Roman Empire

Augustus

Princeps

Lifespan · 63 BCE – 14 CE

A brief orientation

Gaius Octavius — adopted as Caesar's son and political heir in Caesar's will — was eighteen when Caesar was assassinated in 44 BCE. He used the inheritance, the name and the political momentum of the Caesarian faction to make himself one of the three members of the Second Triumvirate, defeated the senatorial conspirators at Philippi in 42, gradually outmaneuvered his fellow triumvirs Lepidus and Marc Antony (the latter at the naval battle of Actium in 31 BCE), and emerged at the age of thirty-two as the sole effective ruler of the Roman world.

The constitutional settlement he then constructed — beginning with his "restoration of the Republic" in 27 BCE, when he took the name Augustus, and refined through several revisions over the next twenty years — preserved the magistracies, the senate, the elections and the language of the old Republic while concentrating effective political and military authority in his person. He lived another forty-one years in that role and died at seventy-five in 14 CE.

The sources

Augustus' own Res Gestae Divi Augusti — the autobiographical account he had inscribed on bronze tablets at his mausoleum — survives in stone copies (most famously the Monumentum Ancyranum). Suetonius' Life and Tacitus' opening pages of the Annales give the principal narrative and analytical treatments. Cassius Dio's later Roman History Books 51–56 treat the period at length.

What changed and what was kept

The genius of the Augustan settlement was its insistence that nothing had changed. The consulships were still held; the senate still met; the laws were still passed. What had changed was that the princeps — the "first citizen," Augustus' preferred title — controlled the provinces with the legions, controlled the public treasury, controlled the religious priesthoods, and was the only figure who could make political action effective. Tacitus opens the Annales with the famous summary judgement: the citizens accepted the new order because they preferred peace to the civil wars that had preceded it.

Why he matters for Virtue & Power

Augustus is the platform's central case for the transformation of a political form without the destruction of its outward shape. The careful construction of a regime that looks like the Republic while being something else — and the question of whether it could have gone otherwise — is the question the essay Augustus and the transformation of Rome takes up. The long Roman imperial order he inaugurated lasted, in some form, for the next five centuries in the west and fifteen in the east.

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