Octavian, Antony and the Res Gestae:how Augustus wrote his own reign

In one line: in the civil war of 44-31 BC Octavian and Mark Antony fought with coins, borrowed gods, letters and a seized will as well as armies; the winner then spent forty years on coins, statues and altars presenting his rule as a restored republic, and closed with a first-person account of his deeds that names none of his Roman enemies and leaves out the killings of 43 BC.

Gold aureus of the triumvirs, late 40-early 39 BC: Mark Antony on one side, Octavian ("CAESAR") on the other, both styled "triumvir for restoring the republic". Photo: Classical Numismatic Group (CNG), CC BY-SA 3.0 / GFDL.

What happened

• 15-20 March 44 BC. Julius Caesar is killed. Caesar's will names his great-nephew Gaius Octavius, aged 18, as chief heir and adopts him. At Caesar's funeral Antony, as consul, gives the eulogy; Plutarch (Antony 14) and Appian (Civil Wars 2.143-147) say he showed the crowd Caesar's bloodied robe, and the crowd turned on the assassins. The two ancient accounts differ in detail.
• 44 BC. Octavius takes the name Gaius Julius Caesar (modern historians call him Octavian) and pays Caesar's legacies to the people. In July, during games he holds for Caesar's victories, a comet appears. Pliny the Elder (Natural History 2.93-94) quotes Augustus's lost memoirs: the people took it as Caesar's soul received among the gods, and Pliny adds that privately he read it as a sign for himself. In a letter quoted by Cicero (Philippics 13.24-25), Antony calls him a boy who "owes everything to a name".
• Autumn 44-April 43 BC. Octavian raises an army from Caesar's veterans without any office. Cicero's Philippics, speeches and a pamphlet (the Second, never delivered) against Antony, call him a drunkard who vomited on the tribunal (Phil. 2.63) and a public enemy.
• November 43 BC. Octavian, Antony and Lepidus become "triumvirs for restoring the republic" (tresviri rei publicae constituendae) and publish proscription lists. Appian (Civil Wars 4.5) puts the names at about 300 senators and 2,000 equestrians. Cicero is killed on 7 December.
• 1 January 42 BC. Caesar is formally deified as Divus Iulius. Octavian's coins begin to call him divi filius, "son of the god". Before Philippi (October 42 BC) he vows a temple to Mars the Avenger (Suetonius, Augustus 29).
• 41 BC. Plutarch (Antony 24) says Antony entered Ephesus hailed as Dionysus the Giver of Joy, with women dressed as Bacchants; Plutarch adds that to most people he was Dionysus the Savage. At Tarsus, Cleopatra comes to meet him dressed as Aphrodite (Antony 26). His family claimed descent from Hercules, and Plutarch says he dressed to resemble him (Antony 4).
• Late 41-40 BC. Octavian besieges Antony's brother Lucius at Perusia. Suetonius (Augustus 15) reports that "some write" he sacrificed 300 prisoners of rank at an altar of Divus Iulius on the Ides of March. The story is Suetonius's report of other writers and is contested.
• 30s BC. Suetonius preserves both sides' insults. Antony says Octavian's ancestors were a freedman rope-maker and a perfumer and baker of Aricia (Aug. 2, 4), that he earned his adoption sexually (Aug. 68), and that he lay in his ship at Naulochus (36 BC) until Agrippa had won (Aug. 16). An anonymous lampoon mocks a "dinner of the twelve gods" at which Octavian played Apollo (Aug. 70).

Silver denarius of Antony and Cleopatra, c. 34-32 BC. The Latin legends honour Cleopatra as "queen of kings and of her sons who are kings" and Antony for conquering Armenia. Photo: CNG, CC BY-SA 3.0 / GFDL.

