Hello, and welcome to the history of Rome, Episode 68, Three Embers.

The House of Caesar was no more.

Though the name Caesar would live on as a symbol of power, authority, and legitimacy,

the family itself was now officially defunct.

From the moment Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BC, to the moment Nero committed

suicide some 117 years later, Rome had been dominated by the Giulio Claudian dynasty.

No one alive remembered a time before they rose to power, and now suddenly, without warning,

they were gone.

Does anyone around here have any idea what we're supposed to do now?

The thing was, the initial transition from Republic to Autocratic Empire had been midwife

by Julius Caesar and his adopted son Augustus.

Two men, with personality so strong that they couldn't help but shape the whole governmental

apparatus to match their own individual quirks, habits, strengths, and weaknesses.

Their descendants had more or less failed to live up to the standard set by the two great

patriarchs of the family, but they had also more or less continued the forms and practices

of governance that had been handed down to them.

One of the quirks of the initial principle was that the legitimacy and authority of the

emperor lay not in codified rules or a spelled out job description, rather it rested on

an ad hoc collection of powers that had been accumulated by Augustus personally during

the constitutional settlements of the 20s BC.

After his death, those powers had been passed along to his descendants for no other reason

that they were his descendants.

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