Sic Semper Tyrannis
The Assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump and the death of Julius Caesar.
“Sic Semper Tyrannis” (Thus Always to Tyrants)
With the assassination attempt on former American president Donald Trump, and since I am doing a course on the Roman Republic, I thought this is a good time to look at the assassination of Julius Caesar, one of the most dramatic, poetic and momentous moments in human history.
Like Donald John Trump, Julius Caesar was a polarizing figure. To this day, historians disagree about whether he is responsible for the destruction of the Roman Republic or whether he was a great statesman who tried to restore Rome to its former glory, much like Trump wants to “make America great again.” Like Caesar, Trump’s supporters believe that his intentions are good, while his opponents believe he wants to become a dictator and perhaps even a king.
Gaius Julius Caesar, the most famous Roman who ever lived (And it can be argued that Donald Trump, similar to Caesar, is the most famous American that has ever lived), was born in 100 B.C. into the gens Julia, a prominent family that traced its ancestry back through one of the founders of Rome, Romulus, to Julius, a son of Aeneas, the mythological Trojan hero who supposedly took his followers to Italy after the sack of Troy, where they would eventually build Rome as recounted in The Aeneid, the epic poem of the great poet Virgil which is, along with the poems of Homer, The Iliad and The Odyssey, some of the most important stories in the Western Canon. According to legend Aeneas was the son of the Greek goddess of love and beauty, Aphrodite, who the Romans called Venus. Caesar thus came from very good stock.
Caesar was related by marriage to a mighty man called Gaius Marius, a man who in his youth, came across the nest of an eagle with seven eggs in it, which he believed was a prophecy that he would become consul, the highest political post in the Roman Republic, for a record seven times. Incredibly, that prophecy came true.
Marius became best known for his military reforms. When Germanic tribes started to threaten Roman territories, he amended the military so that he could recruit more troops by removing requirements that Roman soldiers must own property and a certain amount of wealth to serve in the army. You no longer had to be a Roman citizen to serve and the state now equipped the soldiers and paid them for their service. This created a professional fighting force, one that would become the best military in the world, but which was now more loyal to its generals than to the senate.
Traditionally the legions used a variety of beasts, from wild boars, to wolves, and even mythical creatures like the Minotaur, the half-bull half-man creature that according to Greek mythology lived in a labyrinth on Crete until the hero Theseus killed him with the help of Ariadne, the daughter of king Minos (a great story that you must read), on their standards, which was a pennant, a flag, or a banner that was suspended or attached to a staff or pole and used to identify the unit. However, Marius wanted the eagle to become the only symbol of Rome’s power, so he insisted that the king of birds must be placed on all the other standards. He got his way and from 104 B.C. every legion carried a standard with a silver eagle into battle. Nevertheless, this did not last and later the legions reverted to their traditional symbols.
When a civil war broke out between Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla, a Roman general and politician, Caesar sided with Marius. Marius took control of Rome and he made Caesar a member of the priests. Roman priests could marry and in 84 B.C. Caesar married Cornelia, the daughter of Cinna who was an ally of Marius.
As he predicted, Marius was elected consul for the seventh time, but he died shortly thereafter. His son, Marius the Younger, became the leader of his followers. In 82 B.C. Sulla and his army marched on Rome and defeated them at the Battle of the Colline Gate. Sulla took on the powers of dictator from 82 to 79 B.C. and exacted vengeance on those who supported Marius.
According to the Roman constitution a dictator, referred to as a magister populi, could only be appointed in times of an extreme emergency, when things were so bad that there was no time to allow bickering among the two consuls, and there was a dire need for a strong man to sort out the crisis. However, unlike modern dictators like Benito Mussolini and Adolph Hitler, the Roman supremo was expected to resign his post after six months at the latest. However, once in power, some men found it hard to let go.
Sulla proscribed thousands of Romans, stripping them of their rights and declaring them outlaws and confiscated their property. Sulla demanded that Caesar divorce Cornelia, but to his great credit, he refused. To punish Caesar, Sulla confiscated his inheritance and removed him from the priesthood. Caesar then joined the army in 80 B.C. to get away from Sulla, who became one of the most hated men in the history of Rome.
After Sulla died, Caesar returned to Rome in 78 B.C. and, like so many statesmen seem to do, he tried to become a lawyer. However, Caesar was not very successful and he realized that he needed to improve his public speaking, so he left to study oratory an rhetoric on the island of Rhodes.
