![]() Octavian - only 19 years old when Caesar was assassinated - therefore inherited vast sums of money, but also something much for valuable: a new name. His campaigns in Gaul had brought loot and booty in addition to fame and prestige. Octavian was just coming of age when Caesar returned from his Gallic campaigns and the famous general evidently took a shine to him: when the childless Julius Caesar died, the reading of his will revealed that he had left everything to his great-nephew Octavian.Ĭaesar was by all measures the most potent political figure of his day, and also one of the wealthiest. Fortunately, another relative stepped in to assume that role his great-uncle on his mother’s side was Rome’s most powerful man, Julius Caesar. This young boy grew up surrounded by wealth but lacking what was most important in Roman society: a father. He left behind several children, including a four-year-old son who was also named, after his father, Gaius Octavius - in English we call him Octavian. He died of an illness on his way back to Rome, where he was hoping to stand for election to the consulship, Rome’s highest office. Octavius was the first of his line to break into this club, and proved so adept that in 60 BC he was appointed governor of Macedonia. Although very wealthy, his family had never had the means or ambition to enter the Senate, the highest social class of Republican Rome. His father, Gaius Octavius, was a minor noble from one of the small towns outside of Rome. Rome’s future emperor, the man who would rule the Mediterranean world from Portugal to Syria, was not born into power. From that point, Rome’s first emperor would be known not by his birth-name or his adopted name but instead as Augustus. The second honor was seemingly simpler but ultimately more lasting: a new name. The first was the right to display above the door of his house the corona civica, the oak-leaf crown, a traditional honor given to Roman soldiers who had saved the life of a fellow citizen (for hadn’t this man, although not himself a soldier, saved the lives of the entire Republic?), and to grow laurel trees, the symbol of victory, on either side of his threshold. In the end, their new ruler accepted two tokens that were, while less obviously monarchical, equally laden with meaning. He refused these gestures, so, in commemoration of this “modesty”, the senators instead ordered that a golden shield be set up in the Senate House inscribed with the qualities that they thought (or hoped) this man embodied: virtue, piety, clemency, and justice. These were the ancient markers of kingship, but this new ruler did not want to be king - or at least had no desire to cultivate the image of despotism. It was a paradoxical gesture, for the cost of this new “golden age” was their democracy itself: from now on, Rome and its empire would be ruled by a single unelected leader.Īt first they tried to placate him and offered him symbols that might hint at what he really was: a crown, a sceptre, and the right to wear a special purple toga. In 27 BC, the Roman Senate, broken and cowed after a generation of bloody civil war, met to vote on how best to honor the man who had brought peace and stability back to their Republic.
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