2. King Tarquinius Priscus admitted the Octavii, among other lesser families, to the Roman Senate, and though Servius Tullius awarded them patrician privileges, they later reverted to plebeian rank until eventually Julius Caesar made them patricians once more. Gaius Rufus was the first Octavius elected to office by the popular vote - he won a quaestorship. His sons Gnaeus and Gaius fathered two very different branches of the family, Gnaeus' descendants held all the highest offices of state in turn; but Gaius' branch, either by accident or choice, remained simple knights until the entry into the Senate of Augustus' father. Augustus' great-grandfather had fought as a colonel under Aemilius Papus(1) in Sicily during the Second Punic War. His grandfather, who enjoyed a comfortable income, was apparently content with a municipal magistracy, and lived to an advanced age. This information is given by others; it is not derived from Augustus' own memoirs, which merely record that he came of a rich old equestrian family, and that his father had been the first Octavius to enter the Senate. Mark Antony wrote scornfully that Augustus' great-grandfather had been only a freedman, a ropemaker from the country about Thurii; and his grandfather, a moneychanger. This is as much information as I have managed to glean about the paternal ancestors of Augustus.

3. I cannot believe that Gaius Octavius, his father, was also a money-changer who distributed bribes among the voters in the Campus and undertook other electioneering services. He was certainly born rich; from the start of his life a man of wealth and repute, brought up in sufficient affluence to achieve office without having to engage in such practices; and proved a capable administrator. After his praetorship, he became governor of Macedonia, and the Senate commissioned him to pass through Thurii on his way there and disperse a group of outlawed slaves who, having fought under Spartacus and Catiline, were now holding possession of the district. He governed Macedonia courageously and justly, winning a big battle in Thrace, mainly against the Bessians; and letters survive from Cicero reproaching his brother Quintus, then proconsular governor of Asia, for inefficiency, and advising him to make Octavious his model in all diplomatic dealings with allies.

4. Gaius died suddenly on his return to Rome, before he could stand as a candidate for the consulship. He left three children: Octavia the Elder, Octavia the Younger, and Augustus. The mother of Octavia the Elder was Ancharia; the other two were his children by Atia, daughter of Marcus Atius Balbus and Julius Caesar's sister Julia. Balbus' family originated in Aricia, and could boast of many ancestral busts of senators; his mother was also closely related to Pompey the Great. Balbus served first as praetor, and then with the Commission of Twenty appointed under the Julian Law to divide estates in Campania among the commons. Mark Antony likewise tried to belittle Augustus' maternal line by alleging that his great- grandfather Balbus had been born in Africa, and kept first a perfumery and then a bakehouse at Aricia. Cassius of Parma similarly sneers at Augustus as the grandson of a baker and a money-changer, writing in one of his letters: 'Your mother's flour came from a miserable Arician bakery, and the coin-stained hands of a money-changer from Nerulum kneaded it.'

5. Augustus was born just before sunrise on 23 September,(1) while Cicero and Gaius Antonius were Consuls, at Ox Heads, in the Palatine district; a shrine to him, built soon after his death, marks the spot. The case of a young patrician, Gaius Laetorius by name, figures in the published book of Senatorial Proceedings. Pleading his youth and position to escape the maximum punishment for adultery, he further described himself as ' the occupant and, one might even say, guardian of the place first touched at his birth by the God Augustus '. Laetorius begged for pardon in the name of his ' own especial god '. The Senate afterwards consecrated that part of the building by decree.

6. In the country mansion, near Velitrae, which belonged to Augustus' grandfather, a small room, not unlike a butler's pantry, is still shown and described as Augustus' nursery; the local people firmly believe that he was also born there. Religious scruples forbid anyone to enter except for some necessary reason, and after purification. It had long been believed that casual visitors would be overcome by a sudden awful terror; and recently this was proved true when, one night, a new owner of the mansion, either from ignorance or because he wanted to test the truth of the belief, went to sleep in the room. A few hours later he was hurled out of bed by a supernatural agency and found lying half-dead against the door, bedclothes and all.

