Augustus: Rome's first emperor

Augustus was not a great general, and he knew it. Sickly, cautious and only eighteen when Julius Caesar was murdered, he outlasted and outmaneuvered every rival in thirteen years of civil war, leaving the battlefield to better soldiers such as his friend Agrippa. Then he did what Caesar had failed to do: he made one-man rule acceptable to Rome. Britannica calls him one of the great administrative geniuses of history, the founder of a durable Roman peace, the Pax Romana.²

Early life

Gaius Octavius was born on 23 September 63 BC into a prosperous family long settled at Velitrae (Velletri), southeast of Rome. His father, the first of the family to sit in the Senate, died when the boy was four. What lifted the family out of the ordinary was his mother, Atia: she was the daughter of Julius Caesar's sister Julia, which made Octavius Caesar's great-nephew.³

Caesar took an interest in him early. At twelve the boy gave the funeral speech for his grandmother Julia before the people. In 46 BC he rode in Caesar's African triumph, though he had been too young to fight, and the next year, barely recovered from a serious illness, he followed the dictator to Spain. He was studying at Apollonia, on the Adriatic coast of what is now Albania, when news came in March 44 BC that Caesar had been murdered.⁴

Caesar's heir

Back in Italy he learned that Caesar's will had adopted him as son and made him chief heir. The eighteen-year-old accepted the dangerous inheritance and took the name Gaius Julius Caesar; historians call him Octavian until 27 BC. Mark Antony, Caesar's chief lieutenant, held the dictator's papers and money and refused to hand them over.⁵

Octavian answered by building his own power. "At the age of nineteen," he later wrote, "on my own initiative and at my own expense, I raised an army." Caesar's veterans flocked to the dictator's heir. The Senate, urged on by Cicero, broke with Antony, gave the young man senatorial rank and sent him with the consuls against Antony at Mutina (Modena) in 43 BC. Antony was driven off, but both consuls died, and Octavian's soldiers forced the Senate to give him a consulship at nineteen.⁶

Triumvir and Philippi

Then he changed sides. On 27 November 43 BC Octavian, Antony and Lepidus were formally appointed triumvirs for five years with dictatorial powers to "reconstitute the state." They outlawed their political enemies in the proscriptions, and many were put to death.⁷

Caesar's assassins, Brutus and Cassius, held the east. In 42 BC the triumvirs crossed the Adriatic and fought them in two battles at Philippi. Octavian was ill, and Antony led; in the first battle Octavian's camp was overrun and he barely escaped to Antony's lines. In the second the Republicans were broken, and Brutus and Cassius both took their own lives.⁸ › Battle of Philippi, 42 BC

The struggle with Antony

Antony took the rich east; Octavian took the harder task of settling the veterans on land in Italy. The confiscations provoked a war led by Antony's brother Lucius, which ended when Octavian starved him out of Perusia (Perugia). In 38 BC Octavian married Livia Drusilla, who remained his wife for the rest of his life.⁹

The war at sea against Sextus Pompeius, the son of Pompey the Great, who held Sicily and could starve Rome of grain, went badly at first. It was won in 36 BC off Naulochus in Sicily by Octavian's fleet under his boyhood friend Marcus Agrippa. The third triumvir, Lepidus, was then pushed aside, leaving Octavian and Antony to share the Roman world. From 35 to 33 BC Octavian campaigned in person in Illyricum and Dalmatia, where he was wounded, to give himself military credit to match Antony's.¹⁰

Meanwhile Antony lived in Egypt with Cleopatra, its queen, and made territorial gifts to her. Octavian turned it against him. When the alliance finally broke in 32 BC, he made public the will Antony had left in Rome, which seemed to prove Cleopatra's power over him, and Rome declared war, not on Antony, but on the foreign queen.¹¹

Actium

In 31 BC Antony and Cleopatra brought their fleet and army to western Greece and camped at Actium, at the mouth of the Ambracian Gulf. Octavian and Agrippa cut their communications and penned the fleet inside the gulf. Short of supplies and losing allies to desertion, Antony tried to break out by sea on 2 September 31 BC. The battle was hard fought until Cleopatra's squadron fled, and Antony followed her with a few ships. The rest of his fleet surrendered, and his army gave up soon after.¹² › Battle of Actium, 31 BC

