But what is clear is even as we get into the late Republic period, it was an empire. Julius Caesar famously conquered Gaul, these Germanic peoples, before coming back and essentially taking control to be succeeded by the first official Roman Empire after a long and bloody civil war, Augustus Caesar. These other three empires happened relatively quickly. We're talking within a period of less than 50 years. While the Roman Empire took hundreds of years to form. And so it's hard to ascribe the empire to any one leader. You could say that there was a culture of expansion.