7. I can prove pretty conclusively that as a child Augustus was called Thurinus ('the Thurian'), perhaps because his ancestors had once lived at Thurii, or because his father had defeated the slaves in that neighbourhood soon after he was born; my evidence is a bronze statuette which I once owned. It shows him as a boy, and a rusty, almost illegible inscription in iron letters gives him this name. I have presented the statuette to the Emperor Hadrian, who has placed it among the Household-gods in his bedroom. Moreover, Augustus was often sneeringly called 'The Thurian' in Antony's correspondence. Augustus answered by confessing himself puzzled: why should his former name be thrown in his face as an insult?

Later he adopted the surname Caesar to comply with the will of his mother's uncle, the Dictator; and then the title Augustus after a motion to that effect had been introduced by Munatius Plancus. Some senators wished him to be called Romulus, as the second founder of the city; but Plancus had his way. He argued that 'Augustus' was both a more original and a more honourable title, since sanctuaries and all places consecrated by the augurs are known as ' august' - the word being either an enlarged form of auctus, implying the 'increase ' of dignity thus given such places, or a product of the phrase avium gestus gustusve, ' the behaviour and feeding of birds ', which the augurs observed. Plancus supported his point by a quotation from Ennius' Annals:

'When glorious Rome had founded been, by augury august.'

8. At the age of four Augustus lost his father. At twelve he delivered a funeral oration in honour of his grandmother Julia, Julius Caesar's sister. At sixteen, having now come of age, he was awarded military decorations when Caesar celebrated his African triumph, though he had been too young for overseas service. Caesar then went to fight Pompey's sons in Spain; Augustus followed with a very small escort, along roads held by the enemy, after a shipwreck, too, and in a state of semi-convalescence from a serious illness. This action delighted Caesar, who, moreover, soon formed a high estimate of Augustus' character quite apart from the energetic manner in which he had made the journey.

Having recovered possession of the Spanish provinces, Caesar planned a war against the Dacians and Parthians, and sent Augustus ahead to Apollonia, in Illyria, where he spent his time studying Greek literature. News then came that Caesar had been assassinated, after naming him his heir, and Augustus was tempted, for awhile, to put himself under the protection of the troops quartered near by. However, deciding that this would be rash and premature, he returned to Rome and there entered upon his inheritance, despite his mother's doubts and the active opposition of his step-father, Marcius Philippus the ex-consul. Augustus now levied armies, and governed the Empire: first with Antony and Lepidus as his colleagues; next, for nearly twelve years, with Antony alone; finally by himself for another forty-four years.

9. After this brief outline of Augustus' life, I shall fill in its various phases; but the story will be more readable and understandable if, instead of keeping chronological order, I use subject headings.

He fought five civil wars in all; associated respectively with the names of Mutina, Philippi, Perusia, Sicily, and Actium. Those of Mutina and Actium were against Antony; that of Philippi against Brutus and Cassius; that of Perusia against Antony's brother Lucius; that of Sicily against Sextus Pompeius, son of Pompey the Great.

IO. The underlying motive of every campaign was that Augustus felt it his duty, above all, to avenge Caesar and keep his decrees in force. On his return from Apollonia, he decided to surprise Brutus and Cassius by rapid and forceful action; but they foresaw the danger and escaped, so he had recourse to the law and prosecuted them for murder in their absence. Finding that the officials who should have celebrated Caesar's victory with public Games did not dare to carry out their commission, he undertook the task himself. Because stronger authority was needed to implement his other plans, Augustus announced his candidature for a tribuneship of the people - death had created a vacancy - although he was a patrician but not yet a senator, and thus doubly disqualified from standing. Antony, one of the two Consuls, on whose assistance Augustus had particularly counted, opposed this action and denied him even his ordinary legal rights, except on payment of a heavy bribe. Augustus therefore went over to the senatorial party, well aware that they hated Antony, who was now besieging Decimus Brutus at Mutina and trying to expel him from the province to which he had been appointed by Caesar with the Senate's approval. On the advice of certain persons, Augustus actually engaged assassins to murder Antony and, fearing retaliation when the plot came to light, spent as much money as he could raise on enlisting a force of veterans to protect himself and the state. The Senate awarded him praetorian rank, gave him the command of this army, and instructed him to join Hirtius and Pansa, the two new Consuls, in lending aid to Decimus Brutus. Augustus brought the campaign to a successful close within three months, after fighting a couple of battles. According to Antony, he ran away from the first of these and did not reappear until the next day, having lost both his charger and his purple cloak. But it is generally agreed that in the second engagement he showed not only skill as a commander but courage as a soldier: when, at a crisis in the fighting, the standardbearer of his legion was seriously wounded, Augustus himself shouldered the Eagle and carried it for some time.

