Augustus - An Introduction

Further Reading:

Mike recommends trackong down a copy of 'The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus' by Paul Zanker, and 'Augustus: From Revolutionary to Emperor' by Adrian Goldsworthy.

Mike's own translation of the Res Gestae can be found here, in the OCR AS and A level source book regarding imperial imagery.

Episode Transcript:

Welcome to a new episode of Ancient History 101. I'm your host, Alexandra Sills.

 We're going to be talking the OG Roman Emperor today, and I cannot tell you how much I enjoyed this conversation. In fact, it was so good I didn't want to edit it down. But let's start at the beginning, shall we? We have a big, big topic today, and for this we need one of our expert guests.

 Would you like to introduce yourself for us, please?

 Certainly. My name is Dr Mike Beer. I'm a classicist. I'm an honorary research fellow at the University of Exeter. I'm also an associate lecturer at the Open University.

 Wonderful. Mike is going to talk us through everything Augustus, everything that we ever, ever wanted to know. So I think the first question is, I mean, Augustus is obviously a huge name,

 lots of name recognition. But if we look at the history, sometimes we see different names being used.

 So can you tell us about Augustus when he was still Octavian, please?

 Okay, right. So we don't know him as Augustus until 27 BC, which is when he changes his name to Augustus. Previously, he had been known to us as Octavian, though that's not what the Romans would have called him. He starts off as Gaius Octavianus Thurinus, and he's born in 63 BC.

 And he remains that name for approximately 18 years. And then he is adopted by Julius Caesar in Julius Caesar's will. And thereafter, he starts calling himself Gaius Julius Caesar.

 So it can get quite complicated in the text when we start seeing references to Julius Caesar.

 Is it Julius Caesar? Is it going to be Octavian?

 What do we know about his real biological family to start off with?

 Very little. We know that he is the son of Atia, who is Julius Caesar's niece. So in fact, originally Julius Caesar is more distant than we would normally think. So Octavian is his great nephew.

 And the only reason that he really crops up is because Julius Caesar hasn't got a male heir at this point.

 Well, he has got one, but it's Caesarion, his child with Cleopatra, who doesn't count for legal reasons.

 He had a daughter, Julia, but she died in childbirth. So he's got no male heirs to take over,

 so he ends up adopting Octavian.

 So in Octavian's youth, is he seeing Julius Caesar all the time? Are they a really close-knit family,

 or is there a relationship that develops as Octavian suddenly starts being needed as a potential heir?

 We don't have huge sources on this. The sources that tend to talk about this period are much later.

 We're talking about Suetonius writing about 150 years after all this. We know that he was going through the same process that men of his social class would do in terms of a career progression.

 He was out serving with Julius Caesar's army's sort of late teens, but I wouldn't necessarily say they were really close, really. It was a surprise when his name appeared in the will. It wasn't an expected thing.

 Because that's something that we should really bear in mind, isn't it? We think of Augustus as the man who ruled the Roman Empire, but to begin with, he's quite a small fish in a big pond, and I think that's something that we can easily forget.

 Absolutely. He's somebody that would have probably had a mid-range political life if the Republic had carried on in the way that it had carried on. He would have gone up the political ranks.

 He might have gone quite high, but there was nothing to suggest that he would have been anything special.

 Right, that's really interesting. So we know all about Julius Caesar's assassination. Where is Octavian when this happens, and what does he do when he realizes his great-uncle has been murdered?

 Well, again, the sources are slightly vague on this. He's not in Rome, but he does return to Rome.

 But there is turmoil in Rome at Julius Caesar's assassination. There is chaos, there is absolute chaos.

 The people who assassinate Caesar, and there are a number of them, largely led by Brutus,

 they assume that the death of Caesar will mean the whole system, before Caesar was a dictator, would go back to the way it was. Unfortunately, that is not the case, and what happens is there is a huge popular backlash against the assassination of Caesar. There are riots, there are huge scenes of violence in Rome. So it's a very, very difficult situation. When the will is read, Octavian's name is a bit of a surprise, not least to Mark Antony, who was largely expecting that he would be the person,

 that would be the next person to fulfill Caesar's roles, and that wasn't going to be the case.

 So do we know, and if we do, do we know if Octavian and Mark Antony had met each other before this happened? Would they have interacted at all?

 It's possible that they might have met each other. It's not really clear from the sources.

 It would have been in passing, I suspect, because Mark Antony was very close to Julius Caesar,

 so they would have probably been in the same social circles. But Mark Antony will not get on well with Octavian at all initially, because there's huge rivalry. Mark Antony is the consul of that year.

 He's been Caesar's deputy in Gaul. He is very, very experienced. Most people would have said that he was the natural successor to Julius Caesar, and then this 18-year-old boy appears who's got no name,

 no kind of political cachet, and Mark Antony is both shocked and very, very annoyed.

 Yeah, I think I would be. So Octavian is coming back to Rome. How is it then that this young kid is able to suddenly become a rival of this huge political power?

 Well, there is one particular reason, and it is the name. It is simply by taking on the name of Julius Caesar, he immediately attracts the loyalty of all those people that were connected to Caesar, particularly the military veterans. So they see the son, adopted obviously, but the son of Caesar,

 and that cachet means that many of them will go on to follow Octavian and also as well in the will Julius Caesar has provided for large cash payouts to the citizenry of Rome, and that is expected, and that's what Octavian will go on to do, and that will cement a lot of loyalty as well.

 So Mark Antony has the experience, but he doesn't necessarily have the name recognition or the cachet

 to seal the deal. But Octavian isn't taking complete power straight away.

 It sounds like it's quite a long process. So how does he set about setting himself up as a rival?

 Okay, so as you quite rightly say, it's not immediate. They are both rivals for Caesar's inheritance, as it were, in terms of power and name, but they also both want to do one thing, which is avenge Caesar's assassination, which means that they're both going to be wanting to fight what we would call the liberators, the assassins of Caesar. Initially, they don't realize that they have to get together to do this.

 So right at the beginning of all this, they are very much enemies. Mark Antony will go off up to the north of Italy to take on provinces. Octavian then will raise an army to go and fight against Mark Antony. It looks like there's going to be another civil war, and then suddenly, to the surprise of everyone, they do a deal. They do a deal together. They bring one other person in called Lepidus,

 and they form what is going to be known as the Second Triumvirate. So even though initially they are loggerheads, they realize that to fight against Brutus and Cassius, they need to do a deal and pool resources, and that's exactly what they do.

 So just for anyone who isn't aware, what is a triumvirate in ancient Roman politics?

 When we talk about a triumvirate, we usually use this on two occasions. The first time we use it, we talk about the First Triumvirate, which is a collection of three people. The First Triumvirate is Julius Caesar, Marcus Crassus, and Pompey the Great, and they are three men that come together to do a private deal where they arrange things so that they all mutually support each other in terms of their goals. It's an unofficial thing, so you won't see any references in the text to the First Triumvirate.

 However, we also know the Second Triumvirate, and this is the one that is an official thing.

 There are laws to put into place, and it is these three individuals who will rule the Roman world for approximately 10 years. That's what a triumvirate is. With both triumvirates,

 just because they're working together, should we assume that they are working well together and that they're getting on? I would probably say not. Generally speaking, the three usually become two.

 One person is usually excluded or dies. With the First Triumvirate, Crassus is the first to go.

 Crassus dies fighting against the Parthians. The Parthians are what we would have known as the Persians. The people come after the Persians. He dies in 53 BC, so there's only Pompey and Caesar left,

 and then they start to fall out. It's the same thing with the Second Triumvirate. There are three of them, and then one of them is going to be subtly moved out, and that will be Lepidus. By the mid-30s, it's just Mark Antony and Octavian.

 Is Lepidus excluded for a particular reason? Can we see any machinations behind how it happens?

 He shoots himself in the foot, really. I think Lepidus is aware that he's slightly the third person down.

 In 36 BC, he decides that there is a civil war that goes on between the Triumvirate and one of the sons of Pompey the Great, Sextus Pompey. Sextus Pompey is defeated, and then Lepidus thinks,

 well, this is a good time now for me to make a power play, take a bit more land, get a bit more influence. Doesn't succeed. He's exiled, and he lives the rest of his life in southern France.

 He's out.

 Right, so there's two left.

 Yep. 

We've already seen that in the previous generation, when there's two left, it doesn't end well.

 How do they work, Mark Antony and Octavian, how are they working as a duo now? Are they both in Rome all the time?

 No, they're definitely not both in Rome. There is a division of territory. Essentially, Mark Antony will be sent off east. Well, sent off. He elects to go east, and when we talk about the east - we're talking about the Greek-speaking world, whereas Octavian will take charge of the west. Italy, Gaul, et cetera.

 And the reason for that is that east is, there's more money. There's a huge power base there. Antony has a lot of allies there. And of course, it's in the east that he's going to meet Cleopatra, which is going to be a big bone of contention between Octavian and Mark Antony.

 Sure, okay. So Mark Antony's out in the east, getting rich, having fun, having girlfriends. What's Octavian doing in the west?

 Octavian is, at certain points, making himself rather unpopular because he has to deal with quite a lot of the problems that are going on in Italy. One of them is land settlements for veterans.

 So after the defeat of Brutus and Cassius in the Battle of Philippi in 42, he has to settle all the veterans

 that fought in those campaigns back in Italy, and he has to take land from other people

 to give to the soldiers. It makes him massively unpopular. In 41 BC, there is a big rebellion against him, which is bizarrely led by Mark Antony's brother and Mark Antony's wife at the time, Fulvia.

 It's put down, but Mark Antony's loyalty is, shall we say, a bit suspect at this point. So Octavian and Mark Antony sort of form an extra compact. They intermarry, so Mark Antony is married off

 to Octavian's sister, Octavia.

 OK, so we're very used to the idea of political marriages across history. This sounds like it's a pretty important one. Is Octavian married at this point?

 Octavian ends up being married three times. His first wife is Claudia. We don't know too much about her. His second wife is Scribonia, and that's who he will have his only child with, and that will be Julia.

 His third wife will be Livia, and we know a lot more about Livia.

 So Mark Antony is marrying his sister, but at this time it doesn't sound like Octavian

 is marrying into Mark Antony's family.

 No, not at the moment, but having political marriages is always a way of sealing political deals.

