Useful Notes / Augustus

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"Don't make me come up there, Jupiter."^note Cupid tugging on his legs, signifies his divine descent from the Goddess Venus. Also, historians are pretty sure it was painted when it was first erected - here's a guess◊

There are some badasses whose exploits are obvious. And then there are those few evil genius types who wield absolute power from the shadows, molding society into a willfully submissive machine while maintaining a completely graceful facade. And Caesar Augustus, the first emperor of Rome, is one of those truly legendary evil geniuses.

—Badass of the Week

Divi Filius Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus (born Gaius Octavius, 23 September 63 BC – 19 August AD 14 — i.e. 75 years old at time of death) was the very first emperor (from 27 BC to 14 AD - i.e. a 41-year reign) of The Roman Empire. He was the grand-nephew and adopted son of Julius Caesar and the rival of Mark Antony. The month of August is named after him.

In his youth, he was known as Gaius Octavius, of a respectable but not noble family (though his mother was the niece of Julius Caesar). On Caesar's death, it was found that Caesar had adopted young Octavius in his will; at that point, Octavius would have technically been named Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, so historians generally refer to him from that point as "Octavian". Though there's no evidence he ever used the name "Octavian", which would have called attention to his comparatively humble origins. After his adoption, he simply called himself "Caesar", or on occasion "Gaius Julius Caesar Divi Filius" ("the son of the god"). Once he consolidated his rule, the Senate granted him the quasi-religious title Augustus (meaning roughly "illustrious one"). Augustus though tended not to use the title, sticking with "Princeps" ("first citizen") or "Caesar".

Augustus is one of the most important figures of the Ancient World, a ruthless, intelligent and cunning politician, and easily the most successful despotic ruler in history. Having finished off The Roman Republic, he single-handedly built an autocratic system of government that ran like a well-oiled regime of efficiency and continued in the form he patented for centuries. In his youth, he was Octavian, Caesar's ruthless nephew who had purged and murdered not only the assassins of his adopted father, but also several others in a round of proscriptions. In his older years, he was remembered as the calm, gentle and serene Augustus, who was known for living modestly despite his vast power and whose reign after that, while filled with some high profile exiles, was free of the violence and bloodshed that came before. As observed by Tacitus, he ruled so long and so well that when he died, almost nobody alive remembered the Republic, and none knew how to go back even if they might have wanted to. He took the Roman Republic and converted it into The Roman Empire and presided over Pax Romana, an extended reign of peace in one of the greatest powers in world history. He even managed to get people to keep calling the eighth month "August". Said honor was given after he made a small adjustment to his Uncle Julius' Roman calendar, as a token of which the eighth month was named after his cognomen, Augustus.

Augustus was the first and greatest Emperor of Rome, there is not much debate or doubt about that. In his lifetime, he skirted the popular displays of excess and wealth that for many defined how Emperors were imagined. He lived in his villa in the Palatine Hill, which was widely considered to be austere and well, august, that is to say solemn, spare, stately and refined. These were the qualities Augustus wished to be associated with. His reign was associated with the values of pietas (piety) that is to say selfless service to the state and society and community. To be a Roman was to be a serious person. To conduct oneself in a manner that was measured and rational. While Augustus launched an extensive building program in Rome, most notably knocking down the old Roman Forum and building a new one on top of it (the ruins that exist today are largely from his building program), for the most he avoided doing the grand monuments that developed centuries later. Most of his reign was dedicated to public works, improving established services, and increasing public order. In this way, Augustus wished to communicate that he was turning a page on the chaos and bloodshed and excess of the Late-period Republic. Under his reign, triumphs were no longer bestowed on victorious commanders but resolved solely for him and Triumphs were no longer the grand and excessive festive displays.