On his way to Rhodes, pirates captured the ship. They held Caesar captive and demanded a ransom. Caesar had a great time with them while he waited for the money to arrive. He chatted with them about mundane matters, he played games and laughed, all while he told them that once he was free he was going to have them hanged like the cold-blooded, filthy scum that they are. They probably thought he was joking.
Once the money arrived, the pirates set him free, true to their word. Caesar quickly gathered an armed force and sailed after them. He captured them while they were still distributing the ransom money. The sea thieves were put on trail and Caesar had them executed. Clearly he was also a man of his word.
When he had completed his studies on Rhodes, he returned to Rome where he was elected to the office of military tribune, starting off his political career. He steadily climbed through the offices of the cursus honorum, which was the ladder of Roman political positions. At the bottom, the quaestor was responsible for the state treasury and to supply provisions for troops in the field. Next, the aedile had the responsibility to maintain the public properties, supply the city, and plan public festivals. The aedile was responsible for the parties. The praetor was the second highest position and he had to settle civil disputes, produce public festivals, and stand in for the consul when the consul was out of Rome. Finally, the consul was the highest office on the cursus honorum with the power to command troops in the field and preside over the Senate. The Romans elected two consuls every year who served their terms at the same time.
In 65 B.C. Caesar was elected to the post of aedile, the official party planner, and he set out to entertain the people like never before. He put on lavish games and entertainments, which made him very popular, but it came at the cost of very high debts. In a similar way, Donald Trump became popular through his television show The Apprentice of which he was the undoubted star.
In 63 B.C., Caesar served as pontifex maximus, the high priest of Rome, and he was elected to the role of praetor, the second highest political position in the Republic. Two years later he served as governor in Spain where he expanded the borders of the province and paid off some of his debts. In 60 B.C., he joined two other powerful men, Marcus Licinius Crassus and Gnaeus Pompeius, better known as Pompey, to form the First Triumvirate, an unofficial coalition that dominated Roman politics and war and shaped Roman history over the next twenty years by working together or against each other depending on the circumstances that suited them. They competed for power until all three eventually came to a violent end.
This violated the fundamental principle of the Roman Republic that no-one was supposed to have permanent political power and some prominent Romans opposed them, most notably Marcus Tullius Cicero, a brilliant orator and writer who saw what a great danger these powerful men posed to the Republic. However, in the end he could not prevent them from ruining Rome.
Caesar was elected consul and he proposed that land should be distributed to Pompey’s veteran soldiers, he supported Crassus’ publicani, businessmen who contracted with the state, and he also supported two agrarian laws that would have provided land for twenty thousand of Rome’s poor. However, the optimates, the upper class in Rome, opposed many of the measures that Caesar pushed through. To get his way, Caesar used violence to force them to comply and also to prevent some people from voting against him. This made him many enemies among the rich. Some questioned the legality of his actions.
To avoid being persecuted, Caesar left for Gaul, which is modern-day France, where he had immunity while he served as the governor. While there Caesar set out and conquered all of Gaul in nine years, a campaign known as the Gallic Wars. From there he crossed into Britain. This was a very prestigious deed because the Romans believed that Britain was at the ends of the earth.
The Gauls rose up against the Romans in 53 B.C. under their great chief Vercingetorix. They defeated Caesar at the battle of Gergovia, but Caesar and his forces recovered and forced Vercingetorix to retreat to the town of Alesia in 52 B.C. Vercingetorix hoped to lure them there and then entrap the Romans with a large relief force that was supposed to attack them from the rear.
However, Caesar surprised Vercingetorix by building two walls around the town, one entrapping the Gauls within and a second, wider wall to repel the relief force, a brilliant example of siege warfare (Trump, of course, became known for a different wall). As his supplies ran out, Vercingetorix was forced to surrender, which put an end to the Gallic uprising. (Except of course for Asterix, Obelix, Getafix, Cacofonix, Vitalstatistix and co. who lived in small village on the coast of Brittany as chronicled in the great comic books by Albert Uderzo and René Goscinny about Asterix the Gaul).
