Arve, and welcome to Emperors of Rome, a Roman history podcast from Latrobe University.

I'm your host, Matt Smith, and with me today is Assistant Professor Zachary Hirs, legal

historian in the Department of Classics at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

This is episode C-L-X-X-V-I, prescriptions.

Octavian, Mark Antony, and Lepidus have secured their alliance against Caesar's assassins,

and since they have the control of Rome, it's time to get rid of any competition.

Prescribing an enemy means that they will likely be executed, and their personal fortunes

can be confiscated and put towards paying soldiers, and the second triumvirate makes full use

of this.

Here's Zachary Hirs.

Okay, so it's 43 BCE, and we've got to figure out kind of why prescription is the remedy

for the moment.

And there are two things you've got to remember.

The first is this is an extremely paranoid environment.

The second triumvirate is built really off of Caesar's funeral pyre.

It's built out of this sort of sudden, presumably quite shocking assassination of a major political

figure in the Senate House.

Presumably, all three members of the second triumvirate.

So you've got the manual leader, but come Augustus, who I tend to conventionally call Octavian,

and will be for the purposes of this story.

We've got Mark Antony, and we've got Lepidus, no one really cares about Lepidus, but we

need to mention him.

...