Apart from Nicolaus, every single one of these was born into a world in which emperors were the norm, where Julius Caesar was a literal god to whom they sacrificed little (and big) animals, who had priests and whose name – Caesar – had become a simple noun to denote imperial power and semi-divine authority. They existed in a world where killing a Caesar was a pretty big fucking deal, and a world that only ever killed emperors in order to replace them with other emperors. The notion of the Republic was an imaginary, near mythical one by the time Julius Caesar’s dynasty ended in 69 CE.
