AVGVSTVS

Augustus did not inherit an empire. He inherited a civil war and a name.

In March 44 BC, Julius Caesar was assassinated in the Theatre of Pompey. His will, read publicly days later, adopted his 18-year-old great-nephew Gaius Octavius as his son and heir. The boy arrived in Rome to claim the inheritance and found a republic in convulsions: Caesar's assassins still at large, Mark Antony maneuvering for power, the Senate split, the legions choosing sides. Over the next thirteen years, Octavian did what no one thought an untested teenager could do. He outlasted all of them.

He formed the Second Triumvirate with Antony and Lepidus, defeated Caesar's assassins at Philippi in 42 BC, sidelined Lepidus by 36 BC, and spent the next five years in a slow public rupture with Antony, whose alliance with Cleopatra gave Octavian the casus belli he needed. At Actium, 2 September 31 BC, Octavian's fleet under Agrippa destroyed Antony and Cleopatra's forces in the Ionian Sea. Within a year, both were dead by suicide in Alexandria, and Octavian held sole power over the Roman world at the age of 32.

On 16 January 27 BC, the Senate voted him the name Augustus, "the revered one," a word borrowed from religious augury. The Republic was not abolished. It was simply made to orbit around one man. The Principate had begun.

The empire Augustus consolidated stretched from Hispania to Syria, from the Alps to the first cataract of the Nile. Rome's population was approaching one million, the largest city in Europe and the Mediterranean. Egypt, newly annexed, became the personal property of the emperor and the grain basket of the city. Augustus's Rome was still mostly brick and timber when he arrived; by his death, it was marble. He famously said he had found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble, and he was not exaggerating as much as Roman emperors usually did.

Abroad, the reign was not a time of peace so much as a time of managed war. Campaigns pushed into Germania, Pannonia, and the Alps. The Teutoburg disaster of 9 AD, three legions annihilated under Varus in the German forests, halted Roman expansion at the Rhine and scarred Augustus for the rest of his life. He was said to have wandered the palace at night striking his head against the walls and crying out the words that would echo through imperial memory for centuries.

Culturally, it was the golden age of Latin literature. Virgil composed the Aeneid on imperial commission. Horace wrote the Odes. Livy wrote his history of Rome. Ovid was still a young man writing the Metamorphoses and had not yet been exiled to the Black Sea for reasons Augustus never fully explained.

Augustus's achievement was not conquest but reconstruction. After a century of civil war, he rebuilt the Roman state with a patient, obsessive attention to legitimacy. He refused the title of king. He refused the title of dictator. He accepted princeps, first citizen, and accumulated real power through a stack of individually modest offices that, together, made him untouchable. He held the tribunicia potestas for life, giving him sacrosanct authority over legislation. He held imperium proconsulare over the frontier provinces, giving him command of the legions. He became Pontifex Maximus in 12 BC, putting state religion under his direction.

He remade the senatorial and equestrian classes, the tax system, the army, the provincial administration, the census, the roads, the water supply, the fire brigade, the grain dole, and the laws on marriage and adultery. The Res Gestae Divi Augusti, the autobiographical inscription he left at his mausoleum, lists 35 public works projects in Rome alone, from the Forum of Augustus to the Temple of Apollo on the Palatine.

His family, though, he could not reform. His daughter Julia was exiled for adultery in 2 BC. His chosen heirs, Marcellus, Gaius, Lucius, all died young. By the end, the succession fell to Tiberius, his stepson by his third marriage, a man Augustus did not like and did not trust but had no one else left to give the empire to.

He died at Nola on 19 August 14 AD, supposedly with the words, Acta est fabula, plaudite, "The play is over, applaud."

The Senate declared him Divus Augustus, the Divine Augustus, within weeks of his death. A temple was built to him on the Palatine. The month of Sextilis was renamed Augustus in his honor and remains so in most European languages today. His name became a title: every subsequent Roman emperor for 500 years was called Augustus. In the East, Byzantine emperors used the Greek equivalent, Sebastos, until 1453.

The Roman historiographical tradition treated him with reverence. Suetonius's Life of Augustus is one of the most admiring biographies in the Twelve Caesars. Tacitus, writing a century later, was more ambivalent. He understood that the Republic had ended under Augustus, and that the freedom of the Roman aristocracy had ended with it. Tacitus's opening to the Annals is one of the most famous sentences in Latin prose.

The line contains the whole Tacitean argument: Augustus did not save the Republic. He replaced it with monarchy and gave the monarchy a better name.

In modern memory, Augustus is the emperor against whom all others are measured. He is the template: long reign, patient consolidation, public modesty, private ruthlessness, cultural patronage, peaceful succession. The Julio-Claudians who followed him inherited the system he built, and most of them broke it in various ways. The good emperors of the second century, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius, are essentially Augustan revivals.

Every pope calling himself Pontifex Maximus is using Augustus's title. Every European monarch titled Kaiser or Tsar is using Augustus's name. The modern office of head of state, with its careful separation of ceremonial and executive powers, owes more to Augustus than to any other single figure in political history.