Caesar gained a lot of fame and infamy for these deeds. He killed more than a million Gauls and had more than a million of the survivors sold into slavery. Vercingetorix was taken back to Rome, paraded through the streets and then strangled at the Temple of Jupiter, the most important Roman god. Instead of hailing Caesar as a hero, Pompey and several other senators wanted to use the opportunity to get rid of him. They charged him with genocide against the Gauls.
In the meantime, Crassus set out to win military glory in the East to increase his prestige vis-à-vis Pompey and Caesar. Crassus was a smooth-talking and corrupt man who made his fortune by trading in slaves, taking a cut from the tax collectors, confiscating the property of people who were proscribed, even once adding an innocent man to that list because he wanted his property, and by running a fire department that would only extinguish a fire once the owner of the house or property had agreed to sell it to Crassus at a rock bottom price. I would not be surprised if he had his henchmen set some of those fires too. After a few years of this racket, Crassus owned a big part of Rome.
Crassus used some of his money and connections to finance and assist young up-and-coming politicians who would then be beholden to him and do his bidding, extending his power. (You can see where the Mafia learned their tricks from). When he went into Parthia, modern-day Iraq and Iran, his reputation preceded him. The Parthians defeated him at Carrhae, caught him as he tried to escape, and killed him by pouring melted gold down his throat, a fitting end for a man who was consumed by greed. This left only Caesar and Pompey to vie for power.
(Perhaps George R.R. Martin, the writer of the Song of Ice and Fire book series that was turned into the television series Game of Thrones got his idea for the scene where Khal Drogo pours molten gold onto the head of the Targaryen prince Viserys to kill him from this event in history).
Cicero, who opposed the Triumvirate and was a bitter enemy of Caesar, nevertheless wanted to avoid bloodshed, so he tried to negotiate a deal in which Pompey would go to Spain and Caesar would go to Illyricum, an area consisting of Albania, Montenegro, and Croatia today, which would have put the two colossi on opposite ends of the empire. Instead the Senate granted Pompey the Senatus Consultum Ultimum, which gave Pompey the power to declare Caesar an enemy of the state and then get rid of him. They demanded that Caesar give himself up or his enemies would come and take him in Gaul.
In 50 B.C. the consul Gaius Marcellus demanded that Caesar return to Rome from Gaul. Caesar, sensing that he was walking into a trap, vacillated. Marcellus asked Pompey to use his army to force Caesar to give up his command. Caesar suggested that both him, Caesar, and Pompey should give up their commands. The Senate rejected Caesar’s suggestion because they insisted that Pompey needed his army to bring Caesar to heel. The Senate then appointed new governors to the Gallic provinces. Mark Antony, Caesar’s friend tried to veto the new appointments but he was threatened with his life and had to flee.
Caesar thought about his situation for hours. He realized that if he gave himself up to the Senate, he would have to stand trial in Rome and be condemned by a regime that had become corrupt. He decided he had nothing to lose. On January 10, 49 B.C., Caesar crossed the Rubicon River, now known as the Rigone, on the border between the Gallic provinces and Umbria in northern Italy, with his 13th Legion, an act of war. He famously said:
“Iacta alea est”
which means:
“The die is cast.”
Today, the phrase “Crossing the Rubicon” means there’s no going back, whatever the situation.
Caesar declared that he was going to Rome to liberate it from the corrupt Senators who were acting unconstitutionally.
Pompey’s army wasn’t ready to take on the battle-hardened veterans of Caesar’s legions. Within two months they were at the gates of Rome. The senators who opposed Caesar all fled from Italy. Pompey fled across the Adriatic Sea to Greece where he began to build up a large army. Cicero joined him there as an advisor.
Caesar seized Rome. Citizens feared the worst, but his disciplined soldiers did not loot, they did not destroy the city, nor did they murder his opponents. Caesar cancelled debts, brought Italians into the Senate, and he allowed men who had been exiled by Sulla and Pompey to return to Rome. He even recruited Pompey’s soldiers who were left behind.
Once he had taken Rome, Caesar went to Spain to defeat some of Pompey’s legions who were stationed there. He did so in little over a month. Then he came for Pompey. Pompey had built up a massive force in Greece that vastly outnumbered the men of Caesar. The campaign started badly for Caesar when he had to abandon the siege of Pompey’s Adriatic base at Dyrrachium.