 It means that everything's much closer, but it will be a problem because when he's married

 to Octavia, Mark Antony will also be seeing Cleopatra and having children with her.

 Awkward. So not only is this guy a rival, but he's also cheating on his sister.

 It's one of the things that Octavian will use in his propaganda battle against Antony

 throughout the 30s. He will say that Mark Antony is insulting his honor. He's also betraying a good Roman woman with a foreign woman and playing up to Roman ideals about xenophobia

 and all those sorts of things. So yeah, it's one of the things that Octavian will use against Antony,

 that it's an insult to Octavian's honor.

 Sure. So all this time Mark Antony is out in the East doing his thing, is it a fair assessment to say that Mark Antony is just having fun, or does it sound like he's actually being quite a politically savvy person

 working in the eastern half of the empire at the time?

 He is doing things out there that are politically important. He goes on a campaign against Armenia.

 He does attempt to retrieve the standards that were lost against the Parthians by Crassus. He's not particularly successful, but he is doing things. But if you look at the later sources, they tend to follow Octavian's line, which is essentially saying that he's on holidays and on an extended holiday,

 hanging out with Cleopatra, having fun. But he's gotten a lot of support. It's easy to forget this.

 When they eventually do go head-to-head and fight each other, the majority of the Senate are behind Antony because they think he's more likely to win. He's the more capable general. Octavian is very much unproven and his abilities as a general will be slightly suspect for a long time. Octavian and then Augustus will portray himself as a great military commander, but the sources seem to suggest that's not true at all and that many of his victories are won by other people. So he's a good commander-in-chief, possibly, but he does delegate a lot. And there are sources that say that he does run away from battles,

 that he's mysteriously sick before big battles or he's absent from the battlefield. How far we can believe them, it's unclear. But certainly, at the time, very much what is said in the public message

 is that he's a great commander that he does wonders. He's like Alexander the Great, but say 100 years on, and people are saying well, no, he's not that really. He has lots of capable people around him.

 He's good at delegating. 

Right, and we'll be talking more about how he kind of curates his image later on in the discussion. For now, I want to talk about the rivalry with Mark Antony, and it sounds almost like jealousy of Mark Antony at certain points. When Octavian is talking about Mark Antony specifically with Cleopatra,

 it sounds like he's really making quite personal attacks. Why do you think that is? Why does he make it so personal?

 There is a very personal element to their rivalry, but I think if we put it in terms of the culture at the time, these sorts of personal attacks are very much part of the way that politics is done. An example would be if you look at the speeches of Cicero. So, for instance, we've got the great statesman and lawyer Cicero. We have lots of evidence of the way that he conducted court cases, and the invective that goes on in those speeches, particularly against women, but generally insulting people in the most crude ways about their sexual habits, their personal life, things that you wouldn't ever do now, really, that you wouldn't count on. So this personal nature is part of the rhetoric of the day. He's also trying to whip up a sense of outrage against Antony. He's playing to prejudices that Romans have about people

 from the East, but also about the way that you conduct yourself. So Antony's sexual adventures

 with this foreign queen taps into ideas about self-control, which he doesn't have, about people from the East who are distrusted very often. So I think part of it is playing up to prejudices that his audience will have and that he wants to play on and he wants to encourage. And you will see this much later on

 with the sorts of stuff that comes out about Cleopatra, the sorts of stereotypes, the tropes about foreign women and sorcery and Egyptian religion. This is all stuff that's being used as part of the propaganda machine that Octavian is starting to develop in the 30s.

So just to recap, Mark Antony is out in the East. He's cheating on Octavian's sister. He's got this foreign girlfriend who just happens to be a queen of a foreign power. We can kind of guess, can't we,

 that this is going to end badly for one of them. What's the catalyst for Octavian saying, I'm not going to work with you anymore, we are now officially enemies?

 The thing that really kicks it off, I think, is something that happens in 34 BC and it's known as the donations of Alexandria. A little bit of context. Octavian is particularly annoyed that Mark Antony has three children with Cleopatra. Mark Antony has got children with Octavia as well and they are seen as legitimate children. But he's got three children with Cleopatra. He's got Cleopatra Selene,

 Alexander Helios, they're twins, and Ptolemy Philadelphus. So these three children are recognised, obviously, in Egypt as being legitimate, but the Romans don't see them as legitimate at all. And in 34 BC, Mark Antony and Cleopatra have a little ceremony in Alexandria. They dress up as Egyptian gods,

 they dress up as Osiris and Isis, and Mark Antony announces that he's handing over large numbers of territories in the East that are either Roman or are likely to be Roman in the future to his children by Cleopatra. And he seems to imply that any future Roman capital that would be ruled by him

 would be based in Alexandria.

 Ooh, okay. Now, Mark Antony's best mate, Julius Caesar, we can argue that he was eyeing up monarchical power and that's one of the reasons he was assassinated. And now, Mark Antony,

 his right-hand man, sounds like he wants to start a dynasty, a royal dynasty. That can't have gone down well in Rome. How does Octavian react to it?

 What Octavian does then is he decides to play on this. It's seen as being massively treasonous to be saying these sorts of things. So what he does is he, and this is probably something that is illegal,

 but what he does is he persuades the people that hold on to the wills of important people, the Vestal Virgins, these are sort of like Roman nuns essentially, they look after the wills of the aristocrats.

 And what Octavian does is he gets the Vestal Virgins to reveal the contents of Antony's will.

 And part of that content says that Antony wants to be buried in Alexandria. And he uses this as the

 pretext to say, well actually, this is, he's beyond the pale now. We're going to go to war.

 So yeah, basically Octavian will increase his patriotic image by saying that Mark Antony is a traitor.

 He is trying to basically make Rome an Egyptian thing, that he's going to move everything to Alexandria, that it's going to be a royal dynasty. As you say, we know that the Romans haven't had

 kings for 500 years. This is something that is truly shocking for Romans, we think, and therefore this

 will be the catalyst for the war between them.

 And it's worth mentioning, isn't it, Egypt isn't part of the Roman Empire at this point. It is a foreign country.

 It's been eyed up by the Romans pretty much since about the 60s BC. Pompey the Great has got lots of

 connections there. It's likely that it would have come into Roman hands at some point, and we can

 always argue that Cleopatra and all the things that she does is designed to protect Egypt, because she can see that it's a strategic place that Romans will want to have. It's got the resources of the

 Nile Delta, the huge amounts of grain that can be grown there. So she is, we think, doing

 deals, she's forging relationships with Julius Caesar, with Mark Antony, as a way of protecting

 her country. As a strategist, as a piece of political activity, it's a really, really understandable

 thing that you want to do this. But it's definitely not part of the Roman world at the moment. It's on

 the edge. It's almost going to be taken over, but no, it is at the end and in kingdom. 

So Mark Antony, who's been a consul, which, you know, prime minister or president equivalent, being

 quite open about wanting to be buried in a foreign country with his foreign girlfriend,

 that's awkward. I suppose it would be really, really easy for Octavian to capitalise on that.

 After he's made all of these attacks on Mark Antony's private life, what happens to turn it from an argument of words into an argument of armies?

 Well, what Octavian does, and this is what we have from later sources, is that he gets, he essentially gets the people of Italy to swear an oath of allegiance to him. And he frames it as not just a

 tiff between two politicians, he frames it as a culture war. And this is something that he's

 going to do throughout the aftermath of the Battle of Actium, the battle that they conduct between each other. It will be seen as protecting Roman culture from the influence of Cleopatra. So it will be framed as you'll be speaking Egyptian, you'll be worshipping Egyptian gods. It's seen as

 a real moment of crisis. And that's the clever thing that Octavian does. He just takes it from being what could be seen as yet another civil war. And he's very keen that nobody thinks of it as a civil war. That's something that you will definitely see throughout Octavian and then Augustus that civil wars are a thing you don't talk about. But he'll frame it as a war against a foreign enemy. And you see that repeatedly in the poems that come out after Actium, the way that Cleopatra is framed as an existential threat to Roman values.

 So let's talk about the Battle of Actium. First of all, where is Actium?

 Actium is off the coast of Western Greece. It's sort of just at the point where Greece goes into Albania.

 It's not hugely important place. As far as we know, there was a temple of Apollo there. But other

 than that, there's no significance to it. It is, of course, often the case that Greece is used as a place where Romans go and fight their civil wars. So when Julius Caesar and Pompey were fighting against each other, they also go to Greece as well. Philippi, Battle of Philippi, that was also in

 Greece. Don't trash your own country. Go and trash somebody else's when you're having

 a civil war. Keep your own territory tidy. Everywhere else is covered in bodies.

 So what kind of battle was Actium?

 It's a sea battle largely. And it is a sea battle that is actually more likely to have gone Mark Antony's

 way because he had by far the greater number of ships. He had the support of many Eastern kings.

 He had the greater troop numbers. It was expected that Antony would have won. And I think that was the feeling amongst the Roman Senate. Many senators went over to Antony's side. Of course, what

 Antony didn't have was a general that Octavian had, a general called Marcus Agrippa, who goes

 on to be possibly the most important person in the regime, certainly up to maybe 15 BC, something like that. 

So we've got the prelude to a battle. It looks like fortune is going to favour Antony because

 I mean, Antony's got quite a lot of battlefield experience. He's got experience in commanding

 armies and navies, so he's older. Octavian is the young person he's not really been proven yet.

 What is it about that battle that turns the tide on its head? Why is Octavian winning this

 battle that everyone thinks he's going to lose?

 There are two factors. The generalship of Marcus Agrippa is generally seen as something that is hugely

 important, the strategies that he uses. But the other thing that emerges from later sources

 is simply the fact that Antony makes a huge error in the fact that Cleopatra leaves the battle and Antony follows her and nobody can quite work out why he would have done that. It's very strange.

 It is hard to work with some of the sources because some sources are clearly very anti-Cleopatra

 and they do frame it as Mark Antony being sort of like a slave to his emotions in terms of

 his brain has gone kind of clouded because of this love, this passionate love that he has for Cleopatra.

 But she leaves the battle and he goes as well. It's a huge tactical error and that essentially is why he loses. If he'd stayed, things would have possibly been very different.

 Yeah, I mean, when we talk about Roman military commanders at this point, we always

 talk a lot about the loyalty of the troops. For the people on Mark Antony's side who he's left behind,

 how are they reacting to being abandoned by their commander who they've got this huge

 admiration for?

