68 Fun Facts About Augustus

Augustus's reign opened a roughly 200-year era of stability and prosperity known as what?

The Pax Romana. The calm was relative, since revolts and frontier wars went on, but by convention the era runs from 27 BC to the death of Marcus Aurelius in AD 180.

Augustus founded which dynasty of Roman emperors?

Julio-Claudian. Five emperors from two intermarried clans ruled for nearly a century; the line ended in AD 68 when its last emperor killed himself, and a year of civil war followed.

On which Roman hill, later the home of the emperors, was the future Augustus born in 63 BC?

The Palatine. Suetonius puts his birth at a spot there called Ox Heads; he later lived on the same hill, and the imperial residences built on it gave English the word 'palace'.

Suetonius links Augustus's boyhood surname Thurinus to his father's victory over runaway followers of whom?

Spartacus. His father crushed a band of runaway slaves near Thurii, one of two origins Suetonius offers for the name; Mark Antony later used 'Thurinus' as a taunt in his letters.

Octavius's mother Atia was what relation to Caesar?

His niece. Atia's mother Julia was Caesar's sister, and the young Octavius made his first public appearance giving the eulogy at that grandmother's funeral.

Where was Octavius when Caesar was assassinated in March 44 BC?

Apollonia, in Illyria. Caesar had sent him ahead to study there before a planned war in the East; on the news he thought of appealing to the nearest legions, then sailed for Italy to claim his inheritance.

Besides most of his estate, Caesar's will gave the 18-year-old Octavius which priceless political asset?

His name. As Gaius Julius Caesar, the unknown teenager could rally the dictator's veterans, though his own stepfather urged him to turn the inheritance down.

At 19, Octavian marched his legions on Rome in 43 BC to force the Senate to grant him which office?

Consul. When the Senate hesitated, a centurion from his army showed the hilt of his sword and said, 'This will make him consul, if you do not'; the legions then marched and he was elected.

With Mark Antony and which third man did Octavian form the Second Triumvirate in 43 BC?

Marcus Aemilius Lepidus. Unlike the private deal between Caesar, Pompey and Crassus, this triumvirate was an office created by law, giving the three men five years of near-absolute power.

At an island conference in 43 BC, the triumvirs traded names for a death list whose most famous victim was who?

Cicero. His speeches against Antony had made him a marked man; Octavian is said to have held out for two days before giving him up, and his head and hands were displayed in the Forum.

What name is given to the triumvirs' posted lists of 43 BC, which outlawed their enemies and seized their estates?

Proscriptions. The word comes from posting a man's name as an outlaw; killers were paid a bounty per head, and the confiscated estates funded the triumvirs' troops, as under Sulla.

At which 42 BC battle did Antony and Octavian defeat Caesar's assassins Brutus and Cassius?

Philippi. Cassius killed himself after the first battle on a false report that Brutus had lost too; about three weeks later Brutus was beaten in a second battle and followed him.

Brutus's troops overran Octavian's camp in 42 BC; what did he say had warned him to get out in time?

A friend's dream. Ill as he was, Octavian had himself carried out of camp, he wrote in his memoirs; Brutus's men then stabbed his empty litter through and for a while believed him dead.

Who was the mother of Julia, Augustus's only biological child?

Scribonia. Octavian divorced her on the very day she gave birth to Julia; he blamed her temper in his memoirs, and within months he had married Livia.

When Octavian fell for Livia, she was already married and pregnant by which man?

Tiberius Claudius Nero. He not only agreed to the divorce but gave Livia away at the wedding, as a father would; she was six months pregnant with Drusus, who was born in Octavian's house.

After the siege of Perusia in 40 BC, Octavian is said to have executed prisoners on which symbolic date?

The Ides of March. Suetonius passes on the report that 300 prisoners were sacrificed that day at an altar to the deified Julius, and says Octavian met every plea for mercy with 'You must die.'

The renegade Sextus Pompey used which island as the base for his blockade of Italy?

Sicily. From its ports his fleet cut off Rome's grain, and in 39 BC Octavian and Antony had to recognise his hold on the island by treaty in return for letting the corn ships through.

