In ancient Roman culture, all men had two names, and some had three or more. The first name was the praenomen, one of about twenty or so first names that every man had as a formality. The second name was the nomen, the family name, which told which gens, or clan, you came from. The third name was the cognomen, a nickname that was ascribed to you, or, in later history, one inherited from an ancestor to identify your branch of the gens.

Today, we recognize ancient Romans most readily by their cognomen. When translated, a lot of them sound oddly similar to old-fashioned mob nicknames, such as Caligula ("Little Boots"), Cicero ("Chickpea"),  and Scaevola ("Left-Handed"). However, the most famous of these cognomen, and one of the strangest under the circumstances, is also believed to mean "Hairy":

And no bearer of this cognomen leaps more immediately to mind than the man who signaled the beginning of the end of Rome's republic: GAIUS JULIUS CAESAR.

Yet for the first forty years of his life, this man with the famous (if silly out-of-context) name did little of historical note.  Born circa 100 B.C., he hailed from an old if undistinguished patrician family whose fortunes were beginning to rise around the time of his birth. (Tellingly, Caesar's uncle was none other than Gaius Marius.) Caesar's personal fortunes took a dive when his father died when he was just 15, and went into free-fall after his uncle's faction was annihilated by Sulla. Offered the choice of divorcing his wife (the daughter of a Marian ally) and losing his life, Caesar did neither and went into hiding, and his inheritance was confiscated. He was only pardoned after the vociferous lobbying of his mother's family, which included prominent Sullan allies. Sulla did this reluctantly, and was reputed to say he saw "many a Marius" in Caesar. 

Even after Sulla died, Caesar's career only managed to bump along for the next decade. He served with distinction in the army, was captured by pirates, was freed, hunted down the pirates with his own resources and had them crucified, and eventually began a political career around the age of 30. Caesar did not lack for ambition. Yet his relative lack of success was stark next to that of his contemporaries Crassus and Pompey. Encountering a statue of Alexander the Great in Spain, he broke down weeping upon realizing how much Alexander had achieved, while he by the same age had done nothing.  

Perhaps this was the moment that galvanized him, and drove his rapacious arc through the Senate over the next decade. Caesar was nothing if not a student of history, and history had taught him the following: the Senate had lost the ability to govern the empire; institutions of government were only as strong as the will to preserve them; and a man backed by troops and popular support could do whatever he liked. Every move he made from this point on was not to replicate the achievements of Crassus and Pompey, but to surpass them. 

Caesar churned through the Senate during the 60s B.C. as a one-man political machine. He wormed his way into Crassus's confidence and, bankrolled by the plutocrat's vast wealth, cut deals, forged alliances, made bribes, and aligned himself with anyone who could advance him another step up the ladder toward the consulship. He surprised his contemporaries by defeating two powerful opponents in the election for chief priest, elections that were marred by bitter accusations of bribery from both sides. He made a few missteps, aligning himself with the would-be usurper Catiline in 63 B.C. Yet slick as ever, he avoided being labeled as a co-conspirator.  During this period, he also positioned himself as one of the populares, a step toward earning the favor of the common people, and Crassus's wealth went a good distance in greasing these wheels as well. 

Yet the act that cemented his standing and secured a base of power was the alliance he secured between Crassus and Pompey in 60 B.C., who had been bitter rivals since their consulship. Between the three of them, there was enough gold, swords and political will to master the Senate and Rome. This alliance was referred to by historians as the First Triumvirate ("Rule of Three Men"), and it was with this unchecked political capital that the beast was finally unleashed. 

The consular elections of 60 B.C. were the nastiest, most sordid and brutal elections the Romans had seen in years.  Caesar was determined to become consul, and his optimate opponents, who loathed him,  were determined to defeat him, with even the reputedly-incorruptible Cato resorting to bribery to advance one of Caesar's opponents. Yet it was all in vain. Caesar was elected consul for the year 59 B.C., and from here, the gloves were off.  With Pompey's troops stationed throughout the city as intimidation, he rammed a populist bill redistributing public lands to the poor through the Senate against the loud protests of the optimates. After all, this was the sort of thing they had murdered the Gracchi for seventy years earlier. Now the shoe was on the other foot. They implored Caesar's co-consul Bibulus to stop him, but when he tried, he was assaulted by Caesar's supporters, who dumped a large basket of manure on his head and wounded two magistrates accompanying him. Bibulus fled to his home and did not return for the rest of his consulship, leaving Caesar unimpeded. 

