Augustus

by John Williams

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modest protagonists and pared-down narratives.

besotted with Emersonian transcendentalism,

the simple disyllables Williams gave those two other protagonists.

William Andrews, William Stoner:

the sickly but clever and ambitious youth sufficiently impressed his maternal great-uncle Julius Caesar to be adopted by him;

thereafter known as Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus (“Octavian”).

avenged Caesar’s murder by vanquishing Brutus and Cassius at Philippi,

Antony, whom he defeated at Actium in 31 BC

“too many Caesars is no good thing.”)

The current structure of the Roman Catholic Church derives directly from Augustus’s political creation.

the master of the world referred to himself as princeps, “first citizen.”

augustus, “the one who is to be venerated.”

A strong theme in Williams’s work is the way that, over time, our sense of who we are can be irrevocably altered by circumstance and accident.

Character transformation a key in an interesting story

scholarly adherence to the known facts is balanced by imaginative insights into character and motivation.

Tacitus, writing a century after Augustus’s reign,

there was no other remedy for a country at war with itself than to be ruled by one man.

the epistolary novel, a genre that wasn’t invented until fifteen centuries after Augustus,

Thornton Wilder’s 1948 novel The Ides of March:

Marcus Agrippa—Augustus’s great friend from youth, the author of his military victories,

criticism of the earlier novels is that the author occasionally works so hard to make the writing “beautiful” that it sometimes works against believability;

the best works of historical fiction about the classical world—Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, Wilder’s The Ides of March, Graves’s Claudius novels, Mary Renault’s evocation of fifth-century Athens in The Last of the Wine—

common theme of both Stoner and Augustus: “I was dealing with governance in both instances, and individual responsibilities, and enmities and friendship . . . Except in scale, the machinations for power are about the same in a university as in the Roman Empire

part one is about success in the public, political sphere and part two about failure in the private, emotional sphere—the latter being a potential cost, Williams suggests, of the former.

whatever our characters may be, the lives we end up with are the often unexpected products of the friction between us and the world itself— whether that world is nature or culture,

“He is a man like any other. . . . He will become what he will become, out of the force of his person and the accident of his fate.”

“He had dreamed of a kind of integrity, of a kind of purity that was entire; he had found compromise and the assaulting diversion of triviality. He had conceived wisdom, and at the end of the long years he had found ignorance. And what else? he thought. What else?”

“triviality” tellingly reappears, as the dying emperor ruefully becomes aware of “the triviality into which our lives have finally descended.”

Augustus’s weary realization that the peace and stability for which he has long struggled may not, after all, be what the Roman, or indeed any, nation wants: “The possibility has occurred to me that the proper condition of man, which is to say that condition in which he is most admirable, may not be that prosperity, peace, and harmony which I labored to give to Rome.” He has founded his empire, in other words, on a misconception.

Do we really want peace and stability or do we thrive and grow through conflict?

which means that all their labor, all the slaughter, the deprivations and sacrifices have been in vain.

But did they take away something mote valuable

A lot of people who have read the novel think that Stoner had such a sad and bad life. I think he had a very good life.

“there’s nothing. . . . You get born, and you nurse on lies, and you get weaned on lies, and you learn fancier lies in school . . . and then maybe when you’re ready to die, it comes to you—that there’s nothing, nothing but yourself and what you could have done.”

“what you could have done” is gradually stripped away from a character, leaving only what he did do—which is to say, the residue that is “yourself.”

“A hero is one who wants to be himself.”

to confront one’s self, stripped of pretense and illusion, is the climax to which every life inevitably leads, however great or humble.

in the life of every man, late or soon, there is a moment when he knows beyond whatever else he might understand, and whether he can articulate the knowledge or not, the terrifying fact that he is alone, and separate, and that he can be no other than the poor thing that is himself.”

Marcus Agrippa, sometimes called Vipsanius, tribune to the people and consul to the Senate, soldier and general to the Empire of Rome, and friend of Gaius Octavius Caesar, now Augustus.

Octavius discovered Rome bleeding in the jaws of faction,

I refused a Triumph in Rome;

faction that had oppressed our Republic,

The boy is nothing, and we need have no fear.

they ask stupid questions, and then seem not to understand the answers, for they nod vacantly and look somewhere else.

He is a boy, and a rather foolish boy at that; he has no idea of politics, nor is he likely to have.

Hubris of the aged

We shall use the boy, and then we will cast him aside; and the tyrant’s line shall have come to an end.

That whey-faced little bastard, Octavius,

Did you ever hear of a speech that was not political?

Caesar had talked to me a great deal about him; and I wondered if I had missed something.

But I do wish the little bastard would leave Rome and take his friends with him.

We must somehow make him recognize us; that will be the first tiny advantage we have. Too dangerous to raise an army now, even to avenge the murder;

“Antonius has persuaded himself that we are innocents, and it is to our advantage that he continue that self-deception.”