The Fall of the Roman Republic: Six Lives: Marius, Sulla, Crassus, Pompey, Caesar, Cicero

Plutarch's interest is not in historical analysis but rather in character, in the influence of birth and education, in the significance of individual fame and the moral issues this raises. Born in Boeotia in AD 46, he witnessed both the best and the worst aspects of Roman life during the first century AD - the burgeoning of Latin literature, but also the long and bloody foreign and civil wars that marked the collapse of the Republic and ushered in the Empire. Collected here are the lives of the six men who played a central part in those events: Marius and Sulla, Crassus and Cicero, Pompey and Caesar.