Shock, I think, is the basic word. Absolutely shocked. I mean, many of these soldiers will have followed

 Antony all the way from his days in Gaul. So Julius Caesar's in Gaul fighting, conquering Gaul throughout the 50s. Mark Antony's there at his side. So we're talking 20 year veterans.

 Absolutely shocked. And again, the blame will go to Cleopatra. Cleopatra will be seen

 as the person that has ruined this Roman and that is the narrative. Mark Antony was a

 great Roman ruined by Cleopatra. Though interestingly enough, that is never something that's

 said about Julius Caesar. The whole management of the image of Julius Caesar is protected

 from all this. Julius Caesar's essentially done the same sorts of things.

 I mean, the same exact same mistress.

 Exactly the same. Both they've all had children with her. And yet Octavian is very, very careful

 not to bring Julius Caesar into any Cleopatra arguments, as it were. He's left out. So

 there's a certain amount of hypocrisy I think going on there in terms of being quite happy

 to insult Cleopatra when it's connected with Mark Antony, but being very careful

 to leave it out when he's talking about Julius Caesar.

 And can we see anyone noticing this hypocrisy or calling him out on it?

 Well, I think we can say that the reign of Augustus is marked by a huge amount of

 hypocrisy. I think that there would have been many people around him who would be seeing the double standards going on, but they're letting it go. And there will be reasons why

 they're letting it go. I can't believe that there weren't people very close to Augustus just thinking, well he's saying one thing but he's definitely not doing that. But they're willing to let it go. And there are reasons for that, which I'm sure we'll talk about.

Yeah, I think if it's a civil war there are certain hills that you decide to die on, right?

 There are. As I say, I mentioned before that he doesn't like to talk about civil wars because when

 there have been many civil wars throughout the last 60-70 years there have been a number of civil wars. Obviously he wants to try and avoid implying that he started another one. Which he has done.

 And he certainly won't want later on to imply that his success was largely down to winning civil wars.

 So he's very careful to kind of avoid talking about it. So Cleopatra will be seen as a foreign enemy. Anthony is left out of quite a lot of the accounts of Actium until quite late on. He's not mentioned. He's just referred to as the husband. The husband of that woman and the husband of this witch.

 Because he wants to tell the public that it's a foreign war, not another civil war.

Okay, so it's interesting, isn't it, because in the kind of history of the way Mark Antony has been written in this period we're told that he was drinking a lot. There were a lot of feasting, revels,

 and that his relationship with Cleopatra was almost emasculating. But it sounds like a lot of that is just Octavian not wanting to mention Mark Antony so that he can make it sound like a foreign war, right? Is that a fair thing to say?

 I think it is. And I think as well that if you can kind of look back to the way that certain individuals have been portrayed, you get the same sorts of narrative going on. So if you look back at the way that Alexander the Great is portrayed, the idea that he loses it by becoming very eastern, very decadent, drinking a lot. So I think some of these insults are a bit generic. But yes, I think the way that Mark Antony is portrayed as this sort of decadent, drunk is a way of diverting some of the things that are also going on at the time. We talked earlier on about Rome perhaps wanting Egypt. In a sense, it's

 a power grab, isn't it? And it's Octavian making sure that he has control of it rather than Antony does.

 When Rome finally takes control of Egypt, Octavian will ban all important people from going to Egypt without his permission, because he doesn't want anybody to use it as a power base in the future. He knows that that's a possibility. Sounds strict, but perhaps justified from his perspective.

 So Actium is over. Where does Mark Antony go next, and then what does Octavian do?

 Well, this is the sort of the story that quite a lot of people will be familiar with because it's been romanticised so much by people like Shakespeare. The double suicide of Antony and Cleopatra.

 It's not quite like that. Depending on who you read, he goes first. He'll take his own life first.

 And to be fair that sort of fits in with Roman culture. So amongst Roman aristocrats, the idea

 of taking your own life to preserve your honour is entirely normal. You get lots of examples of people having done that like Cato the Younger, etc. Cleopatra, not so obvious what she's doing, but the

 sources seem to suggest that she wants to see whether she can use her seductive powers on Octavian maybe to cut a deal, because it's clear that she thinks, well, unless I do something, Egypt's going to go

 to Rome, so I need to try and maybe do what I was doing with Julius Caesar, maybe with Mark Antony. It makes it sound very clinical, but I think it's a good strategy. Octavian will reject this,

 so she takes her own life, or maybe she's killed. We don't know. The sources suggest that the famous story that she uses a snake to take her own life, but there is speculation that maybe Octavian had a hand in her death. It's unclear, because it would have made more sense for Octavian to take Cleopatra

 back to Rome as part of his triumph, and then publicly humiliate her, which would be the normal way of doing things. But he would want her out of the way, definitely. It's possible that he had gotten rid of, should we say, but yeah, they're both dead, so that's it, and then Rome takes control.

 So Mark Antony's dead, Cleopatra is dead. What about Mark Antony and Cleopatra's

 children? What happens to them?

 Well, there's a slightly weird thing going on, and we can work out reasons for it. Octavian will allow

 some of the children to survive, but others to die. So the main person to be gotten out of the way is

 Julius Caesar's son, Caesarion. He has to be removed, because even though he's not seen as legitimate

 by Romans, in terms of there was no marriage, legitimate marriage between Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, he's still seen as blood, but a bloodline connection to Julius Caesar. Therefore he is a threat

 to Octavian. So what happens is that the children of Mark Antony with Octavian are allowed to carry on, and the children of Cleopatra and Mark Antony are allowed to carry on. So it's quite interesting

 how Antony's family is integrated later on, because if you actually trace the Julio-Claudian family tree

 down, you will find that the relatives, the descendants of Mark Antony, are very firmly embedded in the Julio-Claudian line. That's on into the future. Yeah, we will find that the children of Mark Antony go on. In fact, you could argue that they go on to exercise more of an influence in the Julio-Claudian line than Augustus' own family.

 Well, that's good for Mark Antony, in a way. Bless him. So we talk about Caesarion being killed because he's a threat to Octavian. Can we tell what Octavian is intending to do at this point?

 Is he intending to restore the Republic?

 Well, it's an interesting point, isn't it? Because the Triumvirate has dissolved, and the Triumvirate was always meant to be something that theoretically was temporary. It's a thing that has to be renewed. So when we've had both of the Triumvirates, it's always been a five-year thing, and then they renew it.

 So yeah, as you say, the Triumvirate is gone. He's got two options, really. He could either make himself a dictator, which you won't want to do, because that didn't end too well for Julius Caesar. Or, as you say, he could restore the Republic. But at the moment, he's still off abroad. He's not back in Rome yet, so he can kind of delay any decisions. He's been Consul once, in 43. He's Consul in 31, and he'll be Consul for quite a few years to come. So he's got power. He's not going to make any decisions until he gets back to Rome.

 Okay. So when he gets to Rome, what can we see him doing?

 The thing that he does, that the history books are very keen to talk about, is he makes a political

 settlement, and this will be in 27 BC. And he does formally restore the Republic. He says he restores the Republic. He's quite open about this. This will be something that crops up in his own history of his life, the Res Gestae. He restores the Republic, and he changes his name. He changes his name to Augustus. So when we're talking about Octavian Augustus, Octavian before 27 BC, Augustus afterwards. We are told in the sources that he did think about calling himself Romulus, because

 Augustus is a sort of an invented name. It means holy one, or revered one. But he was advised, no, don't go for Romulus. It's too much of a connection with kings. You don't really want to go there. Though it is going to fit in. The idea of Romulus is going to fit in with what he wants to achieve.

 So it's not so odd, because he will use the imagery of Romulus a lot in his own image making.

 But yeah, the connection with kings is too close. He is consul. He's been consul in 31. He will be consul all the way through to 23 BC. That should be raising alarm bells for people, because you can't be consul every year. There were lots of laws in the republic that caused a lot of rows about how often you could be consul. There are rules that set down that you need to have gaps between consulships. But he doesn't have that. He stays consul.

 What he does do as well is he gives himself quite a lot of powers. And the powers come from his control of the provinces. He gives himself charge of all the big provinces and all the armies. And we're talking about Gaul, Spain, Syria and Egypt. So all the most recently acquired provinces with all the trained soldiers, all the ones that have got the biggest amount of legions in, and he takes control

 of them. And that at this point is how he sort of has his power. So he said that he's restored the republic. But actually, if you look at what he's done, he's still consul all the time. And he has huge numbers of troops abroad in all the main provinces, all the ones that would have been likely to revolt at this point. So he's still very much in charge. Now you can imagine that the people around him would be saying, well, he hasn't restored the republic really. That's not the republic we know. You can't be

 consul every year. He's got all these armies. You can't do that. You can't have one person having all these things. But they let it go. Nobody really challenges him on it. And I think the reason for that is

 because it's the post war period. They've got peace. And they haven't had peace for quite a long time.

 It's one of the things that I think allows Augustus to have a bit of a free pass is that he does a lot of things which aren't really legit. But because he's restored peace and he's got stability in the economy, people just go, fine, that's a sacrifice we'll make.

I think that's a really important point because when we're talking about the fall of the Roman

 Republic and these constant civil wars, we're often focused on the people organising these wars.

 But what was the cost of the average Roman living in Italy from all of these successive wars? Because they really, really seem to want peace even if it means just letting someone take more control than they're supposed to. Are they just so exhausted that they're willing to accept this now?

 It's often hard to know what ordinary people think because we never really know from the sources what they think. History is written by rich influential men usually about rich influential men.

 So we always get the sense that the arguments that go on in the Republic are very much about individuals obsessed with their own ambition and warlords fighting against each other. I think for

 ordinary Romans it's the sense of uncertainty, it's the effect on the economy, it's things like land, it's the idea of having some sort of set that you've got an economy that's working, that you're not

 going to have pitch battles, you're not going to have Rome invaded by different generals at various

 points. Of course, when you have stability, that's when you start to get things like investment and people start to plan for longer-term projects. Now these were things that were starting to come

 in under Julius Caesar. So Julius Caesar had this sense of I'm going to do stuff that's long-term, so I'm going to start building things, I'm going to start putting down infrastructure. And that's something that Augustus will be very keen to show that he's doing. I'm building stuff. I'm building not just temples and big important buildings, I'm building aqueducts, I'm doing roads. I'm making you feel

 that you don't have to keep looking over your shoulder all the time. And it's one of the main

 things that Augustus will push throughout his reign, the idea that I have brought peace.

