Mary Beard

They sometimes put it down obediently after a bit, but they're not obeying the usual rules of power sharing.

And therefore, they are actually, in a sense, undermining the very structure that the Republican government had been based on, which is people don't hold power for very long and they always share it.

So somehow it's imploded.

And that's combined with the idea that particularly with conquests in the East, and as I said, the individual commanders getting very rich.

So they've got money to use for their own political ambitions at Rome.

Why is there so much generosity in Roman politics, which was a bribery is what we mean.

Generosity is what the guys themselves would have said.

That's because there's a hell of a lot of money around Rome.

Yeah.

I mean, we have to be careful because we're seeing this retrospectively.

And I think that I'm sometimes guilty of...

of somehow imagining that one-man rule was kind of inevitable in Rome because of all these problems, and then tracking it and saying, look, you can see that there are these individuals.

Here it comes.

And then Julius Caesar, here it comes.

And, well, he's interrupted in mid-flow because he's assassinated in 44 BCE.

But in a sense, that is the moment when people kind of think,

Right, one man rule is probably here to stay.

Now, that's not what his assassins said.

His assassins also, I think the Romans are very aware about these currents and these pressures.

The assassins say, right, we want liberty back.