Augustus keeps the name

Caesar's will named an heir almost no one had heard of: his great-nephew Gaius Octavius, eighteen years old. Historians call him Octavian. Within fourteen years he would rule the Roman world, and he would never call himself king.

Cicero's mistake

Cicero thought the young man could be used against Mark Antony and then dropped. A letter to Cicero repeats his quip that Octavian should be "praised, honored, and raised up." The Latin word for raised up also meant got rid of. Octavian heard about it.

In 43 BC Octavian marched his army on Rome and got a consulship at nineteen. Then he joined Antony and Lepidus in the Second Triumvirate. Unlike the first, this one was legal, a five-year office created by law. They began with proscription lists, copied from Sulla. Cicero was on one. Soldiers caught him in December 43, and Antony had his head and hands nailed up in the Forum.

After beating Brutus and Cassius at Philippi in 42, Antony ruled the East alongside Cleopatra and Octavian took the West. They fought it out at Actium in 31, and within a year Antony and Cleopatra had killed themselves. After nearly twenty years of civil war, one man held every army.

The settlement of 27 BC

In January 27 BC, Octavian announced he was handing the state back to the Senate and people. The senators, who knew where the legions were, begged him to stay on. He let them persuade him to keep, for ten years, the provinces where most of the armies sat. The grant was renewed for the rest of his life. The Senate gave him a new name, Augustus, "the revered one."

Then he left almost everything in place. Consuls were still elected and the Senate still met. He refused to be dictator and called himself princeps, the first citizen. In his own account of his deeds, he wrote that after 27 BC he "excelled all in authority, but had no more power than the others who were my colleagues in each office."

Word by word, that was close to true. But he held those powers in a combination nobody else could, for life, with the armies behind him.

Switch from the surviving offices to the concentration of power. See why keeping familiar institutions did not restore the old balance.

Did anyone notice?

A century later the historian Tacitus asked how many people alive at Augustus's death in AD 14 had ever seen the Republic. Hardly anyone. Tacitus wrote as a senator under emperors, with a grudge on behalf of his class, but he had a point. People who had lived through two rounds of proscriptions wanted peace, and the familiar forms let them accept it without admitting anything had ended.

Historians still argue over when the Republic ended: 49, 44, 31, or 27 BC. Your answer depends on whether a republic is its offices or the restraint of the people who hold them.

The pattern

Across the century, each break handed the next person a precedent.

None of these men thought he was ending the Republic. Most believed they were rescuing it.