With the victory of Octavian Caesar, the heir of Julius Caesar, over Antony and Cleopatra at the battle of Actium in 31 B.C., the greatest of Rome’s civil wars came to an end. Indeed, the whole era of civil war, which had torn apart late republican Rome for over half a century, was now over. A

fter decades of reckless violence, political instability, economic misery, betrayals, cruelty, and staggering levels of corruption, what happened next in Roman history comes to the historian as almost a complete surprise. Rome was hated from Spain to Syria, the fragility of Roman power was obvious, and astrologers had long been predicting the empire's imminent collapse.