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Octavian

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I'm really interested in the opinion of those more knowledgeable - it seams to me that if it weren't for Octavian, that the Roman Empire would probably have fragmented into bits and pieces after the major exapansions of Julius Caesar, much like Alexander's conquests fragmented after his death. Octavian is the one man in the West who figured out how to govern that much territory under one government. And, unlike China, the emperor remained firmly in control of the governing bureacracy.

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I don't know if it would've fragmented permanently like what happened with the Macedonian generals after Alexander, but without Octavian, and the Caesar name, there certainly wouldn't have been an easy transition. I think civil wars would've continued, along with social disorder for an indeterminable amount of time. The Senate may have been able to wrest control, but it would've been only periodic, mixed in with terms of control under various great generals. Either way, hope for the Republic was dying. Augustus at least preserved the Roman state. Another couple generations of continued strife may have seen the collapse of the 'empire' long before it established itself as we've come to know it.

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What does Octavian have to do with the name "Caesar?" And were all of Alexander's generals Macedonian? I thought he conquered the world by finally uniting Greece.

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Octavian was Caesar's heir and took the name Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus. In so doing, the people, who loved Caesar, immediately viewed Octavian with additional interest and support.

 

Alexander was Macedonian, but not how we think of it today. In the ancient world, the Macedonians were of the same Dorian stock as the Greeks. Today, the words get jumbled into arguments of racial and ethnic claims to Alexander, but Macedonians were Greek.

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I meant, did Alexander take any generals from any of the other Greek city states?

 

All Octavian had to do was rename himself and the people liked him? Wow, and we think the American public is ignorant and gullible...

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LOL, well it's a bit more involved than that, but adding the name Caesar certainly helped legitimize Octavian. Remember, Caesar was a god :)

 

I believe all of Alexander's generals were Macedonian, but I certainly could be wrong. Off the top of my head, his generals were Hephaistion (who died before Alexander did), Cassander, Lysimachus, Seleucus, Nicator, Ptolemy.

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Hmmm. I don't know. I'm trying to imagine a Roman Empire where Antony and Cleopatra had defeated Octavian. The Empire most likely would have been ruled from Alexandria by a heavily centralized Oriental court. The Emperor would claim to be the god Dionysus incarnate, and the Empress would claim to a living Isis. I guess with all pretenses abandoned to traditional Roman Republican government, with a veritable god-king in charge of the resources of the East, you might make the case that Antony and Cleopatra would have brought the entire Roman world under an iron heel.

 

But history is full of what ifs. :-)

 

What Augustus did was inspire a rebirth of culture and tradition (no matter how superficial or self-serving it may have been in some cases) and he cautioned his successors to keep the peace rather than expand the borders. He set the general trend for the next two hundred years or so.

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I remember reading part of a book on the first 12 emperors, and when Marc Antony made it known he wanted to be emperor following Caesar someone laughed at him. Julius was truly an extraordinary though mad individual. Marc Antony was just a lower measure of man. There's no way Marc Antony could have kept the empire together.

 

What's amazing about the Roman empire is that so many of the emperors really were talented individuals - which was partially due to the nature of succession. To some extent, whoever was emperor was the man who could make himself emperor. Heredity was only loosely correlated with succession. In the Octavian/Marc Antony dispute I'm sure part of what happened was that the legionaires could plainly see who the better man was.

 

The people of Egypt may have bought Cleopatra/Antony as gods, but Italy and Greece? Italians took Julius seriously because he proved himself on the battlefield.

 

Poor Cleopatra, she probably just assumed the heir apparent would be the man to get power. She was trying to tie her nation's fate to the rising star of Rome. It's just that Roman politics were a bit complicated.

 

I just thought of something - wasn't Marc Antony equestrian and not patrician?

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