The two armies then confronted each other at Pharsalus in the heart of northern Greece. Pompey had nearly forty thousand men against the twenty-two thousand soldiers of Caesar. Despite the overwhelming odds, Caesar’s infantry stood firm against Pompey’s cavalry. Caesar then brought in his reserves and overwhelmed the enemy. Magnanimously, Caesar told his troops:
‘Spare your fellow citizens’
Instead of killing them, they captured most of Pompey’s men. Pompey fled to Alexandria in Egypt. True to his honorable reputation, Caesar burned Pompey’s papers without reading them.
As soon as Pompey got off the boat in Egypt, Pothinus and Achillas, two advisors of the boy-king Ptolemy XIII, beheaded him as he was rowed to the shore and then they carried his head on a spear through the streets of Alexandria. Caesar soon arrived with a small force to apprehend his rival. The Egyptians proudly showed him the severed head. Ptolemy hoped that this would please Caesar and that the great man would support him in a dispute with his sister Cleopatra VII. He was wrong.
Caesar was disgusted at how the Egyptians treated Pompey and he had Pothinus killed. Then he put Cleopatra on the throne and had an affair with her, producing a son. Cleopatra was an intelligent, politically astute, and manipulative woman. She sure swayed Caesar. The Egyptians attacked the small Roman force, but during the fighting Ptolemy was killed, leaving Cleopatra in charge.
In 47 B.C. Caesar travelled to Asia Minor to settle scores with Pharnaces II, the King of Pontus, who had supported Pompey. In five days Caesar crushed his forces. It was then that Caesar summed up his victory by uttering the immortal words:
“Veni, vidi, vici,”
Which means:
“I came, I saw, I conquered.”
With Pompey and Crassus gone, Caesar was now the top dog in the Roman world. He returned to Rome after an absence of nearly two years. The Senate, probably eager to win his favor, made him dictator for ten years. Yet, the resistance against him continued. Caesar suffered from epilepsy and despite suffering from a fit during the Battle of Thapsus in Africa in 46 B.C., he defeated a rebel army. After this battle, Marcus Porcius Cato, a bitter enemy of Caesar who had been in charge of the garrison at Utica in Africa, committed suicide, rather than accept Caesar’s clemency. Caesar then pursued the sons of Pompey to Spain and defeated them at the Battle of Munda in 45 B.C., which finally brought the civil war to an end.
His enemies were worried that he would retaliate against them like Sulla did when he came to power, but instead Caesar showed remarkable restraint. He returned to Rome and set out to repair the damage, to restore law and order, and to rectify the Republic. He forgave the supporters of Pompey and he made plans to rebuild Corinth and Carthage and settle some of his veterans there, he improved the roads to Ostia, he reformed the Roman calendar, changing it to the Julian calendar which is named after himself and still the basis of the one that we use today (the month of July is named after him), he passed sumptuary taxes, sin taxes to dampen the debauchery of the elites, and he encouraged families to have more children to re-populate the Republic after the deadly and devastating civil wars. His reforms brought some stability to the Roman world.
By any standards Caesar was an extraordinary man. He had exceptional energy and vigor and he could multitask like a mother. It is said that he could read, write, listen and dictate his decrees all at the same time. He was able to dictate four important letters at once, and seven at the same time if they were ordinary epistles. In his eventful life he fought fifty battles and despite his ruthlessness towards the Gauls, he earned a reputation as a merciful man.
However, Caesar was not perfect and his enemies worried that he was becoming too powerful. They feared that he was trying to make himself king and they had good reasons to think so. With the support of the army, Caesar could do as he pleased, and perhaps understandably, his achievements went to his head. He took the position of consul and packed the Senate with his own men, making his word law. He was rude to other senators and clearly did not consider them his equal. His statue was carried with those of the gods at the beginning of games and another of his statues was placed with the statues of the kings. Coins were minted with his portrait on them. Many men became jealous when he named the calendar after himself.
Apart from vanity, Caesar also had a weakness for women. He had affairs with the wives of several prominent men, which made him even more enemies. Although Cleopatra was probably Caesar’s most famous sexual conquest, he also had an affair with a woman named Servilia Caepionis who was the mother of a man that would become very important in ending his life, Marcus Junius Brutus. Some even rumored that Brutus was Caesar’s son. Caesar also slept with his sister, Junia Tertia, with the knowledge and encouragement of her mother. He also had affairs with the wife of Crassus, a woman named Tertulla, and Mucia, the wife of Pompey. Caesar seemingly did not only want to beat them in politics, but also humiliate them in bed. These are just a few of his numerous dalliances. Clearly then, as now, it is “good” to be famous. It did not always go one way. In 62 B.C., Publius Clodius Pulcher, a rival politician, tried to seduce Caesar’s wife, Pompeia. Although Trump had some affairs, I doubt whether he slept with the spouses of his most prominent political opponents, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.
