate.

‘Time erodes both steel and stone.’ So Ovid had written in the months before his death.