 I've not stopped fighting people, but I'm fighting people at the edges of empire and I'm bringing in

 more slaves and bringing in more land. It's not civil war. You in Italy, you're going to have a great

 time. So it's peace. It's peace is the thing that I think possibly blinds people to this, but the historian Tacitus who's writing in the 2nd century AD, now we've lost quite a lot of what he has to say about the

 Julio Claudians and most of what he's said about Augustus has gone, but he does say that he says

 that Augustus almost seduced people through the idea of peace.

 Augustus got away with all the things that he does politically because he brought peace. And

 we can make comparisons nowadays with any politician that says as long as the economy is okay,

 as long as your mortgage comes down, as long as you've got jobs, you'll turn a blind eye to things that maybe I'm doing that are perhaps a bit dodgy or things that you might not like. And I think

 that's exactly what happens with Augustus. 

So you've spoken about him coming home. He's become consul several times. He's clearly not wanting to step back and take a less public life. Does he stand up at any point and say, you know what, I want to be emperor? Because we know him as the first emperor. So how does that happen?

 He has to play very, very carefully because he's seen what happened to Julius Caesar. What happened to Julius Caesar isn't necessarily down to the things that he was doing. I mean, he was assassinated I think because aristocrats saw that Julius Caesar being in charge was a block on their own political ambitions.

 But we're told that the other reason that he was killed was because he was ostentatiously acting like a king. So we're told that he had like a golden throne and that he wouldn't stand up for the senate and he had lots and lots of statues made of himself. And it was clear that he almost wanted to be a king. So

 Augustus has to go, well, I want to be like Julius Caesar, but there are certain things I can't do.

 They didn't work. So Augustus has to go through a charade essentially. He has to accumulate powers

 around himself, but he has to make it look like they are not official powers. So quite a lot of what Augustus does is about managing his image. So a lot of what he will end up doing will make it look like he's doing things almost reluctantly or that the powers that he has are unofficial down to his reputation or that people have given him stuff to do and he's sort of said, I don't really want to do this, but I will if you insist. And he will also cultivate an image of humility and being very low key.

So if we read in Suetonius we get various interesting stories like he puts it out that his wife Livia

 and his daughter Julia make all their own clothes. So they all wear homemade clothes. That he has simple tastes. That he likes doing the things that ordinary people do like gambling with dice or

 going to watch the chariot racing. That he has a sort of a fairly plain way of speaking so it's not an elevated, very educated kind of way. It's more speaking the tongue of the common man. This sort of imagery that I'm not trying to be a king I'm not trying to have a golden crown and I am somebody who's mostly ordinary But at the same time he will also be implying in the background that he's somehow partly divine and that's to do with the fact that fairly early on he deified Julius Caesar. He made Julius Caesar into a god. So that he could call himself son of a god. And that's what you'll see on all the coins. That's this D.F. divi filius son of a god. 

That's quite the contrast.

 It is. It's a good way for Augustus to ensure that people are very quick to follow him and to do what he says. Because he has that added weight of I'm semi divine. So any law that I put into practice isn't just

 a secular law. It's the son of a god telling you to do these things. How much people believe this I'm not entirely sure. But he does use it This connection with Julius Caesar for quite a long time until he feels comfortable that people are respecting him for who he is. And then he starts to slightly sideline that and rely more on his own personal achievements.

 So he's the son of a god who's just a normal guy. Does anyone use the word emperor in his lifetime?

 The word that we've taken to be emperor is the Latin word imperator. But imperator doesn't actually mean emperor. It means general. It means somebody that has imperium. And imperium means the power to command. So imperium actually is something that consuls have. It's the power to be in charge of an army. So the idea of an emperor doesn't actually really exist at this point certainly. And even later on you'll actually get people being called another title rather than an emperor. What Augustus likes

 to call himself is first citizen or first among equals. So he's pretty much inter pares. So it's always

 the suggestion that he's like everyone else but his general good reputation means that people will let him speak first in the senate or sort of bow down to his superior advice. But he's not anything, he's not got a title that makes him better than anyone else. He's just a better kind of person so why wouldn't you listen to him first? 

So it sounds like a slow accumulation of different roles and ranks until essentially he is the guy

 in charge. Is there a point where we see everyone saying okay this is just how it is now. We are having a dynasty that's going to be in charge of us instead of someone who's going to relinquish power

 and have it from some other guy instead of their own family.

 The interesting thing is that if we say that he's collecting this series of unofficial powers how do you pass them on? He said that he's restored the republic which means that for most people that would have been the idea that you go back to a democratic system. So all these powers, all these things that he has he cannot possibly leave them to anyone because people around him are saying well that's a hereditary monarchy, you can't do that. Nonetheless, there are a series of successes that are lined up.

 People that he is grooming to, we don't know, take over in some way. He can't pass powers of consulship on, he can sort of maybe promote them up the ranks. Maybe there's this sense that somehow

 genetically the qualities of Augustus will be kind of a symbol that he nominates within his own family.

 I would imagine though that the first time that he starts nominating successors would be the moment that people around him were saying yes this is a king we're talking about because in a republic you cannot possibly pass these powers on. But again, people don't seem to mind and there are a series of successes that come and go because Augustus ends up living a long time so like Louis XIV everybody that gets nominated dies before he does. So I think that's the point and the point, the first point that happens is in 23 BC where the first person that Augustus has nominated which is his nephew Marcellus the son of Octavia not with Mark Antony but with a previous husband, he dies and there is a worry about who's going to take over because at the same time Augustus gets very ill and he almost dies.

 Augustus is quite a weedy chap if you believe later sources, he's not like the guy you see in all the statues and stuff, this person frozen at the age of maybe 30 or 40, he's quite short we're told, he's got bad teeth, he's always ill, he's arthritic he's short, he's got a monobrow all these things if you believe that Suetonius, but he gets very ill every so often and people do worry that he's going to die and he almost does in 23 BC the person he wants to take over does die and then there's a worry about what's going to happen next the person who steps up to possibly take over is Agrippa at that point. 

So who is Agrippa to Augustus at this point, is he a family member is he a friend?

 Well he starts off being a friend and a colleague, he's of a lower social status than Lactavian was

 when they got together but he's a very very capable and loyal general and he's pretty much the second

 in command to Augustus at this point Augustus gives him various important roles to do

 and in the terms of the building of the infrastructure of Rome, quite a lot of what we still have is down to Marcus Agrippa, so the original Pantheon in Rome was commissioned and built by Marcus Agrippa, we've also had various aqueducts that are still around by Agrippa but he does actually end up marrying into Augustus' family, he marries Julia, so Marcellus is dead and then Julia is now married to Agrippa. Julia doesn't have really much choice in it.

 Ah right, okay, so the best friend becomes the son-in-law

 The son-in-law indeed. Now if you walk around Rome you will see various buildings that say

 this was built by Marcus Agrippa.

 Why is it that Augustus allows Marcus Agrippa to put his name on buildings but isn't allowing him perhaps to take credit for things like battles?

 I think it's being selective in terms about what you want to take the credit for and again I think that there are parallels to make between sort of modern leaders now it's about what you would like to be

 what you feel comfortable with allowing people to get credit for and things that you're not, so I think

 building temples that's fine people can be allowed to do that winning battles is more prestigious possibly and Augustus is very keen up to a certain point to claim credit for himself for the battles

 when he starts getting too old then clearly he has to kind of allow the younger generation to take

 but allowing other people to sort of put their names on buildings is something that Augustus is quite keen to do actually, it's a way of people expressing loyalty to the regime as it were and he's quite happy for them to pay for it as well.

 We often hear about Augustus finding Rome a city built of brick and then leaving it in marble, that's great... we've also seen that sometimes it's his friends doing it, so what is Rome like when Augustus

 becomes the guy in charge and how does he change that?

 It's generally regarded as being a bit of a mess when Augustus comes to power, it's been through quite

 a lot of civil wars obviously it's a bit shabby, it's a bit run down there's an awful lot of things that are

 temporary structures, for instance really up to the time of Pompey the Great's theatre that is built in Rome, they used to have theatres that were sort of built each year and then torn down the idea being that they thought it was a slightly dodgy thing to have morally therefore they didn't want to have permanent theatres, so they would build a theatre and then they'd pull it down I think one of the things that motivates Augustus to beautify Rome is the fact that compared to Alexandria, it really was

 very second rate so he basically wants to make Rome a world class capital part of that will be to do with repairing things and part of it will be to do with creating new things he will end up finishing quite a lot of the things that Julius Caesar started and he will build an awful lot of things that are new himself and many of the things that he does are connected with building temples and the reason

 that he does that is there is a general sense and it's not just Augustus thinking this, these are

 the other thinkers at the time they think that part of the problems that have beset Rome over the last century or so are down to the fact that Romans aren't religious enough they are not doing what the gods tell them so Augustus will very much pitch himself as a religious person and part of that will be he's going to restore lots of temples and he's going to build lots of temples so some of those things

 will survive down to us possibly the most notable Augustan religious building

 that we have is the Ara Pacis the Temple of Peace, which you can still see in Rome in a very

 nice museum by the Tiber.

 Yeah that is a beautiful building, highly recommended if you're in Rome because I know a lot of people skip it. So he's building in Rome and he's making the city beautiful we've talked about wanting to do things for the citizens themselves, partly to ensure their loyalty what are the kind of things that he's doing for instance with culture?

 It's a very big thing for Augustus, in fact it's when you look at Augustus's reign, quite a lot is to do with the vibes with the feelings that are in general rather than concrete things that he does in terms of changes in laws he's very very keen that this is a reboot under him, he's restarting things so he will pitch an idea of a golden age that he will preside over where everything will somehow revert to an idealized past there will be a great flourishing of art and culture that there will be a period of peace and prosperity and fertility so many of the motifs that we see are connected with bountiful crops

 lots of people having babies a general feeling of optimism for the future so we can see those images

 on the Ara Pacis of lots of plants and lots of cornucopias and people having babies and we have marriage laws that are brought in by Augustus in 18 BC which is all to do with encouraging

 the right sorts of people to have babies, lots of big families, lots of tax breaks and in 17 BC

 he has something called the secular games, and the secular games are a big celebration of a brand new golden age - a cyclum - which is a period of about 110 years. There is a big festival in Rome, it's generally something that people will think this is a brand new age Augustus is ushering in this

 age of prosperity and peace and I think people seem to have bought into that

 Definitely, I think that would be true. What about writers and artists at the time? Can we see him

 particularly patronising certain writers?