Unfortunately for him, consulships only lasted a single year. Once he was out of office, he was no longer immune to prosecution by his enemies, who were chomping at the bit to attack him with the full force of the law. However, it was common practice for consuls to govern a foreign province in the year following their term, thus extending their immunity. Caesar outmaneuvered his enemies in three ways: he had his term governing a province extended from one year to five; he successfully wrangled control of three provinces instead of one, which included the command of four legions;  and he orchestrated the election of his ally, Publius Clodius Pulcher, as tribune of the plebs. Clodius could veto any attempt by the Senate to prosecute Caesar or repeal his laws. In addition, Clodius was a massively destabilizing presence in the city, fully embracing violence and intimidation as a tactic against his (and Caesar's) opponents. One of his victims was the former savior of Rome, Cicero, whom he successfully drove into banishment and confiscated his property. Against the evil genius of Caesar, there seemed to be no resistance. 

With Rome secure at his back, Gaius Julius Caesar marched off to govern Cisalpine Gaul in 58 B.C. Having bent the Roman state to his will, he was now ready for his military career to truly begin. It is at this point that the image of Caesar the world knows, and has even admired, comes into view: the larger-than-life colossus bestriding the world with his armies, the brilliant general seizing his destiny. The collateral damage, apart from thousands of Roman and non-Roman lives, would be nothing less than Rome's tradition of representative government. 

The segment to come is context. Context for things to come. This does not mean that it is unimportant in itself. Some exceptionally dramatic things happen in the eighteen years following Sulla's death, involving earth-shakingly huge figures on the world stage. Nonetheless, they are here to serve as context for an even bigger one, one that no one saw coming.

​But for now, context.

In our last segment, the year was 78 B.C., and the dictator Cornelius Sulla had decidedly pinned the Roman Republic under his thumb. The faction of Gaius Marius had been smashed and scattered to the winds. The representatives of the people, the tribunes, and their nominally-supportive Senate allies, the populares, had been vanquished, and the conservative optimates reigned supreme. Well-pleased with his work wiping out any and all progressive gains from the past 200 years, Sulla had retired from public life and promptly died, presumably happy and secure in the belief that his changes were secure and immutable. 

Ohhhh, Sully...

As with other men and mice, all of Sulla's well-laid plans would come to nothing. Their undoing would come at the hands of a new, ambitious generation of senators, some who wished to emulate his path to one-man rule and a few who sought to defend against it. The three men below would come to define this struggle for the destruction or salvation of the Republic:

The first and most pre-eminent of these men, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, was one of Sulla's lieutenants. Throwing in with Sulla during the wars with Marius, he so impressed the dictator that he was gifted with the title Magnus: "The Great." Handsome and hugely-skilled in the arts of war (he was compared in looks and talent to a latter-day Alexander the Great), Pompey the Great was showered with prestigious commands, honors and even the consulship in spite of the fact that he had never served a day in the Senate and was technically ineligible to hold office. These extra-legal honors greatly troubled the senators not enraptured with him, and they saw him very much for what he was: an opportunistic strongman-in-the-making. 

Marcus Licinius Crassus was several rungs down the ladder from Pompey in popularity, but was unrivaled in Rome for his wealth, and wielded it similarly to the way Pompey did command. He used Sulla's vicious proscriptions to buy up the valuable property of executed Romans for cheap. He established Rome's first fire brigade from an army of 500 slaves, who would rush to burning homes but then refuse to put them out until the owners agreed to pay Crassus an exorbitant fee. Crassus also bought burnt and collapsed properties and rebuilt them with slave architects and laborers, flipping them for huge profits. In modern dollars, Crassus's fortune is estimated to have been worth $8.4 billion, a staggering personal sum now as then.

