Res Gestae Divi Augusti

• 1. Introduction

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  Res Gestae Divi Augusti was completed just one month before Augustus died, on the 19th of August AD 14. He left the text beside his will, instructing the Senate to engrave it and display it publicly. The original was cut into a pair of bronze pillars and placed before his mausoleum in Rome. Scholars have called it a literary form unique to the ancient world. It was a first-person record of an emperor's life and accomplishments, in the emperor's own words.

  The text spans the period from 44 BC, when Julius Caesar was killed, to the year of Augustus' own death. But it was never written to be a complete chronicle. Augustus chose what the Roman people would know about him. What he chose to record, and what he chose to omit, reveal as much about the first Roman emperor as anything he actually wrote. By design, the inscription was also a monument to the Julio-Claudian dynasty that would govern Rome for generations to come.

• 2. Enemies Without Names

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  At the age of nineteen, the Res Gestae records, Augustus raised an army to restore liberty to the republic. He presents this act as entirely his own initiative and at his own expense, with no mention of allies or circumstances. The text throughout presents its author as the sole agent of Rome's transformation, viewing every development from one perspective only.

  Caesar's murderers Brutus and Cassius appear in the text only as "those who killed my father." Mark Antony, Augustus' great rival in the East, becomes "he with whom I fought the war." Sextus Pompey is dismissed with a single word: "pirate." In a document covering decades of Roman civil war, the men who opposed Augustus have no names and no standing.

  The scholar Werner Eck has argued that it cannot be stated that Augustus made any false statements. The omissions are real, but the text appears to stay on technically truthful ground. Augustus also devoted space to recording the offices and honors he had declined to take and the privileges he had refused to be awarded. The appendix was written in the third person, not the first. It is likely not by Augustus himself, but added for the benefit of provincial readers.

• 3. The Weight of Generosity

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  Augustus claimed to have spent 600 million silver denarii, equal to 24 million gold aurei, from his own funds over his reign. Ancient currencies cannot be reliably converted into modern equivalents. What is clear is that the total was more than anyone else in the empire could have afforded.

  Augustus consolidated his hold on power partly by reversing prior tax policy. His first such move was to deposit 170 million sesterces of his own money into the aerarium militare, Rome's military treasury. The text is careful throughout to attribute every expense to his personal wealth, not to the state.

  Paragraphs 15 through 24 of the text detail donations of money, land, and grain to the citizens of Italy and to his soldiers. They also record the public works he commissioned and the gladiatorial spectacles. The closing section of the text lists the buildings he renovated or constructed throughout Rome. All of this spending was not merely practical. The text was explicit that it was composed, in part, to present Augustus as the most generous of all the Romans.

• 4. Copies Across the Empire

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  An Ambassador from the Holy Roman Empire to the Ottoman Sultan may have been the first European to read the Res Gestae in its carved, surviving form. He found it at Ancyra, on a temple to Augustus in what is now Ankara, Turkey. At first only portions were legible; homes built by locals against the temple walls obscured much of the inscription. The Ancyra copy is known as the Monumentum Ancyranum. It emerged as the most complete surviving version, preserving the text in both Latin and Greek. Additional fragments were found at Apollonia, in Greek, and at Antioch in Pisidia, in Latin.

  The Latin text at Ancyra opens with a declaration that Augustus had "placed the whole world under the sovereignty of the Roman people." The Greek versions found at Ancyra and Apollonia handle that language differently. They soften the language of conquest, rephrasing or removing passages about the subjugation of provinces. The opening lines of the Greek text omit references to Roman conquest altogether. The Greek versions also contain several errors, their translators shaping the text for local audiences rather than preserving it word for word.

  By the 20th century, most of the buildings obscuring the Ancyra temple had been cleared. The full extent of the inscription was newly visible. It was about to draw a very different kind of attention.

• 5. Borrowed Authority

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  Under Atatürk, the new Turkish government used the Res Gestae to highlight the culture and history of his emerging state. The ancient text had found a second life in a country that had not existed when the inscription was first carved. But in Italy, the Fascist movement found a far more aggressive use for the same document.

  By the 1920s, Italian Fascists had co-opted the Res Gestae alongside other symbols of Roman imperialism. They used it to help justify conquest and to inspire Italians to fight for the fatherland. In 1937, for the two thousandth anniversary of the birth of Augustus, Mussolini staged a formal celebration built around the ancient text. He used it to add legitimacy to his political program. When Hitler visited, he adored the work.

  Werner Eck observed that it cannot be stated Augustus made any false statements in the Res Gestae. What he wrote to record his own accomplishments proved powerful enough, two thousand years after his birth, to serve as a script for fascism.