Halicarnassus was the birth-place of two historians, Herodotus and Dionysius, though Herodotus is better known: both, however, left their native place for the metropolis of their day, Herodotus for Athens, at that time the mistress of a growing empire, Dionysius for Rome. ‘I took ship to Italy,’ he says of himself, ‘at the time when the Civil War was brought to an end by Augustus Caesar, in the middle of the one hundred and eighty-seventh Olympiad, and I have spent in Rome the twenty-two years which have elapsed between that time and this. I have learnt the Roman language thoroughly and made myself acquainted with the national records; and throughout the whole of this period I continued working on matters connected with this history.’ We gather, then, that he migrated to Italy about 30 b.c. This period was particularly important in Roman history. The revolution, the seeds of which had been sown as early as 13.3 b.c., by Tiberius Gracchus, had after its various vicissitudes come to an end for the time being, Julius Caesar, the champion of the people, having become in all but name the monarch of the Roman world. With his murder in 44 b.c., since the Republic could not be restored, the struggle for supremacy began again: the murder of one man meant the repetition by others of the same process by which he had obtained his power. Augustus and Antony emerged as the chief rivals for the vacant throne, and Augustus at Actium secured it; a fact all must have realized in spite of the fair-sounding names of liberty and republic. That a contemporary should write a true account of the events about this time was vitally necessary. Augustus, when established in power, began to gather around him a literary circle including Virgil, Horace, and Livy, under the patronage of the distinguished Maecenas.