This is not to say that Augustus didn't sponsor art. His client Maecenas established himself as a cross between propagandist and literary agent, and cultivated relationships with many Roman poets and writers, chiefly Virgil who composed The Aeneid partly to cater to Augustus' Cult of Personality. The poem itself is of course a great deal more complex and ironic in how it depicts its highly Augustus-esque version of Aeneas. Architecturally, Augustus sponsored monuments like the Ara Pacis Augustae, an altar piece with stunning bas reliefs depicting his family and household in domestic setting, a level of detail rarely shown before. Augustus wished to present himself in public as a family man, and he often sponsored statuary of himself, his wife Livia and his sister Octavia (briefly the wife of Mark Antony, but not for long because he engaged in an affair with Cleopatra). There is also the still surviving Mausoleum of Augustus, which he intended to be his tomb and resting place.

Politically, however, Augustus spent his entire regime trying to pretend he was not in fact a tyrant, which he in fact was. Augustus was a master of deception and dissimulation. He wished to convince everyone that he had restored the Republic. He avoided taking on titles like 'Dictator' or 'Dictator Perpetuo'. He was fundamentally a private citizen. A private citizen with the greatest wealth in the Roman imperium, with the entire Army in his pocket, with a list of clients and whole families dependent on his word and favor for their careers. He had that immense power which he never gave up. In the Senate, Augustus had the title of Princeps, the First Citizen, which meant he often spoke first in the Senate to debate legislation. Invariably, what Augustus spoke became law. There was no one bold/moral/stupid enough to challenge that. The one time the fiction cracked was the Marcus Primus Affair of 23 BCE. Primus was a Macedonian Governor charged with illegally starting a war against Thrace without Senatorial authority. At his trial, Primus claimed that he had waged war on Augustus' orders. The claim was shocking and disturbing at the time for its implications. If it was Augustus, then he had ordered a war without senatorial authority, something he had always pretended to honor in his earlier actions, and that meant that Augustus was to be tried for Primus' crime. But even if it was true, there was nothing the Senate could do about it because Augustus was the Boss of Bosses and there was nothing the senate could do about it. For Augustus, the situation risked bringing the deception of the state to bare, i.e. the Republic was over and Rome was now under his boot, or sandal if you will. Augustus himself was called to testify in the trial, where he denied Primus' claims. The Jury voted him guilty but the voting was close enough to suggest that some believed Primus' claims. That close shave was the nearest Augustus came to being confronted with his deception in his lifetime. And after Primus' death by execution, his attorney who had proposed said strategy to invoke the Emperor as a 'get out of jail for free' card was executed without trial, a year later. Augustus was definitely popular and didn't need to break people's heads all the time but he still broke people's heads when he felt he had to send a message.

In his personal life, Augustus was often brazen and wilder than the image of piety he proclaimed. In the period of his youth and during the Civil War, he was a major womanizer, given to seducing the wives of senators and other patrons. Most disturbing is his marriage to his wife, Livia. She had previously been married to the Roman Senator, Tiberius Claudius Nero (the biological father of the Emperor Tiberius in fact). During the Civil War, Nero had fought against Octavian and he and his young family had been on the run. Octavian however lusted after his wife Livia and eventually through force and coercion, he forced Nero to divorce Livia and surrender custody of his child to him. The fact that Octavian was a wife-stealer much in the way of Rome's founders who had abducted the Sabine Woman, was a source of ribaldry even at Octavian and Livia's wedding. After that, Octavian and Livia are recorded to have had a long happy marriage, as far as one can tell. While popular fiction would like to imagine a cunning and scheming Lady Macbeth, it was truly unlikely that Livia had much agency in the situation of Octavian stealing her from her husband. Livia attained the title Livia Augusta and became the model of the roman Matriarch, even appearing in statuary and coinage, a rarity for Roman women, but not at all uncommon in other kingdoms. The elevation of Octavian's family to positions of authority was itself a mark of royalty, and not at all a sign of Republican virtue. Augustus even after his marriage to Livia was rumored for his adultery. Nonetheless, he would later make adultery illegal in Rome and punishable by exile. The fact that he was himself a major practitioner was of course not brought up, both out of fear of violence and also out of the indignity of acknowledging oneself to have been one of the Emperor's many cuckolds. The biggest victim of Augustus' hypocrisy of course was his daughter, Julia, from his first wife Scribonia (who he had cast aside to be with Livia). Julia was regarded to be a 'party girl' who had been seduced by some men, and who was also somewhat involved with the poet Ovid (the facts are not clear). Augustus banished both of them to the frontiers of his Empire and refused to ever let them return no matter their protests.