At which battle in September 36 BC was Sextus Pompey's fleet all but destroyed?

At Naulochus, on 3 September 36 BC, Octavian's admiral sank or captured most of Sextus Pompey's ships; Sextus fled east and was executed the following year.

After forcing a fellow triumvir into retirement in 36 BC, Octavian let him keep which office for life?

Pontifex maximus. Octavian refused to take the chief priesthood from a living holder, even when the people offered it to him, and assumed it only after the exile's death, in 12 BC.

The Battle of Actium, where Octavian beat Antony and Cleopatra, was fought off the coast of which modern country?

Greece. Antony's fleet was bottled up in the Ambracian Gulf on the west coast; when Cleopatra's squadron fled he followed with a few ships, and the forces he abandoned soon surrendered.

Which naval commander won the Battle of Actium for Octavian?

Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa commanded Octavian's fleet at Actium, as he had against Sextus Pompey; he later married Julia and was raised to powers almost equal to the emperor's.

What city did Octavian found near the site of the Battle of Actium?

Octavian founded Nicopolis, 'victory city', on the site of his camp across the gulf from Actium, and held games there every four years to commemorate the battle.

After its conquest in 30 BC, Egypt was treated as what?

Octavian's personal property. A prefect answerable to him alone governed it, and its treasure cleared his civil-war debts; so much coin reached Rome that interest rates there fell.

Which group did Augustus forbid to enter Egypt without his permission?

Senators. Augustus let none of them set foot there without his leave; Tacitus says he feared that anyone who seized the country, with its grain, could starve Italy into submission.

What does the honorific title 'Augustus', granted by the Senate in January 27 BC, mean?

Augustus means 'the revered' or venerable one, a word of religious rather than political flavour that set him above ordinary men without making him a king.

Which name was proposed for Octavian in the Senate before it settled on 'Augustus'?

Some in the Senate suggested Romulus, as a second founder of Rome, but the name smacked of kingship, and on Munatius Plancus's motion the Senate chose Augustus instead.

The golden shield the Senate gave Augustus in 27 BC listed four virtues: valor, piety, justice and what?

Clemency. By his own account the shield, hung in the Senate house, was part of the Senate's thanks for his handing the state back to Senate and people that year.

From 26 to 24 BC Augustus ran the Empire from which city on Spain's Mediterranean coast?

Tarraco. Too ill to campaign in Cantabria, he stayed in what is now Tarragona; when its people boasted that a palm had sprouted on his altar, he said it showed how rarely they lit a fire there.

Which nephew of Augustus, married to his daughter Julia, died in 23 BC and has a theatre named for him?

Marcellus. Widely expected to be Augustus's heir, he died at about 19; his uncle gave him a public funeral and laid him in the new family mausoleum, the first to be buried there.

In the 23 BC settlement, Augustus was granted for life the powers of which office, without holding it?

Tribune of the plebs. As a patrician he was barred from the office itself, so he took its powers instead, the veto and a sacrosanct person, and counted the years of his rule by them.

In 20 BC Augustus negotiated the return of the standards lost by Crassus at Carrhae from which empire?

Parthia's king Phraates IV returned the eagles captured from Crassus at Carrhae in 53 BC; Augustus presented the diplomatic coup at Rome as a military submission.

Which temple did Augustus build in his new forum to house the recovered standards?

Augustus vowed a temple to Mars Ultor, Mars the Avenger, before avenging Caesar's murder; dedicated in his new forum in 2 BC, it housed the recovered standards.

Which famous image of Augustus shows an easterner handing back a captured Roman eagle?

Prima Porta. The scene fills the breastplate of the statue found at Livia's villa; its pose borrows from a famous Greek athlete, the Spear Bearer, to give him an ageless hero's body.

In which AD 9 battle did Publius Quinctilius Varus lose three entire legions?

Three legions under Varus were annihilated in the Teutoburg Forest in September AD 9; Suetonius says Augustus cried 'Quinctilius Varus, give me back my legions!'

Which leader of the Cherusci destroyed Varus's legions in AD 9?

Arminius, a Cherusci noble who had served as a Roman auxiliary officer, lured Varus into an ambush; he was murdered by rivals within his own tribe around AD 21.

