Yet his—and Antony’s—mastery remained that of a despot. The triumvirate, which had been hurriedly renewed in 37 after its expiry the year before, had no foundations in precedent, only in the exhaustion and misery of the Roman people. The sense of helplessness that the Republic had inspired in other peoples was now its own. As early as 44 BC, following Caesar’s assassination, one of his friends had warned that Rome’s problems were intractable—“for if a man of such genius was unable to find a way out, who will find one now?”17 Since then the Roman people had found themselves ever more
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