Before Augustus

"...the author does an admirable job of showing just how complicated and interconnected all the great patrician families were and how their jealousies and rivalries ultimately led to their undoing and the end of the great Roman Republic." — New York Journal of Books The political process that culminated in the transition from Republic to Empire in ancient Rome began with the military reform of Caius Marius in the last decades of the 2nd century BC. Following the Civil War and Sulla’s dictatorshi