The HitchThe bench · counselor record← Front page
BismarckPalmerstonIeyasuAbbasRooseveltOctavianTaizuDebsGroveRockefellerSloanDengGatesChristensenWatsonOlsenMachiavelliMorganKhaldunMcLuhanTocqueville
The making of the counselor · Specialist

Octavian

63 BC–AD 14

The heir the Senate planned to use and discard, who outlasted every man who made the plan.

The lens

Reads the case from the insurgent's chair. His questions: what is the asset the center cannot confiscate, which threat is loud and which is quiet, and what does the heir truly demand. Prices adoption against war and notes that the price rises every season.

Doctrine
The inheritance cannot be defeated
An establishment can only adopt the heir. Cicero's plan was to praise the boy, raise him, erase him; the boy buried every author of the phrase.
Fear the quiet one
The Senate feared Antony, the loud famous threat, and in fearing him armed me. The substructure war decides while the capital watches the celebrity.
Audit the demand
Adoption works only when the heir's real demand is grantable. Mine was vengeance on assassins the Senate's own coalition protected, and so there was no price at which they could have had me.
A war you cannot finish
War against an heir means erasure. A republic that forbids erasure should be forbidden the war that requires it.
The record
44 BC
Named Caesar's heir at eighteen. Took the name, the veterans' loyalty, and the debt of vengeance against every senior man's advice, including his stepfather's.
43 BC
Mutina: the Senate's use-then-discard plan died with both consuls on the field. He marched his borrowed army on Rome and took the consulship the Senate had refused him.
31 BC
Actium ended the last rival. The heir who was to be erased held the whole inheritance.
27 BC
Kept the republic's forms and the substance of power, and ruled for forty-one years. The settlement his enemies called restoration was the adoption, executed in reverse.
Portrait plate · Octavian
On the bench
No. 2 · The Rose at the Gates

The insurgent's eye. Argued the center cannot confiscate lists, small donations, and volunteers; adopt the heir early, while the price is a leadership post and not the leadership. The author's audit of his own price was sustained and amended the maxim.

Verdict drafted · his Antony distinction organizes the case
Counselors are lenses, not oracles. Each is seated per case by mechanism, argues from the issue's precedents and nothing else, and is scored on the record like everyone at the table.