Augustus: The Life of Rome's First Emperor

by Anthony Everitt

Book Overview

He found Rome made of clay and left it made of marble. As Rome's first emperor, Augustus transformed the unruly Republic into the greatest empire the world had ever seen. His consolidation and expansion of Roman power two thousand years ago laid the foundations, for all of Western history to follow. Yet, despite Augustus's accomplishments, very few biographers have concentrated on the man himself, instead choosing to chronicle the age in which he...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0812970586
• ISBN13: 9780812970586
• Release Date: January 2006
• Publisher: Random House Trade
• Length: 432 Pages
• Weight: 1.04 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Great read!

This is definitely a keeper for my collection.

A cool, refreshing read.

Anthony Everitt’s style is engaging and concise. I really enjoyed his insights and perspectives on Augustus!

Augustus: The first, longest reigning and arguably best Roman emperor

Caesar Augustus gets a page in the New Testament. He is honored each year by the month of August. And yet...he is little known to the average person. Anthony Everitt has followed up his excellent biography of the Roman orator Cicero with this fine biograpy of Augustus (Octavian was his real name) who reigned form 27 BC-14 AD being succeeded by his stepson Tiberius who was the natural son of Augustus'wife Livia., Augustus was the grand-nephew of Julius Caesar. He was raised in patrician comfort in Rome and a small village about 20 miles from the metropolis of one million citizens and slaves. Augustus was a bright boy; knew several languages and enjoyed reading Greek and Roman literature. He went on military campaigns under the aegis of Caesar participating in the defeat of the first triumvirate assassins of Caesar (Brutus and Cassius) in the battle of Philippi in 42 BC. Augustus was frail; he was no great warrior like his heroes Caesar and Alexander the Great. He did have survival skills in the dangerous climate produced by Rome's various civil wars and civil upheavals as the Republic died to rise no more. Augustus defeated Mark Antony his chief rival for dictactorship. Octavian's legions destroyed Mark Antony and the latter's paramour Cleopatra at Actium in 31 BC. Augustus then held supreme power in Rome until his death in 14 AD. He may have been poisoned by his wife Livia or an enemy but this is all conjecture. Augustus turned Rome from a city of brick to a city of marble. He also governed the empire with high standards of administrative and military accountability. Augustus wisely went slowly in implementing his many reforms. During his reign the empire expanded eastward as the legions battled everyone from the various tribes of Gaul to the Germans to the distant Thracians. Augustus was something of a hypocrite in his personal life. He had countelss mistresses; was known for his spartan lifestyle but at times would luxuriate in lavish palaces. He enjoyed drinking to excess; gambling and could be cold blooded in killing his enemies. He did allow freedom of speech in Rome. He was a secular man who would do ceremonial obeisance to the many gods in the Roman pantheon. His family was highly dysfunctional! He banished his daughter Julia to a distant island due to her philandering ways. He never saw her again! His wife was a cold, calculating Roman matron who has been accused of poisoning her enemies. Augustus enjoyed the artls being a good friend of the poet Horace. During his reign Virgil wrote his epic "The Aneid" Much of the book deals with countless battles which occurred as Augustus fought his way to supreme power. The political and social scenes is also surveyed by Everitt. The book is written in a popular style which would serve the novice in ancient history well. Unfamiliar Latin terms; the organization of the Roman government, military and religious priesthood are briefly described. The book contains good maps of battles; is

"Ave!"

I know that it is difficult to write a comprehensive and correct biography of folks from over 2000 years ago, because of the scarcity of sources, and the questionable accuracy of those that survive. The author of this work has done an admirable job of sifting through what is available, and making an educated assumption as to what is correct. When there is some stark contrast among the sources, he gives his reasons for why he has chosed a particular situation. This is an excellent and thorough biography of the first Roman "Emperor", and it begins, of course, with Julius Caesar, and continues down, in an afterward, to the reign of Claudius. The writing is crisp and clear, and one never gets confused by the proliforation of Roman names. Everything is set out perfectly, and the reader goes from page to page learning new things, along with recognizing things that he or she has already known. A master of the biographers art!

Exactly what I was looking for...

