(1) BEST: AUGUSTUS

JULIO-CLAUDIAN DYNASTY

(27 BC – 14 AD: 40 YEARS 7 MONTHS 3 DAYS)

 

THE Roman emperor – the first and best emperor, the definitive and archetypal emperor.

The most august emperor. Dare I say it, the most Augustus of emperors, or rather, Augustus of Augustuses, since all emperors were titled Augustus for his title (not to mention the eighth month of the year) or Caesar for his adoptive family name.

Augustus is commonly nominated as the best or top emperor and I’m not about to dissent from that. It’s a common nomination for a reason. The Roman Senate themselves routinely invoked him as the first of their two benchmarks or gold standards when inaugurating new emperors. I’ve already referred to the second part of this invocation in reference to Trajan, but of course the full phrase also invoked Augustus – felicior Augusto, melior Traiano, may you be “luckier than Augustus and better than Trajan”. Luckier or more fortunate that is, with the connotation of divine fortune that favored Augustus. And since the Senate deified Augustus, consistent with the imperial cult he cultivated (heh), he made his own divine fortune.

Caesar Augustus – born Gaius Octavius and also known as Octavian – instituted the Roman Empire itself, characterized by the imperial peace, the Pax Romana or Pax Augusta. The grandnephew of Julius Caesar and named in Caesar’s will as his adopted son and heir, he inherited Caesar’s name, estate, and the loyalty of Caesar’s legions.

He formed the Second Triumvirate with Mark Antony and some other guy no one remembers (Lepidus) to defeat the assassins of Caesar. The Triumvirate effectively divided the Republic between them as a duumvirate of Octavian and Antony, with the former in control of its western provinces and the latter its eastern provinces. Octavian then famously fought and defeated Antony in the latter’s alliance (and romance) with Cleopatra, taking Egypt from de facto Roman client state to province.

With Octavian as sole ruler of the Republic, he adopted the title by which he has thereafter been known (and used to honour his imperial successors) – Augustus. And also Princeps or First Citizen (Princeps Civitas), which has come to denominate the Principate, the system of imperial rule instituted by him and which endured for two centuries until Diocletian’s Dominate. That system essentially involved Augustus maintaining the façade or formal appearance of the Republic over the reality of imperial authority and institutions of empire, hence the modesty of the Princeps title.

And having transformed the Republic into an empire, he dramatically enlarged the empire – annexing Egypt of course in his defeat of Anthony and Cleopatra, but also conquering northern Hispania (modern Spain and Portugal), the Alpine regions of Raetia and Noricum (modern Switzerland, Bavaria, Austria, Slovenia), and Illyricum and Pannonia (modern Albania, Croatia, Hungary, Serbia). He also extended the borders of the province of Africa (the former territory of Carthage), peacefully converted the client state of Galatia (part of modern Turkey but with Gauls!) into a Roman province, and added Judea to the province of Syria as a recurring source of unforeseen Roman imperial woes, not to mention Christianity.

In other words, he sealed up the Mediterranean under Roman supremacy (not to mention Italy’s alpine buffer), making the Mediterranean their b*tch – or mare nostrum as they called it. Not so much Germany though, with Augustine famously mourning the defeat and loss of three legions under their commander Varus in the Battle of Teutoberg Forest – “Quintili Vare, legiones redde! “(“Quintilius Varus, give me back my legions!”).

Oh well – even the greatest can’t win them all. However, it is a convenient segue to a comparison between Augustus and Julius Caesar. Caesar may well have been more charismatic than Augustus and definitely was a greater military leader, but I would say that Augustus obviously had greater political acumen than Caesar – given that the latter’s ambitions provoked his own assassination while the former’s created the empire. And fortunately Augustus could rely on the skill of his military commanders to compensate for his lack of skill – foremost among them Marcus Agrippa, who can lay claim to being among the best Roman military leaders.

After that comparison to Julius Caesar, I can’t resist quoting Dovahhatty’s comparison of Augustus to Alexander the Great (upon him visiting the latter’s tomb, where Dovahhatty has Augustus scoff “Pfft – what a loser!”):

“For when Alexander became king, he was twenty. When Octavian was adopted by Caesar, he was nineteen. When Alexander took thirteen years to conquer the sh*thole of the East, Octavian took the same time to subdue the entire Mediterranean. And while Alexander’s empire disintegrated the nanosecond after he died, Octavian would lay the foundations for the greatest empire in human history”.

Beyond the frontiers of his empire, Augustus “secured the empire with a buffer region of client states and made peace with the Parthian Empire through diplomacy”. Within them, “he reformed the Roman system of taxation, developed networks of roads with an official courier system, established a standing army, established the Praetorian Guard as well as official police and fire-fighting services for Rome, and rebuilt much of the city during his reign”. As he famously said, he found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble.

Finally, the longevity of Augustus’s reign and its legacy to the Roman world should not be overlooked as a key factor in the success of the Roman Empire, if only because as Tacitus observed, the younger generation at his death in 14 AD (after his reign of over 40 years!) had never known anything else than his Principate.

But it wasn’t just that – “Augustus’s own experience, his patience, his tact, and his political acumen also played their parts. He directed the future of the empire down many lasting paths, from the existence of a standing professional army stationed at or near the frontiers, to the dynastic principle so often employed in the imperial succession, to the embellishment of the capital at the emperor’s expense. Augustus’s ultimate legacy was the peace and prosperity the Empire enjoyed for the next two centuries under the system he initiated. His memory was enshrined in the political ethos of the Imperial age as a paradigm of the good emperor. Every emperor of Rome adopted his name, Caesar Augustus, which gradually lost its character as a name and eventually became a title. The Augustan era poets Virgil and Horace praised Augustus as a defender of Rome, an upholder of moral justice, and an individual who bore the brunt of responsibility in maintaining the empire”

(By the way, if I was extending my top ten to emperors past 476 AD, the top five would remain the same. Basil II, Justinian and Heraclius would be in sixth to eighth place and I’d probably shuffle Valentinian out for Alexios I in ninth place, while placing the last emperor Constantine XI in my wildcard tenth place. That is probably over-ranking him, but I just can’t resist the symmetry of first and last emperors in first and tenth place. Besides, he chose to go out with the empire in a bang rather than a whimper – and that’s worth something, even a wildcard tenth place).

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD-TIER)

EMPIRE-MAKER

 

MAXIMUS:

Augustus didn’t claim any formal victory titles that I could find, but did hold three triumphs – for his conquest of Pannonia, for the naval victory against Cleopatra and Antony at Actium, and for the conquest of Egypt

DEIFICATION:

Divine Augustus!

SPECTRUM RANKING COMPARISON: Exactly the same – top spot, as he also was in the ranking by Daily Roman Updates, but no surprise there.