• 34 BC. At the "Donations of Alexandria" Antony assigns eastern kingdoms to Cleopatra and her children and names Caesarion as Caesar's son (Plutarch, Antony 54; Cassius Dio 49.41). A Roman-standard denarius carries Cleopatra's portrait and a Latin title.
• Before Actium. Pliny (Natural History 14.148) says Antony put out a book On His Own Drunkenness not long before the battle. The text is lost. Kenneth Scott (1929) read it as a reply to charges from Octavian's side. In a letter quoted by Suetonius (Aug. 69), Antony answers the complaint about Cleopatra: "What has changed you? That I'm sleeping with the queen? She is my wife," and then lists women he says Octavian was sleeping with.
• 32 BC. Antony divorces Octavia, Octavian's sister. Two of Antony's former associates, Titius and Plancus, go over to Octavian and tell him where Antony's will is kept. Octavian takes it from the Vestal Virgins and reads parts of it to the Senate and people: that Caesarion was Caesar's son, legacies to Cleopatra's children, and burial in Alexandria even if Antony died in Rome (Plutarch, Antony 58; Dio 50.3). Plutarch says many thought it wrong to open a living man's will. Whether the text was genuine, altered or read selectively has been debated since.
• 32 BC. War is declared on Cleopatra, not on Antony, with Octavian performing the old fetial rite (Dio 50.4). The Res Gestae later says: "The whole of Italy of its own accord swore allegiance to me and demanded me as its leader in the war in which I won at Actium" (RG 25).

A "legionary denarius" of Mark Antony, 32-31 BC, for his Third Legion. The galley side names him augur and triumvir; the reverse, eagle between standards, was struck in a series naming his legions one by one. Photo: CNG, CC BY-SA 3.0 / GFDL.

• 32-31 BC. Antony strikes the legionary denarii in huge numbers to pay his fleet and army, each issue naming a legion. Pliny (Natural History 33.132) says Antony mixed iron into the denarius; the coins' lower silver content is one reason they stayed in circulation for well over two centuries.
• 2 September 31 BC. Octavian's fleet under Agrippa defeats Antony and Cleopatra at Actium. Both die by suicide at Alexandria in August 30 BC. Virgil's Aeneid (8.675-713) later pictures the battle on Aeneas's shield: "Augustus Caesar leading the Italians into battle, with the senators and people, the household gods and the great gods", against Antony with "barbarian wealth", followed (the poet adds, "shame!") by his Egyptian wife. Horace (Odes 1.37) celebrates the death of the queen, a "fatal monster", and does not name Antony.

Denarius of Octavian, 28 BC: "Caesar, son of the god, consul for the sixth time" and, on the reverse, a crocodile with AEGVPTO CAPTA, "Egypt captured". Photo: CNG, CC BY-SA 3.0 / GFDL.

• 28 BC. An aureus now in the British Museum shows Octavian seated on a magistrate's chair with the legend LEGES ET IVRA P R RESTITVIT, "he restored to the Roman people their laws and rights" (Rich and Williams 1999).
• 13-16 January 27 BC. Octavian formally returns his extraordinary powers and receives the name Augustus, the oak-leaf civic crown and a golden shield honouring his courage, clemency, justice and piety (RG 34).
• 20-19 BC. Parthia returns the standards captured from Crassus in 53 BC and from Antony's army, by negotiation. Coins show SIGNIS RECEPTIS, "standards recovered", and a Parthian kneeling to hand one over. The Res Gestae says the Parthians were "compelled" to return them and asked "as suppliants" for Rome's friendship (RG 29).

Gold aureus of Augustus, Pergamum, 19 BC: SIGNIS RECEPTIS, "standards recovered", around a capricorn, the zodiac sign Augustus used as his own emblem. Photo: CNG, CC BY-SA 2.5 (CNG licence template).

Denarius struck at Rome by the moneyer P. Petronius Turpilianus, 19-18 BC: a kneeling Parthian holds out a Roman standard. Photo: CNG, CC BY-SA 3.0 / GFDL.

• 19-18 BC. A Spanish mint strikes denarii with the comet and DIVVS IVLIVS, 25 years after the comet of 44 BC.

Denarius of Augustus, 19-18 BC: the comet of 44 BC labelled DIVVS IVLIVS, "the divine Julius". Photo: CNG, CC BY-SA 2.5 (CNG licence template).

• c. 20 BC onward. The type of the Prima Porta statue is created. The marble found in 1863 at Livia's villa at Prima Porta is usually dated to the early first century AD and taken to copy an earlier bronze. On the breastplate a Parthian hands a legionary standard to a Roman figure (identified variously as Mars, Tiberius or a personification of the army). Augustus stands barefoot, a convention for gods and heroes, with a Cupid on a dolphin at his leg, pointing to Venus, the claimed ancestress of the Julian family.

The Augustus of Prima Porta, marble, early 1st century AD, Vatican Museums. Photo: Joel Bellviure, CC BY-SA 4.0.

