One January morning, Julius Caesar, the governor of Gaul, arrived at a river named the Rubicon, which marked the frontier with Italy. A governor was forbidden to lead troops out of his province, but Caesar was a gambler. Quoting a line from one of Menander's plays: "The die is cast," he ordered his legion over the river and on toward Rome. Crossing the Rubicon has come to stand for every fateful step in history since. The result was a civil war which destroyed Rome's traditional freedoms and established a permanent dictatorship on the wreckage of its constitution. This book gives readers a harrowing account of the fall of the Republic, capturing the suspense and drama of Rome's most famous political rivalries, its vibrant and charged atmosphere, and featuring some of the most celebrated personalities in history: Caesar, Cicero, Spartacus, Cleopatra, Brutus, Pompey, Virgil.--From publisher description