The symbol engraved on Augustus’ signet ring was a sphinx. Julian the Apostate described him as ‘a chameleon’. He seized power declaring himself the saviour of the Roman Republic, but in the process abolished it. He ruled as an autocrat but maintained the fiction that he was no more than the Republic’s First Citizen — and left as his legacy a new system of imperial government that was to continue for another 400 years in the West and until 1453 in Constantinople in the East.
This year marks the 2,000th anniversary of Augustus’ death in 14 AD, on the 19th of the month by then named in his honour. His 40-year-long reign saw not only the transformation of Rome’s government and administration but also of its art, architecture and literature, which were harnessed to glorify Augustus himself and his regime, giving birth to models that continued to exert a powerful influence on imperial and dynastic art into modern times.
The emperor-to-be’s family was a fairly insignificant one, but he was, through his mother, a great-nephew of Julius Caesar, who adopted the young Octavian, as he then was, as his son and heir. When Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC, the 18-year-old Octavian, ‘Divi Julii Filius’, son of the (post mortem) hastily deified Julius, found himself titular leader of the Julian faction.
Mark Antony sought contemptuously to dismiss the upstart — small in stature, with sandy hair, bad teeth and delicate health — addressing him as ‘you, boy, who owes everything to your name’. But Octavian bided his time, and having disposed of his other rivals, this ‘boy’ provoked a war with Antony, defeated him at Actium in 31 BC, drove him and his lover Cleopatra to suicide, and annexed Egypt as a personal fiefdom.
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