Beginning this period in 46 BC immediately presents us with issues of uneasy adjustment and faltering responses to shattering social and political change. The Civil War, fought from one end of the Mediterranean to another, raised problems about the nature of Urbs and Orbis, city and world, and their relations. Caesra drew his own solutions from the widest cultural range. The first years of the period set the scene for the developing drama of the transformation of every aspect of the societies of the Mediterranean world ruled from Rome, and of the identity of Rome itself, as experiment, setback and new accommodation succeeded each other in the hands of the generals of the continuing war-years, and finally, after Actium, of Augustus and his advisors. The central problems of this subject concern the dynasty, charisma and authority of the Roman Emperor, the institutions of the Roman provincial empire, and the most intensely creative age of Roman art and Latin literature, and how these were related. The sequel addresses very different rulers. Tiberius, Gaius Caligula and Claudius, whose reigns did much to shape the idea of an imperial system and its historiography, which we sample through Tacitus and the biographies of Suetonius, and the virulent satirical sketch by Seneca of Claudius’ death and deification. The subject invites consideration of the changing relations of Greek and Roman, and the increasing unity of the Mediterranean world; and also of the social and economic foundations of the Roman state in the city of Rome and in the towns and countryside of the Italy of the Georgics and Eclogues. Within Roman society, political change was accompanied by upward social mobility and by changes in the cultural representations of status, gender and power which pose complex and rich questions for the historian.