1 mar 44 año aC - **Julius Caesar Dictator for Life Rome Controls Mediterranean

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Julius also, then, set himself up in the city, when he started gaining more power in Rome. Actually he gained power in Rome mainly by military might, by kind of making the Senate nervous and winning a few battles, and that was against the law. It was against the law for Julius Caesar to do that, but he did it anyway. He tried to consolidate his power, though, by putting forth policies that moderately helped the lower classes. He didn't cancel debts, but he mitigated debts. He eased some of the strains on the poor. He was assassinated by conservative Senate forces--you know, Brutus and Cassius and others--on the Ides of March, as you all know, March 15th, 44 BCE.
He had adopted another Roman, Octavian, and Julius Caesar's adopted son, Octavian, then formed an alliance with Mark Antony, who had been Julius Caesar's friend, and a lesser known figure named Lepidus, whom you don't really need to remember. Because at the end it turned out that Mark Antony and Octavian fought a civil war. Octavian won, and Octavian defeated Mark Antony. And by this time Mark Antony had palled up with Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, and Octavian beat both of them, and he became the sole ruler of the empire in 27 BCE.
He refused the title of king, and he took the traditional Republican titles. One of his propagandists said this about him: "The pristine form of the Republic was recalled as of old." Or Augustus--he had taken the title Augustus by this time, which means "the great"--he himself said, "I transferred the Republic from my power to the dominion of the Senate and the people of Rome." In other words, in his propaganda, Augustus basically said, "I'm not a king, I'm just another senator, and I'm giving the Senate and the people all their power back." A lie, all lies. See, lying in government didn't start with our government. So Augustus actually reconstituted the Senate, and it was just that, a Senate reconstituted by the emperor. He became more and more the patron of all the people. And this is the way the emperor would forever then try to present himself. He and his family, the emperor's family, was, in a sense, the patron for the whole people of the Roman Empire--at least for all the Romans--the paterfamilias of the entire empire.
This led to what we famously call the Pax Romana, "the Roman Peace," because you had the end of long, hundreds of years of civil wars and other wars, at least within Rome itself. There were always battles and wars going on, on the boundaries, the frontiers of the Roman Empire, but within the center of the empire there was an amazing period of peace.
Most people saw this peace--many people in history say it is good. It's debatable whether it was good for everybody. Non-Romans and poor people may have seen the Pax Romana as more oppressive than a liberation, just like people saw the Pax Americana that way, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and before the beginning of the Iraq War. The Romans maintained peace, for one thing, by leaving local populations pretty much alone when it came to local customs, religions, and living arrangements. When they thought it was necessary, they maintained peace by destroying communities and forcibly moving populations. But they tried to do that only when they needed to do so to keep their absolute control.
The Romans prospered by taxation. They did hold censuses, not universal ones as mentioned in the Bible, but local censuses, in order to keep taxes high and fully paid. But they didn't--the Romans themselves didn't want to be bothered with collecting taxes. So they would have local, sort of higher class, local elites, would bid for the right to collect local taxes, and so the Romans would take the highest bid. In other words, if I'm a rich, wealthy person in Corinth, I would say, "I'll be the local tax collector, and I'll guarantee you I'll send to Rome this amount of money for a year." Of course, the Romans didn't care then how much I charged you, the people of Corinth in its area. Actually the City of Corinth wouldn't have been taxed because it was a Roman colony, and one of the benefits of being a Roman colony is that you didn't have to pay taxes, or at least the citizens didn't have to pay taxes. But the people in the outlying villages and towns and farms and everything would pay taxes.
And if I'm the tax collector, the way I make a profit is by charging you a lot more than I need just to send to Rome. The Romans didn't care about this. They just knew it was going to happen. This was the way they collected their taxes. This is why the word "tax collector" is such a bad word, for everybody but the Romans; why you'll see in the gospels the term "tax collectors and sinners." Why? Because the Jews didn't like the tax collectors because they were being ripped off by them.
Yale New Testament pg. 36

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