Augustus (title)

• 1. Introduction

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  Augustus is one of the most durable words in the history of power. On the 16th of January, 27 BC, the Roman Senate gave this title to a man named Octavian, and in doing so, invented a word that would echo across empires for nearly fifteen centuries. Before that moment, "augustus" was a minor, obscure honorific with vague religious associations. Afterward, it was the name of Roman emperors, Byzantine rulers, Holy Roman Emperors, and eventually a personal name still given to boys today.

  How did a single Latin word travel so far, attach itself to so many rulers, and outlast the very empire that created it? The answer touches on Roman religion, civil war, the politics of succession, and the peculiar art of projecting divine favor without claiming to be a god.

• 2. Before the Emperors

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  One early recorded use of "augustus" as an honorific dates to 58 BC, predating Octavian's famous renaming by about three decades. At that point it appeared in connection with provincial Lares, the household gods of Roman communities. The word's power came from its root: the Latin verb augere, meaning to augment or increase, and its close relation to augury, the practice of reading divine signs.

  Rome itself was said to have been founded under the "august augury" of Romulus. The word thus carried a halo of sacred origin, connected to the very act of founding sacred or consecrated space. In Latin poetry and prose it described the further elevation of something already holy. When Roman senators eventually reached for a title to confer on Octavian, this older, spiritually charged word was waiting.

• 3. Octavian's Careful Reinvention

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  Octavian had a delicate problem. His great-uncle Julius Caesar had been murdered precisely because he seemed to want divine monarchy. The Senate and Roman public were alert to anything that smelled of kingship. Octavian had to claim supreme authority while appearing not to claim it at all.

  He ended Rome's prolonged and bloody civil war with his victory at Actium. He was pontifex maximus, the chief priest of Roman state religion. He held tribunician power, which made his person legally inviolable and gave him the right to veto any act by any magistrate in Rome. He was already the supreme commander of all Roman legions. What he needed was a title that reflected all of this without making him look like a king.

  The name "Romulus" was apparently considered and then rejected. It would have made Octavian too obviously the second founder of Rome, a claim too blatant to survive Roman republican sensibilities. "Augustus" was unprecedented as a cognomen, vaguely tied to Republican religiosity, and suggested that his authority flowed from the approval of Rome and its gods. His full official title became Imperator Caesar Divi Filius Augustus.

• 4. Gods, Cult, and Expansion

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  Augustus did not keep the title to himself, at least not entirely. His religious reforms extended the honorific Augusti to minor local deities across the empire, including the Lares Augusti of local communities and obscure provincial gods like the North African Marazgu Augustus. Granting the title to local gods was a ground-level feature of imperial cult, which continued until Christianity officially replaced Rome's traditional religions.

  The religious ambiguity of the word made this possible. It could be applied to the living emperor, to the genius or soul of a ruler, to a local goddess, to the personification of peace or victory. Subjects beginning from Asia and Bithynia started worshipping the genius of Augustus, establishing ruler-cult communities. Pax and Victoria, both perceived as female, received the feminine form Augusta. Ceres, Bona Dea, Juno, Minerva, and Ops were also granted the title. The word had become a theological tool as much as a political one.

• 5. Succession and the Tetrarchy

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  Augustus bequeathed the title to his adopted heir Tiberius by will. From that point it became a standard titular element of every imperial name, even though it conferred no specific legal powers on its own. The Senate bestowed it on new emperors, and the date of investiture with the title was celebrated annually as the dies imperii.

  For most of the first two centuries, Augustus was unique to a single bearer at a time. In 161, Marcus Aurelius broke that pattern by elevating Lucius Verus to Augustus alongside him. The Tetrarchy instituted by Diocletian formalized the plural: two Augusti and two Caesares would share the empire's governance, though Diocletian as senior Augustus retained legislative power. Both Diocletian and Constantine the Great used the title semper Augustus, meaning "ever Augustus," a form that pointed toward the later Holy Roman use of the phrase. From the 3rd century onward, new emperors were often acclaimed as Augusti by the army rather than by the Senate alone.

  The last emperor proclaimed in the West went further than any predecessor. Romulus adopted Augustus not only as a title but as a proper name, becoming Romulus Augustus pius felix Augustus, doubling the word across both name and honor.

• 6. Augusta and Female Power

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  The feminine form Augusta began in the same obscure religious space as its masculine counterpart. It was bestowed on women of the imperial dynasties as a marker of worldly power and a status near to divinity. No honorific ranked higher for a woman within the Roman imperial system.

  The first woman to receive it was Livia Drusilla, by the last will of her husband Augustus himself. From his death in 14 AD until her own death in 29 AD, she was known as Julia Augusta. The title was not reserved for living women. State goddesses associated with imperial generosity received it too: Ceres, Bona Dea, Juno, Minerva, and Ops all carried the honorific. Pax and Victoria, personifications of peace and victory understood as female, were likewise designated Augusta, extending the title's reach into Rome's entire symbolic vocabulary.

• 7. Byzantine and Holy Roman Afterlives

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  In Rome's Greek-speaking provinces, "Augustus" was translated as Sebastos or Hellenised as Augoustos. Both forms remained in use in the Byzantine Empire until Constantinople fell in 1453. Over time, though, Sebastos lost its imperial exclusivity. After the 8th century, Autokrator and Basileus became the exclusive titles of the emperor, and Sebastos was gradually applied more broadly. The emperor Heraclius, following his victory over the Sasanian Empire in 629, introduced Basileus as the primary imperial title. Until that reform, royal titles had been avoided in Rome since the legendary overthrow of Tarquinius Superbus by Lucius Junius Brutus in the late 6th century BC.

  In the West, Charlemagne adopted the title serenissimus Augustus after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Otto I's style became imperator Augustus, though he avoided explicit mention of Rome in deference to Byzantium. By the 12th century the standard formula was Dei gratia Romanorum imperator semper Augustus, meaning by the grace of God, Emperor of the Romans, ever Augustus. That formula held until at least the 16th century. When the phrase semper Augustus was translated into German in the empire's later period, it was not rendered literally but as allzeit Mehrer des Reiches, meaning "ever Increaser of the Reich," a translation that reached back to the Latin root augere and the word's oldest meaning. An Irish dimension exists too: the Annals of Ulster described the High King Brian Boru, who lived from around 941 to 1014, as the only Irish king to receive the distinction August iartair tuaiscirt Eorpa uile.