The Heir Caesar Chose in Advance

In 45 BC, a sickly eighteen-year-old named Gaius Octavius was studying rhetoric in Apollonia, a small coastal town in modern-day Albania. He had no army, no political office, no wealth of his own. Yet halfway across the Mediterranean, Julius Caesar had already written the young man's name into his will — not as a recipient of some minor gift, but as his adopted son and sole heir.…