The tongue cut out still quivered, and with noiseless movement beat the vacant air”: Two thousand years ago, Rome was torn apart by a savage civil war, which ended with the transformation of the republic into a tyranny. To the poet Lucan, the civil war seemed a kind of gladiatorial spectacle, the body of the republic being maimed to the cheers of the public. “This one cuts off the ears”, Lucan wrote. “That one gouges out the eyeballs from their hollow sockets, and, his mangled limbs viewed by himself, put out his eyes.” Forced to commit suicide in 65CE after...