Triumvirate and Principate

Abstract

More than thirty years after its publication The Roman Revolution still stands unrivalled, not as the ‘definitive’ account of the emergence of a monarch from the ruins of the Republic but as something far more than that, the demonstration of a new method in the presentation of historical change. The aspect of this method, which has found most imitation, is of course prosopography; and it is indeed essential to it. But far more important is the use made of contemporary literature to mirror events, and to analyse and define the concepts and the terms in which the events were seen by those who lived through them.It is the common characteristic, perhaps even the definition, of great works of history that they invite imitation and offer a challenge, not just to apply their methods and standards to other areas, but to pursue their own conclusions further. The present paper is gratefully offered as an attempt to portray with a different emphasis some aspects of the establishment of Octavian as a monarch, first by demonstrating the extent to which the institutions of the res publica remained active in the Triumviral period, and secondly by redefining the change which culminated in 27 B.C., precisely by asking again in what terms it and the novus status which emerged from it were seen by contemporaries.