ABSTRACT
Rome's Mulvian Bridge, which still stands over the Tiber, has long been remembered as the scene of one of history's most fateful battles, in which Constantine, fortified by the vision of a cross that promised victory, crushed the army of Maxentius and took possession of the capital he would one day abandon. But for centuries earlier, the most significant episode the bridge had seen was a nocturnal skirmish in the consulship of Marcus Tullius Cicero and Gaius Antonius. The events of that quieter clash, as well as those of the ensuing day, are the subject of this chapter. As we will see, those events temporarily placed a handful of written texts at the center of the Roman political stage. The resulting drama would test the limits of the role of writing in the Roman imagination at large.
