Augustus Caesar

63 BC – 14 · Generation II · First Roman emperor (r. 27 BC – AD 14) · Julio-Claudian

Augustus, born Gaius Octavius in Rome on 23 September 63 BC, founded the Roman Empire and ruled it as its first emperor from 27 BC until his death in AD 14. His father, also named Gaius Octavius, belonged to a prosperous equestrian family from Velitrae and rose to govern Macedonia, but died in about 59 BC, and the boy was educated by his stepfather, Lucius Marcius Philippus. The connection that made his career came through his mother Atia, a niece of Julius Caesar.

In March 44 BC the eighteen-year-old was at Apollonia in Illyria when news came that Caesar had been murdered. The dictator’s will named him principal heir, with three-quarters of the estate, on condition that he take Caesar’s name. Against his stepfather’s advice he accepted. Historians call him Octavian for the years that followed, a name he never used himself. He recruited troops among Caesar’s veterans, marched on Rome in 43 BC and became the youngest consul the city had elected. Later that year he joined Mark Antony and Marcus Lepidus in a triumvirate, which began by outlawing and killing its political enemies, and in October 42 BC the armies of Antony and Octavian defeated Caesar’s assassins Brutus and Cassius at Philippi.

The victors divided the Roman world among themselves, and then fell out. Lepidus was pushed aside in 36 BC after the war in Sicily against Sextus Pompey. Antony, who had married Octavian’s sister Octavia in 40 BC, allied himself with Cleopatra of Egypt and became her lover, and Octavian turned Rome against him by taking Antony’s will from the keeping of the Vestal Virgins and having it read out in the Senate. On 2 September 31 BC Octavian’s fleet, commanded by Marcus Agrippa, won the battle of Actium in Greece. Antony and Cleopatra killed themselves the following year, Cleopatra’s son by Caesar was put to death, and Egypt became the victor’s personal property.

Master of the Roman world at thirty-two, Octavian was determined not to be seen grasping at power as Caesar had been. In January 27 BC he ceremonially returned his powers to the Senate, which handed them back and gave him the name Augustus, “the revered”. He called himself only princeps, first citizen. The Senate, the magistrates and the assemblies kept their places in what was presented as a free republic, while he held command of most of the armies and about half the provinces. In 23 BC, after a serious illness, he gave up the consulship and received instead the powers of a tribune. He became pontifex maximus in 12 BC and was hailed as father of his country in 2 BC, and the month of Sextilis was renamed in his honour. This system, the principate, lasted until the crisis of the third century.

His government was thorough. Under him Rome took in Egypt, Dalmatia, Pannonia, Noricum and Raetia and finished the conquest of Hispania, and in 20 BC he recovered by negotiation the standards that Crassus had lost to the Parthians. He overhauled taxation and the coinage, laid out roads with an official courier service, and created a standing professional army, the Praetorian Guard, and police and fire brigades for the capital. The city itself was rebuilt, with a new forum and its temple of Mars Ultor, the Theatre of Marcellus, the Ara Pacis, and the public baths built by Agrippa. Augustus is said to have boasted that he found Rome a city of brick and left it one of marble. Virgil, whose patron he was, composed the Aeneid in these years. The great failure came in AD 9, when Arminius, leader of the Cherusci, wiped out three legions under Quinctilius Varus in the Teutoburg Forest, and Rome gave up its ambitions beyond the Rhine.

The succession troubled him for decades. A marriage to Scribonia, contracted in 40 BC for political reasons, gave him his only surviving child, Julia. He divorced Scribonia and in 38 BC married Livia, who remained his wife for the rest of his life. One possible heir after another died before him: his nephew Marcellus in 23 BC, Agrippa in 12 BC, and Julia’s sons Lucius and Gaius Caesar, whom he had adopted, in AD 2 and AD 4. Julia herself he banished for adultery in 2 BC, under the moral laws he had introduced. In AD 4 he adopted his stepson Tiberius, Livia’s son, who succeeded him.

Augustus died at Nola on 19 August AD 14, aged seventy-five. Tacitus and Cassius Dio both claimed that Livia poisoned him, a story many modern historians dismiss. His ashes were placed in his mausoleum in Rome, the Senate declared him a god, and his own account of his achievements, the Res Gestae, was inscribed in bronze in front of the tomb.

Place in the family

Augustus Caesar was the younger of 2 children of Gaius Octavius of Velitrae and Atia Balba recorded in this archive.
The archive records 5 of his descendants, across 4 generations.

Images

Marble head of the young Octavian, dated to about the time of Philippi in 42 BC (Archaeological Museum of Spoleto). (Following Hadrian, CC BY-SA 2.0)
Gold aureus of Octavian, struck about 30 BC (British Museum). (PHGCOM, public domain)
Augustus with his head veiled as pontifex maximus, a statue of the late first century BC (Palazzo Massimo, Rome). (Vicenç Valcárcel Pérez, CC BY-SA 4.0)
The Mausoleum of Augustus in Rome, where his ashes were placed in AD 14. (MumblerJamie, CC BY-SA 2.0)

One of 17 people of Julio-Claudian (85 BC–68) in this archive. Rome’s first imperial family: the Julii and the Claudii joined by marriage and adoption, Augustus to Nero.

Parents

Gaius Octavius of Velitrae (100 BC – 59 BC)
Atia Balba (85 BC – 43 BC)

Siblings

Octavia the Younger (69 BC – 11 BC)

Partners

Married Scribonia of Rome (70 BC – 16) in 40 BC; the marriage was dissolved in 38 BC — one child together
Married Livia Drusilla (59 BC – 29) in 38 BC

Children

Julia the Elder (39 BC – 14)
Tiberius Caesar (42 BC – 37)

Life

63 BC — Born
40 BC — Married Scribonia
38 BC — Parted from Scribonia
38 BC — Married Livia
14 — Died

Sources

Augustus · Wikipedia
Augustus · World History Encyclopedia
Augustus · Livius.org