 There are a group of writers that flourish under Augustus, they are many of the big names of Latin literature, particularly Virgil and Ovid, Horace, Propertius... these are all people that are

 they are a loose collective, some of them are certainly being paid by the regime, not necessarily

 to be a mouthpiece of the regime but certainly paid to produce literature, the person who

 procures these people acts as a literary patron is someone called, guys, Maecenas. Maecenas is the third

 big member of Augustus's government he's not a military figure in any way but he basically collects

 together these poets and these poets will often praise Augustus in their work, so we get quite a lot of

 poetry that is talking about how great the Battle of Actium was, how great members of Augustus's family are praising peace, praising the Golden Age, praising Augustus's ancestry, the Julian family

 say that they can trace themselves back to Aeneas and Romulus and Remus, so there are poems that all seem to have the same themes scholars are divided as to whether or not these people are acting

 independently, they just all like Augustus this stuff is coming out freely, and other people are saying

 well there seems to be a tick box of themes and motifs that appear in all of them, are they being paid? Some of them get paid very well, so we don't know to what extent these people are fully on board with

 Augustus's program of reforms and changes or whether simply they know that's where the money is, they're writing to order.

 So when we talk about him doing a whole reboot we do see some beautiful monuments that still stand to this day, we do see an explosion in literature that we still read to this day. What about

 politics and economy, is he good on politics and economy?

 We have conflicting sources about how happy people are politically Suetonius tells us that there are assassination attempts, that behind all this lovely happy optimistic atmosphere there is a certain amount of paranoia politically - I think Augustus is panicking slightly because he is aware that he's not

 immortal even though that's one of the things that he likes to kind of push out as an image

 that he is sort of immortal that he knows that this coalition of powers that he's got can't last forever

 that sooner or later somebody will want the republic properly to come back and it's this period that it's more likely to happen this close to people remembering what the republic was. He seems to have largely managed people's expectations and I still think it's to do with the power there are

 no massive problems in terms of the economy at this stage Augustus is still adding provinces to the Roman world not in the sense somebody like Trajan later on is going to do where going on big campaigns but Augustus is very clear that he is bringing people in. Some of them are being conquered but some of them are also doing deals shall we say so there is a certain amount of diplomacy

 going on. It seems to have been a period of relative prosperity and calm which is as it goes on makes it easier for Augustus to worry less about his own position but he's still concerned about who's going to come next and that is something that is bubbling under the surface so and behind the scenes

 there's an awful lot of political machinations going on - who's going to take over - there's rivalry between two sides of the family and he's having to manage that and you know what that might mean in terms of what comes next.

So we were talking about Augustus' rise to power and what he did to change Rome and its fabric and its culture. But now I want to get into the messiness of his private life. So we briefly mentioned wives in the first half of this episode. Can we talk about his wives in a bit more detail, please?

 OK, so we mentioned Scribonia, his second wife, who provided him with his only natural child, Julia.

 But then he marries for the third time and this is the wife that I think many people will know, which is Livia. Now, Livia comes from a very noble and long-lived family, the Claudians. She is already married to somebody else at the point that Octavian will meet her. So Octavian is married to Scribonia, Livia is married to somebody else. And this is where the moral high ground that Augustus will come to occupy will fall down a lot. On the day that his daughter is delivered, he divorces his wife Scribonia.

 Then he goes on to demand that Livia's husband divorce Livia and so he can marry her. Livia is pregnant at that point, not with Augustus' child, but with her husband's child. So that's the way they get together. Yeah, it's all the stuff later on where Augustus portrays himself as a very moral person and all the attacks that he made on Antony. Yeah, it's a lot of hypocrisy because his own personal life is turbulent, shall we say. So he marries Livia and therefore he brings on board her two sons and they will be Drusus and Tiberius. So the Augustus family will be Julia, his daughter, and Drusus and Tiberius.

 Unfortunately, as time goes on, we're going to get a bit of a rift going on. Certainly, if you believe Robert Graves and the Claudius novels and ever seen I, Claudius, you will certainly know the reputation that Livia has where she ends up supposedly bumping off nearly all of the family

 to make sure that Tiberius becomes the heir. But I can talk you through how all that plays out.

 So what age was he when he married Livia, roughly?

 He is, oh, I'm going to say that he's probably in his mid-20s. So still quite young, third wife.

 Yes, that's quite normal for Romans. Mark Antony ended up having five wives. These are all political marriages. So a lot of the retrovals happen when people are very young and very often they are not even consummated. They are just simply alliances that you can have with important families. Aristocratic Romans do marry several times and it's not regarded as being somebody who fails in their marriages frequently. It's just simply that's what you do.

 So it is something that you do but perhaps divorcing your wife on the same day as she's given birth still perhaps raises a couple of eyebrows, right?

 It would do, but then we do have to remember who knows these things. The scandals, and there are lots of scandals coming up, I think these are restricted to a fairly close circle. Not in the sense that they're being hidden, it's just the fact that ordinary people don't have access to this information.

 I'm sure that they don't know who most of these people are. There's no kind of media in any sense.

 So emperors, as they will become, or even senior politicians, they're just not known by the public.

 So when we talk about scandals to come and we think this is going to rock the world of Augustus and bring him down, no it won't because the only people who would know about these are the elite essentially.

 Right, okay, so it's a kind of guarded secret between the upper crust.

 I think so, yes.

 Right. So he's divorced Scribonia, but he had a child with her.

 Yes.

 Livia has got two children by her previous husband. Do they have any biological children of their own together?

 No, they don't have any children together at all. What eventually will happen, eventually, after a long time, is that Augustus will adopt Livia's children. But this takes a while for it to happen because Augustus will prefer to try and seek an heir from his own biological child, Julia. So it will be Julia that will be married off to various people to try and provide heirs. And we mentioned that Julia gets married toAgrippa and they will have five children together. And it's two of those children that Augustus will push for initial heirs and that's Gaius and Lucius Caesar.

 Okay, those names don't crop up very often. Can we assume that their careers were quite short?

 Yes, they don't live that long. Gaius dies in 4 AD and Lucius dies two years before that in 2 AD.

 So we're talking about late teens. They are people very, very much at the beginning of their careers.

 So they both die in sort of the early stages of their army careers. Again, I'd imagine that these are people that are not that well known. When Marcellus dies in 23, he's only 19, I think. So you've got to remember the life expectancy in the Roman world is lower than ours. The fact that Augustus gets to be 76 is unusual because many people would struggle to get beyond their 30s. So Gaius and Lucius will end up not getting that far. Okay, so Agrippa himself will die in 12 BC.

 Let's talk a little bit about Julia, the only child of Augustus biologically.

 Is that a close relationship? Do they really seem to love each other? What's her life like?

 Well, if they did love each other, then it very, very, very definitely ended in a hate relationship. She is somebody, I think, that has a really raw deal certainly in the historical sources. She is essentially used as someone who's been married off to create male heirs. WhenAgrippa dies, she is then handed over to Tiberius to be married to him. They don't like each other at all. It's a very, very miserable marriage by all accounts. What happens to Julia eventually is just appalling. She is accused, and we don't know whether or not this is machinations by Livia or whether it's true. She is accused of mass adulteries with senior aristocrats. This is seen as intolerable to Augustus because he's passed a series of moral laws

 telling people how to behave in bed and how they should get married. She's basically now got a reputation for going against all these laws. He sees that as humiliating. In 2 BC, he banishes her to a very little island off the coast of what is now modern-day Tuscany. She stays there almost for the rest of her life, to be followed actually by her own daughter, Julia the Younger, who's accused of something similar. It's horrible. Anybody who's seen I, Claudius, will remember the scenes where Augustus is asking, is anybody here who hasn't slept with my daughter? Yes, she is just absolutely out of the family by that stage. Absolutely. There's an awful lot of misogyny, obviously, in the Roman world.

 We could go down the route that Livia is taking out that side of the family to make sure that Tiberius or Drusus gets into power. But it's entirely possible that Julia was just a very unhappy woman

 who was just seeking happiness outside the arranged marriages that she was having to go through.

 She produced five children with Agrippa literally over about eight years, I think. Maybe you can't blame her for just wanting to be a bit happy. 

The framing of it as multiple adulteries might be masking the fact that some of them were very important people and that maybe Augustus saw them as threats, political threats, so the possibility of plots, possibly. It's not just a moral thing in that case. It's to do with Augustus possibly thinking that there was a coup going to be taken up against him.

 Okay. So for her, I mean, first she's married off to her dad's best mate. Then when he dies, she's married off to her stepbrother. Essentially to be a baby-making machine. She doesn't get any choice in this, I'm assuming.

 I wouldn't imagine so. Women don't have any choice about who they marry. These are all arranged marriages. To be fair, quite a lot of the men don't have that much choice either because it's decided by parents. So if you're a Roman aristocrat, you are told who to marry. So to put a little bit of context for the Julia and Tiberius relationship, Tiberius is already married to somebody, and this is where it gets slightly complicated. He's married to one of Agrippa's daughters, not one by Julia. He is told by Augustus, you must divorce Vipsania and marry Julia. And Tiberius says, I don't want to.

 I don't want to divorce my wife. And Augustus will say, you've got no choice. He has to marry Julia.

 They don't have any children, and the marriage apparently is very, very unhappy.

 Okay. So we see him making decisions on behalf of both his children, not just the girls.

 He is making decisions for the boys, even though they are saying to him, we don't want this.

 A Roman father can do that. A Roman father theoretically has absolute power over his children.

 He can have them killed theoretically in Roman law. I don't think that happens very often, but he's allowed to do that. So as the pater familias, the father figure, he can do that. And he would also then reinforce that by saying this is to do with dynastic reasons. This is a really important thing.

 This is not just your happiness. You're doing this to produce heirs for the future. Okay. So he's definitely looking forward rather than what's right in front of him.

 Let's talk about Tiberius. So it's an adopted son, and it doesn't sound like he was the first choice to take over. We know that it is Tiberius who is taking over. So what kind of relationship is that?