• 4 July 13 BC-30 January 9 BC. The Senate decrees and then dedicates the Ara Pacis Augustae, the Altar of Augustan Peace (RG 12). Its reliefs show a religious procession with Augustus, Agrippa, family members and children, and a panel of a seated goddess with two infants, animals and fruit (identified as Tellus, Pax, Venus or Italia).

The so-called Tellus panel, Ara Pacis Augustae, Rome, 13-9 BC. Photo: Chris Nas (edited on Commons), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Part of the Ara Pacis processional frieze, 13-9 BC, showing members of Augustus's family and their children. Which figure is which is debated. Photo: Amphipolis (Flickr), CC BY-SA 2.0.

• 2 BC. The temple of Mars Ultor, "the Avenger", vowed at Philippi, is dedicated in the new Forum of Augustus, and the recovered standards go into its inner shrine (RG 21, 29). The same year the Senate and people hail Augustus as pater patriae, "father of the fatherland" (RG 35).

"Roma. Forum of Nerviae and Forum of Augustus": the columns of the temple of Mars Ultor, photograph published between 1925 and 1949. Library of Congress; no known restrictions on publication.

• 19 August AD 14. Augustus dies. Suetonius (Aug. 101) says he left with the Vestals an account of his deeds to be carved on bronze pillars before his mausoleum. The Rome original is lost. The text survives from copies set up in the province of Galatia: at Ancyra (modern Ankara), in Latin and a Greek version, on the temple of Rome and Augustus; at Apollonia, in Greek; and at Antioch in Pisidia, in Latin.

The Latin Res Gestae on the temple wall at Ancyra, drawn by Edmond Guillaume for Perrot, Guillaume and Delbet, Exploration archéologique de la Galatie (1872). Heidelberg University Library scan, CC0.

The Greek version of the Res Gestae on the outer cella wall of the temple of Augustus and Rome, Ankara. Photo: Carole Raddato, 2016, CC BY-SA 2.0.

How it works

• Transfer: both sides borrowed divine and family prestige. Octavian took the name "Caesar", then divi filius, and put the comet and Divus Iulius on coins; later Apollo, the capricorn and Venus (the Prima Porta Cupid). Antony took Hercules as ancestor and appeared as the New Dionysus in the East, and put a queen's portrait and royal title on a Roman coin. Each borrowed symbol invited the audience to transfer the god's or the dead dictator's standing to the living man.
• Name-calling: the labels come from every side. Cicero calls Antony a drunk and public enemy; Antony calls Octavian a boy who owes everything to a name, low-born and sexually compromised; Horace calls Cleopatra a "fatal monster". In the Res Gestae, Sextus Pompeius's fleet becomes "pirates" (RG 25: "I made the sea peaceful from pirates"), and his crews "slaves who had fled their masters".
• Whataboutism: Antony's letter in Suetonius (Aug. 69) meets the charge about Cleopatra with a list of Octavian's own affairs. The original charge is not answered; it is matched.
• Scapegoating: declaring war on Cleopatra alone recast a war between Roman commanders as a foreign war. Blame for the conflict was placed on an Egyptian queen; Plutarch (Antony 60) reports Octavian saying Antony had been drugged and was no longer master of himself, so the Roman opponent became her captive. The will reading, with its Alexandrian burial, served the same frame.
• Card stacking: the Res Gestae lists offices, games, money, buildings, conquests and honours, and omits the proscriptions of 43 BC, the Perusia reports, Antony's name, Lepidus's name (he appears in RG 10 only as the man who had taken the chief priesthood amid civil unrest) and the names of Brutus and Cassius, who appear as "those who killed my father" (RG 2).
• Euphemism / doublespeak: civil war appears as freeing the republic "oppressed by the tyranny of a faction" (RG 1). Four decades of pre-eminence after 27 BC appear as "authority" (auctoritas) rather than "power" (potestas) (RG 34). A negotiated return of standards appears as Parthian suppliants.
• Glittering generalities: libertas, res publica, pax and "laws and rights restored" appear on coins, altars and the text itself as summary claims that are hard to test. The 28 BC aureus states a restoration without saying what was restored or to whom.
• Bandwagon: "the whole of Italy of its own accord" (RG 25) and "by the consent of all" (RG 34) present universal agreement as the proof of right. Syme and other modern historians treat the 32 BC oath as organised rather than spontaneous.