Pompey and Crassus first became associates during a festive romp known as the Third Servile War (See Part III), or, as it is more popularly known, the Revolt of Spartacus. In 71 B.C., an army of escaped gladiators, slaves and other ne'er-do-wells had ravaged central Italy for two years.This army, reputed to be over 120,000 strong, was led by a Thracian gladiator named Spartacus. Under his brilliant tactical leadership, the slave army had routed four Roman armies and, according to some, was poised to march on Rome. The Senate chose Crassus to lead a fifth army, as he was the only one who volunteered for the job. For most of 71, he pursued Spartacus across central and southern Italy, nearly losing six of his legions in a rout at one point. Finally, he managed to pin the slave army into the toe of Italy, and waited for them to starve or surrender. 

According to Plutarch, not much of consequence was achieved during Pompey and Crassus's consulship, as they continued to squabble and oppose one another. However, they must have gotten along at some point, as nearly all of Sulla's reforms gutting the office of tribune and plebeian council were repealed during their tenure. This restoration of the tribunate would have been bitterly opposed by the Optimates in the Senate, but wildly popular among the common people, which may have been the point all along. 

Following the consulship, Crassus faded into the background somewhat, content to grow his fortune and use it to influence the Senate and foster the careers of certain unsavory up-and-comers (who we will touch on later). Pompey, on the other hand, rode his consular wave of popularity to even greater heights. In 67 B.C., the Senate granted him unprecedented military authority to sweep the Mediterranean clean of pirates, who plagued the seaways at this time. Pompey was reputed to have succeeded in a matter of months, but he wasn't done there. Pompey's pirate-hunting operation turned into a case of mission creep on steroids, as he turned his wrath against the pirates' sponsor in the East, Rome's old enemy Mithridates of Pontus. In the course of his war against Pontus, the nations of Armenia, Cappadocia, Parthia, Syria, Colchis, Nabataea and Judea were dragged into the melee. Three years later, huge swaths of Asia Minor and the Middle East had become Roman territory, and Pompey was hailed as the greatest general of his age, and recognized by all as the most powerful man in Rome. 

And what of Marcus Tullius Cicero, whom we mentioned earlier? His rise took place slightly after Crassus and Pompey, and could not have been more different in its path. A "new man" of the Senate, he was a staunch believer in the traditions of the Republic, pursuing his path to the consulship via the cursus honorum, the prescribed path laid out by ancient custom. Cicero was a brilliant orator and writer, and according to some reshaped the Latin language with his words the same way Shakespeare remade English. He used these words to ardently defend the Republic from her enemies, namely those who would see Rome reduced to one-man rule.  

In the year of his consulship (63 B.C.), he demonstrated precisely this quality in his revelation of the plot of Lucius Sergius Catilina (or Catiline). In a series of four powerful speeches to the Senate, Cicero revealed that Cataline plotted to murder him and overthrow the Republic with the support of foreign troops. Catiline, who was the scion of one of Rome's oldest families, attempted to discredit Cicero by claiming this "new man" was maligning his ancestral dignity from jealousy, and thus insulting the Senate at large. Yet Cicero so skillfully dismantled Catiline's character that he utterly destroyed any support for him in the Senate and drove him from the city. Catiline was later killed in battle against Roman legions, and his co-conspirators were rounded up and executed (disturbingly, without trial.) Cicero was hailed as "father of his country," and a contemporary could reasonably claim that this was a man who could stand against the creeping ambitions of senators such as Crassus and Pompey, and hold the state secure against any assault.

But as I mentioned earlier, all of this is merely context, the setting of the stage for a new figure who has been conspicuously absent thus far. He doesn't come out of nowhere; he has always been there, watching, waiting, patiently calculating and preparing for his moment to emerge from the shadows. No one has thought terribly much of him up to this point; he isn't rich, he has no illustrious military background or oratory fame. He doesn't really seem to have achieved much of any importance in his life. But in 60 B.C., he reveals himself to be far more formidable than anyone ever guessed, and in a short time, to be the greatest danger the Republic had ever faced.