In military terms, Augustus was a consolidator rather than an expansionist. After defeating Cleopatra and conquering Egypt, he paid court to the tomb of Alexander the Great, and discussed the Macedonian who was drawn to conquest, while Augustus believed the harder task was ruling the domain after the conquest. Most of his Empire was spent outside Rome, traveling to various provinces and keeping an eye on the army. Under one man rule, everything was monopolized, including titles, honors, recognition. In his reign, Augustus experienced two major defeats and setbacks. In the North, one of his commanders, Varus, faced a brutal defeat the Battle of Teutoberg Forest leading him to lament, "Quinctilus Varus, where are my legions" as a non-sequitur in his later life. In the East, Augustus sponsored an expedition into Arabia in 26 BCE which faced a major setback and defeat. These experiences confirmed his suspicion and belief that contrary to the dictum of Jupiter in The Aeneid that Rome would inherit an "empire without limit", governing the Empire in fact required a firm awareness of limitations. Most of his empire was maintained via propaganda. He was obsessed with having statues made of himself, always showing him in youthful aspect even when he grew old. There are more statues of Augustus than any other figure in classical antiquity that have been unearthed, statues spread far and wide, you would similar statues in North Africa as you would in Italy and the Middle East.

He was succeeded by his stepson Tiberius. The Julio-Claudian Family became the first imperial dynasty and his successors became more openly imperial than he had been, prone to displays of opulence, decadence, and grandeur that the austere Augustus would have scorned, at least publicly. Eventually they would be toppled by military commanders who in turn would form other kinds of dynasties. But fundamentally, the system of one-man rule patented by Augustus endured for more than four centuries, and in the Eastern Roman Empire, more than a thousand years after his death. He became the model of a wise and just ruler in the Middle Ages and beyond. The rise of Republican sentiment in the Age of The Enlightenment however cast him as the gravedigger of the Republic and looked at him with negative judgment. In the 20th Century, many dictators such as Mussolini, Kemal Ataturk, Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin declared themselves to be fans of Augustus, as do many modern tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg, a fan club that many consider inherently unsavory.

Historians however balance the good with the bad. The consensus settles on the idea that the Fall of the Republic isn't solely Augustus' fault. Given the circumstances of the political situation of his youth, a time of political violence and bitter factionalism, it's plausible to argue that Octavian had sufficient cause to believe that he needed to act out of self-defense to protect himself, his family, and his friends. All of them were liable to be targeted through violence and proscription in the wake of Caesar's death. Augustus contended primarily against enemies (Brutus, Mark Antony) who weren't better than him in any sense. Still it can't be denied that once Augustus attained absolute power, he did not choose by any means to uphold the Republic or reform it any sense. Rather he made the political choices most beneficial to his power and his family and acted entirely out of selfish intentions. That he brought about peace was more a case of attrition (outlasting enemies and any other rival faction that could challenge him) than through any clear moral reckoning. His Uncle Julius pardoned enemies when it wasn't advantageous and expedient for him to spare them. Augustus never countenanced such actions, and he ruthlessly killed, executed, destroyed any who stood his way or countered his will. In popular culture, he is often prone to either Historical Villain Upgrade or Historical Hero Upgrade depending on which part of his career you narrate. Since his life was so long, it is difficult to tell a complete picture that balances his ruthless ambition and the brutal extermination of his enemies with his massive public works programs and 45 years of competent administration. Most films focus far more on his self-destructive imperial successors since the excesses of Caligula and Nero are inherently more entertaining than the competent administration of a despotic regime. In other cases, Augustus is featured as a background character in works that focus on Caesar, Antony, and Cleopatra.