 Up and down. Up and down, it's fair to say. Tiberius is a very, very experienced general.

 He's one of the people that achieves quite a lot of the victories that we would associate with Augustus.

 If anybody's familiar with the statue called the Prima Porta statue, the famous statue of Augustus where he's sort of raising his arm, and he's got what looks like a cloak hanging over one arm.

 You can see it in the Vatican. That is, we think, dated to about 20 BC, and on the front of Augustus' armour is an image of the King of the Parthians handing over the legionary standards that were lost at the Battle of Carrhae in 53 BC, the Roman defeat then, to a general, a Roman general that we think might be Tiberius. So Tiberius is a very capable commander. Sources seem to indicate that he's quite a cold, distant man, but again, we're not entirely sure about that. But yes, he's really, really miffed quite a lot of the time that Augustus is clearly just going through the other side of the family.

 Tiberius feels that he's always been very loyal. He's been very capable. He's seen Agrippa preferred, first of all. Then he's seen Gaius and Lucius. And even then, after Gaius and Lucius, there is another son called Agrippa Posthumous who's also then adopted. Tiberius is thinking, oh, you know, when is it going to get to me? Agrippa Posthumous will get banished eventually, so it's Tiberius' turn.

 I think even at some stage that Augustus was preferring Tiberius' younger brother, Drusus, as being a bit more of a candidate. And then finally, when he adopts Tiberius as his successor, as his stepson, or as a proper son, I should say, he also then says, ah, but I want you at the same time, I want you to adopt, I want you to adopt your nephew. Your nephew, the son of your brother, Drusus, called Germanicus.

 Germanicus is another famous Roman general. And Tiberius is thinking, but I've already got my son of my own already. What Augustus is essentially saying to Tiberius is, I'm adopting you. You might be the next heir, but I think possibly I would prefer your nephew to be the actual heir. So you make sure you adopt him instead.

 Is this because at the time Germanicus is too young to be adopted himself by Augustus?

 Yes. Also as well, Germanicus is a rapidly rising person up the ranks. He's a bit of a star.

 He's the guy that will end up sorting the problems out when there's a big rebellion in Germany in the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD where three legions get massacred. Augustus is distraught at this and he sends Germanicus out to sort the problem out. So yeah, I think with Tiberius, we can see in the sources

 that every so often he will flounce off. So he basically takes himself off to Rhodes, the island of Rhodes for quite a long time, when he feels that Agrippa is being preferred to him. And it's only when Agrippa dies that Augustus says, right, you've got to come back. And he's very reluctant to do that. So you can understand why Tiberius should be really resentful. He is clearly seen as like fifth or sixth choice.

 It's not a vote of confidence. When he's finally first choice, it sounds like it's only because a placeholder until Germanicus is ready, right?

 That's harsh.

 It is And to be fair, we combine that with the stories that come to us from Suetonius and Suetonius really doesn't give him a very good press at all, same with Tacitus. So we sort of look back and we always imagine that the emperor that he might become is down to the fact that he's resentful.

 He's got a really bitter kind of grudge against Augustus and that forms the way that he is as an emperor later on. 

So Augustus is showing himself as a kind of first citizen. He's pushing morality laws.

 But from what we've learned about his marriages and how they happened and ended, how he treats his children, it sounds like his private life was actually really quite messy.

 It was. One of the sources, I think Suetonius says that his wife Livia used to go off finding young women for him to have sex with, which is quite a serious accusation to make. He's got a reputation as a massive womanizer, and that goes all the way back to when he was a Triumvir. This is something that Mark Antony will throw at him. You say, well, you're having a go at me about Cleopatra. How many women do you regularly sleep with? So please don't kind of get all preachy with me. I think what we do tend to find with Augustus, it's one of the reasons I really like studying him, is that he's the consummate politician, that the stuff that he says, the stuff that he does publicly, is so much at odds with what he does privately. So he pitches himself as a very, very religious man. There's lots of images you see of Augustus with his head covered, which shows that he's being a priest. You look at him on the side of the Ara Pacis. He is restoring temples, he's building temples. And yet, you do sort of think,

 I bet you he's probably not that religious, because he knows being religious goes down well with his voter base, that there's an awful lot of people who like the idea of somebody who's very conservative socially and religiously. And that's what he pitches. And it works, because he does. He goes from being this triumvirate, and as a triumvirate, he's quite a nasty piece of work. He's very ambitious, he's very ruthless. He changes his name, and then he reinvents himself, and he becomes this sort of slightly crusty, old-fashioned, socially conservative religious figure, certainly to the public.

 And you sort of think, well, how much of that is true? I suspect a lot of it isn't, and that's probably what makes Augustus the success that he was, because he manages his public image so well. 

So he's not just rebooting Rome, he's rebooting his own reputation at the same time.

 Oh, absolutely. The stories that you see in later sources about him being a triumvirate show him as being particularly nasty. So there are stories that say that he bumped off two of the consuls in 43,

 that supposedly they died on the battlefield, but some people have suggested that he had them killed

 so that he could become consul. There are stories about him torturing people, plucking out their eyes, all these sorts of things. But of course, with a name change, you can reinvent yourself, and that's exactly what he does. So after that, nobody thinks about him as being this ruthless, aggressive person who, in fact, perpetrates some civil wars. He is this kindly father figure who's got a big family and likes going to the temples. He's all about peace and prosperity. That's the new image, and the old Octavian is forgotten.

 It's really interesting, isn't it, because when you look at instances in him in, for instance, modern works of fiction, I'm thinking particularly HBO's Rome, which doesn't go up to him being an emperor.

 It shows him in his youth. The kind of image that that show has is of him being a quiet, socially awkward genius who is almost reluctant to take power, and everyone around him behaves really badly.

 But as you get to the end of that series, you do get the sense that he's like a chess player. He's moving people around. And that's the other interesting thing about Augustus, is that people find him hard to warm to because he's quite cold. Mark Antony is this very passionate, larger-than-life figure. Lots of flaws, obviously. But when they see Augustus, they sort of see this person as kind of so calculating,

 so ruthless in terms of, and so false in many ways. So I think that's why he's probably not as immediately an attractive character to engage with, but obviously politically incredibly astute.

 It's interesting.

 I mean, in that show, they almost show him, he's almost sociopathic in that he doesn't really understand, he doesn't seem to understand emotions as much as he does tactics.

 I like that, because he does manipulate people. He manipulates his own family quite ruthlessly to get what he wants. They are just pawns. Does that make him a good ruler? Possibly. I mean, later on, you're going to get lots of emperors that are more volatile, shall we say, the Caligulas and the Neros, the Domitians. Augustus, at least, I suppose, is reigning in that kind of excess, but he is nonetheless as ruthless as we will see later emperors, I think.

 So I've mentioned the HBO show, which, I mean, is already getting quite old, hasn't it? But is there an adaptation, a novel, a show, a movie that you think really seems to have nailed his personality and his vibe?

 I would definitely agree with you with HBO. It's almost 20 years old now, I think. It's still almost the go-to. I would say I, Claudius, a little stagey now, but actually in terms of how close it is to the history,

 it's very close, and that's adapted from Robert Graves' novels. One that I saw a few years ago,

 I've only seen the first series, not the second series, is called Domina, which is all about Livia,

 and I really liked that series. I thought that that was really interesting, and that definitely pushed the angle that she was very, very politically astute and that, in fact, that it was more of a partnership

 than perhaps some of the other sources, and I liked that. I liked the idea that he was being not much advised, but was having good dialogues and the exchanges of ideas about policy with Livia. That sort of fits in quite well with what we find later on with Emperors, that there are women in the imperial family that are incredibly intelligent, politically astute. People like Messalina with Claudius,

 and then we have Agrippina with Nero, two women that get absolutely slated and put through the mill by historians, but I would imagine that happens to them simply because they are too powerful and too clever. Definitely Domina. That was, I think, on Sky. I'm trying to think if there are any other ones at the moment, not that I can think of off the top of my head.

 We've touched on Livia there. What can we tell about their kind of marriage? I've obviously got the impression that she didn't like her step-daughter very much, but what kind of impact on his rule did Livia have?

 Well, Livia is going to be somebody that will outlive Augustus and will go on to be quite a strong presence in the life of Tiberius. In the early reign of Tiberius, she is officially deified eventually.

 There's no doubt that there was a strong bond between them. They are married for, we're going to say, what, 40-something years. They don't have any children together, so clearly the bond isn't just to do with producing heirs. Depending on who you read, that she is this sort of serial killer type figure

 that's picking off poisoning everybody in the family that's not Tiberius. I do like the interpretation that Domina gave, which is that she comes from a very, very influential and powerful family,

 and that Octavian, when he marries her initially, is trying to forge connections with this powerful family. So I think that coming from the background that she does, she's definitely not the submissive, humble matrona that the propaganda puts out about her being this kind of submissive wife.

 She's very clever. She's very astute. I like to think that she was advising him about a lot of things.

 And that's certainly how, when you see something like I, Claudius, presents her as being the person actually who is the power behind the throne. And I think that's possibly a way that we can see

 what the dynamics are within that family that, yes, Augustus is clever, but undoubtedly Livia was also a powerful figure.

 So Augustus, his daughter is the baby-making machine, but his wife, he can respect for having intellect

 and worth beyond what her uterus can produce.

 The fact that they don't have children together means that, yes, there might have been love,

 but I think it's also the fact that she's just a very, very powerful ally to have, somebody that he can rely on. Though ultimately, if you go down Robert Grave's route, she kills him, supposedly. This is the idea that Robert Graves says that Livia ends up poisoning her own husband because he's going to change his will.

 So is that something we see in ancient sources, or is that just something in modern adaptations to make everything a bit juicy?

 It's coming from Tacitus. Tacitus is hinting that Livia, he sort of says that somebody dies and he sort of says maybe Livia had a hand in it. And from that, Robert Graves has said, well, essentially Livia is just killing people. So she poisons people. We're told that maybe she poisoned Drusus, her own son,

 because Drusus at some point said, I think we should have the Republic back. Sealed his fate. I don't know. I mean, it's a nice idea, but it does really, really smack a misogyny. And you've just got to think that actually in the ancient world, people dying young isn't that unusual, especially if you're a soldier, it's going to happen. But yeah, the people who like to see the conspiracies do like the idea of saying,

 well, all these people dying, is it credible? Well, yes, it probably is credible, but it's an interesting one.

