Masters of Rome is a series of historical novels by Australian author Colleen McCullough, set in ancient Rome during the last days of the old Roman Republic; it primarily chronicles the lives and careers of Gaius Marius, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, Pompey the Great, Gaius Julius Caesar, and the early career of Caesar Augustus.
The series has a thesis (first introduced in 1939 by Sir Ronald Syme in his epic historical treatise The Roman Revolution): as Rome became more powerful within the Mediterranean world, the old ways of doing things – through the deliberation of various interests, mainly aristocratic and mercantile – became impossibly cumbersome.
McCullough points out that the translation of the alternative Greek version of his words is "Let the dice fly high," which characterises not fatalism (as with the former) but rather risk-taking.
However, most historians place the end of the Republic a decade later, after the final showdown between Augustus and Mark Antony at the Battle of Actium, in 31 BC.
Carr argued that she should not continue in chronological order through the Second Triumvirate and the Julio-Claudian and Flavian dynasties, but instead skip ahead to write about the Five Good Emperors.