Piso Frugi and Crassus Frugi

Abstract

Civil wars are not always murderous to the upper order in society. Many of the nobiles managed to weather the storm and prosper thereafter in the years of peace, happily exploiting the new dispensation. Some had ancient pedigree and nothing else to commend them, but the stock of the dynasts Sulla, Pompeius, and Crassus enjoyed high prestige and carried dynastic pretensions: peers and rivals to the Caesars of the Julian and Claudian line. Their alliances and vicissitudes are a large chapter in the annals of the first imperial epoch. Discreet, obscured or held down by Caesar Augustus, the descendants of Pompeius Magnus begin to come up again in the last decade of the reign (after A.D. 4), and enjoy favour with his successor.