 Scholars still debate it. So it's a line or two in Tacitus. It's not really expanded upon, but Graves goes with it full on.

 So we're moving on to the end of his life, hinting that he might have been murdered.

 What do we know for sure about this period of his life as he's getting older?

 As he gets older, he is still being portrayed in all the images that are out there as a 30 or 40 year old.

 So he's one of these figures that freezes his public image, the statues, the coins, when he's sort of somewhere between 30 and 40. It's to give the idea that he's a little bit like a god, like Apollo,

 that he doesn't age. And yet, of course, he does age. He does get ill. He is looking to move on.

 There are things going on. I talked a little bit earlier on that there's a big rebellion in the Teutoburg Forest in Germany, where three legions are lost, which is a massive, massive blow to him.

 And it's something that is going to maybe have far-reaching effects, because if you get a serious rebellion that succeeds somewhere, the news will get around other provinces and it's likely to weaken them. So if Germany rebels, then think about other places that have been recently conquered.

 Gaul, Egypt, et cetera. Will they revolt as well? So that is an issue, but it is dealt with.

 And the fact that it's dealt with by Germanicus seems to reassure people that because Germanicus has been set up as an heir apparent, then things will be going okay. 

I mentioned also as well that Julia the younger, so one of the granddaughters of Augustus,

 is also exiled for supposed adultery, and she goes off to join her mother in exile. So there's still family problems, but it looks like Augustus can kind of wind things down a bit. He knows that Tiberius is there, not the first choice. Germanicus is there, probably the first choice. And so as we get further on,

 we start to see him being more comfortable about mentioning things like civil wars. 

So there is a document, it's not a document, it's an inscription that appears towards the end of his life.

 It's called the Res Gestae Dei Augustus, the Achievements of Augustus. It's basically his CV.

 And it was originally placed outside his mausoleum. So there's a big mausoleum of Augustus in Rome.

 It's always, always under repair. It might open this year. It wasn't open last time I went a couple of years ago. But it's where all the members of the imperial family up to I'm going to say about 98, 99 AD are buried. And it lists all the achievements of Augustus. So it's a very, very upbeat document.

 And it lists all the laws that were passed and all the provinces that were annexed and all the temples that were built or rebuilt. It lists all the offices that Augustus was awarded. It lists all the money that Augustus spent on various big projects. It gives all his achievements essentially. And it actually is quite comfortable in talking about civil wars at that point. So he doesn't feel he's got to disguise it anymore

 because he's gone on for so long that nobody is thinking, oh, he did civil wars. We better get rid of him. He's been such a feature of the Roman world for so long. A little like, I'm going to give two examples. A little like, I've mentioned Louis XIV before. We could also say Queen Victoria

 and we could also say Elizabeth II. If you have a ruler that goes on for so long, there'll be large numbers of people alive that only remember that ruler. They will have no memory of what came before. So the longer a king, queen rules, the more you don't remember what went on before. So for Augustus, the fact that he's been in sole charge from pretty much 30 BC and he dies in 14 AD. For the ancient world, that's a really long time. That's 44 years. There are hardly any people who remember the Republic.

 So therefore, when Tiberius gets named as the next ruler, nobody turns around and says, you can't do that. We don't do that. They don't remember what it was like before. As far as they're concerned,

 every time that there was some kind of change of ruler beforehand, every time there was a conflict,

 there'd always be lots and lots of problems. There'd be riots. There'd be wars and stuff. There's been no civil strife for 44 years. Therefore, they're saying this system must be okay. 

Yeah, and that perhaps wouldn't have been the assumption that they would have made if he died five years after Actium, right?

 Oh, almost certainly. I think if he died five years after Actium, then it would have definitely either gone back to the Republic or you'd just have another person trying to take over. But the very fact that he is such a feature of Roman life for so long, people are so used to the idea of having this one person.

 And they also think as well, what if Augustus has named somebody as an heir? It must be okay.

 We trust his judgment. So it's longevity, essentially, that really helps. I think he does things that are really great. He does things that are not so great. He has successes. He has a few failures.

 But it's the very fact that you can go that long and not have major disruption. Over that time, internally. Largely, things are successful. Largely, there are no real disasters. I mean, all you could have,

 if you decided maybe that at some point there would have been weak points, like if we had earthquakes, if we had a big disaster, if we had a plague, that would have changed things, I think immensely. But the fact is that there are no major problems. There are no big wars. There are no big natural disasters. There are no economic failures There are no big crop failures. It's a period of relative stability. It's not quite the golden age that Augustus says it is. But it does mean that by the end of that era, nobody ever afterwards seriously says, let's go back to the Republic. Ever. And you get shocking emperors. You get absolutely shocking emperors. Yeah, real shockers. And nobody says after Ornero or Domitian or Commodus, they don't go, oh, it's not working. They just simply go, oh, the system is generally fine. We just need to find somebody who's more like Augustus. And we do have to remember as well that after this period, the title Caesar and Augustus get incorporated into the titles of all the other emperors.

 So that's some impact then.

 Well, it's probably the biggest impact that he has actually. That every emperor afterwards, if it's a good emperor, then they will be compared favorably to Augustus. If it's a bad emperor, they will say we just need to go back and be more like Augustus.

 So after he's the last one left standing until his death, he's in charge for an awfully long time,

 which you've mentioned is perhaps unexpected, considering that you mentioned he's weak and ill all the time. No major invasions, no major natural disasters. So actually it sounds like, yes, it was what he was doing insofar as building an image, making sure that he's giving Rome monuments and beautification, making life generally better for the people living in it. But it also sounds like he just was a bit lucky.

 It is luck.

 It's like any rule nowadays is that you become a government and you think, well, am I going to be inheriting something awful? I mean, we've had governments recently where we've had things like COVID, for instance, massively unpredictable. The government had to sort of deal with that.

 You have to kind of think on your feet and develop new strategies. There are points in the Roman world where there are huge problems. So poor old Marcus Aurelius, for instance, has things like outbreaks of plague and then massive problems in Germany. I mean, he's stuck out there for ages.

 All it takes is one big rebellion somewhere or a big economic failure, and then that's it.

 But Augustus, as you say, happened to be quite lucky in the sense that he just happened to be around when there was nothing major going on. And compared to what had come before,

 people saw that as this kind of golden age of prosperity and peace. I'm imagining that they would have kind of connected it and thought it isn't luck, it's because he's so wonderful that the universe has kind of righted itself, right?

 Well, and the fact is as well, is that one of the first things that Tiberius does is he makes Augustus into a god. Part of the reason, of course, is so that Tiberius can do what Augustus did with Julius Caesar,

 which is say, I'm a son of a god, but it just puts this kind of sheen onto the whole Augustan era.

 It's like we had this great emperor, he kind of kick-started it all, and then we've made him a god.

 And so that whole era now takes on this kind of romantic glow when everybody looks back and goes,

 oh, wouldn't it be nice if we were like that? And it's why they put up with so many awful members of the Julio-Claudian family. You would have thought that after Caligula, they'd be thinking, no, you know. But no, they think that he's got sort of magic genetics, that if you're connected to Augustus,

 then you must be brilliant. But you're not because you get Nero eventually, and that doesn't go well either. But he has got this kind of magic touch where people just think, you know, he's almost the archetype. He's the archetype of what is a good emperor. Everybody in some way tries to be like Augustus.

 Is he someone that we should be admiring for what he did? Or should we maybe take a balanced approach and take certain things that we don't like from his career and his personality? We don't want to idealise him, right?

 Well, some people would say that he destroyed the Republic. So if you're a fan of the Roman Republic,

 then that's clearly a bad thing. But those people who study the Roman Republic will say he was in an awful mess anyway. So something had to be done with it. Other people will say that, you know,

 he started this glorious period of the Roman world. That everybody really knows, you know,

 the famous things like the Colosseum and the great emperors like Hadrian, et cetera.

 All that is part of this period that Augustus kickstarts. But of course, you know, ultimately we're talking about emperors. We're talking about the legacy of that will be you know, empires in the future,

 and empires obviously can be rather toxic. You know, if we think to something like Mussolini,

 Mussolini clearly takes Augustus as a massive, massive influence. He's studying imperial fascism.

 He's always talking about how Augustus is his sort of role model. It really does depend on what your thoughts are about, you know, what the Roman Empire will end up doing, whether you feel it's a force for good, or whether you feel it's the template for awful things that come afterwards.

 It's him that starts it off. He took Rome in a certain direction. You know, after the Republic fails,

 there are other ways they could have gone. The way he took it was through autocracy. You know, it was a path that many other civilizations have followed as well, looking at the Roman model. 

So it's fair to say then that there are a diverse group of people who will always be able to find something to admire about him, right? And there are also people with maybe less honorable intentions

 that will be finding things that they can admire about him as well.

 He's a divisive figure. He's an ambiguous figure. So I think, as we've talked about, that there seems to be a discrepancy between the private person and the image that he portrays for the rest of the world.

 And I think, yeah, you can sort of see lots of different things in Augustus, and I think he'd be quite happy with that, because I think he likes the idea of being a bit ambiguous. People have suggested that, you know, that he portrays a different face to different people. So he'll be like this to one group of people. He'll be something different to another group of people. The consummate politician, in a sense.

 And that's another piece of legacy that he has, is that many politicians will look to the way that Augustus was and say, yes, it's all about image-making. It's all about doing one thing, thinking another thing, having this public and private persona and manipulating image to get what you want.

 I think I'm fair in saying this. One of his most vocal number one fans at the moment

 seems to be Mark Zuckerberg. Would it be fair to say, then, that if you hear someone in modern society

 saying that they're a huge fan and admirer of Augustus, you should maybe ask some questions.

 What is it that you admire about Augustus before we continue the conversation?

 Well, yes, there's other fans of Augustus spring to mind. Boris Johnson was a big fan of Augustus.

 And also, as well, Augustus is often associated with the imagery of far-right Italian football fan movements. I've seen that sort of thing. Again, that's very much linked to the Mussolini connection.

 But yes, as far as I know, he's not being adopted by too many far-right groups. But yes, Boris Johnson was quite a vocal person about Augustus and about the qualities of leadership

 that Augustus had. So you can draw your own conclusions about whether there are any other aspects of Augustus's life that Boris Johnson feels that he could identify with.

