Augustus

AUGUSTUS (63 BCE–14 CE), Roman emperor. Born Gaius Octavius, he was the grandnephew of Julius Caesar. Adopted by Caesar, and made his chief heir at nineteen, Octavius built upon Caesar's name, charisma, military success, political connections, and fortune. Calculating, opportunistic, an unfailingly shrewd judge of men and circumstances, he emerged in 31 BCE from thirteen years of political chaos and civil war triumphant over Mark Antony and sole master of the Roman world.

Exhausted by the effects of civil war and seeking only peace and a return of order and prosperity, Roman citizens and provincial subjects alike hailed Octavius as a savior sent by divine Providence. He did not fall short of their expectations. To mark the beginning of a new order, he assumed the name Augustus in 27 BCE. In a series of gradual steps, he restructured the Roman political system. While preserving the forms of republican government, he in effect established a monarchy, concentrating in his own hands all real power, political, military, financial, and legal. This power was used with great and enduring success to reform the administration of the provinces, the finances of the Roman state, and every aspect of military and civil life. In so doing he laid the basis for two centuries of unparalleled peace and prosperity in western Europe and throughout the Mediterranean world. The golden age of Rome's empire, "the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous" (Gibbon), was the supreme legacy of Augustus.

Himself deeply pious, Augustus understood fully the important role that religion plays in securing that unity of shared belief that is essential to the integration and successful functioning of a pluralistic society. Through carefully orchestrated and highly effective propaganda techniques, he projected the image of himself as a divinely sent savior; and the very name he assumed, Augustus, evoked in Latin and in its Greek form, Sebastos, an aura of divine consecration and charismatic authority.

Augustus undertook a thorough reform of Roman state religion. He restored some eighty-two temples that had fallen into decay and built numerous new ones. He revitalized old cult forms and priesthoods, such as the lares compitales and the Fratres Arvales, and instituted new ones, such as Pax Augusta and the Seviri Augustales. He carefully steered public approval of his person and policies into religious channels. Particularly in the Greek provinces of the East, he permitted himself to be worshiped as a god. Roman state cult celebrated the divine element and creative force that resided in Augustus through the cult of the Genius Augusti. Religious reform and innovation were linked to programs of social and moral reform, aimed at restoring traditional Roman values of service and piety toward country, family, and the gods.

The Augustan program tapped the wellsprings of popular piety in an age of religious revival. It mobilized in its service literary and artistic talent of enduring genius: Vergil's Aeneid, Horace's Roman Odes and Carmen saeculare, Livy's history of Rome, and the iconography of the Altar of Augustan Peace (the Ara Pacis) at Rome all celebrated, each in its own medium, the message that the gods themselves had willed the peace-bringing and benevolent rule of Rome and Augustus over the entire human race.

The best-balanced introduction to Augustus and his achievement is H. H. Scullard's study From the Gracchi to Nero, 5th ed. (London, 1983), which includes extensive bibliographical notes. Recent but somewhat superficial accounts of Roman religion in the age of Augustus include Continuity and Change in Roman Religion, by J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz (Oxford, 1979), pp. 55–100, and Religion and Statecraft among the Romans, by Alan Wardman (London, 1982), pp. 63–79. For interpretative studies of Augustus's religious policy within the context of traditional Roman religion, see my Princeps a Diis Electus: The Divine Election of the Emperor as a Political Concept at Rome (Rome, 1977), pp. 121–130, 189–219, and my following contributions to Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt, vol. 2.17.2, (Berlin and New York, 1981): "The Cult of Jupiter and Roman Imperial Ideology," pp. 56–69; "The Theology of Victory at Rome," pp. 804–825; and "The Cult of Virtues and Roman Imperial Ideology," pp. 884–889.

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Bowersock, Glen W. "The Pontificate of Augustus." In Between Republic and Empire: Interpretations of Augustus and His Principate, edited by Kurt A. Raaflaub and Mark Toher, pp. 380–394. Berkeley, 1990.

Cotton, Hannah M., and Alexander Yakobson. "Arcanum imperii: The Powers of Augustus." In Philosophy and Power in the Graeco-Roman World. Essays in Honour of Miriam Griffin, edited by Gillian Clark and Tessa Rajak, pp. 193–209. Oxford, 1992.

Eck, Werner. Augustus und seine Zeit. Munich, 1998.

Fishwick, Duncan. "On the Temple of Divus Augustus." Phoenix 46 (1992): 232–255.

Huttner, Ulrich. "Hercules und Augustus." Chiron 27 (1997): 369–391.

Pollini, John. "Man or God: Divine Assimilation and Imitation in the Late Republic and Early Principate." In Between Republic and Empire: Interpretations of Augustus and His Principate, edited by Kurt A. Raaflaub and Mark Toher, pp. 334–363. Berkeley, 1990.

Radke, Gerhard. "Augustus und das göttliche." In Antike und Universalgeschichte. Festschrift Hans Erich Stier, edited by Reinhardt Stiehl and Gustav Adolf Lehmann, pp. 257–279. Münster, 1972.

Speyer, Wolfgang. Das Verhältnis des Augustus zur Religion. Berlin and New York, 1986.

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Whitehorne, John E. G. "The Divine Augustus as Theos Kaisar and Theos Sebastos." Analecta papyrologica 3 (1991): 19–26.

Zanker, Paul. The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus. Translated by Alan Shapiro. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1988.