Augustus

Download or read book Augustus written by Adrian Goldsworthy and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2014-08-28 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed historian and author of Caesar presents “a first-rate popular biography” of Rome’s first emperor, written “with a storyteller’s brio” (Washington Post). The story of Augustus’ life is filled with drama and contradiction, risky gambles and unexpected success. He began as a teenage warlord whose only claim to power was as the grand-nephew and heir of the murdered Julius Caesar. Mark Antony dubbed him “a boy who owes everything to a name,” but he soon outmaneuvered a host of more experienced politicians to become the last man standing in 30 BC. Over the next half century, Augustus created a new system of government—the Principate or rule of an emperor—which brought peace and stability to the vast Roman Empire. In this highly anticipated biography, Goldsworthy puts his deep knowledge of ancient sources to full use, recounting the events of Augustus’ long life in greater detail than ever before. Goldsworthy pins down the man behind the myths: a consummate manipulator, propagandist, and showman, both generous and ruthless. Under Augustus’ rule the empire prospered, yet his success was constantly under threat and his life was intensely unpredictable.

Download or read book Augustus written by John Williams and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2014-08-19 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE 1973 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD By the Author of Stoner In Augustus, his third great novel, John Williams took on an entirely new challenge, a historical narrative set in classical Rome, exploring the life of the founder of the Roman Empire. To tell the story, Williams turned to the epistolary novel, a genre that was new to him, transforming and transcending it just as he did the western in Butcher’s Crossing and the campus novel in Stoner. Augustus is the final triumph of a writer who has come to be recognized around the world as an American master.

Download or read book Augustus written by Anthony Everitt and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2007-10-09 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He found Rome made of clay and left it made of marble. As Rome’s first emperor, Augustus transformed the unruly Republic into the greatest empire the world had ever seen. His consolidation and expansion of Roman power two thousand years ago laid the foundations, for all of Western history to follow. Yet, despite Augustus’s accomplishments, very few biographers have concentrated on the man himself, instead choosing to chronicle the age in which he lived. Here, Anthony Everitt, the bestselling author of Cicero, gives a spellbinding and intimate account of his illustrious subject. Augustus began his career as an inexperienced teenager plucked from his studies to take center stage in the drama of Roman politics, assisted by two school friends, Agrippa and Maecenas. Augustus’s rise to power began with the assassination of his great-uncle and adoptive father, Julius Caesar, and culminated in the titanic duel with Mark Antony and Cleopatra. The world that made Augustus–and that he himself later remade–was driven by intrigue, sex, ceremony, violence, scandal, and naked ambition. Everitt has taken some of the household names of history–Caesar, Brutus, Cassius, Antony, Cleopatra–whom few know the full truth about, and turned them into flesh-and-blood human beings. At a time when many consider America an empire, this stunning portrait of the greatest emperor who ever lived makes for enlightening and engrossing reading. Everitt brings to life the world of a giant, rendered faithfully and sympathetically in human scale. A study of power and political genius, Augustus is a vivid, compelling biography of one of the most important rulers in history.

Download or read book The Romans in the Age of Augustus written by Andrew Lintott and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2009-12-23 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Incorporating the most recent scholarship, this book offers afascinating history of Rome and the Roman peoples during the ruleof the first Roman emperor, Augustus. Written in an easily accessible style, making it the idealintroduction to Augustan Rome for those with little previousknowledge Offers compelling insight into the workings of Roman societyduring this pivotal period in its history Incorporates the most recent scholarship on aspects ofAugustus's reign including the armed forces, religion, andintellectual and cultural life Andrew Lintott is a widely respected expert on the RomanRepublic

Download or read book The House of Augustus written by T.P. Wiseman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-23 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A radical reexamination of the textual and archaeological evidence about Augustus and the Palatine Caesar Augustus (63 BC–AD 14), who is usually thought of as the first Roman emperor, lived on the Palatine Hill, the place from which the word “palace” originates. A startling reassessment of textual and archaeological evidence, The House of Augustus demonstrates that Augustus was never an emperor in any meaningful sense of the word, that he never had a palace, and that the so-called "Casa di Augusto" excavated on the Palatine was a lavish aristocratic house destroyed by the young Caesar in order to build the temple of Apollo. Exploring the Palatine from its first occupation to the present, T. P. Wiseman proposes a reexamination of the "Augustan Age," including much of its literature. Wiseman shows how the political and ideological background of Augustus' rise to power offers a radically different interpretation of the ancient evidence about the Augustan Palatine. Taking a long historical perspective in order to better understand the topography, Wiseman considers the legendary stories of Rome’s origins—in particular Romulus' foundation and inauguration of the city on the summit of the Palatine. He examines the new temple of Apollo and the piazza it overlooked, as well as the portico around it with its library used as a hall for Senate meetings, and he illustrates how Commander Caesar, who became Caesar Augustus, was the champion of the Roman people against an oppressive oligarchy corrupting the Republic. A decisive intervention in a critical debate among ancient historians and archaeologists, The House of Augustus recalibrates our views of a crucially important period and a revered public space.

Download or read book Ten Caesars written by Barry Strauss and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bestselling classical historian Barry Strauss delivers “an exceptionally accessible history of the Roman Empire…much of Ten Caesars reads like a script for Game of Thrones” (The Wall Street Journal)—a summation of three and a half centuries of the Roman Empire as seen through the lives of ten of the most important emperors, from Augustus to Constantine. In this essential and “enlightening” (The New York Times Book Review) work, Barry Strauss tells the story of the Roman Empire from rise to reinvention, from Augustus, who founded the empire, to Constantine, who made it Christian and moved the capital east to Constantinople. During these centuries Rome gained in splendor and territory, then lost both. By the fourth century, the time of Constantine, the Roman Empire had changed so dramatically in geography, ethnicity, religion, and culture that it would have been virtually unrecognizable to Augustus. Rome’s legacy remains today in so many ways, from language, law, and architecture to the seat of the Roman Catholic Church. Strauss examines this enduring heritage through the lives of the men who shaped it: Augustus, Tiberius, Nero, Vespasian, Trajan, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius, Septimius Severus, Diocletian, and Constantine. Over the ages, they learned to maintain the family business—the government of an empire—by adapting when necessary and always persevering no matter the cost. Ten Caesars is a “captivating narrative that breathes new life into a host of transformative figures” (Publishers Weekly). This “superb summation of four centuries of Roman history, a masterpiece of compression, confirms Barry Strauss as the foremost academic classicist writing for the general reader today” (The Wall Street Journal).

Download or read book The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus written by Paul Zanker and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the imperial mythology that was reflected by Roman art and architecture during the rule of Augustus Caesar