Tropes as portrayed in fiction:

• Cult of Personality: Pompey the Great and uncle Julius Caesar had started it, but Augustus took it to a higher level.^note A notable innovation by Augustus was that he never aged in his portraits. While the busts of Caesar and Pompey show balding, middle-aged men, Augustus was always depicted as a fresh-faced, god-like youth. He more or less hired Horace, Ovid and Virgil and made them part of his permanent staff. When Ovid started to get uppity, Augustus had him exiled to the island Tomis on the Black Sea. Virgil, who in his earlier works had written about the victims of Octavian's purges, ended up writing The Aeneid which is state propaganda (albeit very well written and complex).
  Mary Beard: One of his most significant and lasting innovations was to flood the Roman world with his portrait: heads stamped on the small change in people's pockets, life-size or larger statues in marble and bronze standing in public squares and temples...This was on a vastly bigger scale than anything of the sort before...about 250 statues, not to mention images on jewels and gems, found right across Roman territories and beyond, from Spain to Turkey and Sudan, show Augustus in many different guises, from heroic conqueror to pious priest.
• Expy: Tavi a.k.a. Gaius Octavian from the Codex Alera is heavily patterned off of Augustus, right down to the name and the unexpected rise to power, albeit somewhat (though not entirely) Lighter and Softer than his real counterpart, with the manipulative old serpent personality being given to his arch-politician grandfather, Gaius Sextus.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Being a somewhat obscure relation of Julius Caesar, most stories depict Octavian's rivals failing to anticipate Caesar leaving everything to him in his will, the loyalty of Caesar's legions to the name or indeed Octavian's political savvy.
• Heel–Face Turn: From blood-spattered triumvir to wise and benevolent father of the nation. Bridging the diametrically opposed retrospective portrayals of the first emperor is a weighty topic in the historiography of the early Empire. Even with his extensive Cult of Personality considered, melding the brutality of Octavian with the benevolence of Augustus is a challenging one for historians, both then and now. On the matter, historian Anthony Everitt states:
  Anthony Everitt: Opposites do not have to be mutually exclusive, and we are not obliged to choose one or the other. The story of his career shows that Augustus was indeed ruthless, cruel, and ambitious for himself. This was only in part a personal trait, for upper-class Romans were educated to compete with one another and to excel. However, he combined an overriding concern for his personal interests with a deep-seated patriotism, based on a nostalgia of Rome's antique virtues. In his capacity as princeps, selfishness and selflessness coexisted in his mind. While fighting for dominance, he paid little attention to legality or to the normal civilities of political life. He was devious, untrustworthy, and bloodthirsty. But once he had established his authority, he governed efficiently and justly, generally allowed freedom of speech, and promoted the rule of law. He was immensely hardworking and tried as hard as any democratic parliamentarian to treat his senatorial colleagues with respect and sensitivity. He suffered from no delusions of grandeur.
• Heroic BSoD: Apparently his stoic façade dropped when he learned about the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest ^note  when an alliance of Germanic peoples ambushed and annihilated three Roman legions and their auxiliaries, led by Arminius, a Germanic warlord and a former ally of the Romans spending days in mourning without shaving and crying
  Quintili Vare, legiones redde! ^note  Quintilius Varus, give me back my legions!
• Historical Downgrade: One of his most popular depictions is in the BBC miniseries I, Claudius (based on the book), in which he's played by BRIAN BLESSED as a simple, kindly, emotional and rather oblivious man who never realizes that he's been dancing on the strings of his devious and manipulative wife Livia for practically his whole life. She even states confidently that she had to trick him into making every good decision he ever made during his rule.
• Historical Villain Upgrade: While his adoptive father is about equally likely to be depicted as hero or villain, Augustus is usually portrayed unsympathetically as a cruel and cold-blooded schemer. Even the ones that acknowledge his virtues (say, Rome), for that matter, tend to suggest that being brought up in the chaotic days of Caesar's dictatorship and having greatness thrust on him as his heir meant he chose to grow up and become as ruthless as his enemies far too fast.
• I Did What I Had to Do: Octavian had to commit to a lot of unsavory actions as Augustus to give rise to the Roman Empire. But he did it all to ensure Rome would survive the civil wars that tore apart the Republic.