II. Because Hirtius fell in battle, and Pansa later succumbed to a wound, a rumour went about that Augustus had engineered both deaths with the object of gaining sole control over their victorious armies after Antony was defeated and the state bereaved of its consuls. Pansa certainly died in such suspicious circumstances that Glyco, his physician, was arrested on a charge of poisoning the wound; and Aquilius Niger goes so far as to assert that in the confusion of battle Augustus despatched Hirtius with his own hand.

I2. However, when Augustus heard that Mark Antony had been taken under Lepidus' protection and that the other military commanders, supported by their troops, were coming to terms with these two, he at once deserted the senatorial party. His excuse was that some of them had contemptuously called him ' the boy', while others had not concealed their view that, once publicly honoured, he should be got rid of to avoid having to pay his veterans and himself what they expected. Augustus showed regret for his former allegiance by imposing a heavier fine on the people of Nursia than they could possibly meet, and then exiling them from their city; they had offended him by erecting a monument to fellow-citizens killed at Mutina, with the inscription: 'Fallen in the cause of freedom!'

I3. As member of a triumvirate consisting of Antony, Lepidus, and himself, Augustus defeated Brutus and Cassius at Philippi, though in ill-health at the time. In the first of the two battles fought he was driven out of his camp, and escaped with some difficulty to Antony's command. After the second and decisive one he showed no clemency to his beaten enemies, but sent Brutus' head to Rome for throwing at the feet of Caesar's divine image; and insulted the more distin- guished of his prisoners. When one of these humbly asked for the right of decent burial, he got the cold answer: 'That must be settled with the carrion-birds.' And when a father and his son pleaded for their lives, Augustus, it is said, told them to decide which of the two should be spared, by casting lots or playing morra.(1) The father sacrificed his life for the son, and was executed; the son then committed suicide; Augustus watched them both die. His conduct so disgusted the remainder of the prisoners, including Marcus Favonius, a well known imitator of Cato's, that while being led off in chains they courteously saluted Antony as Imperator, but abused Augustus to his face with the most obscene epithets.

The victors divided between them the responsibilities of government. Antony undertook to pacify the Eastern provinces if Augustus led the veterans back to Italy and settled them on municipal lands. However, Augustus failed to satisfy either the landholders, who complained that they were being evicted from their estates; or the veterans, who felt entitled to better rewards for their service.

I4. At this point Lucius Antonius felt strong enough, as Consul and brother of the powerful Mark Antony, to raise a revolt. Augustus forced him to take refuge in the city of Perusia, which he starved into surrender, but only after being twice exposed to great danger. On the first occasion, before the revolt broke out, he had found a private soldier watching the Games from one of the seats reserved for knights, and ordered his removal by an attendant; when Augustus' enemies then circulated a rumour that the offender had been tortured and executed, an angry crowd of soldiers began to demonstrate at once and Augustus would have lost his life had not the missing soldier suddenly reappeared, safe and unhurt. On the second occasion Augustus was sacrificing close to the walls of Perusia, during the siege, when a party of gladiators made a sortie and nearly cut off his retreat.

I5. After the fall of the city Augustus took vengeance on crowds of prisoners and returned the same answer to all who sued for pardon or tried to explain their presence among the rebels. It was simply: 'You must die!' According to some historians, he chose 300 prisoners of equestrian or senatorial rank, and offered them on the Ides of March at the altar of the God Julius, as human sacrifices. Augustus fought, it is said, because he wished to offer his secret enemies, and those whom fear rather than affection kept with his party, a chance to declare themselves by joining Lucius Antonius; he would then crush them, confiscate their estates, and thus manage to pay his veterans.

