The Roman Chronicles - Volume II

THE ROMAN CHRONICLES: VOLUME II — THE DEATH OF LIBERTY 133 BC to 14 AD

In 133 BC, a Roman tribune named Tiberius Gracchus stood in the assembly and proposed that the land should belong to the people who worked it. The Senate killed him for it. His brother Gaius made the same argument twelve years later. The Senate killed him too.

The Republic had another century to live. It spent that century proving, repeatedly and at enormous cost, that the men who killed the Gracchi had been right about one thing: the argument, once started, could not be stopped. It could only be resolved — by force, by blood, or by the careful construction of a system that looked like the Republic and functioned like a monarchy and never admitted to being either.

The Death of Liberty is the second volume of The Roman Chronicles — the complete narrative history of Rome told with the pace of a political thriller and the honesty of a post-mortem. This volume covers the most consequential century in Roman history: the hundred and fifty years in which the Roman Republic, the most sophisticated self-governing state the ancient world had produced, was slowly, deliberately, and irreversibly destroyed.

What you'll find inside:

The Gracchi — two brothers who saw what was coming and said so, and were killed for the clarity of their vision.

The Social War of 91 BC — when Rome's Italian allies, the men who had fought every Roman war and built every Roman road for two centuries, finally revolted to demand the citizenship they had been denied. Rome fought a brutal two-year war and then passed the law that conceded everything the revolt demanded. The thirty-year delay cost a hundred thousand lives and produced exactly the outcome Gaius Gracchus had said was inevitable.

Sulla, who marched on Rome with a Roman army, became the first man to do what everyone had always known was possible and no one had done. Caesar, who did it better and paid for it with twenty-three stab wounds. Pompey, Crassus, and the First Triumvirate — three men who divided the world between them in a room in northern Italy while two hundred senators travelled there to ask permission.

The civil wars. Actium. Cleopatra. The last queen of the Ptolemies choosing her own death over Octavian's triumph.

And then Augustus — the most remarkable political achievement in Western history. The man who replaced the Republic with a monarchy so carefully that the word monarchy was never spoken, who restored the Republic on paper in January of 27 BC and maintained the restoration until his death, and who built a system so complete and so permanent that it took four centuries to fully unravel.

The succession that kept failing — Marcellus, Agrippa, Gaius, Lucius, each one dead before the question could be answered, until only Tiberius remained: competent, damaged, resentful, and willing.

The Roman Chronicles is the series for readers who want the full story — not the marble and the mythology, but the decisions, the contradictions, the human beings who built something extraordinary and watched it become something they no longer recognised. Written by a fifty-year veteran of management and leadership, the series treats Rome's history the way Rome deserves: as the most instructive political experiment in the history of the world.

The Death of Liberty stands alone for readers new to the series. It works best as the second act of a trilogy.

Also in The Roman Chronicles: - Volume I: The Republic — From Romulus to the Gracchi - Volume III: The Eternal Sunset — From Augustus to the fall of Rome