Appian’s writings vividly describe Catiline’s conspiracy, the rise and fall of the First Triumvirate, and Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon, defeat of Pompey and untimely death. The climax comes with the brith of the Second Triumvirate out of anarchy, the terrible purges of Proscriptions which followed and the titanic struggle for world mastery which was only to end with Augustus’s defeat of Antony and Cleopatra.

If Appian’s Roman History as a whole reveals how an empire was born of the struggle against a series of external enemis, these five books concentrate on an even greater ordeal. Despite the rhetorical flourishes, John Carter suggests in his Introductions, the impressive ‘overall conception of the decline of the Roman state into violence, with its sombre highlights and the leitmotif of fate, is neither trivial nor inaccurate.’

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