I6. The Sicilian war, one of his first enterprises, lasted for eight years. It was interrupted by two storms that wrecked his fleets - in the summer, too - and obliged him to rebuild them; and by the Pompeians' success in cutting his grain supplies, which forced him to grant a popular demand for an armistice. At last, however, he built an entirely new fleet, with 20,000 freed slaves trained as oarsmen, and formed the Julian harbour at Baiae by letting the sea into the Lucrine and Avernan lakes. Here he exercised his crews all one winter and, when the sailing season opened, defeated Sextus Pompey off the Sicilian coast between Mylae and Naulochus; although on the eve of the battle he fell so fast asleep that his staff had to wake him and ask for the signal to begin hostilities. This must have been the occasion of Mark Antony's taunt: ' He could not even look at his fleet with steady eyes when it was ready for battle; but lay on his back in a stupor and gazed up at the sky, never rising to show that he was alive until his admiral Marcus Agrippa had routed the enemy.'

Augustus has been taken to task for crying out, when he heard that his fleets were sunk: 'I will win this war, even if Neptune does not want me to!' and for removing the god's image from the sacred procession at the next celebration of Games in the Circus. It would be safe to say that the Sicilian was by far his most dangerous campaign. He once landed an army in Sicily and was sailing back to Italy where the bulk of his forces were stationed, when the Pompeian admirals Demochares and Apollophanes suddenly appeared and he just managed to escape them with a single ship. He was also nearly captured in Calabria: as he walked along the road to Rhegium by way of Locri, he saw a flotilla of biremes heading for the shore and, not realizing that they were Pompeians, went down to greet them on the beach. Afterwards, while hurriedly escaping by narrow, winding paths, he faced a new danger. Some years previously he had proscribed the father of Aemilius Paulus, an officer of his staff, one of whose slaves, now seeing a good opportunity to pay off an old score; tried to murder him.

Lepidus, the third member of the triumvirate, whom Augustus had summoned from Africa to his support, thought himself so important as the commander of twenty legions that, when Sextus Pompey had been beaten, he demanded the highest place in the government with terrible threats. Augustus deprived him of his legions and, though successfully pleading for his life, Lepidus spent what was left of it in permanent exile at Circeii.

I7. Eventually Augustus broke his friendship with Mark Antony, which had always been a tenuous one and in continuous need of patching; and sought to prove that his rival had failed to conduct himself as befitted a Roman citizen, by ordering the will he had deposited at Rome to be opened and publicly read. It listed among Antony's heirs the children fathered by him on Cleopatra. Nevertheless, when the Senate outlawed Antony, Augustus allowed all his relatives and friends to join him, including Gaius Sosius and Titus Domitius, the Consuls of the year. He also excused Bononia, a city traditionally dependent on the Antonian family, from rallying to his side as the rest of Italy was doing. Presently he defeated Antony in a sea-battle off Actium, where the fighting went on so long that he spent the whole night aboard his flagship.

In winter-quarters on Samos, after this victory, Augustus heard the alarming news of a mutiny at Brundusium among troops whom he had picked from every corps in the Army. They were demanding the bounties due to them and an immediate discharge. He returned to Italy, but ran into two storms: the first between the headlands of the Peloponnese and Aetolia; the second off the Ceraunian Mountains. Some of his galleys went down on both occasions; the rigging of his own vessel carried away and her rudder split. He stayed no more than twenty-seven days at Brundusium, just long enough to pacify the mutineers; then took a roundabout route to Egypt by way of Asia Minor and Syria, besieged Alexandria, where Antony had fled with Cleopatra, and soon reduced it. At the last moment Antony sued for peace, but Augustus forced him to commit suicide - and inspected the corpse. He was so anxious to save Cleopatra as an ornament for his triumph that he actually summoned Psyllian snake-charmers to suck the poison from her self-inflicted wound, supposedly the bite of an asp. Though he allowed the lovers honourable burial in the same tomb, and gave orders that the mausoleum which they had begun to build should be completed, he had the elder of Antony's sons by Fulvia dragged from the image of the God Julius, to which he had fled with vain pleas for mercy, and executed. Augustus also had Caesarion, Julius Caesar's bastard son by Cleopatra, overtaken, and killed him when captured. However, he spared Cleopatra's children by Antony, brought them up no less tenderly than if they had been members of his own family, and gave them the education which their various positions deserved.

