Rome spent centuries fearing kings. The aversion began with Tarquinius Superbus, Rome’s last monarch. His arrogance and abuse of power made Romans swear never to submit to one man rule.
The vow proved surprisingly fragile.
Over the next centuries, a series of increasingly ambitious men discovered something dangerous: if you accumulated enough military prestige, wealth, and personal loyalty, Rome’s institutions became surprisingly flexible.
But what happens when brilliant men become convinced they are larger than the institutions around them?
Here are seven powerful men who changed Rome forever.
The Powerful Men Who Changed Ancient Rome
Tarquinius Superbus: Expelled King
Romulus founded Rome and became its first king. He was followed by six successors.
The last of Rome’s seven kings was the villainous Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, better known as Tarquin the Proud. He ruled from 535-509 B.C. and became Rome’s original cautionary tale about solo rule.
Sure, he had a gloriously over-the-top name. But “Superbus” didn’t mean “superb.” It meant proud, arrogant, overbearing. Romans heard “Tarquin the Insufferable.”
He was ruthless, ambitious, and grasping. His rise to power came through murder and conspiracy. To seize the throne, Tarquin cleared away rivals and family members alike, taking power in a bloody coup.
Oddly, once he had power, he seemed less interested in governing than possessing power itself. He wasn’t remembered for wise reforms or statecraft. He ruled through fear, intimidation, and force.
And then things got worse.
Tarquin’s son Sextus raped Lucretia, a respected Roman noblewoman. The resulting outrage ignited a political firestorm.
The Tarquins were expelled from Rome and kingship was labelled toxic. Romans spent centuries treating monarchy as a dirty word. And painters spent centuries painting Lucretia to immortalize her.
Tarquin spent years trying to claw his way back into power, repeatedly threatening the new Republic. Even in exile, he remained a thorn in Rome’s side. A Bond villain, trying to rig the system.
Ironically, Rome may owe him a strange debt. Tarquin was so terrible that he helped create the Republic. The Romans swore never again to submit to a king.
Of course, five centuries later they quietly reinvented monarchy and simply called it something else.
Gaius Marius: First Man in Rome
Gaius Marius was an upstart from rural Italy. He clawed his way into Rome’s elite by talent, ambition, and sheer force of will.
Yet even after reaching the top, he never quite seemed to believe he belonged there. That insecurity would prove oddly durable. Because the outsider from Arpinum would become Rome’s first great warlord — and became First Man in Rome.
Despite being outside the upper echelon, Marius methodically built a career of odds-defying social mobility. Some people chafed, of course, because he was a plebeian not a patrician.
Though he had a hard time winning the respect of his social betters, he dominanted on the battlefield.
Marius wasn’t just ambitious. He could fight. Before he became Rome’s political wrecking ball, he built a reputation as a gifted and disciplined commander with a knack for winning difficult campaigns.
He first distinguished himself under Scipio Aemilianus during the siege of Numantia in Spain, where he earned a reputation for toughness and military competence.
His greatest triumph came in the war against Jugurtha, where he projected an image of relentless energy and practical leadership. Later, he crushed invading Germanic tribes.
His victories were so dramatic that many Romans believed he’d literally saved the Republic from destruction. For a time, Marius was more than a successful general. He was Rome’s indispensable man.
He also succeeded in politics. Though he began as a political back bencher — serving as quaestor and aedile without much fanfare — Marius gradually clawed his way upward. Eventually, he rose to become consul an astonishing seven times.
But age did not mellow him. It seemed only to sharpen his anxieties.
Another “First Man” was rising through the ranks: Lucius Cornelius Sulla. Brilliant, ambitious, and aristocratic, Sulla possessed something Marius never entirely acquired: ease within Rome’s elite patrician world.
Then came the crisis.
A lucrative and prestigious command against Mithridates VI was up for grabs. Since Sulla was consul and had proven himself a gifted commander, the Senate awarded him the campaign.
Marius balked. Using a tribune and a plebiscite, he maneuvered the command away from Sulla and handed it to himself instead.
Sulla was less than pleased. He did the unthinkable: he marched his army on Rome itself and drove Marius from the city. Bad on Marius. Really bad form for Sulla.