Then and now

Barre Cult of Personality Mural, Somali Democratic Republic, 1976. Public domain (CC0).

The Somali mural fuses a ruler's portrait with the flag, as Augustan coins fused one man's head with Rome's gods and victories. The scale and reach differ: a Roman coin passed from hand to hand around the Mediterranean for decades, and much Augustan imagery was made by cities, mint officials and private patrons, not a single ministry. For a first-person account of a ruler's rise, copied across an empire, see Kadesh and Behistun: kings carving their own record (Darius I's Behistun text, c. 520 BC). For a later ruler who came out of civil conflict and used medals, monuments and official bulletins, see Revolution, counter-revolution and Napoleon's bulletins, 1789-1815.

The Augustan images were reused directly in the twentieth century. For the 2,000th anniversary of Augustus's birth in 1937-38, the Italian Fascist government held an Augustan exhibition, reassembled the Ara Pacis in a new pavilion by the Tiber (opened in September 1938), and carved the Latin Res Gestae on the pavilion's base, where it still stands on the wall of the present museum.

Positions on the record

• Octavian/Augustus's stated position (Res Gestae): at nineteen he raised an army to free the republic from a faction; he avenged his father lawfully; he spared citizens who asked for pardon (RG 3); after ending the civil wars he handed the republic back to the Senate and people and afterwards held no more power than his colleagues.
• Antony's stated position, which survives almost only in quotations by writers hostile to him or writing under his rival's successors: Octavian owed his rise to Caesar's name; Octavian's attacks on Cleopatra were hypocritical; his book on drinking, lost, was his reply. His own coins, which survive directly, present him as augur, triumvir and commander of loyal legions.
• Ancient readings. Tacitus sets out both verdicts at the funeral: one side said duty to his father and the needs of the state drove him to civil war and that he ruled as princeps, not as king or dictator (Annals 1.9); the other said these were pretexts, recalled the proscriptions and the treaties with Antony, and called what followed "peace, no doubt, but bloody" (pacem sine dubio post haec, verum cruentam, 1.10). In 1.2 Tacitus writes that he won over "the soldiers with gifts, the people with grain, and everyone with the sweetness of leisure" (militem donis, populum annona, cunctos dulcedine otii pellexit). Velleius Paterculus (2.89), writing under Tiberius, praises the restoration of the republic's old form.
• Modern historians. Ronald Syme's The Roman Revolution (1939) treats Augustus as a faction leader who took power by violence and managed opinion to cover a monarchy (see its chapter "The Organization of Opinion"); he wrote with the dictatorships of the 1930s in view. Paul Zanker (1988) and Karl Galinsky (1996) argue that "propaganda" is too narrow a word: much Augustan imagery came from below, from cities and patrons competing to honour the ruler, and the settlement answered a real demand for peace after decades of war. Barbara Levick (1982) argued that coin types were often chosen by mint officials to honour the emperor, so he was their audience as well as their subject.
• This archive's reading. Documented: the coins, the monuments, the Res Gestae's text and its omissions, and the insults recorded by Cicero and Suetonius. Not shown: whether Antony's will as read in 32 BC was genuine and complete; whether the Perusia sacrifice happened; what Antony's book on drinking said; and how far Augustus personally chose each coin and relief. Antony's side of the war survives mostly through the winner's era, so the record is thinner for him, not necessarily cleaner or dirtier.

Same-method test

Had Antony won and set up a first-person account listing his conquests, calling Octavian's side "a faction" without naming him, leaving out the proscriptions he also signed, and presenting his eastern monarchy as the republic restored, the page would tag the same techniques. Octavian's answer to charges with counter-charges would score as whataboutism just as Antony's letter does.

How to spot it

• Read a ruler's own account for who is not named. In the Res Gestae, unnamed enemies are "a faction", "pirates", "slaves" or "those who killed my father".
• Check the numbers and titles against independent sources: the Res Gestae's figures for games and money are specific; its account of 44-31 BC is not.
• When a war is declared on a foreigner, ask who is fighting on the other side.
• Look at who made an image: mint official, city council, senate or ruler. A flattering coin is evidence of flattery; it is not proof of central direction.

