These wars vastly increased Rome's power and wealth, but at home the republic entered a period of civil disorder to which many causes have been assigned. These include inflation; the monopoly of agriculture by wealthy landowners to the detriment of small farmers; the clamor for Roman citizenship by Italians who were not Romans; the devastation of Italy during the Second Punic War; the corruption of the governors of new provinces; and, most important, the very expansion of Rome, which changed from a small city-state into an empire that was too large to be administered by the old republican type of government in which two consuls, elected every year, wielded power between them, each having the right to veto the other's decisions.
In the final days of the Roman republic, a series of ambitious and brutal leaders struggled for control of the state, but none was able to solve Rome's problems or establish lasting power for himself and his faction of supporters. Among these would-be rulers were the three members of the First Triumvirate, Crassus, Pompey, and Julius Caesar, who in 49 B.C. marched on Rome with his legions and in the following year defeated Pompey, who had become his rival; and the Second Triumvirate of Mark Antony, Lepidus, and Octavian, who finally gained power for himself in 3l B.C. after defeating the combined forces of Antony and Cleopatra, Egypt's queen, at the Battle of Actium.
Octavian, Rome's first emperor, whom the Roman Senate officially named Augustus — meaning "revered" — in 27 B.C., had been as unscrupulous and cruel as any of the other power seekers while consolidating his position. Able to bring order where other leaders had failed, he reorganized the Roman bureaucracy and opened its membership to common men, freedmen, and even slaves. He cleverly masked his power, which was absolute, by retaining the old forms of republican government.