No Roman commander had ever turned his army against the city. Sulla had just shattered one of the Republic’s oldest taboos and demonstrated something dangerous: political disputes could now be settled by force. Others would remember the lesson.
Marius was forced to flee. But when Sulla departed to fight Mithridates, Marius returned to the stage, determined to reclaim power one more time. But the final act felt different. The energy and brilliance remained, yet desperation had crept in.
A remarkable career curdled into overreach. And then, almost absurdly, it ended. Marius achieved his long sought 7th consulship and died days later of natural causes in 86 B.C.
For a man who spent a lifetime fighting for power, there was something bleakly Roman about the ending. After all the ambition, wars, rivalries, and bloodshed, the First Man in Rome simply ran out of time.
Sulla: The First Dictator
Sulla was pivotal in the decline of the Roman Republic. He defeated Marius in the civil war and later became Rome’s first dictator, executing enemies on a scale that made future strongmen take notes.
It didn’t begin that way. Unlike Marius, Sulla was born a patrician, though from a declining branch of the ancient Cornelii family.
At 25, no one would’ve predicted dictatorship. He had pedigree but little money, certainly not enough to compete in Rome’s brutal power politics.
Then fortune intervened. Almost absurdly, Sulla inherited substantial wealth from two women who adored him: his stepmother and a longtime mistress. Suddenly, the struggling aristocrat had options.
He ran for office as quaestor and eventually served under Marius during the Jugurthine War. Sulla probably learned a great deal. He also may have begun quietly collecting grievances. He was a snob.
When Sulla finally received his own independent command, he marched east to fight Mithridates. But events in Rome soon pulled him back. Marius and his allies had seized control of the city.
Armed soldiers were forbidden within Rome. Sulla found rules negotiable. Rather un-patrician of him.
Rather than negotiate with Rome’s populist faction, Sulla decided to remove the problem permanently. He marched on Rome, named himself dictator, and issued proscriptions.
At first, around 200 condemned names appeared on tablets in the Roman Forum. Then the lists grew. And grew.
Eventually thousands were marked for death. Their property was confiscated. Their families ruined. Their murder legally sanctioned.
The terror lasted for months. Ancient sources describe streets running with blood. Hyperbole perhaps. Then again, perhaps not.
While Rome suffered, Sulla grew astonishingly wealthy.
Naturally, Marius remained one of Sulla’s obsessions even in death. Since his rival inconveniently died before Sulla returned, Sulla later had Marius’ remains exhumed and scattered. Grievance collection had become a lifestyle.
Satisfied with his work, Sulla voluntarily retired into opulent debauchery and handed power to the Optimates. Ancient writers describe a body deteriorating from disease and overindulgence.
One name on Sulla’s lists should have worried him more than the others: Gaius Julius Caesar.
Caesar had the misfortune of being married to Cornelia, daughter of Sulla’s enemy Cinna. Sulla eventually spared him, though not happily. “You’re fools if you don’t see many Mariuses in that boy.”
As usual, Sulla’s instincts were flawless.
Pompey: Prestige Politics
In the final, turbulent decades of the Roman Republic, few figures loomed larger than Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, better known as Pompey the Great.
Pompey emerged during the chaos of the Marius-Sulla civil wars. Young, handsome, ambitious, and absurdly successful, he seemed born under an unusually favorable star. Victories appeared to find him with suspicious ease.
Pompey was not just successful militarily. For a while, he seemed almost absurdly successful.
He won early victories under Sulla during the civil wars and displayed such confidence and talent that Sulla reportedly nicknamed him Magnus— “the Great” — after Alexander.
He then proceeded to collect triumphs at a rate that must have annoyed nearly everyone in Rome.
Pompey crushed resistance in Spain, wiped out Mediterranean piracy with startling speed, and reorganized Rome’s eastern territories after defeating Mithridates VI. His campaigns expanded Roman power and made him wildly popular.
Pompey wasn’t quite Caesar on the battlefield. He lacked Caesar’s improvisational brilliance and relentless aggression.
But he was disciplined, methodical, and extraordinarily competent. More importantly, success seemed to follow him everywhere.
For a time, Pompey looked less like a general and more like Rome’s future. That may have been the problem.
