Outside the Vienna Secession building stands one of the more theatrical bronze monuments in Europe: the Marc Anton Gruppe, cast in 1899 by the Austrian sculptor Arthur Strasser. It shows Mark Antony in full Roman dress, seated in a chariot pulled not by horses but by four lions — two fully grown, two younger, all rendered with remarkable musculature and a controlled ferocity that has not softened in 125 years of Viennese weather. The patina has gone deep green. The lions look ready to move. Antony sits above them with the bearing of a man accustomed to commanding things that could kill him.

On August 9, 48 BC — the same calendar date, by a coincidence historians have noted, as the Battle of Adrianople 426 years later — Julius Caesar’s army defeated Pompey’s at Pharsalus in Thessaly, ending the civil war between them in a single afternoon and ending the Roman Republic as a functioning political institution in any meaningful sense. The Republic would survive in form for another seventeen years, until Augustus completed its constitutional conversion. But Pharsalus was where it ended in fact, because Pharsalus eliminated the only man with the political authority, military reputation, and institutional support to contest Caesar’s supremacy on terms the existing system could legitimate.