Augustus

Gaius Octavius was born in 63 BC into the equestrian class. His father died when he was four; his great-uncle Julius Caesar took him in. When Caesar was murdered on the Ides of March 44 BC, the eighteen-year-old learned in Apollonia that he had been adopted in the will. Cicero called him a boy who owed everything to his name. Within months he had raised a private army on that name alone.

In 43 BC he joined the republicans against Mark Antony, won at Mutina, then switched sides. With Antony and Lepidus he formed the Second Triumvirate. The proscriptions condemned hundreds of senators — among them Cicero, the man Octavian had once called father. At Perusia in 41 BC, some 300 knights and senators were reportedly sacrificed at Caesar's altar. The coldness of the young Octavian sits uneasily beside the later merciful emperor. Both belong in the record.

The naval victory at Actium in 31 BC, engineered by his friend Agrippa, left him master of the Mediterranean. On 13 January 27 BC he stood before the Senate and announced he was restoring the Republic. The Senate begged him to keep command of the frontier provinces. He agreed, and so kept every legion. Three days later they voted him the name Augustus, the revered one. The Republic ended in republican language.

His self-summary reads: "I excelled all in influence, but had no more power than my colleagues in office." That sentence is the Principate in miniature. He invented no new office; he stacked existing ones — consulship, proconsular imperium, tribunician veto, pontifex maximus, pater patriae. Cities of brick became cities of marble. Succession proved harder than seizure: he lost his nephew Marcellus and his grandsons Gaius and Lucius young, and fell back at last on Tiberius, Livia's son from a previous marriage. He died at Nola on 19 August AD 14, asking friends whether he had played his part well in the comedy of life. He had ruled forty-one years and bequeathed two centuries of peace.