The Optimates gather their forces to oppose…

Burebista, in battles mentioned by Strabo, defeats the Celts who menace his western borders after 48 BCE, forcing them back westward into Pannonia, a region originally peopled by the Pannonii (sometimes called Paeonii by the Greeks) and invaded from the fourth century BCE by various Celtic tribes.

Emesa in antiquity is a very wealthy city.

The city is a part of a trade route from the East, heading via Palmyra that passes through Emesa on its way to the coast.

Apart from Antioch, a very important city for the Romans as the Syrian port city, Emesa prospers under its Roman vassal rulers.

The economy of the Emesani Kingdom is based on agriculture.

With fertile volcanic soil in the Orontes Valley and a great lake, as well as a dam across the Orontes south of Emesa, which provides ample water, Emesa’s soil is ideal for cultivation.

Farms in Emesa provide wheat, vines and olives.

Each year neighborhood princes and rulers send generous gifts honoring and celebrating Emesa’s cult and its Temple of the Sun.

The priesthood of the cult of El-Gebal in Emesa is held by a family that may be assumed to be descended from Sampsiceramus I or the later Priest King Sohaemus, either by the priest-king or another member of the dynasty.

The priest that serves in the cult of El-Gebal wears a costume that is very similar to the dress of a Parthian Priest: an Emesani priest wears a long-sleeved and gold-embroidered purple tunic reaching to his feet, gold and purple trousers and a jeweled diadem on his head.

When Sampsiceramus I died in 48 BCE, he had been succeeded by Iamblichus I, during whose reign the prominence of Emesa grows after Iamblichus establishes it as the new capital of the Emesani dynasty.

Prior to succeeding his father, Iamblichus I had been considered by Cicero in 51 BCE (then Roman Governor of Cilicia), as a possible ally against Parthia.

Shortly after Iamblichus I becomes priest-king, he prudently supports the Roman politician Julius Caesar in his Alexandrian war against Pompey, sending troops to aid Caesar.

Caesar, victorious in the civil war, returns to Rome in 46 BCE to an unprecedented quadruple triumph, in which he has Vercingetorix, imprisoned for nearly six years, executed in Rome.

Appointed Dictator for ten years, he is also appointed prefect of morals.

Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, son of Catulus’s old foe, is co-consul.

Among Julius Caesar's greatest supporters, Lepidus had started his cursus honorum as a praetor in 49 BCE, and had been placed in charge of Rome while Caesar defeated Pompey in Greece.

Caesar leaves in November for Farther Spain to deal with a fresh outbreak of resistance by …

…the sons of the late Pompey, Gnaeus and Sextus, who have seized Corduba (Córdoba).

Caesar proceeds to Utica, where Cato the Younger is garrisoned.

On the news of the defeat of his allies, Cato commits suicide.

Caesar is upset by this and is reported by Plutarch to have said: Cato, I must grudge you your death, as you grudged me the honor of saving your life.

The battle precedes peace in Africa—Caesar pulls out and returns to Rome on July 25 of the same year.

Opposition, however, will rise again.

Titus Labienus, the Pompeian brothers and others have managed to escape to the Hispania provinces.

The civil war is not finished, and the Battle of Munda will soon follow.

Caesar besieges Pompey's supporters at Thapsus, a North African seaport about five miles (eight kilometers) east of present-day Teboulba, Tunisia, on February 6, 46 BCE.

Pompey's father-in-law, intending to relieve Caesar's siege, draws up his fourteen legions and fifteen thousand cavalry on the corridor of land that forms the northern approach to the city.

Caesar's officers cannot restrain their own forces, who surge forward and overwhelm the enemy and, completely out of control, slaughter about ten thousand of them.

Within three weeks of his victory, Caesar has conquered Roman Africa.

King Juba, who had been a supporter of Pompey the Great against Julius Caesar, has attempted to establish a strong, independent Numidian state.

After Caesar defeats Juba in 46, he forms a new province, Africa Nova, from Numidian territory.

Sallust, who has found refuge in Caesar's army, has participated in Caesar's African campaign and becomes governor of Numidia, which becomes briefly the province of Africa Nova until Augustus restores Juba II (son of Juba I) after the Battle of Actium.

Many parts of the Indonesian archipelago play a role in local and wider trading networks from early times, and some are further connected to interregional routes reaching much farther corners of the globe.

Nearly four thousand years ago, cloves—which until the seventeenth century grow nowhere else in the world except five small islands in Maluku—had made their way to kitchens in present-day Syria.

By about the same time, items such as shells, pottery, marble, and other stones; ingots of tin, copper, and gold; and quantities of many food goods are traded over a wide area in Southeast Asia.

As early as the fourth century BCE, materials from South Asia, the Mediterranean world, and China—ceramics, glass and stone beads, and coins—begin to show up in the archipelago.

In the already well-developed regional trade, bronze vessels and other objects, such as the spectacular kettledrums produced first in Dong Son (northern Vietnam), circulated in the island world, appearing after the second century BCE from Sumatra to Bali and from Kalimantan and Sulawesi to the eastern part of Maluku.

Around two thousand years ago, Javanese and Balinese are themselves producing elegant bronze ware, which is traded widely and has been found in Sumatra, Madura, and Maluku.

In all of this trade, including that with the furthest destinations, peoples of the archipelago appear to have dominated, not only as producers and consumers or sellers and buyers, but as shipbuilders and owners, navigators, and crew.

The principal dynamic originated in the archipelago.

This is an important point, for historians have often mistakenly seen both the trade itself and the changes that stemmed from it in subsequent centuries as primarily the work of outsiders, leaving Indonesians with little historical agency, an error often repeated in assessing the origins and flow of change in more recent times as well.

In order to facilitate administration of their new territories, the Chinese build roads, waterways, and harbors, largely with corvée labor (unpaid labor exacted by government authorities, particularly for public works projects).

Agriculture is improved with better irrigation methods and the use of plows and draft animals, innovations which may have already been in use by the Vietnamese on a lesser scale.

New lands are opened up for agriculture, and settlers are brought in from China.

After a few generations, most of the Chinese settlers probably intermarry with the Vietnamese and identify with their new homeland.

Vietnam is governed leniently during the first century or so of Chinese rule, and the Lac lords maintain their feudal offices.

In the first century CE, however, China intensifies its efforts to assimilate its new territories by raising taxes and instituting marriage reforms aimed at turning Vietnam into a patriarchal society more amenable to political authority.

In response to increased Chinese domination, a revolt breaks out in Giao Chi, Cuu Chan, and Nhat Nam in CE 39, led by Trung Trac, the wife of a Lac lord who had been put to death by the Chinese, and her sister Trung Nhi.

The insurrection is put down within two years by the Han general Ma Yuan, and the Trung sisters drown themselves to avoid capture by the Chinese.

Still celebrated as heroines by the Vietnamese, the Trung sisters exemplify the relatively high status of women in Vietnamese society as well as the importance to Vietnamese of resistance to foreign rule.