  I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.
• I Have No Son!: His reaction when he learned about his daughter's antics. He banished her to a tiny island and is supposed to have remarked: "if only I had never married, or had died childless."
• Irony: He died on August 19th, during the month he named after himself.
• Just the First Citizen: Word-for-word; he preferred being called "first citizen of the state" instead of anything approaching "king". He did at least try to put up a facade of sharing power with the other members of his junta, possibly because of what happened when the previous guy got accused of being too ambitious.
• Madness Mantra: As shown in I, Claudius he never got over the loss of the Battle of Teutoberg Forest. Suetonius mentions that even years later, Augustus was known to mutter "Quintili Varus, legiones redde!" ("Quinctilus Varus, give me back my legions!")
• Meaningful Rename: He had several of these as his position and circumstances changed. He started out as Gaius Octavius, then after Caesar posthumously adopted him he became Gaius Julius Caesar. In 27BC he added the honorific title Augustus (meaning "August One") to his name and is typically just referred to as Augustus after this point. As he went along he also added other titles like Divi Filius (son of a god) and imperator (a title given to victorious generals). By the end of his life he was known as Imperator Caesar Divi Filius Augustus.
• Non-Action Guy: To a point. Many of his military victories, including the big one, Actium, were won by Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, while Augustus was a master politician (and was no coward for it—Roman political life was no picnic). In modern media, this is skewed and he becomes a borderline Sissy Villain.
• Old Shame: For one of the grubbier acts of his early career: signing off on the murder of Cicero. He would later protest that this was Mark Antony's decision, and that he argued against it for two days. Whether this was genuine Cassandra Truth from someone who had no qualms about adding dozens of other men to the proscription lists or just a retrospective attempt to shift the blame away from himself for a squalid episode will never be known for sure.^note The fact that Augustus would keep the dead man's son, Cicero Minor, as an ally throughout the latter's record in history suggests he did intend to make amends for it.
• One-Steve Limit: After Julius Caesar posthumously adopted him, Octavian also officially became Gaius Julius Caesar. To avoid confusion, works in which he features will normally refer to him as either Octavian or Augustus.
• The Purge: Initiated one after he took power with Antony and Lepidus, targeting not only their enemies but men who just happened to be very rich.
• Sickly Prodigy: While undoubtedly a talented politician and competent general, Augustus always was of poor health and fell ill often. It surprised him as much as anyone that he lived to a ripe old age.
• The Social Expert: One of his successors, four centuries later would comment on this quality; Emperor Julian the Apostate, in one of his comic satires noted that he was famous for having this:
  Emperor Julian: Octavianus entered, changing colour continually, like a chameleon, turning now pale now red; one moment his expression was gloomy, sombre, and overcast, the next he unbent and showed all the charms of Aphrodite and the Graces. Moreover in the glances of his eyes he was fain to resemble mighty Helios, for he preferred that none who approached should be able to meet his gaze...what a changeable monster is this! What mischief will he do us?
• Stop Being Stereotypical: Was pretty straight edge and reportedly got exasperated with the hedonism and decadence he saw from Romans. Particularly, he was troubled by his daughter Julia's alleged promiscuity. Say it with us, now:
  IS THERE ANYONE IN ROME WHO HAS NOT SLEPT WITH MY DAUGHTER?
• Succession Crisis: His efforts to avert one of these dominated the last few decades of his life. The big problem was that his preferred heirs kept dying before him. This was a major storyline in I, Claudius, which showed Livia killing them all to ensure that her son Tiberius, the heir Augustus least wanted, succeeded him.
• Technician Versus Performer: Compared to his namesake. Augustus evidently knew and felt any successful regime of his that was to survive should be ably and competently managed foremost.
  Plutarch: He [Julius Caesar] learned that Alexander, having completed nearly all his conquests by the time he was thirty-two years old, was at an utter loss to know what he should do during the rest of his life, whereat Augustus expressed his surprise that Alexander did not regard it as a greater task to set in order the empire which he had won than to win it.
• True Companions: Marcus Agrippa and Gaius Maecenas, friends with the first emperor from a young age. They served as his chief general and chief administrator respectively.

Depictions, Allusions, And Others: