Curated playlist
1st-century BC Roman consuls
- CiceroRoman statesman and lawyer (106–43 BC)
- Julius CaesarRoman general and dictator (100–44 BC)
- Mark AntonyMark Antony was born in Rome on the 14th of January 83 BC, into a family already marked by violent ends and broken ambitions. His grandfather, the noted orator Marcus Antonius, had been murdered during the purges of Gaius Marius in the…
- PompeyPompey the Great was born on the 29th of September 106 BC in Picenum, and he died on the 28th of September 48 BC, one day short of his 58th birthday, murdered on a beach in Egypt by a former colleague. In between those two dates, he…
- AugustusOn the 8th of May 44 BC, a teenager named Gaius Octavius accepted a dead man's will and, with it, the most dangerous inheritance in the Roman world. Julius Caesar, his great-uncle and Rome's dictator in perpetuity, had been stabbed to…
- Gnaeus Octavius (consul 87 BC)Gnaeus Octavius died on the Janiculum Hill in 87 BC, beheaded by a cavalry officer named Gaius Marcius Censorinus, his head carried to the dictator Cinna and then nailed to the Rostra in the Roman Forum. He was a serving consul of the…
- Lucius Antonius (brother of Mark Antony)Lucius Antonius lived his early years in the shadow of his older brother, one of Rome's most powerful men. He was nicknamed Pietas as a young man, a word that meant duty, loyalty, and devotion to family. That name would define nearly every…
- Gaius MariusGaius Marius died on the 13th of January, 86 BC, within a fortnight of taking office as consul for the seventh time. No Roman before him had ever held that office more than twice in succession. By the time he died, he had saved Rome from…
- Lucius Cornelius CinnaLucius Cornelius Cinna was killed by his own soldiers early in 84 BC. He died during a mutiny while trying to move his army across the Adriatic Sea near Ancona. By then he had already served as consul four times in a row, a feat the Roman…
- Marcus Licinius CrassusMarcus Licinius Crassus stood at the center of Rome's most dangerous political experiment, a man so wealthy that Plutarch calculated his fortune at 7,100 talents of silver before his final campaign. He was called "the richest man in Rome,"…
- SullaSulla composed his own epitaph. Carved into his tomb on the Campus Martius, it read: "No friend ever served me, and no enemy ever wronged me, whom I have not repaid in full." That a man would write these words about himself tells you…
- Marcus Vipsanius AgrippaMarcus Vipsanius Agrippa was born around 63 BC into a plebeian family of no great distinction in Roman public life, and yet he would become the man without whom, in the words of historian Glen Bowersock, Octavian might never have become…
- Gaius Asinius PollioGaius Asinius Pollio emerged from the hills of central Italy, born in the town known today as Chieti. His father bore the name Gnaeus Asinius Pollio, a man whose identity appears on surviving inscriptions. A brother named Asinius…