Total War Rome: Destroy Carthage

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In the second century BC Rome was still a republic, ruled by wealthy patricians whose families traced their ancestry back to the first years of the city some six hundred years earlier. The republic had been formed when the last king of Rome was ousted in 509 BC, and it was to survive until the establishment of the empire under Augustus towards the end of the first century BC. The main administrative body was the Senate, led by two annually elected consuls. Outside the Senate were twelve elected tribunes, representatives of the common people (the plebs), who had power of veto over the Senate. The complex alliances and rivalries between the patrician families (the gentes, singular gens), as well as between the patricians and the plebs, are crucial to understanding the history of Rome at this period, at a time when overseas conquest gave a tempting vision of personal power to generals that eventually led to civil war in the first century BC and to Octavian proclaiming himself Augustus. Why the establishment of an empire should not have happened more than a century earlier, when Rome’s armies stood supreme and its most outstanding general, Scipio Aemilianus Africanus, had the world at his feet, is one of the most fascinating questions of ancient history and the backdrop to the story in this novel.

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