Augustus's account of his own deeds, inscribed in bronze at his mausoleum, is known as what?

Res Gestae Divi Augusti. The bronze originals outside his tomb are lost; the text survives only because provincial cities carved their own copies of it, in Latin and in Greek.

The fullest surviving copy of Augustus's own account of his reign is carved on a temple in which modern capital?

Ankara. The Latin text and a Greek translation line the walls of a temple of Augustus in what was Ancyra; a Habsburg embassy to the Ottoman sultan found it in the 1550s and knew it from Suetonius.

Which poet wrote the Carmen Saeculare for Augustus's games of 17 BC?

Horace. His hymn to Apollo and Diana was sung by a choir of boys and girls at the Secular Games, a festival meant to come round only once in 110 years, so that nobody could see it twice.

The vigiles, established in AD 6, were what?

A combined fire brigade and police force. Augustus enrolled freedmen after fires swept Rome in AD 6 and paid them from a tax on slave sales; he meant to disband them, but they proved too useful.

In AD 6 Augustus put 170 million sesterces of his own money into a new treasury that paid for what?

Soldiers' retirement bonuses. Earlier commanders had paid off veterans with land seized from its owners; the new fund, fed by fresh taxes, gave each time-served man a cash payout instead.

In AD 6 Augustus imposed a much-resented 5% tax on what?

Inheritances. Close relatives and the poor were exempt; when the wealthy kept protesting, Augustus sent assessors to list their land and houses as if for a worse tax, and the complaints stopped.

Which Roman month was renamed in Augustus's honour in 8 BC?

Sextilis. He passed over September, his birth month, because Sextilis had brought his greatest victories, among them the conquest of Egypt; the month before it was already July, for Caesar.

Augustus boasted that he had found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of what?

Marble. Suetonius ties the boast to his building programme, but Dio, who puts it on his deathbed, insists he meant the strength of the empire rather than the look of its streets.

What did the Senate vote in 13 BC to mark Augustus's return from Gaul and Spain?

An altar of peace. River silt later buried the Ara Pacis; its carved slabs came to light piecemeal from the 1500s, and the altar was pieced together again only in the 1930s.

What cast the shadow for Augustus's giant sun-marker on the Campus Martius?

An obelisk taken from Egypt. Brought from Heliopolis in 10 BC, it threw its shadow across a bronze-lined pavement, though Pliny reports the readings had gone wrong within decades; it now stands in Piazza Montecitorio.

Rome's first stone amphitheatre, built by Augustus's general Statilius Taurus, was destroyed by what?

The fire of AD 64. This was the Great Fire, and Dio lists the arena among the losses when most of the city burned; Rome's next stone amphitheatre was the far larger Colosseum, completed in AD 80.

Augustus's mock sea battle of 2 BC set 'Athenians' against 'Persians', recalling which battle of the Persian Wars?

Salamis. Thirty warships and about 3,000 fighters met on a basin dug beside the Tiber, and Dio notes that the 'Athenians' won again, just as they had in 480 BC.

On which island did Augustus keep a villa displaying huge bones said to be those of giants and sea monsters?

Capri. He liked the island so much that he gave Naples the larger Ischia in exchange for it; the 'giants' bones' in his villa were probably the fossils of big extinct mammals.

Augustus banished which close relative to a tiny island for adultery in 2 BC?

His daughter. Julia was held on tiny Pandateria, now Ventotene, denied wine and any male visitor he had not vetted, and his will barred her ashes from the family tomb.

Where did Augustus die in AD 14?

Nola. Already ailing, he grew worse on the way back from seeing his heir off towards the Balkans, took to his bed there and died in the very room where his father had died.

According to the rumour that Livia murdered Augustus, what did she use?

A poisoned fig. Dio says she smeared poison on figs still on the tree, ate the clean ones herself and handed him the rest; both he and Tacitus report it only as a suspicion.

On his deathbed, Augustus reportedly compared his own life to what?

A play. He asked his friends whether he had acted his part well in life's comedy and called for applause; Suetonius gives his actual last words as a farewell to Livia.

