I read a pretty fascinating book recently, "Caesar's Legacy" (which turned out to be about Octavian far more than Caesar). It reminded me that, when the Triumvirate was started, there was utterly NO reason to believe that anyone would come out of it as anything more than a vicious warlord plundering their enemies. We think, in hindsight, that there was some kind of inevitability to (a) Augustus ending up the last man standing and (b) his coming up with solutions to much of the Republic's dilemmas that actually worked so well, they lasted for centuries. None of this was foreseen, none of it was a given. In fact, the more I read about Augustus, the more I think it was all rather miraculous, given what had happened before!

I've pondered a lot why the book was titled so, and I've decided - Caesar's best legacy to the Republic was actually Octavian.