Characters and Events of Roman History From Caesar to Nero the Lowell Lectures of 1908 is a classic Roman history text by Guglielmo Ferrero. In the spring of 1906, the College de France invited me to deliver, during November of that year, a course of lectures on Roman history. I accepted eight lectures, of the history of the government of Augustus from the end of the civil wars to his death; that is, a retelling of the matter contained in the fourth and fifth volumes of the English edition of my work, The Greatness and Decline of Rome.