Which stepson and adopted son succeeded Augustus as emperor?

Tiberius. He was a last resort: Augustus adopted him only after the two grandsons he had raised as heirs died young, and his will opened by saying that a cruel fate had taken them.

After Augustus died at 75 in AD 14, the Senate promptly voted him which posthumous honour?

Divine status. The Senate declared him a god with his own temple and priests, and a former praetor swore he had seen the dead emperor's spirit rise to heaven from the pyre.

Which poet did Augustus banish to the Black Sea coast in AD 8?

Ovid. He blamed 'a poem and a mistake' and never said what the mistake was, and he spent the last nine or ten years of his life at Tomis, on the far edge of the empire.

In whose Aeneid does Jupiter promise Rome imperium sine fine, sovereignty without end?

Virgil's Aeneid has Jupiter grant the Romans 'imperium sine fine'; the poet read parts of the unfinished epic to Augustus, who ordered it preserved after Virgil's death in 19 BC.

In 1937–38 Mussolini staged an 'Augustan exhibition' in Rome to mark what?

The 2,000th anniversary of Augustus's birth. The show opened on his birthday, 23 September 1937, as propaganda casting Fascist Italy as the heir of imperial Rome, and ran for over a year.

Whose 1939 book The Roman Revolution recast Augustus as a ruthless party boss who seized the Roman state?

Ronald Syme. The New Zealand-born historian wrote as fascist regimes rose in Italy and Germany, and traced how Octavian built a personal party that took over the Roman state step by step.

Which queen of Kush raided Roman Egypt and later won a favourable peace from Augustus?

Amanirenas, usually identified with the one-eyed 'Candace' of Strabo. Her raiders carried off a bronze head of Augustus and buried it under a temple stair at Meroë, where it was dug up in 1910.

Which son of Herod the Great did Augustus depose in AD 6, putting Judea under direct Roman rule?

Herod Archelaus, whom Augustus had allowed only the title of ethnarch, not king. When his subjects complained of his rule he was banished to Gaul, and Judea became a Roman province.

Kings of which distant land sent embassies to Augustus, an honour he said no Roman commander had received?

India. Dio says its envoys reached Augustus on Samos with tigers, the first the Romans had seen, and that one of them later threw himself alive into a fire at Athens.

By 38 BC Octavian's coins had replaced his praenomen with which victory title?

Imperator, the acclamation troops gave a victorious general, became his first name, as Imperator Caesar. The emperors who followed at first avoided using it that way, and only from Vespasian's reign was it the ruler's regular title.

Which honorific title did the Senate confer on Augustus in 2 BC?

Pater patriae, father of the country. Suetonius says he turned the title down when the people first offered it, then accepted it in tears when the whole Senate pressed it on him.

The Trophy of Augustus, raised to mark his conquest of the Alpine tribes, stands at La Turbie above which microstate?

Monaco lies just below it. In the Middle Ages the trophy was turned into a fortress; in 1705 Louis XIV had it partly blown up, and the ruin then served as a quarry.

Which region, in modern Yemen, did Egypt's prefect Aelius Gallus fail to conquer for Augustus?

Arabia Felix, whose Sabaean heartland Gallus reached before thirst and disease wrecked his army and it withdrew to Egypt. His friend Strabo blamed the Nabataean guide Syllaeus, who was later beheaded at Rome.

Which son of Cleopatra did Octavian order killed after conquering Egypt?

Caesarion, Cleopatra's son by Caesar and her nominal co-ruler, was sent south for safety but was killed at seventeen. Plutarch has the philosopher Arius warning Octavian that too many Caesars was no good thing.

Which kingdom did Augustus hand to Cleopatra's daughter Cleopatra Selene II and her husband Juba II?

Mauretania, granted in 25 BC. Juba had been raised in Rome after Caesar defeated his father, and the couple renamed their capital Caesarea in the emperor's honour; it is now Cherchell in Algeria.

In AD 4, whom did Augustus require his newly adopted heir to adopt in turn?

Germanicus, though the heir already had a son of his own. Germanicus then married Augustus's granddaughter Agrippina and died before he could rule, but their son Caligula became emperor.