 So if Augustus has a different face for every occasion, it's fair to say that people of all different kinds

 of political ideologies will find things to like, things to maybe not like as much.

 Yes, I think that's fair to say. And I think that's why it makes him such an interesting person to study.

 Because in some cases he's unknowable. Because how do you differentiate between what he's putting out there to the public and what he's really doing?

 Let's talk about sources, then. Because we want to talk about the sources that are written as close to his lifetime as possible. Do we have a full set of sources? Are they reliable?

 Right, not a full set of sources. And some of them exist in a lesser form than others. So if we go through what's around at the time, the stuff that's out at the time is largely, we have to treat with a great deal of caution, it's the literary stuff, it's the poetry, which is mostly praising Augustus.

 Well, it's all praising Augustus, depending on how you look at Virgil's Aeneid, which some people have said is a bit more nuanced. It's all very pro-Augustus. And again, we have to be careful with that.

 The raise guest eye, the autobiography of Augustus, is produced by Augustus. So it is his own words.

 But of course, it doesn't mention any of the problems. He doesn't mention any defeats. He doesn't mention the family problems at all. It's all relentlessly upbeat. It's a CV that doesn't necessarily lie,

 because it's a public document, but it omits things. So you know what it's like, we all do CVs,

 we're all presenting one part of our personality, and it's the successful part.

 There is a historian that comes on in Tiberius' reign called Velius Parterculus, but he's relentlessly pro-Tiberius so anything that he tends to say about Augustus should be seen in that light.

 Then we have quite a big gap. We have a big gap, and the next sources we've got are 2nd century AD.

 So the main ones that people will look for will be Suetonius. Suetonius' biographies of the Julio-Claudians. We have Tacitus but Tacitus is largely missing the Augustus material. We have some of his other stuff about the Julio-Claudians, not complementary, and essentially Tacitus blames Augustus

 for giving the world Tiberius and Nero. And then a century on after that, we have Cassius Dio,

 who's got quite a lot to say about Augustus, but it's 200 years afterwards. And all of these later sources

 seem to be filtering their view of Augustus through subsequent emperors.

 So for example, Tacitus really, really doesn't like the Julio-Claudians because essentially he blames the Julio-Claudians for putting a system in place that gave the world Domitian. And Domitian is somebody that basically was very, very unpleasant to the Senate, and Tacitus doesn't like that.

 So the later sources are quite far away. And so for somebody like Augustus, who's essentially been turned into a god, it's difficult to know how accurate these things are. But clearly, if they're writing outright lies, then it might be fairly easy to check that. Suetonius has got quite good resources.

 Up to a certain point, he was working for the Emperor Hadrian, and he was in charge of the library and the archives. So he's got access to quite a lot of information. So we don't tend to think of Suetonius

 as being massively unreliable. He is very gossipy, and he does like scandals, so he does tend to pick out the interesting stuff. But from the time, we've got very little. So everything is, generally speaking,

 about 100 years at least afterwards.

 And that, for any kind of source, has its pluses and minuses. You've got not so many eyewitness accounts. But you have got hindsight. And that's something that's interesting, that Suetonius and Tacitus know what's coming. So they can kind of trace the influence. They can kind of see how he fits in. Depending on whether you like the imperial system, you're going to think Augustus is wonderful.

 If you think, oh, there's awful emperors, then it's not great. But yeah, we don't really have much from the time. I think that's more an accident rather than Augustus clamping down and not allowing free speech. Suetonius has mixed things to say about that. He seems to say that Augustus is slightly paranoid, and he does sort of have a go at people for writing bad stuff. But sometimes he's quite relaxed about it, and he allows people to make jokes about him. So we don't really know whether or not

 Augustus is going around seizing independent historians. But on the whole, we do know a reasonable amount about him. And of course, of his early life, we've got Cicero, very early life. So Cicero is one of our main sources for the Lake Republic. Now, there's not a huge crossover, because Cicero ends up being killed in 43 about the time that Octavian comes on the scene. And it is, of course, largely Octavian's fault that Cicero gets killed, because it's Octavian that suggests

 that Mark Antony proscribe him. So we've got a couple of mentions of Octavian by Cicero. It's not a huge amount, but it's that end that we've got, the sort of the early life that we can see a little bit about him. 

I mean, Cicero is a really interesting source as well, because a lot of it is coming from his letters to his friends. So it's not intended for a public audience necessarily. And it is someone that he's met in person. So that's fairly reliable.

 Yes, I'm going to say yes for the letters. Yeah, if we get sort of speeches, then clearly much of it is for effect. But we think for the letters, certainly to close friends, then they're going to be candid.

 And we do know that Cicero was trying to manipulate Octavian into kind of taking Mark Antony out, and it all backfires. So unfortunately for Cicero. So for our sources, I would say, that we've got a number, and they don't tend to massively contradict each other either. So either they're working from the same sources, or they're all place-choicing one source that's wrong, if it's always possible.

 Nobody has come out and said that there are major problems with knowing about Augustus,

 the main things that he does.

 Are there any misconceptions about Augustus that we can say categorically right now, what you've heard is not true?

 Oh, that's a good question. I'm not so much a misconception, but I do genuinely think that because Augustus manages his image so carefully, that people, when you say Augustus and you sort of picture who he is, they have this image of him in his 30s, the statue imagery, the image on the coins.

 And it's the reality, it's this kind of very, very ill pasty person who goes on to be 76, and yet is still producing images of himself in his 30s. I think that's the misconception. They always imagine that Augustus looks like that through his whole life. And it's not, it's just basically, he's just banned anybody from producing images that don't show him like that.

 It's a really, I mean, I suppose the analogy that I would make is that maybe celebrities that don't like being photographed as they get older. Photoshopping is probably a way of thinking. That's the main misconception, is that he is somebody that is eternally youthful, he's vigorous, he's handsome, and he's eternally young. And yet in reality that he's very ill, he's arthritic, he's prone to all kinds

 of gastrointestinal disorders. He's just not like his public image at all. 

And I'm guessing that we don't have any image of him that would be more authentic.

 Not that I'm aware of. I don't, from what I know, that he would have absolutely forbidden that.

 You notice if you see all the images of Augustus, even the sort of slightly cheap knockoff copies

 that turn up in the provinces, they're all identifiably him because they all have exactly the same hairline. That's how you identify Augustus is his hairline. That only falls apart, really,

 when you realize that they use Augustus's image often if they'd want to represent other members

 of the Julio-Claudian family. Because they all associate Augustus with success, so they all start looking like him. So very often you'll get a statue that turns up and they'll say, who's this? Is it Germanicus?

 Is it Gaius? Is it Lucius? Is it Tiberius? Or is it Augustus? But yeah, he's somebody that looks the same

 and he looks, yeah, in his thirties. The prima porta statue is the sort of the archetype image of Augustus. And yet Suetonius says that he's got bad teeth and, you know, he's got his hairs falling out

 and all that sort of stuff. He's really small. And yet the prima porta statue is slightly larger than life-size. It's just, you know, almost two meters. 

It's worth mentioning as well, if you can't make it all the way to Rome to see that statue,

 you can see an excellent replica in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

 Yes, and I get a funny feeling as well that there's probably one in the Cambridge Museum

 that they have where they have all the replicas.  And Google it, of course,

 because you can examine it in great detail. But that image of Augustus, this almost god-like figure,

 is so not like the reality at all. But it worked because that's how we picture him today.

 And they all go, all the other emperors go on. Well, apart from Nero, he seems to be the odd one.

 He's quite happy showing himself in all kinds of unflattering poses. But all the other emperors that come along, they all essentially adopt the I look like a god image. So even somebody like Claudius, who we know has got quite a lot of physical ailments, he ends up looking really buff

 and like a sort of an avenger. And that's from Augustus. That's the way you do it. Show that you are like a god and people will fall for it.

 You've kind of answered my next question already, but I'm going to ask it anyway in case there's anything else. What's the huge impact that we see him make on history? Not just in Rome, but beyond.

 I think more than anyone else, and there have been empire builders before him - he is the person that legitimizes the idea of empire. The people that come after him will essentially be using him

 as the kind of template for what they want to do. Good people and bad people. So whether it's Charlemagne or Napoleon or Hitler, in some sense, they're all looking back to the Roman Empire.

 And the Roman Empire starts with him. Some people have argued that Julius Caesar

 is somebody who is also a role model, but Julius Caesar is the sort of the faltering first steps

 of what will become the Roman Empire. Augustus learns from that mistake, and he's the one that starts the idea of the cult of the ruler, the person who rules not just by the laws that they have,

 but by personal charisma.

 So he's not just copying Julius Caesar, he's correcting Julius Caesar, right?

 Absolutely. He looks to Julius Caesar and says, actually, those things that he did were good,

 but those are the things that I can't do. I can't be a dictator. I can't look like a king.

 But essentially, Julius Caesar had the right idea in terms of one-person rule. So yes, that's exactly what he was doing. So right idea, correcting the methodology. And I think, yeah, that's a huge impact to have.

 I know that, obviously, Augustus takes a huge space on bookshelves and in documentaries, et cetera,

 but I think it's because he kind of deserves it. He has had that massive impact. We can't really get away with not talking about him.

 He's the one that, if you're ever going to study classics, certainly the Roman world,

 you might end up doing Nero, you might do Hadrian, you might do Constantine, but you've got to have Augustus in there somewhere.

 Well, thank you for being the person to bring us, Augustus, to the podcast. It's been fantastic talking to you about Augustus. Thank you so much for lending us your expertise.

 Thank you very much. I very much enjoyed it.

 I'm not going to lie, I was hesitant to dedicate two whole hours to Augustus. I was thinking to myself,

 do we really need to keep talking about this 'great man'? But I'm so glad that I did because Mike has demonstrated why it's so important to re-evaluate these men who have had such an impact on history,

 to critically think about them instead of just idolising them and idealising them. And I'm willing to bet that if you came into these episodes with an idea of who Augustus was already, that maybe now you have an idea that the image that you have is probably one that he created for you, because it sounds like Augustus was the ultimate political chameleon. And whether you love or hate him, you have to give him credit for creating this multifaceted image that has endured until today. He's the ultimate politician, the king of spin. And I love what Mike said, that if we want to understand the Roman Empire and every emperor who came after Augustus, we have to get to grips with Augustus first.