Images

Image	Source	Licence
Aureus of Antony and Octavian, 40-39 BC	Wikimedia Commons, CNG	CC BY-SA 3.0 / GFDL (CNG template)
Denarius of Antony and Cleopatra, c. 34-32 BC	Wikimedia Commons, Classical Numismatic Group	CC BY-SA 3.0 / GFDL (CNG template)
Legionary denarius of Antony, LEG III, 32-31 BC	Wikimedia Commons, CNG	CC BY-SA 3.0 / GFDL (CNG template)
AEGVPTO CAPTA denarius, 28 BC	Wikimedia Commons, CNG	CC BY-SA 3.0 / GFDL (CNG template)
SIGNIS RECEPTIS capricorn aureus, 19 BC	Wikimedia Commons, CNG	CC BY-SA 2.5 (CNG template)
Kneeling Parthian denarius, 19-18 BC	Wikimedia Commons, Classical Numismatic Group	CC BY-SA 3.0 / GFDL (CNG template)
DIVVS IVLIVS comet denarius, 19-18 BC	Wikimedia Commons, CNG	CC BY-SA 2.5 (CNG template)
Augustus of Prima Porta	Wikimedia Commons, Joel Bellviure	CC BY-SA 4.0 (statue public domain)
Ara Pacis, "Tellus" panel	Wikimedia Commons, after a photo by Chris Nas	CC BY-SA 4.0
Ara Pacis, processional frieze	Wikimedia Commons, Amphipolis	CC BY-SA 2.0
Forum of Augustus, temple of Mars Ultor (1925-49)	Library of Congress	No known restrictions on publication
Res Gestae at Ancyra, Latin text (plate, 1872)	Wikimedia Commons, Perrot, Guillaume and Delbet; Heidelberg University Library	CC0
Res Gestae at Ankara, Greek text (2016)	Wikimedia Commons, Carole Raddato	CC BY-SA 2.0
Barre Cult of Personality Mural (1976)	FRAME gallery	Public domain (CC0)

Image gaps

• The LEGES ET IVRA P R RESTITVIT aureus (28 BC). The British Museum's photographs are licensed CC BY-NC-SA, which this archive does not use. Cited, not shown.
• Antony's Ephesian cistophori (c. 39 BC), with Antony in the ivy wreath of Dionysus and Octavia on the reverse. No openly licensed photo was found.
• The Apollonia and Antioch-in-Pisidia copies of the Res Gestae. The only openly licensed photo of the Antioch fragments found was too unclear to read and was not used.
• The 1938 Res Gestae wall of the Ara Pacis pavilion. Photos exist on Commons, but none was found with a confirmed free licence during this build.

Sources

• Res Gestae Divi Augusti: text, translation and commentary in Alison E. Cooley, Res Gestae Divi Augusti (Cambridge University Press, 2009); P. A. Brunt and J. M. Moore, Res Gestae Divi Augusti (Oxford University Press, 1967).
• Suetonius, Life of Augustus 2, 4, 15, 16, 29, 68-70, 101.
• Plutarch, Life of Antony 4, 14, 24, 26, 54, 58, 60.
• Cassius Dio, Roman History 49.41, 50.3-6.
• Appian, Civil Wars 2.143-147, 4.5.
• Cicero, Philippics 2 and 13.
• Pliny the Elder, Natural History 2.93-94, 14.148, 33.132.
• Tacitus, Annals 1.2, 1.9-10. Velleius Paterculus, History of Rome 2.89.
• Virgil, Aeneid 8.675-713. Horace, Odes 1.37.
• Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939).
• Paul Zanker, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus, trans. Alan Shapiro (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988).
• Karl Galinsky, Augustan Culture: An Interpretive Introduction (Princeton University Press, 1996).
• Kenneth Scott, "Octavian's Propaganda and Antony's De sua ebrietate", Classical Philology 24 (1929); "The Political Propaganda of 44-30 B.C.", Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 11 (1933).
• Barbara Levick, "Propaganda and the Imperial Coinage", Antichthon 16 (1982).
• J. W. Rich and J. H. C. Williams, "Leges et iura P.R. restituit: a new aureus of Octavian and the settlement of 28-27 BC", Numismatic Chronicle 159 (1999).
• Michael H. Crawford, Roman Republican Coinage (Cambridge University Press, 1974), for the triumviral and legionary issues.
• Christopher Pelling, "The Triumviral Period", in The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. X, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1996).