In 30 BC Octavian took Egypt. Antony and Cleopatra killed themselves; Caesarion, Cleopatra's son by Julius Caesar, was hunted down and put to death. Egypt became Octavian's personal possession. At thirty-three he was master of the entire Roman world.¹³

The first emperor

Octavian remembered that Caesar had been killed for ruling openly as a dictator. In January 27 BC he made a show of handing the state back to the Senate and the people. "I transferred the republic from my own control to the will of the senate and the Roman people," he wrote, and he received in return the name Augustus, a word with an ancient religious ring. He kept direct command of the provinces that held most of the army. In 23 BC, after a near-fatal illness, he gave up the consulship and took instead a higher command over the provinces and the power of a tribune for life.¹⁴

Behind the republican facade he rebuilt the state. He cut the swollen civil war armies into a standing professional force, posted a permanent guard, the praetorians, in and around Rome, and in AD 6 founded a military treasury, funded by new taxes, to pay soldiers' retirement bonuses. In 20 BC diplomacy, not war, persuaded the Parthians to return the legionary standards they had taken from Crassus. The doors of the temple of Janus, closed in peacetime, had been shut only twice in Rome's history before him; under Augustus they were closed three times.¹⁵

Command style

Augustus fought only two foreign wars in person, Suetonius notes: in Dalmatia as a young man and against the Cantabrians of northern Spain after Actium, a campaign his health forced him to leave. Britannica is blunt: he needed his relatives and friends in the military sphere "because he was not a great commander." His genius was in choosing and trusting others. Agrippa won Naulochus and Actium for him; his stepsons Tiberius and Drusus carried the frontier to the upper Danube and, for a time, to the Elbe.¹⁶

He was a strategist rather than a tactician. He saw that war was won by money, loyalty and timing: he paid Caesar's veterans out of his own pocket, won the propaganda war, and let Antony's prestige drain away before he struck. His campaigns of conquest, conducted through others under his auspices, added the Alpine lands, the Balkans up to the Danube and northwestern Spain. His own testament lists Cantabria, Aquitania, Pannonia, Dalmatia, Illyricum and the Alpine tribes among the lands subdued.¹⁷

Later life and death

The search for an heir darkened his old age. His nephew Marcellus died in 23 BC, Agrippa in 12 BC, and his grandsons Gaius and Lucius Caesar, whom he had adopted, both died young. In AD 4 he adopted his stepson Tiberius. In 2 BC the Senate and people hailed him Father of his Country.¹⁸

His last years brought the worst military crises of the reign. In AD 6 Pannonia and Illyricum revolted. Then in AD 9 the German leader Arminius ambushed and destroyed three legions under Publius Quinctilius Varus in the Teutoburg Forest. According to Suetonius, Augustus let his hair and beard grow for months and would beat his head against a door, crying, "Quintilius Varus, give me back my legions!" The plan to conquer Germany up to the Elbe was abandoned.¹⁹ › Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, AD 9

Augustus died at Nola, near Naples, on 19 August AD 14, a month before his seventy-sixth birthday, after a long private talk with Tiberius, who succeeded him. On 17 September the Senate enrolled him among the gods of the Roman state. He left an account of his achievements, the Res Gestae, to be engraved on bronze pillars in Rome; the best-preserved copy survives on the walls of the Temple of Rome and Augustus at Ankara.²⁰

Legacy and memory

The system Augustus built outlived him by centuries. Britannica's verdict is that his reorganization turned the decaying Republic into a monarchy "with many centuries of life ahead of it," and created a durable peace, based on easy communications and flourishing trade, that carried Greek and Roman culture to later ages.²¹

He was also a master of his own image. With Maecenas as patron, Virgil, Horace and Livy wrote in the new age, and the Altar of Peace (Ara Pacis), dedicated in 13 BC, and the Forum of Augustus with its Temple of Mars the Avenger still stand in Rome. Britannica warns against the usual picture of a cruel young triumvir who mellowed with age: when plots demanded it, the old emperor was still ruthless.²²

Read about his great-uncle Julius Caesar, the battles of Philippi and Actium, or the other greatest commanders of ancient Rome, among them Trajan, who abandoned Augustus's policy of not extending the frontiers.