Biographies are the stories of people's lives. They usually begin with either when the person was born (if known), or some brief details about who their parents were and then when they were born. They then tell the story of the person's life with all the little, intimate details which make up such lives. They always record when the person died (if they have died) and often include the short and long term results of what they did as a way of saying "this person was important - look at the longlasting legacy they left". This is what you have to do.

In this case you have been asked to write a biography with special emphasis on the time he or she was involved in the government of Rome, or had an influence on the decisions made about the government of Rome. This means that you still have to write about his or her life either side of that time but the greatest amount of your writing will be focused on that special period of their life.

You must include dates. However, one of the problems in this task is that if we use the dates we think of for this period we would be writing BC (before Christ) but, of course, they did not use that sort of dating. However, as historians, you can do that but there are ways around it. You could use expressions such as "when he was 25 (55BC)" or "in the 10th year of his reign (68BC) which gets over this problem.

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