In 60 B.C., Caesar formed a political alliance with Marcus Licinius Crassus and Pompey. Crassus supplied staggering wealth.
Pompey brought military prestige and popularity. Caesar supplied political brilliance and ambition. Together, they became the unofficial rulers of Rome.
But power-sharing arrangements have a short shelf life. As Caesar piled victory upon victory in Gaul, Rome grew nervous. Pompey did too.
When Caesar crossed the Rubicon and marched into Italy, the Senate turned to Pompey as its defender. Awkwardly, Pompey’s legions were in Spain. Rome itself was left strangely exposed.
Pompey retreated east and eventually fled to Egypt, where he made a catastrophic miscalculation. Hoping to curry favor with Caesar during a dynastic struggle against Cleopatra, the young king Ptolemy XIII murdered Pompey and presented his severed head to Caesar.
Caesar reportedly wept. Pompey had spent decades as Rome’s golden boy and presumed savior. In the end, he died as a political inconvenience.
Caesar: Constitutional Collapse
Julius Caesar did not single-handedly destroy the Roman Republic. By the time he arrived, men like Marius, Sulla, and Pompey had already cracked its foundations.
But Caesar finished the job.
Rome’s shift from republic to empire was a political earthquake that unfolded over decades and ended with blood on a Senate floor. And it wasn’t inevitable.
It emerged from ambition, fear, institutional weakness, and one man with a persistent inability to leave well enough alone.
Caesar was born in 100 BC into a respectable but faded patrician family. He had pedigree but not power. Family prestige could still open doors in Rome, but pedigree alone no longer guaranteed success.
He was intelligent, charming, and quietly calculating. Not obviously destined for greatness. Not yet.
As a young politician, Caesar understood something many senators did not: Rome increasingly ran on spectacle. As aedile, he staged lavish public games and celebrations that dazzled ordinary Romans and horrified traditionalists. He buried himself in debt doing it.
But debt could be solved. Obscurity was harder.
Romans admired military success above almost everything else, and Caesar understood the assignment. To become indispensable, you needed conquest, wealth, loyal soldiers, and public adoration.
Assigned to Gaul, Caesar moved with startling speed. Over the next decade, he built one of the most extraordinary military records in Roman history. He conquered vast territories, accumulated staggering wealth, and created something increasingly alarming: an army loyal to Caesar as much as Rome.
Back in Rome, senators watched with growing unease. Caesar now possessed money, popularity, battle-hardened troops, and something dangerously close to a cult of personality.
Then came the ultimatum. The Senate ordered Caesar to disband his army and return as a private citizen. Caesar refused.
In 49 BC, he crossed the Rubicon with his troops, violating one of Rome’s oldest political taboos and openly declaring civil war. “The die is cast,” he reportedly said.
He knew exactly what he was doing. The Senate turned to Pompey. Pompey’s military resources were scattered and Rome itself was poorly prepared.
Caesar moved quickly. Too quickly.
After victory, Caesar launched reforms, reorganized debt, reshaped the calendar, funded building projects, and filled Rome with spectacles. But he also steadily concentrated power in himself.
Then, he accepted the title “dictator for life.” Bad form.
On March 15, 44 BC, Caesar attended a Senate meeting at the Theater of Pompey unarmed and without guards. Around 60 conspirators attacked him. He was stabbed 23 times.
Ancient writers claimed Caesar collapsed beneath Pompey’s statue. If true, history briefly developed a sense of theater. Among his killers were men he had pardoned and promoted.
Shakespeare later supplied “Et tu, Brute?” Reality rarely produces dialogue that good.
Mark Antony: Dynastic Spectacle
Mark Antony looked like Rome’s future. Handsome, charismatic, physically imposing, and wildly popular with soldiers, he seemed born to command. Unfortunately, he also possessed a remarkable talent for making things worse.
Antony was a larger than life personality. Antony fit the role perfectly. He was brave, charming, generous, theatrical, and catastrophically impulsive.
At first, Antony was Caesar’s right-hand man, loyal lieutenant, and occasional political enforcer. He helped Caesar test public opinion and probe Rome’s tolerance for monarchy.
In carefully staged moments, Antony publicly offered Caesar a crown. Caesar theatrically refused it. Again and again.
