Episode 57. Augustus, Part One: The Man Who Would Not Be King

Sources and Historiography

This episode has been drafted primarily from Suetonius's Life of Augustus. Suetonius was writing in the early second century CE, a century after Augustus's death, with access to the imperial archives as Hadrian's private secretary. Almost all the physical description, the working habits, the superstitions, and the details of the household come from his Life. In the cases where they do not come from Suetonius, they are usually in Cassius Dio, writing another century later still from Greek-speaking Bithynia in Asia Minor—modern northwestern Turkey.

Both sources have limitations. Suetonius is thematic, rather than chronological. He groups anecdotes by category—ancestry, physique, virtues, vices, notable sayings, superstitions, death—rather than narrating events in order. This makes his Life of Augustus a strange reading experience for a modern biographer, because it is not really a biography, in our sense. It is a character portrait assembled from archival material and organised by theme. It is also, in places, organised to illustrate a moral conclusion Suetonius has already reached. When he reports that Augustus was moderate in his diet and modest in his household, he is not only telling us what the archive says. He is also telling us what a good emperor ought to look like, and holding Augustus up as the example.

Dio is more chronological, but further from the events and working, for this period, from sources he does not name. His account of the 23 BCE illness is the fullest we have. It is not necessarily the most accurate, because the details of a sickroom scene reach him across two centuries, and what he records may already have been shaped by the political uses to which the story was put.

What neither of them can see is the ordinary population of the empire. Augustan Rome had roughly a million inhabitants. The Italian peninsula had perhaps six million. The empire, from Spain to the Euphrates, held fifty or sixty million. Almost nothing in Suetonius or Dio is about any of them. The empire that Augustus administered through his correspondence did not, in the sources, contain the people it was administering. Tacitus's famous analytical verdict, quoted last episode, that the principate was built on grain for the people, bonuses for the army, and the sweetness of peace for everyone else, is, among other things, the rare ancient moment when one of the senatorial historians looks outside the senatorial chamber and names who the settlement was actually for. It was for the soldiers who got their pay, for the urban poor who got their grain, and for the propertied classes who got safety. The people it was paid for by were the provinces, which Augustus governed, but the sources do not describe.

That absence is the largest thing about the Augustan period that the literary tradition does not tell us. The archaeology is doing some of that work now. The inscriptions, the papyri from Egypt, the provincial census records—these are being used by modern scholars to recover the empire that Augustus built for other people to live in. In this episode, I have followed the literary sources because the character portrait is what they are best at, and because the question of who Augustus was as a person is the question the sources were actually trying to answer.

Works CitedPrimary Sources

• Cassius Dio. Roman History, Books 52–53. The fullest narrative of the settlement years and the 23 BCE illness.
• Donatus. Life of Virgil. For the literary patronage relationships.
• Horace. Odes, Books 1–3. Published in 23 BCE, the same year as the illness.
• Res Gestae Divi Augusti. Augustus's own account, read as the official version.
• Suetonius. Life of Augustus. The indispensable source for character, physical detail, working habits, and household.

Secondary Sources

• Eck, Werner. The Age of Augustus. Blackwell, 2003. Short, rigorous, excellent on the mechanisms of the settlement.
• Galinsky, Karl. Augustan Culture. Princeton University Press, 1996. The standard modern account of the cultural programme and its poets.
• Goldsworthy, Adrian. Augustus: First Emperor of Rome. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2014. The best modern biography, particularly strong on the administrative improvisation of the early settlement.
• Syme, Ronald. The Roman Revolution. Oxford University Press, 1939. The foundational modern analysis, still essential after eighty-five years.

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