Augustus

Uh, and I've tried to keep it, uh, accurate, um, whilst at the same time speculating what kind of a man it was that was, that rose to power with Augustus and that really made Augustus possible.

In what way possible?

Well, Augustus, who was born Gaius Octavius Thurinus, was a pretty feeble physical specimen.

He was, uh, often ill, quite frequently on the point of death.

And, uh, as a soldier, he was pretty hopeless.

... where they decide that they're just going to kill certain people and take their wealth, and that will feed their armies.

Yes, exactly.

This is the famous conference in Bononia where, uh, the three kind of people who emerged victorious and alive from the civil wars, Lepidus, Mark Antony, and Octavius, um, met on an island, patted one another down to make sure no one had a concealed weapon, and then carved up the world, and then turned to the question of how they were to pay their soldiers, who were watching from the riverbanks where this, where the island was.

We don't have that much information about Jesus before He was 30 years old and began His ministry, and Luke is the one who gives us a majority of that.

So in Luke Chapter 2, and in Verse 1 it says, "And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed." And you know, I've got a footnote here on Caesar, and, uh, I won't go into all of that, but there was a number of different people called Caesar.

It's somewhat confusing, but it's l- the way we use the title President.

So you could say President, uh, Roosevelt, President Lincoln, President Washington.

Uh, they aren't all the same people.

That's j- the title that's associated with them.

And so this was Caesar Augustus.

And in Verse 2 it says, "And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria." So Cyrenius here is the Greek form of the word Quirinius, I think is what it...

fellow

And then at the end of the Cicero books, he's the kind of he's the 19 year old consigliere of the 18 year old Octavius, who was the heir to Julius Caesar after his assassination.

And he is a sort of interesting brooding figure.

These two teenagers who took over the world.

Would that mean that he was a modest figure that didn't want to celebrate his achievements if there was such a little record of him?

I think he had to be a careful number two.

He was a much better soldier than Octavius who became Augustus, who was sickly, quite short, often ill, nearly died several times, in which case Agrippa would have taken over.

He was the trusted number two.

Agrippa, a central figure as the Roman Republic of Julius Caesar transitions after his murder to an empire.

But Agrippa's been largely forgotten in history because it's the Octavius, Augustus Octavius, the first emperor who gets all of the headlines because he got to write the history Until now, the book is already a bestseller, Agrippa.

So if you're into that, because apparently men think about the Roman Empire every day, all of the time.

And clearly Robert Harris is someone, because I think this is the fifth time, this is the fifth time going there between the Cicero trilogy and Pompeii as well.

Let's see what we've got today.

He says, today in 14 AD, is this going to be something about Augustus? Today in 14 AD, Tiberius asked, well it must have been just after Augustus died, his successor, Tiberius, his stepson.

Tiberius asked the Senate to confirm him as Augustus's successor.

Right, yeah.

That's personally, this is just a pure personal historical opinion.

Some people make that argument.

Myself, personally, some people say when Caesar, Julius Caesar, his dictatorship, that was the end of the Republic at that point.

I put it at the point in time when Augustus handed over all his powers, Augustus, Octavian, had collected nearly all, well, all the important powers of the state into one person, into his own person, powers of the tribune, the powers of the most important, all of it together into one man, himself.

There is a stone from Halicarnassus in the British Museum on which the idea is formally expressed from another point of view.

The inscription is of the time of Augustus and the emperor is designated as savior of the community of mankind.

There we have the notion of the human race apprehended as a whole, the ecumenical idea, imposing upon Rome the task described by Virgil as regere imperio populos and more humanely by Pliny as the creation of a single fatherland for all the peoples of the world.

This idea, which in the Roman Empire and in the Middle Ages took the form of a universal state and a universal church, passed afterwards into the conception of the intercohesion of peoples as contributors to a common pool of civilization, a principle which, when the idea of progress at last made its appearance in the world, was to be one of the elements in its growth.

End of footnote.

The general atmosphere in France in the reign of Louis XIV was propitious to the cause of the moderns.

Men felt that it was a great age, comparable to the age of Augustus, and few would have preferred to have lived at any other time.

Their literary artists, Corneille and then Racine and Molière, appealed so strongly to their taste that they could not assign to them any rank but the first.

From that time the treatise has often been printed, edited, translated, but opinion still floats undecided about its origin and period.

Does it belong to the age of Augustus or to the age of Aurelian? Is the author the historical Longinus, the friend of Plotinus, the tutor of Porphyry, the victim of Aurelian? Or have we here a work by an unknown hand more than two centuries earlier? Manuscripts and traditions are here of little service.

The oldest manuscript, that of Paris, is regarded as the parent of the rest.

It is a small quarto of 414 pages, whereof 335 are occupied by the problems of Aristotle.

Ba-da-ba-ba-ba.

Melancholy words, and appropriate to our own age when cleverness is almost universal and genius rare indeed, and the choice between liberty and servitude hard to make, were the choice within our power.

But these words assuredly apply closely to the peaceful period of Augustus when Virgil and Horace, praising their tyrant, sang, not to the confused age of the historical Longinus.

Much has been said of the allusion to the lawgiver of the Jews as no ordinary person, but that remark might have been made by a heathen acquainted with the Septuagint at either of the disputed dates.

I just, we had the whole place to ourselves.

It was like we could envision exactly what everything was and where Augustus walked.

And it was so exciting.

Now, of course, in Greece, it's tricky because people go to Greece to find these archaeological sites.

You know what I saw.

You know whose portrait was painted on the edge of the slab that came from a tomb that was old in the time of Augustus Caesar.

Coincidence or not, here was the face of the woman who waited for me the night before in Shepherd's Hotel.

It's amazing how racial characteristics persist through centuries in Egypt.