Rome 63 BC to AD 14: WACE Year 12 Ancient History

What this dot point is asking

SCSA wants you to study Rome across the period from roughly 63 BC to AD 14 as a society in crisis and transformation, with a particular focus on the nature and exercise of power and authority. You need to explain why the Republic broke down, how ambitious individuals exploited its institutions, and how Octavian rebuilt the state as Augustus. The Rome option is examined through analysis of written and archaeological sources and through extended-response essays in the external paper, so you must be able to name and evaluate evidence such as Cicero, Appian, Suetonius and the Res Gestae.

By 63 BC the Roman Republic governed a Mediterranean empire with institutions designed for a single city. The consulship of Cicero in 63 BC, and his suppression of the Catilinarian conspiracy, showed both the rhetorical strength of the senatorial order and the desperation of indebted aristocrats outside it. Cicero's four Catilinarian orations, delivered in the Senate and Forum, are a central written source for the period and reveal how the language of the "common good" (res publica) masked factional struggle.

The deeper causes of breakdown were structural. The reforms of Gaius Marius from 107 BC had opened the legions to the landless, so soldiers looked to their commanders rather than the state for land and pay. Sulla's march on Rome in 88 BC and his dictatorship from 82 BC set the precedent that armies could decide politics. The Gracchan crises of 133 and 121 BC had already shown that reform of land and citizenship could end in political murder. By the 60s BC the Republic was dominated by dynasts whose wealth, clientage and military glory dwarfed the annual magistracies meant to restrain them.

The so-called First Triumvirate of 60 BC, an informal alliance of Pompey, Crassus and Caesar, bypassed the Senate to share power and patronage. Caesar's conquest of Gaul from 58 to 50 BC, recorded in his own Commentarii, gave him a loyal veteran army and immense prestige. When the Senate, backed by Pompey, demanded he disband it, Caesar crossed the Rubicon in January 49 BC, beginning civil war. His victory at Pharsalus in 48 BC and his subsequent dictatorship, culminating in the title dictator perpetuo in early 44 BC, made him a king in all but name.

Caesar's murder unleashed a final round of civil war. His heir, the young Octavian, allied with Mark Antony and Lepidus in the Second Triumvirate of 43 BC, a body given legal power to "set the state in order". The proscriptions that followed, in which Cicero was killed in December 43 BC, eliminated opponents and funded the legions. The triumvirs defeated the assassins at Philippi in 42 BC, then turned on each other. Octavian's propaganda cast Antony as the slave of the Egyptian queen Cleopatra VII, and his victory at the naval battle of Actium in 31 BC left him master of the Roman world.

Octavian's genius lay in disguising monarchy as restoration. In the settlement of 27 BC he claimed to hand the Republic back to the Senate and people, receiving in return the name Augustus, a vast provincial command and the prestige to dominate elections. The further settlement of 23 BC gave him tribunician power (tribunicia potestas) and a superior proconsular command (imperium proconsulare maius) without holding the consulship continuously. He governed through auctoritas, personal authority, rather than naked power (potestas), a distinction he himself draws in the Res Gestae, the first-person account of his achievements inscribed across the empire.

The Augustan settlement transformed Roman society. The princeps controlled the army through pay and the new treasury (aerarium militare) of AD 6, secured the grain supply, and rebuilt the city, boasting that he found Rome brick and left it marble. Monuments such as the Ara Pacis Augustae, dedicated in 9 BC, and the Forum of Augustus projected an ideology of peace, piety and dynastic continuity. Moral legislation, including the marriage and adultery laws of 18 BC, sought to restore traditional values. When Augustus died at Nola in AD 14, power passed smoothly to his stepson Tiberius, proving the new system had outlived its founder.

Historiographically, Ronald Syme's The Roman Revolution (1939) influentially argued that Augustus led a new ruling oligarchy that seized power behind republican forms, while later scholars such as Karl Galinsky stress consensus and cultural renewal. Students should weigh the bias of the surviving sources: Augustus' own Res Gestae is self-justifying, Suetonius and Tacitus wrote under later emperors with their own agendas, and Appian's Civil Wars, composed in the second century AD, looked back from a settled imperial age.