Augustus

by John Williams

Published in 1972, Augustus won the National Book Award for fiction in the following year. (Williams was born in Texas in 1922 and died in Arkansas in 1994, after a thirty-year career teaching English and creative writing at the University of Denver.)

the novel’s subject—the eventful life and history-changing career of the first emperor of Rome—seems impossibly remote from the distinctly American preoccupations of the author’s other mature works, with their modest protagonists and pared-down narratives.

Augustus. The emperor who gave his lofty name to a political and literary era was born Gaius Octavius Thurinus in 63 BC, the year in which the statesman Cicero foiled an aristocrat’s attempt to overthrow the Roman Republic (a system of government to which Augustus himself would administer the coup de grâce three decades later). The offspring of one Gaius Octavius, a well-to-do knight of plebeian family origins, he was raised in the provinces about twenty-five miles from Rome. While still a teenager, the sickly but clever and ambitious youth sufficiently impressed his maternal great-uncle Julius Caesar to be adopted by him; he was thereafter known as Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus (“Octavian”).

In 44 BC, following Caesar’s assassination and his subsequent deification by decree of the Senate, the canny nineteen-year-old, eager to capitalize on his dead relative’s prestige and thereby enhance his standing with Caesar’s veterans, referred to himself as Gaius Julius Caesar Divi Filius (“Son of the Divine”).

By the time he was twenty-five, having avenged Caesar’s murder by vanquishing Brutus and Cassius at Philippi, the new Gaius Julius Caesar had shrewdly maneuvered himself to the center of power in the Roman world as one of three military dictators, or “triumvirs.” (Another was Marc Antony, with whom he would eventually quarrel.) At this point the “Gaius” and “Julius” disappeared, to be replaced by “Imperator”:...

Antony, whom he defeated at Actium in 31 BC and who committed suicide a year later, along with his paramour, Cleopatra. (As the imperator gave the order to murder Cleopatra’s teenaged son Caesarion—a potential rival, since the youth’s father had been Julius Caesar himself—he remarked that “too many Caesars is no good thing.”) Master of the world at thirty-three, he then set about consolidating his power, craftily legitimating his autocratic rule under the forms of traditional republican law, and establishing the legal, political, and cultural foundations for empire that would persist, in one form or another, for the next fifteen centuries. And, indeed, beyond: The current structure of the Roman Catholic Church derives directly from Augustus’s political creation.

The life of the first emperor is an ideal vehicle for a historical novel, a genre that is most successful when scholarly adherence to the known facts is balanced by imaginative insights into character and motivation.

A postscript: Caesar’s Egyptian whore, Cleopatra, has fled Rome, whether in fear of her life or in despair at the outcome of her ambitions, I do not know; we are well rid of her. Octavius goes to Rome to claim his inheritance, and he goes in utter safety. I could hardly hide my anger and sorrow when I heard this from him; for this stripling and his loutish friends can go there without risk to their persons, while you, my hero of the Ides of March, and our Cassius, must lurk like hunted animals beyond the precincts of the city you freed.

Caesar was dead—by the “will of the people,” the murderers said; yet the murderers had to barricade themselves in the Capitol against those very people who had “commanded” the act. Two days later, the Senate gave its thanks to the assassins; and in the next breath approved and made law those very acts of Caesar for the proposal of which he had been killed. However terrible the deed, the conspirators had acted with bravery and force; and then they scattered like frightened women after they had taken their first step. Antonius, as Caesar’s friend, roused the people against the assassins; yet the night before the Ides of March he had entertained the murderers at dinner, was seen speaking intimately with one of them (Trebonius) at the instant of the murder, and dined again with those same men two nights later!

“We would aid that Decimus who was one of the murderers of Julius Caesar?”

Decimus was one of the murderers; Octavius goes to his aid. Casca was one of the murderers; Octavius has agreed not to oppose his election as tribune of the people. Marcus Antonius was a friend of Caesar; Octavius now opposes him.

“All over Rome. I keep remembering your Uncle Julius.” He shook his head. “You can’t trust anybody.” “No,” Octavius said. He smiled softly.

And how they crowd themselves together, these Romans. Beyond the walls of the city lies some of the most beautiful countryside that you can imagine; yet the people huddle together here like fish trapped in a net and struggle through narrow, winding little streets that run senselessly, mile after mile, through the city. During the daylight hours, these streets—all of them—are literally choked with people; and the noise and stench are incredible. A few months before his death, the great Julius Caesar decreed that only in the dark hours between dusk and dawn might wagons and carts and beasts of burden be allowed in the city; one wonders what it must have been like before that decree, when horses and oxen and goods-wagons of all descriptions mingled with the people on these impossible streets.

Thus the ordinary Roman who lives in the city proper must never have any sleep. For the noise of the day becomes the din of the night, as drovers curse their horses and oxen, and the great wooden carts groan and clatter over the cobblestones.

Yet those who live in these towering ramshackle buildings are little safer than those who would wander the streets at night; for they live in constant danger of fire. At night, in the safety of my hillside cottage, I can see in the distance the fires break out like flowers blooming in the darkness, and hear the distant shouts of fear or agony. There are fire brigades, to be sure; but they are uniformly corrupt and too few to accomplish much good.

And yet in the center of this chaos, this city, there is, as if it were another world, the great Forum. It is like the fora that we have seen in the provincial cities, but much grander—great columns of marble support the official buildings; there are dozens of statues, and as many temples to their borrowed Roman gods; and many more smaller buildings that house the various offices of government.

There is a good deal of open space, and somehow the noise and stench and smoke from the surrounding city seem not to penetrate here at all. Here people walk in sunlight in open space, converse easily, exchange rumors, and read t...

Even their gods serve the state, rather than the other way around.

The name of Octavius Caesar is on everyone’s lips. He is in Rome; he is out of Rome. He is the savior of the nation; he will destroy it. He will punish the murderers of Julius Caesar; he will reward them. Whatever the truth, this mysterious youth has captured the imagination of Rome; and I, myself, have not been immune.