decimus

i'm heading to rome for a week or twain after saving up all my hard-earned pennies, and i was interested in seeing what y'all experts would recommend me seeing while i'm in the eternal city, especially anything off the beaten track. i hope to god/s i posted this in the appropriate section of the forum, if not, save me mods.

definitely the roman republic, the others are too anglocentric, hellenocentric, not roman, and it wouldn't be fair to do a spread of christianity one without a decline of christianity one to go with it.

i have to credit you agrippa, with being the no. 1 military man. i mean you pwned sextus pompey twice when octavian couldn't even avoid getting pwned every couple of months by a storm, and then you showed antony who was boss. and i'm sure you smacked some random tribes in spain and illyricrum around too. but kudos on being the only good general not to die in the civil wars (taurus dont count).

i've been looking round at biographies of that most dastardly tyrant octavian, and i've seen references to a 'life of augustus' in fragments by nicolaus of damascus, and i was wondering, perchance, if anybody knew the location of a reliable translation on the web, preferably on a website so reliable i could cite it.

well i wasn't quite sure where to post this, since it concerns the transitional period from republic to empire, so i just went ahead and double posted. mods, please correct me if i have sinned. i've always been puzzled by agrippa's motivations, it seems like all of augustus' significant military victories are attributable to him so he essentially made augustus emperor. why then was he content to play second fiddle to augustus, and not seize power in his own right?