You're a bright young thing from an aristocratic Roman family, burning with entitlement and ambition. Your
cursus honorum means you have to accumulate experience before you can run as senator or other high office of state, so you accept a post as governor of some far province.
You get there, and it's all very underwhelming. The place is even filthier than Rome, sometimes little more than a village built with sticks. Food and weather are atrocious. The locals can't understand you, and you can't understand them without going through some local translator you may or may not trust. There is nothing interesting to do except adjudicating the occasional squabble between neighbouring tribes. You are too far from the action in Rome to keep up with the political winds, and you know people are forgetting you with every passing day. Your troops are bored and restless, corruption and moral decay are everywhere in your ranks. You're increasingly paranoid and fearful for your life - if one can be assassinated in Rome, where it's full of people at all times and eventual scrutiny is inevitable, think of what could happen here in the middle of nowhere, where nobody is watching...
So one day you snap out of it. You will be glorious, peasants be damned. You will be a Caesar, you will conquer and embiggen Rome's glory. What are these idiots going to do anyway, with their little wooden sticks? Let's remind them how we got here in the first place! And off you go into unprovoked conflict.
You get there, and it's all very underwhelming. The place is even filthier than Rome, sometimes little more than a village built with sticks. Food and weather are atrocious. The locals can't understand you, and you can't understand them without going through some local translator you may or may not trust. There is nothing interesting to do except adjudicating the occasional squabble between neighbouring tribes. You are too far from the action in Rome to keep up with the political winds, and you know people are forgetting you with every passing day. Your troops are bored and restless, corruption and moral decay are everywhere in your ranks. You're increasingly paranoid and fearful for your life - if one can be assassinated in Rome, where it's full of people at all times and eventual scrutiny is inevitable, think of what could happen here in the middle of nowhere, where nobody is watching...
So one day you snap out of it. You will be glorious, peasants be damned. You will be a Caesar, you will conquer and embiggen Rome's glory. What are these idiots going to do anyway, with their little wooden sticks? Let's remind them how we got here in the first place! And off you go into unprovoked conflict.