Augustus Down the Centuries
'History is a reinterpretation of the past which leads to conclusions about the present' wrote Arnaldo Momigliano. Taking that lead, John M. Carter explores the posthumous images of the Roman emperor, Augustus.
When the Emperor Augustus died in AD 14 in his seventy-sixth year, he had been master, jointly or singly, of the Roman world for fifty-six years. He had created the political and social conditions which ensured the perpetuation for another two centuries of a system of rule which brought almost unbroken peace, a large measure of prosperity, and very wide diffusion of Graeco-Roman material and intellectual culture to all those who lived within the confines of the Empire. It was he who gave that Empire definite shape and almost its final limits. His names Caesar Augustus became the titles of imperial legitimacy; the achievements of his reign in literature, architecture and the fine arts ranged from the sensational to the merely notable; and his posthumous deification reflected a strong tendency among the ordinary inhabitants of the Empire to see him as indeed a superman or species of divine being.
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