Augustus

Our 9th entry in #EuropeanBios is Augustus. I think I overloaded my timeline with Roman rulers because it's really just hearing over and over again about what Julius Caesar did and then the fallout from that, but Augustus has some fine, fun facts that I shall now relate.

Firstly we should get his name right. Everybody in Roman times had like one of 10 names, so lots of people had the same name. To confuse matters further they would change names over time, dropping names and tacking new ones on to the end like medals for big accomplishments.

So Augustus had a total of 9 names which he mixed-and-matched over his life. He was born Gaius Octavius, later became Gaius Julius Caesar, then finally Caesar Augustus, with several intermediate forms. This is very Modern Queer of him but sadly he was not very gay.

Because it's very confusing to call the same dude 8 names as we move through time I am going to call him Augustus the whole time but in reality he was called Octavius until he was 19, Caesar 19 until middle age, and Augustus later. People who didn't like him called him Octavius.

Augustus was named heir by Caesar in his will. It is frequently said that he was Caesar's adopted son, but he wasn't adopted by Caesar, just named as his successor with a provision that he take Caesar's name, which was pretty common in wills at the time and didn't mean adoption.

Augustus was 19 years old and also out of Italy entirely when Caesar was assassinated, putting him at something of a disadvantage in trying to take over the entire Roman empire, but he managed it. This was VERY improbable. To demonstrate how weird this was I shall use an analogy.

Imagine it's 2014 and Barack Obama is suddenly assassinated by members of the senate. Despite the existence of Joe Biden as VP and obvious replacement, Malia Obama gets pissed and decides to take over the US government.

Malia Obama goes to the US army and says "yo, I will pay you like 5x whatever the government is paying you to help me take over". Despite the fact that she is 19, has no money and no claim to being president, about a third of the US army decides she's legit and sides with her.

Malia Obama then takes the army, occupies Washington DC and scares the shit out of everybody until Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell decide it's not worth having her burn Washington to the ground, so they form a new government where Joe, Mitch and Malia are all co-president.

This is not, like, established precedent or anything. There's never been co-presidents before but Malia has a ton of soldiers so they're on board. Malia then uses her power as president to raid the treasury and pay the soldiers the 5x bonus she promised them to get all this done.

Now imagine all that happened except it's not Malia Obama but instead, like, a talented intern that you've never heard of who Barack Obama met a few times and thought had a bright future ahead of him. And then that guy then declares that he's been adopted by Barack Obama.

That's basically how it went down. Augustus (currently calling himself Gaius Julius Caesar) was just... apparently very persuasive? And people liked Caesar so they supported him even though he wasn't actually related? It was truly wild.

Once Augustus was in power he got the senate to pass a law declaring that he was not just Julius Caesar's heir but actually his adopted son. So saying "Augustus was Caesar's adopted son" is legally speaking true but would have come as a surprise to Julius Caesar.

Instead of Joe and Mitch as co-presidents it was Antony, Julius Caesar's friend and rival who we've mentioned before, and Lepidus, who we haven't and was pretty inconsequential. The new government was called the triumvirate and they decided to kick things off with lots of murder.

They needed money, partly because Augustus had just spent so much money bribing the army to help him take over. They acquired this money by a time-honored Roman tradition of picking rich people they didn't like, sentencing them to death, and taking all of their stuff.

Rounding up unpopular rich people and sentencing them to death was called "proscription" and had been done by several previous rulers of Rome to raise money which they then distributed to poor people to boost their popularity. This sounds good to me and we should probably try it.

But proscription didn't raise as much money as they wanted, because a lot of what they seized was goods and property which they had to auction off, but there was not a lot of competition at the auctions because there were suddenly a lot fewer rich people around to bid on things.

Augustus capped off the murder by romancing a lady called Livia who at the time was both married and pregnant; she was surprisingly into this and gave birth, then 3 days later handed the kid to her husband, divorced him and married Augustus. They remained together for life.

Fun fact: this was her second kid. Her first kid was called Tiberius and would grow up to be Augustus' successor, so as political and family moves go Livia was pretty smart.

Augustus then began a slow, continuous and life-long process of undermining his enemies and accumulating power. The details of this are really very dull, but soon he was the sole ruler of Rome and had supreme authority over everything, while officially remaining just a senator.

This transformed Rome from a Republic to essentially an Empire with Augustus as the first emperor. People had been dead set against Julius Caesar doing this but Augustus managed to pull it off, crucially by maintaining bodyguards at all times to prevent unfortunate stabbings.

Lepidus, one of the triumvirate, was the first to try seizing power. Augustus won once again by out-bidding Lepidus' soldiers, who turned on him. Lepidus was quietly retired, which considering what Augustus had recently done to people who just had a lot of nice furniture was getting off pretty lightly.

Antony was not so lucky. He had been sent overseas to fight wars and had hooked up with Cleopatra. Augustus used this as an excuse to undermine him, saying he was under Cleopatra's control, then chased him and defeated his troops. Antony killed himself to avoid the disgrace.

Now firmly in control, the interesting bits of Augustus' life were over. He remained in power for 43 years, dying of natural causes at the age of 76. As he aged he slowly gave more and more power to his chosen successor, Tiberius, who smoothly adopted office as he died.

Augustus is interesting in how he differs from some other hugely successful warlords I've covered, like Alexander the Great, Hannibal and Julius Caesar, in that he absolutely knew what to do with his empire once he'd got it. In fact he was better at running the empire than war.

Rome went from 4m citizens to 5m under his rule. Things were calm and productive after decades of turmoil, and this calmness made him popular, so Romans were happy to give him unlimited power. He reinvented how Rome worked and that system lasted for hundreds of years after him.

Augustus got on with things quietly, and the result is that he's not nearly as famous, which is weird because at the time he was so famous that they renamed the month of August after him. Apart from that bit when he was 19, his was a life of power but devoid of drama.