Appian, a Greek historian of the second century, wrote The Civil Wars, Rome’s long fight from the Gracchi through Augustus. This is Book 5. Book 4 closed at Philippi in Macedonia, where Brutus and Cassius died and the last army that still treated Caesar’s killing as a liberation was finished. What follows is war among heirs, not restorers.

Perusia, a hill town in central Italy (today Perugia), starves while Fulvia, Mark Antony’s wife, and Lucius Antonius, his brother, try to make a war from pride and grievance. The city burns, and the name becomes a warning. Then the map splits: Antony in the east, Octavian in the west, and Sextus Pompey — Pompey the Great’s son — holding the sea from Sicily and choking Rome’s grain. Agrippa, Octavian’s admiral, learns the water. At Naulochus he breaks Sextus. Lepidus, the leftover of the three-man pact, reaches for rank he no longer has and is left alive as a joke in a priesthood. Antony stays with Cleopatra in Egypt. The book ends in 35 BCE, last Pompey dead, last partnership rotting. Appian’s Egyptian books are lost; we do not get Actium from him. We get two men, and a republic already waiting for one of them.