Augustus Caesar: The First Emperor of Rome

When the nineteen-year-old Gaius Octavius sailed to Italy in 44 BCE, he was a sickly, sheltered great-nephew of Julius Caesar with no military experience and only a modest name. Fourteen years later he stood before the Roman Senate and offered to lay down his power. The Senate, in gratitude and relief, refused — and instead bestowed on him a title no Roman had ever borne: Augustus, the “Revered One.” In a single act, the Republic became an empire, and Rome’s first true emperor set in motion a 1,500-year story of imperial Rome that would reshape the ancient world.

From Octavian to Triumvir

Octavian was born on 23 September 63 BCE in Rome, the son of Gaius Octavius and Atia, who was Julius Caesar’s niece. After Caesar’s assassination on the Ides of March, 44 BCE, the young man learned he had been adopted in his great-uncle’s will. Though his family tried to dissuade him — his mother called him a fool for going — Octavian rushed to Rome to claim his inheritance and his dangerous political destiny.

He arrived to find the city in chaos. Mark Antony, Caesar’s trusted lieutenant, had seized the late dictator’s papers and money. A band of senators, including Caesar’s killers Brutus and Cassius, controlled the eastern provinces. To find his place, Octavian did something extraordinary: he raised a private army out of Caesar’s discharged veterans, marched on Rome, and used it to make himself consul at twenty. He then turned that army into a bargaining chip and joined with Antony and another Caesar loyalist, Lepidus, to form the Second Triumvirate in 43 BCE.

The Triumvirate brought not peace but blood. The proscriptions that followed targeted hundreds of senators and knights, including the great orator Cicero, whose head and hands were nailed to the Rostra in the Roman Forum. Among those proscribed was also Julius Caesar’s murderers, and the triumvirs pursued them across the Mediterranean. At the Battle of Philippi in 42 BCE, the republican armies of Brutus and Cassius were destroyed. Cassius killed himself; Brutus followed suit days later, famously quoting a line of Euripides.

Actium and the End of Antony

For the next decade the Roman world was split between Octavian in the west and Antony in the east, where Antony had become the lover and partner of Cleopatra VII of Egypt. The arrangement frayed. Octavian waged a propaganda war in Rome, broadcasting Antony’s supposed drunkenness and his submission to a foreign queen. When the Senate stripped Antony of his powers, war was inevitable.

On 2 September 31 BCE, off the western coast of Greece, the fleets of Octavian’s admiral Agrippa met the combined Egyptian and Roman fleet of Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium. Agrippa’s lighter, more maneuverable ships outfought Antony’s heavier vessels, and Cleopatra’s sudden flight with sixty ships dragged Antony after her. The battle was over, and with it the fate of the Republic. Antony and Cleopatra fled to Egypt, where both took their own lives the following summer. In 30 BCE Octavian entered Alexandria as the unopposed master of the Roman world.

The First Emperor

In 27 BCE Octavian traveled to Rome and made a carefully staged political performance. Before the Senate, he declared that the civil wars were over, that the Republic was restored, and that he was ready to retire. The Senate, terrified of disorder and grateful for peace, begged him to stay. In a single resolution they granted him the title Augustus and, more importantly, broad imperium proconsulare maius — greater proconsular command — over every province that contained an army, plus the tribunicia potestas that made his person inviolable. He was, without ever using the hated word rex, the master of Rome.

He was, however, careful to preserve the fiction of the old Republic. He kept the Senate in being, allowed it to debate, and dressed his regime in the language of tradition. He refused the title dictator. He even shared the consulship with colleagues for many years, though after 23 BCE he ruled without ever holding the consulship again, governing instead through a network of loyal clients and a streamlined imperial civil service. He was, in his own words, princeps — “first citizen” — and his regime is known to historians as the Principate, the first great chapter of the Roman emperors.

The Pax Romana

Augustus’s most famous boast, recorded in the great inscription known as the Res Gestae, was that he had found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble. More importantly, he left it a city at peace. The long era of civil war that had raged almost without interruption since 133 BCE was over. The Pax Romana, the Roman Peace, would last, in the Mediterranean basin, for roughly two centuries — a transformation explored in detail in What Was the Pax Romana.

He reorganized the army into a permanent professional force of about twenty-eight legions, fixed their term of service at sixteen years, and established a pension system funded by a new inheritance tax. He built a network of stone highways, rebuilt Rome’s crumbling infrastructure, and created the Praetorian Guard to protect the emperor. He reorganized the grain supply, established a permanent fire brigade and police force, and adorned the city with gleaming new temples, theaters, and the great Forum of Augustus.

Family, Scandal, and Succession

Augustus’s private life was less orderly. His daughter Julia and his granddaughter of the same name both scandalized Rome with affairs so notorious that the elder Julia was eventually exiled to the barren island of Pandateria, where she died of malnutrition. Augustus’s chosen heirs all died before him: his nephew Marcellus in 23 BCE, his great general Agrippa in 12 BCE, and his beloved stepson and son-in-law Tiberius, who, forced to divorce the woman he loved and marry Julia, retreated to sulk in Rhodes for years.

In the end, Tiberius was the only one left. Augustus died on 19 August 14 CE at Nola, in Campania, at the age of seventy-five. According to Suetonius, his last words were a greeting to his successor: “Poeta Romane, actiunculam, et quidem κελεύσματος ἐγένετο, vale” — a quip about the play of life. The Senate deified him, and his cult spread across the empire.

Legacy of the First Emperor

Augustus ruled for more than forty years, longer than any Roman emperor who came after him. He established the template of the Roman monarchy, gave his name to a month, and made his adoptive name — Caesar — a title that would outlast Rome itself. The reforms he began reshaped Roman law and Roman society for centuries. Whether he was a calculating cynic or a genuine restorer of order, he was, as the poet Horace wrote, “Romulae gentis pater”, the father of the Roman race.