What does survive, however, is the text of Augustus’ curriculum vitae, a document that he wrote at the end of his life, summing up his achievements (Res Gestae, as the surviving version is usually titled in Latin – or ‘What I Did’). It is a self-serving, partisan and often rose-tinted piece of work, which carefully glosses or entirely ignores the murderous illegalities of his early career. It is also a unique account, in roughly ten pages of modern text, of what the old reptile wanted posterity to know about his many years as princeps, how he defined the role and how he claimed to have changed
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