Dictator

I have also made constant use of the great nineteenth-century works of reference edited by William Smith: his Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (three volumes) and Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (two volumes); these are now freely available online. The Magistrates of the Roman Republic, Volume II, 99 BC – 31 BC by T. Robert S. Broughton was also invaluable, as was The Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World edited by Richard J. A. Talbert. Again, wherever possible I have followed the facts and descriptions offered in the original sources – Plutarch, Appian, Sallust, Caesar – and I thank all those scholars and translators who have made them accessible and whose words I have used.

Biographies of, and books about, Cicero, which have given me numberless insights and ideas, include: Cicero: A Turbulent Life by Anthony Everitt, Cicero: A Portrait by Elizabeth Rawson, Cicero by D. R. Shackleton Bailey, Cicero and his Friends by Gaston Bossier, Cicero: The Secrets of his Correspondence by Jérôme Carcopino, Cicero: A Political Biography by David Stockton, Cicero: Politics and Persuasion in Ancient Rome by Kathryn Tempest, Cicero as Evidence by Andrew Lintott, The Hand of Cicero by Shane Butler, Terentia, Tullia and Publia: the Women of Cicero’s Family by Susan Treggiari, The Cambridge Companion to Cicero edited by Catherine Steel, and – still thoroughly readable and useful – The History of the Life of Marcus Tullius Cicero, published in 1741 by Conyers Middleton (1683-1750).

Biographies of Cicero’s contemporaries which I have found particularly useful include: Caesar by Christian Meier, Caesar by Adrian Goldsworthy, The Death of Caesar by Barry Strauss, Pompey by Robin Seager, Marcus Crassus and the Late Roman Republic by Allen Ward, Marcus Crassus, Millionaire by Frank Adcock, The Patrician Tribune: Publius Clodius Pulcher by W. Jeffrey Tatum and Catullus: A Poet in the Rome of Julius Caesar by Aubrey Burl.

For the general ambience of Rome – its culture, society and political structure – I have drawn on three works by the incomparable Peter Wiseman – New Men in the Roman Senate, Catullus and His World and Cinna the Poet and other Roman essays. To these I must also add The Crowd in Rome in the Late Republic by Fergus Millar, which analyses how politics might have operated in Cicero’s Rome. Also valuable were Intellectual Life in the Late Roman Republic by Elizabeth Rawson, The Constitution of the Roman Republic by Andrew Lintott, The Roman Forum by Michael Grant, Roman Aristocratic Parties and Families by Friedrich Münzer (translated by Thérèse Ridley) and (of course) The Roman Revolution by Ronald Syme and Theodore Mommsen’s History of Rome.

For the physical recreation of Republican Rome I relied on the scholarship of A New Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome by L. Richardson jr, A Topographical Dictionary of Rome by Samuel Ball Platner, the Pictorial Dictionary of Ancient Rome (two volumes) by Ernest Nash and Mapping Augustan Rome, the Journal of Roman Archaeology project directed by Lothar Haselberger.

A special word of thanks should go to Tom Holland whose wonderful Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic (2003) first gave me the idea of writing a fictional account of the friendships, rivalries and enmities between Cicero, Caesar, Pompey, Cato, Crassus and the rest.