May 2nd

Assassination and Another Caesar

• in 44 b.c. Caesar secured a vote for the senate making him dictator for life
• Caesar never ruled by terror like Sulla, but he also showed no sign of letting up his high position as Sulla had done
• He raised himself even higher, permitting a religious cult to be established in his honor and wearing the purple robe of the ancient Roman kings
• On the ides of March (March 15) 44 b.c. Caesar appeared in the Senate house unarmed and unguarded, according to his custom, and a crowd of senators struck him down with their daggers
• Caesar's murder did not restore the republic; instead, his death produced yet another crop of warlords and yet more bouts of civil war.
• Mark Antony once a commander under Caesar and nor a consul; the leading assassins, Brutus and Cassius; and Caesar's grandnephew and his adopted son, The youthful Octavian Caesar.
• The murdered dictator had become a founding hero, whose memory would inspire all future supreme rulers of Rome
• The partners then divided the Roman world, with Octavian based in Rome, Lepidus in North Africa, and Mark Antony in Alexandria
• Antony's passionate love affair with Queen Cleopatra, one of the last descendants of the Greek rulers of Egypt, made him unpopular in Rome, and his efforts to win prestige by making conquests on the eastern frontier ended in failure  
• Octavian pushed Lepidus out of power and successfully began expanding Rome's frontiers northward toward the Danube
• in 31 b.c., the rulers of the two halves of Rome's empire went to war
• Octavian's forces defeated those of Antony and Cleopatra in a decisive naval battle near Actium off the western coast of Greece
• Antony and Cleopatra returned to Egypt, and within a year, both committed suicide
• Octavian was now the supreme warlord-- the third to rule Rome, and the one who finally managed to turn military dictatorship into legitimate and permanent monarchy 

The Roman Peace 30 b.c. - a.d. 235

• Augustus' new system of government kept many features of the Roman Republic, allowed subject peoples a good deal of self-rule and brought Rome's destabilizing expansion to a halt. The result was two hundred years of stability that modern scholars call the Roman Peace
• Roman literature and art, philosophy and law, architecture and engineering were often inspired by Greek models, but Roman achievements in these fields eventually equaled to surpassed those of the Greeks and became just as much an inspiration and model for future Western development
• The era of the Roman peace was one of massive social, religious, and cultural changes that would form a pattern of Western Civilization.