I8. About this time he had the sarcophagus containing Alexander the Great's mummy removed from its shrine and, after a long look at its features, showed his veneration by crowning the head with a golden diadem and strewing flowers on the trunk. When asked 'Would you now like to visit the Mausoleum of the Ptolemies?' he replied: ' I came to see a King, not a row of corpses.'

Augustus turned the kingdom of Egypt into a Roman province; and then, to increase its fertility and its yield of grain for the Roman market, set troops to clean out the irrigation canals of the Nile Delta which had silted up after many years' neglect. To perpetuate the glory of his victory at Actium, he founded a city close to the scene of the battle and named it Nicopolis - or 'City of Victory' - and made arrangements for the celebration of Games there every five years. He also enlarged an ancient local temple of Apollo, and embellished his camp with trophies taken from Antony's fleet, consecrating the site jointly to Neptune and Mars.

I9. Next, he suppressed a series of sporadic riots and revolts; besides certain conspiracies, all of them detected before they became dangerous. The leaders ofthe conspiracies were, in historical sequence: Lepidus the Younger; Varro Murena, and Fannius Caepio; Marcus Egnatius; Plautius Rufus and Lucius Paulus (the husband of Augustus' grand-daughter), and besides these Lucius Audasius, a feeble old man who had been indicted for forgery; also Asinius Epicadus, a halfbreed of partly Parthian origin. And Audasius and Epicadus had planned to rescue Augustus' daughter Julia and his grandson Agrippa Postumus from the prison islands where they were confined, and forcibly take them to the legions abroad. But attempts against Augustus' life were made by men from even the lowest walks of life; so I must not forget one Telephus, a slave, whose task it had been to remind a lady of her engagements; he nursed a delusion that he was fated to become emperor, and planned an armed attack on the Senate as well. Then an Illyrian camp-orderly, who had managed to sneak into the Palace without being noticed by the porters, was caught on.e night near the imperial bedroom, brandishing a hunting-knife; but since no statement could be extracted from him by torture it is doubtful whether he was really insane or merely pretending to be.

20. Augustus commanded armies in only two foreign wars: against the Dalmatians while he was still in his 'teens, and against the Cantabrians after defeating Antony. In one of the Dalmatian battles his right knee was bruised by a sling-stone; in another, he had one leg and both arms severely crushed when a bridge collapsed. The remainder of his foreign wars were conducted by his lieutenants; though during some ofthe Pannonian and German campaigns he either visited the front or kept in close touch with it by moving up to Ravenna, Milan, or Aquileia.

2I. Either as commander on the spot, or commander-in-chief, Augustus conquered Cantabria, Aquitania, Pannonia, Dalmatia, and the whole of Illyricum, besides Raetia and the Alpine tribes known as Vindelicians and Salassians. He also checked the raids of the Dacians, inflicting heavy casualties on them - three of their leaders fell in action; drove all the Germans back across the Elbe, except the Suebians and Sigambrians, who surrendered and agreed to settle in Gallic territory near the Rhine; and pacified other tribes who gave trouble.

Yet Augustus never wantonly invaded any country, and felt no temptation to increase the boundaries of the Empire or enhance his military glory; indeed, he made certain barbarian chieftains swear in the Temple of Avenging Mars that they would faithfully keep the peace for which they sued. In some instances he tried to bind them to their oaths by demanding an unusual kind of hostage, namely women; well aware that barbarians do not feel bound to respect treaties secured only by male hostages. But he let them reclaim their hostages as often as they pleased. Even when tribes rebelled frequently or showed particular ill-faith, Augustus' most severe punishment was to sell as slaves the prisoners he took, ordering them to be kept at some distance from their own country and not to be freed until thirty years had elapsed. Such was his reputation for courage and clemency that the very Indians and Scythians - nations of whom we then knew by hearsay alone - voluntarily sent envoys to Rome, pleading for his friendship and that of his people. The Parthians also were ready to grant Augustus' claims on Armenia and, when he demanded the surrender of the Eagles captured from Crassus and Antony(1) not only returned them but offered hostages into the bargain; and once, because several rival princes were claiming the Parthian throne, announced that they would elect whichever candidate he chose.