In 44 B.C., Caesar was made Dictator Perpetuus, Dictator for Life, something that many of Trump’s opponents claim he will do even though it is forbidden by the United States’ Constitution and he has never shown any inclination towards that. To aggravate the suspicions, Caesar accepted the gift of a golden throne in the Senator house, a triumphal robe, and a laurel crown, becoming a king in everything but name. To compound the problem, he planned a war against Parthia to avenge the death of Crassus, and his supporters spread the rumor that there was a prophecy that only a Roman king could defeat them. However, when someone hailed him as King, he replied:
‘I am Caesar and not King.’
Even so, if he looks like a king, he walks like a king and he talks like a king, the chances are that he is a king. Cicero certainly thought so and he called Caesar a tyrant. Sixty senators agreed and started to plan his assassination (others put the number at eighty). They were led by a general named Gaius Cassius Longinus, but they also needed Brutus, who had a reputation for honesty, to give credibility to their plot and to convince Caesar to step into their trap. Brutus fought with Pompey, but perhaps out of affection for his mother and sister, when Caesar defeated them at Pharsalus, he ordered his troops to spare his life. Caesar made Brutus a friend and supported his career by making him a Praetor, a position just below the Consul. Initially Brutus was reluctant to join the conspiracy, but the plotters reminded him that he was a descendant of Lucius Junius Brutus, the man who threw the king Tarquinius Superbus off the Roman throne to found the Republic. Cassius also wanted them to kill Mark Antony, a man loyal to Caesar, but Brutus refused.
Although his opponents claim that Trump is a tyrant, he never acted like a king during his stint as president and I don’t believe that he will do so if he gets elected for a second time.
There were several ominous signs that indicated that something bad was going to happen. Caesar sacrificed an animal that turned out to have no heart. A soothsayer warned him that some danger would come into his life no later than the Ides of March. (It is amazing how many of the auguries were accurate). The night before the fateful day, he dreamt that he was in heaven and his wife Calpurnia dreamt that he would soon be killed. All this made him hesitate to leave his house.
Caesar was due to depart for Parthia on the 18th, so on the 15th, the Ides of March, the conspirators lured him to a special meeting of the Senate at a hall next to a great stone theater built by his old enemy Pompey. Brutus came to his house and persuaded him that there was urgent business that required his attention. When he was reluctant to leave, one of his men mocked him for being superstitious. Eventually he relented. On the way, someone handed him a note that warned him of the assassination, but he handed it to his slave without reading it. He probably thought it was a petition and left it for later.
At the senate hall he sat down on a seat below the statue of Pompey. Only senators were allowed inside, so his bodyguard was not with him. The conspirators concealed their daggers easily under their togas. A man named Tillius Cimber approached him and handed him a petition. Once Caesar took it, Tillius grabbed Caesar by his cloak and held him in place. Another man named Casca, who had sneaked up behind Caesar, tried to stab him in the throat, but instead his dagger penetrated Caesar’s back. Caesar realized what was happening and he called out for help. Casca called on the other senators to step up and they stabbed so wildly at Caesar that many of them were wounded by the blades of the other assassins.
Caesar was completely taken by surprise. He briefly fought back with a stylus that was used to write on wax tablets, but that was no match for the overwhelming number of assassins and their daggers. He desperately tried to escape, but he tripped over his toga and fell down. The conspirators stabbed him twenty-three times. Brutus, perhaps symbolically, stabbed him in the genitals and after this Caesar seems to have given up and accepted his fate. He covered his face as they continue to stab him, one blow pierced his heart, and he died in a pool of his own blood at the foot of the statue of Pompey, arguably the most poetic and the most dramatic death in history.
According to one account Brutus stood over Caesar and said:
“Sic semper tyrannis” (thus always to tyrants),
but that is probably an embellishment. John Wilkes Booth famously said those same words after he assassinated President Abraham Lincoln.