I've been watching the HBO series "Rome" and wanted to read about the real Octavian's life. This book provided exactly what I was looking for. The book emphasised those important years between Julius Caesar's death and the deaths of Cleopatra and Antony during which Octavian went from a boy to an Emperor, and then the difficulties he faced within his family after he took power. I suppose that the highest praise I can give this book, is that I liked it so much, I plan on reading Everitt's book about Cicero as well.

"I found Rome built of clay; I leave it to you in marble."

Thorough, solid, scholarly, and balanced, this well-written biography immerses the reader in the haunted, violent, and sprawling empire whose focal point of power was Rome and its princeps, or first citizen, Gaius Octavius, later known as Augustus, the first and longest reigning and arguably most influential of all of Rome's emperors. Apart from giving us a well-drawn portrait of Octavius's rise to power through his adoptive father Julius Caesar and his long and eventful life thereafter, this biography places us in the midst of constant struggles for power and the ever-present border wars that were necessary to ensure the empire's expansion and stability. We are treated as well to the complex world of political intrigues, shifting loyalties, and shaky alliances that sewed the empire together over the years. Monumental events in the lives not only of Julius Caesar and Augustus, but also of Mark Antony, Cleopatra, Agrippa, and Tiberius, among many others, are portrayed in detail from available historical sources. The author is careful to guide us as to the accuracy of these sources, and his judgments seem reasonable and fair. In the end, Augustus was on balance a decent leader, but Everett doesn't spare us the princeps' vicious cruelties and shrewd drive to power as well as his willingness to sacrifice anyone and anything for the good of the empire and for the perpetuation of his bloodline after his death. Anyone wanting a thorough understanding of this period of the Roman Empire is well advised to read this work. Not only is it highly educational, but it's damned enjoyable reading.

An Excellent Biography

For a man who's achievement in terms of altering Roman history, Augustus Caesar has always stood (literally from the git-go) in the shadow of his magnificent great Uncle, Julius Caesar. There's a sort of magnificence to Caesar that Augustus simply couldn't match; where Caesar was a protean talent, equally at home in rhetoric, literature, art, ambition, or military genius, Augustus' talents were on a far more normal scale. That said, as was remarked by a grieving friend of Caesar's after the Ides of March, "If Caesar could find no way out, who can?"? And it was the 18-year-old Octavius who, over a 45-year-career, found that way out. Augustus' achievement was to ruthlessly pursue supreme personal power in Rome for 20 years, and to spend the next 40 years turning that power into a functioning system that prolonged the Roman Empire for at least 200 years, arguably until its demise, and provided the peaceful environment for some of its greatest Roman art and literature. When he was born, Rome was, as it had been for centuries, firmly in the political grip of an incredibly small, wealthy elite of Senators who essentially ran the Republic as their own personal preserve. When he died, men from all over the Empire were now actively involved in its administration, the grip of the "old boys club" on power politics was broken forever, and he managed to harness the incredible competitiveness of Roman politics to solve most, if not all, of the old Republic's problems while taming the aristocracy. He did this through a constant, thoughtful, trial-and-error process that managed - just! - not to offend the hypsensitive reactionary elements in the Republic while accommodating them to a new world in which Roman power, and Roman talent, had to be harnessed world-wide. An extraordinary achievement. This is simply the best biography of Augustus I have read on multiple levels (although, finally, his regime is receiving the kind of attention it has long deserved; another excellent recent book is Caesar's Legacy). Everett's biography of Cicero was superb, and he brings the same ability to condense multiple facts and sources to his biography of Augustus. While not bowing down in worship, neither does he show the unfortunate tendency of late-20th-century biographers to simply write off Augustus as some kind of proto-Mussolini. After a thorough sketch of the disintegrating Republic, he fairly notes the ruthlessness and power-mad qualities of Augustus' earlier career, the vicious quality of much of the Triumvirate. Of course, after Caesar's murder, Augustus was playing a zero-sum game in which victory or destruction were his only options. More interesting to me is the quiet crawl towards a proto-empire that, if all of Octavian's dynastic plans had not suffered destruction, might have worked far better than the system did under later Julio-Claudian Emperors. In fact, nothing shows up Augustus' extraordinary qualities so much as the fact that his decades-long ba