An Emperor’s Long Shadow: Augustus and the Dawn of Imperial Rome

Rome had already killed one man who tried to rule it alone. Julius Caesar, stabbed twenty-three times on the floor of the Senate, was the lesson that everyone drew the wrong conclusion from. The conspirators thought they had saved the Republic. They had only created a vacancy.Into that vacancy stepped an eighteen-year-old from a provincial Italian family, named in a dead man's will as his heir. He had no army of his own. He had no political record. He had a name, a calculation, and a quality that no one around him initially recognized: he was prepared to wait as long as necessary and to do whatever the waiting required.What Gaius Octavius - Augustus - eventually built was the most consequential political achievement in Western history. He ended a century of civil war. He reorganized the Roman world's finances, armies, administration, and physical infrastructure. He presided over one of the great ages of Latin literature. He transformed Rome from a city of brick into a city of marble, and he transformed the Roman constitution from a Republic into an empire - while insisting, with a discipline he never once relaxed, that he had done no such thing.An Emperor's Long Shadow is the story of that achievement and the man behind it: from the brutal civil wars of his youth, through the propaganda masterpiece that destroyed Mark Antony, to the forty-five years of the Principate in which Augustus performed the role of reluctant public servant while holding every instrument of power simultaneously. It is also the story of what the performance cost - in the lives of Julia and Cicero and Ovid and all the others consumed by the machinery of Augustan order - and of the shadow he left behind: a template for imperial rule that shaped the Roman world for three centuries, gave the word Caesar to the German language and the Russian, and cast a light that Western civilization has been reading by ever since.He found Rome a city of brick. He left it a city of marble. The marble is still there.