The performance continued until the crowd itself began chanting “King Caesar.” The idea of monarchy, once unthinkable, was slowly becoming thinkable.
Then Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March. Rome was stunned.
Antony moved quickly. Displaying Caesar’s bloodied body in the Roman Forum, he delivered a funeral oration that transformed grief into fury.
Public outrage exploded. The conspirators suddenly discovered Rome was an unhealthy place to remain.
Following Caesar’s assassination, Antony emerged as one of the dominant figures in Rome’s final Republican years. He became consul.
But his alliance with Caesar’s heir Octavian gradually curdled into rivalry. At first they shared power. Eventually, they shared mutual suspicion.
Meanwhile Antony increasingly shifted eastward. He formed both a political and romantic alliance with Cleopatra, and together they had three children.
This proved disastrous for Antony’s image in Rome. To many Romans, Antony no longer looked like a traditional Roman statesman. He appeared increasingly monarchic, increasingly eastern, and increasingly Cleopatra-shaped.
Eventually the rivalry exploded into open conflict. At the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, Octavian’s admiral Agrippa defeated Antony and Cleopatra.
With defeat came panic. Believing Cleopatra dead, Antony reportedly stabbed himself. The wound was inconveniently slow to finish the job. He was carried to Cleopatra and died in her arms.
Antony spent much of his life looking like Rome’s future. Then Octavian/Augustus arrived and revised the casting.
Augustus: Smiling Autocrat
In the ranking of Rome’s best emperors, Augustus almost always gets top billing. Universally so.
He was so successful that later emperors adopted his name as part of their title. To become emperor was, in some sense, to become Augustus.
But he did not begin as Augustus.
Before the marble statues and imperial gravitas, he was Octavian: a sickly-looking 19 year old suddenly shoved into the spotlight after Caesar’s assassination. He was shocked to discover that Caesar had named him his adoptive heir.
At first glance, Octavian looked like a bit of a nobody. But appearances were misleading. The young man possessed a dangerous combination of intelligence, ruthlessness, ambition, and Caesar’s name.
In short order, he formed an alliance with Mark Antony and Marcus Lepidus. Together they became the Second Triumvirate. Before they could mobilize armies, however, they needed money.
Sulla’s old playbook returned. Proscriptions resumed. Death lists appeared. Property was seized. Corpses accumulated.
Rome had seen this film before. Eventually the victors divided the Roman world among themselves. Octavian took Italy, and the killing expanded outside Rome.
Then, rather unexpectedly, Octavian developed a human side. He fell in love with Livia — inconveniently eight months pregnant and already married. He went on to sideline Lepidus and defeat Antony.
At this point, one might reasonably wonder: how did this ambitious, but murderous, young operator end up at the top of everyone’s emperor rankings? Had he died fighting Antony at Actium, would he have gone down in history as a monster with blood on his hands?
Possibly. So he rebranded. It was one of the strangest personality pivots in history.
After his chilling purges, Octavian quietly transformed himself from ruthless power broker into generous public benefactor. He spent lavishly on Rome and carefully positioned himself as the restorer of order rather than its destroyer.
It was a remarkable act of political theater. Even more remarkably, people bought it. Rome, exhausted after decades of chaos, proved surprisingly willing to accept the revised version.
Augustus ruled for decades. He launched the Pax Romana, mastered propaganda, and presided over an era in which literature, art, architecture, and public building flourished.
Alongside Agrippa, he reshaped Rome on an astonishing scale. Temples, forums, theaters, roads, and monuments transformed the city.
Augustus later claimed he had found Rome built of brick and left it clothed in marble. For once, he was not exaggerating.
But one problem haunted his reign: succession. Augustus had no surviving sons. One by one, his preferred heirs died.
Eventually he was forced into the decision he least wanted to make. He named Tiberius. And somewhere in the distance, Roman history sighed heavily.
I hope you’ve enjoyed my guide to the original power brokers of Rome. You may find these other Rome histories interesting:
- History of the Rise and Fall of Rome
- History of the Roman Emperors
- Historical Facts about Rome
- Top 10 Worst Emperors Ranked
- History of Augustus
- History of Nero
- History of Caligula
- History of Julius Caesar
- History of Hadrian
- Tiberius, the Reluctant Emperor
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