After they killed Caesar, the conspirators barged out into the street and proclaimed that they had killed the tyrant and have liberated Rome. Instead of cheering them on as heroes and rejoicing, the people simply watched them in stunned silence.
Just after Caesar died, his great-nephew, Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, better known as Octavian, a man who would become known as Augustus, and who would become the first Roman Emperor because of these memorable events, saw a comet streak across the sky during games that he was holding to honor the goddess Venus. Augustus would later build a temple in honor of this celestial sign.
The conspirators found the Forum deserted. They marched through the streets brandishing their daggers while a band of gladiators protected them. Then they went home. The next day Cassius and Brutus spoke to the Senate to try and justify the murder. They accused Caesar of becoming a despot, something that Trump’s opponents might well have done if he was killed. The assassins also criticized Caesar for forbidding the senate to tax the people for their personal gain, something that they must have thought would please the senators, and they claimed that he wanted to move the Roman capital to Alexandria so that he could be near Cleopatra.
The fact that they did not kill Mark Antony proved to be their biggest mistake.
Antony held Caesar’s funeral in the Forum, at the very center of Rome. He gave an inflammatory speech, made immortal by the imagination of William Shakespeare, and he read Caesar’s will, in which the great man named Octavian as his adopted son and his heir and left three hundred sesterces to every Roman citizen in the city. Caesar, much like Trump, was always very popular among the ordinary people and these dramatic and generous actions, along with the sad sight of Caesar’s butchered body, roused their anger. They started fires in the forum and lynched a man who they thought was one of the killers. Then they marched to the houses of Brutus and Cassius and tried to kill them. This forced the conspirators to flee from Rome.
Octavian met Antony, and together with Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, the Governor of Spain, they made a five-year legal pact known as the Second Triumvirate. Unlike the deal between Crassus, Caesar and Pompey, this one was official. Between them they had control of forty-three legions. The three men drew up a list of three hundred senators and two thousand equestrians who supported the assassination of Caesar and then set out to kill them.
They sent a centurion who caught and killed Cicero in his villa. The man cut off and carried Cicero’s head and hands to Rome where Antony displayed them in the Forum. Antony’s wife is said to have taken out Cicero’s tongue and jabbed a pin through it repeatedly in revenge for the power of his speech.
In 42 B.C. they left Lepidus in charge of Italy while Antony and Octavian lead an expedition to Greece to kill Brutus and Cassius. At the Battle of Philippi, Antony, who was a much better general than Octavian, defeated Cassius’s troops and Cassius committed suicide. Three weeks later, Antony defeated Brutus and he also killed himself by falling on his own sword. In this way the three main enemies of Caesar met their Maker.
That same year the senate declared that Julius Caesar was a god and they built a temple in his honor.
Eventually Octavian and Antony turned on each other. Antony started a torrid love affair with the Egyptian queen Cleopatra. Then Antony made the critical mistake of confronting Octavian at sea instead of on land and he and Cleopatra were defeated at the battle of Actium in 31 B.C. The two famous lovers both committed suicide shortly after and four years later Octavian took the name Augustus and became the first Roman Emperor. Ironically, in an attempt to save the Republic, the conspirators created the conditions that allowed Octavian to usurp all the power and destroy it.
No enemy from the outside could have done this, and in a similar way, there are hardly any outside pressures that can bring the American Republic to a fall. Right now it is pressures from the inside that are the biggest threat. The death of Caesar started the civil war that led to the end of the greatest power in the ancient world, and in a similar way the assassination of Trump could have ignited a civil war in the United States of America, setting off violence and hatred that is simmering under the surface for a long time now, that might still tear the country apart.
Thank God it has not happened yet.
Long live President Trump!
If you want to do a fascinating and free course on the rise and fall of the Roman Republic at Hillsdale College, you can do so here: https://online.hillsdale.edu/courses/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-roman-republic
If you like what you just read, please follow me on Medium and share this with your friends. If you did not, I thank you for reading this far and I hope you will like my next post.
Thank you.
Bibliography
De la Bédoyère, G. (2006). The Romans for Dummies. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Chichester
Gwynn, D.M. (2012). The Roman Republic — A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.
Aldrete, G.S. (2018). The Rise of Rome. The Teaching Company. Chantilly.
Spignesi, S.J. (2003). In The Crosshairs — Famous Assassination and Attempts from Julius Caesar to John Lennon. New Page Books. Franklin Lakes.