Augustus, Rome's First Emperor

This was a well written book that tried to keep me interested in Augustus Caesar. Since most of the source material for his life comes from his own spin doctors, it's not given to introspection or internal motivation. But Everitt does a pretty god job of bringing out what tensions he can find in the story and tells a pretty good tale.

It was actually pretty surprising that Octavian--his name before becoming emperor--became the big winner in the Roman political sweepstakes. Given his childhood status as an adopted son after the death of his biological father, his rise to power is pretty improbable. His surprise adoption by Julius Caesar gave him the wealth and the clients needed to make his political chops, and many of his opponents accused him of being Julius' boy toy while in Spain, a charge which Everitt thinks is overblown. Since that inheritance from Julius was made public only after the ides of March, Mark Anthony should have kicked his ass right then. But he was somehow able to out maneuver Anthony in the following years and eventually win all the marbles for himself. He really owes much of his success to his boyhood friends, Agrippa and Maecenas. Agrippa saved his ass more than once on the battlefield as Octavian really had no stomach for war, and Maecenas  was the Karl Rove of his day, pulling together political support and making the backroom deals that gave Octavian the power to triumph over Anthony. Anthony didn't help his own cause by dallying with Cleopatra, giving Octavian the opening he needed for a fairly major smear campaign.

Later, much of Augustus' advice came from the political infighting of his own family. By then, the Roman republic was finished as the senate had pretty much ceded all practical power to him, and he stepped into the role as the first Roman emperor pretty easily. Being in Augustus' family was no easy role, however. He shipped both his daughter and then a granddaughter off to remote islands when their behavior did not comport with the political image he wished to convey. Likewise, he probably had his grandson strangled as one of his final acts before going off to his villa to die. He could be one cold hearted bastard. He became preoccupied with his succession and the power struggles that would follow his death, especially after two other grandsons, who he had been grooming to take his place, suddenly and unexpectedly died.

Of course, the upshot over his preoccupation with the dynastic succession was that while the empire lasted another 1400 years, the role of the emperor wasn't nearly what Augustus hoped for. Tiberius took over under duress when Augustus died--after Augustus forced him to divorce his first wife to marry one of Augustus' daughters--but he left the throne to Caligula, and things went downhill quickly, leading to the rise of the praetorian guards holding power over the emperors. They appointed Claudius, who was poisoned by his wife, so that her son Nero could take over, leading to a series of civil wars lasting through the end of the first century. But the empire itself had been put on a firm administrative basis that allowed it to survive until 1453, albeit contracted around Constantinople after 325.

Author: Everitt, Anthony

Date Published: 2006

Length: 15 hr 37 min

Narrator: Curless, John